Daily Devotion

Jude says two things about the evil men that he is attacking. 

 

(1^st) He criticizes everything that he does not understand. Anything that is out of his orbit and his experience he disregards as worthless and irrelevant. “Spiritual things are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). They have no spiritual discernment, and therefore, they are blind to and contemptuous of, all spiritual realities. 

 

(2^nd) They allow themselves to be corrupted by the things they do not understand. Jude describes men who have lost all awareness of spiritual things and for whom the things demanded by the animal instincts are the only standards.

 

The terrible thing is that the second condition is the result of the first one. No man is born without a sense of spiritual things but the tragedy is that he can lose that sense until, for him, the spiritual things cease to exist. A person may lose any faculty if he refuses to use it. We discover that with such simple things as games and skills. If we give up playing a game, we lose the ability to play it. If we give up practicing a skill—such as playing the piano—we lose it. Every person can hear the voice of God. But if people consistently refuse to listen to God, they will in the end be unable to hear the voice of God and will have nothing left of his Master’s desires.