The Technique of Bible Study, No. 2

Techniques of the Christian Life

TL07-02

Apostates

Now, beginning with first 20, Jude begins to wind up the book of Jude. However, in these final verses we again touch upon some magnificent areas of doctrine, so we will pause to look into those. But he is going to now tie up this letter with advice to Christians on the course of the action that they should follow in an age of apostasy.

Again, I want to remind you that an age of apostasy does not only have personal implications and effects upon us. It also has national implications. We are increasingly facing the fact that the nation is suffering now the consequences of its apostate condition. It is becoming evident that even unbelievers are appalled at the extent of the pornography, at the extent of the moral degeneration, at the extent of a breakdown in the things that hold the society together and keep it from self-destructing. One of the things that is particularly ominous on the horizon is the thing that is happening to the American economy. You cannot take an economic condition such as we are in and survive for very long. One of the things that we have found historically about apostasy is that when a nation commits itself headlong to an apostate condition, it ends up with a number of the citizens being destroyed. There is population decimation that inevitably goes along with apostasy. The best way to bring about a jungle where the population begins to be decimated is to collapse the economy. So we are not talking about a nice book in the Bible that someday might be helpful for you to know something about. You are closer to experiencing the consequences of apostasy than most of us like to think.

The Doctrine of the Human Spirit

1. Soul and Spirit

   The human spirit is distinguished from the soul in the Word of God. In Hebrew 4:12, the Scripture says, For the Word of God is living, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and as a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." Then in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, Paul expresses that hope for all believers when he says, "And the very God of peace sanctify you holy, and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus. The Scriptures everywhere make a distinction between the human soul and the human spirit. They are not one in the same thing. Together, they do constitute the immaterial part of man's being.

2. Soul Life and Spirit Life

   In the original creation of man, the human spirit was received along with the human soul. This is taught in Genesis 2:7, where the Hebrew declares that God breathed into the nostrils of man the breath of lives, giving him soul life for his contact with other people, man-consciousness contact, and He gave him spirit life for his God-consciousness contact. You might say that God breathed soul life into one nostril while He breathed spirit life into the other nostril. He had formed man's body out of the dust of the ground, and this man leaped into life, a living soul made in the image and likeness of God.

3. Spiritual Death

   Today a person is born physically with a dead human spirit. In Jude 19, we read about an apostate's "not having the spirit." They do not have a human spirit because they are spiritually dead. In 1 Corinthians 2:14, Paul points out that the natural man, that is the unbeliever, who has a dead human spirit is incapable of receiving the things of the Spirit of God. When your human spirit is dead, this verse says that the things of doctrine are "foolishness unto, neither can you know them," you cannot learn spiritual phenomena because "they are spiritually discerned;" that is, they are discerned by means of the human spirit. For this reason, Jesus told the woman at the well that they that worship God must worship Him in what? In their human spirit and in truth, with doctrine. You cannot worship God except through the learning of the Word of God. The person is born physically alive, but he is born with a dead human spirit.

4. Spiritual Birth

   The believer's human spirit has been made alive at the point of salvation. We read in Ephesians 2:1, "And you has he made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins." How has He made us alive at the point of salvation? Obviously, not physically--we were already alive that way. This refers to coming alive in the human spirit. Ephesians 2:5 says, "Even when we were dead in sins, has made us alive together with Christ. By grace are you saved." The human spirit is made alive at the point of salvation.

5. "Epignosis" Stored in the Human Spirit

   The human spirit is the storage space for doctrine as full knowledge, or what the Greek refers to as "epignosis." There are some sub-points under this one:

   1. The Grace System of Perception

      Under the filling of the Holy Spirit, doctrine goes from the Bible to the mind of the soul and thence to the human spirit. This is the grace system of perception. We have this taught in John 14:26, 1 Corinthians 2:9-16, and in 1 John 2:27. A Christian confesses all his known sins. His unknown sins are covered by the confession of known sins. He is now in the spiritual status of being filled with the Spirit and thus a spiritual believer. That constitutes spirituality. Under this condition, God the Holy Spirit can teach him spiritual phenomena. As he listens to the Word of God explained, and as he goes positive to the truth, he receives this Word into his soul, and it is stored, by faith--because he believes, in his human spirit. The human spirit is a huge reservoir that God has prepared to receive His viewpoint.

   2. Spiritual Perception

      This is the Holy Spirit teaching the human spirit via the human mind. When you talk about a person being a discerning Christian--spiritual discernment, we are referring to this act where the Holy Spirit can teach a human spirit (Job 32:8, Romans 8:16).

   3. A Spiritual Maturity Structure

      Doctrine in the human spirit is the basis for the erection of a spiritual maturity structure in the soul (Ephesians 4:20-24). As the result of the building up of the reservoir of Bible doctrine in the human spirit, building up these principles of truth that you now understand, you are able to build within your soul spiritual maturity. You can never become a spiritually mature Christian until you have built up a pool of doctrinal truth. Therefore, we say that the most important thing in your life as a Christian is to feed your soul, or to fill that reservoir. If you do not do that, you will never progress to spiritual maturity.

   4. Spiritual Learning

      The unbeliever has only his human I.Q. to function with, but the Christian, the believer, also has a living human spirit, as well as God the Holy Spirit for the learning and storage of doctrine. This is taught in Ephesians 3:16-20. The Christian has not only human IQ, and spiritual development is not dependent upon human I.Q. The Christian also has a human spirit and God the Holy Spirit to teach him. Ephesians 3:16 says, "That He would grant you according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man." "Strengthened with might speaks about the working of God the Holy Spirit, as he refers there to the Holy Spirit, strengthening the inner man," that is, the Holy Spirit indwelling the believer's life.

      Verse 17 says, "That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith that you, being rooted and grounded in love." "That Christ," that is, "The Christ, the Son of God." "May dwell" means to be at home in your life here on earth. Christ is at home in your life. "That (the result being) you will be rooted," that is, filled with the Spirit, the source of your life, like a root is the source of the life of the plant. "And grounded," that is, that you have a foundation, you would be established firmly in love; that is, the love which is part of the fruit of the spirit. This can be equated to being filled with the Spirit. You cannot have the fruit of the spirit, or any portion of it, unless you are filled with the Spirit. So we are to be rooted, and our life is to be sustained, by the power drawn from a relationship to God the Holy Spirit where his love is free to function in us and this will ground us and stabilize us in our spiritual lives.

      Verse 18: "May be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height." "Comprehend," that is, doctrine in the human spirit ("epignosis"), what we can grasp of the truth of God, and notice the extent of this comprehension. It is described here in words that picture a cube. That is, it has breadth to it, it has width, it has length, it has height, and it has depth. You come out with a cube structure representing the fullness of our knowledge of doctrine and of our relationship to the mind of God.

      Verse 19 says, "And to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge that you might be filled with all the fullness of God." "To know" is the Greek word "knowing from experience the love of Christ which passes knowledge," which means more than "gnosis" head knowledge. It is on to the full cube knowledge of "epignosis." "And that you might be filled with all the fullness of God" which refers to the spiritual maturity structure of the soul.

   5. Spiritual IQ

      The spiritual IQ of a believer is determined by the amount of Bible doctrine stored in the human spirit. That's what's behind the statement that the unbeliever has only his human IQ to deal with, but that the believer has the capacity of building a spiritual IQ because he has a living human spirit and God the Holy Spirit to teach him.

6. The Gospel Message

   In the communication of the gospel to the unbeliever, the Holy Spirit acts as the human spirit for the perception, the spiritual truth, of salvation (John 16:8-11, 1 Corinthians 2:14-16). Now you say, "I cannot understand spiritual truth unless God the Holy Spirit teaches me. I'm an unbeliever. I have a dead human spirit. The Holy Spirit cannot teach my dead human spirit. There is no truth that can come up from the human spirit. How will I learn the gospel?" Well, at this one point, John 16:8-11 explains to us that God the Holy Spirit comes in and He substitutes for your dead human spirit at that point, and he makes clear to you the spiritual phenomena involved in salvation. This is the doctrine of common grace. It is called the convicting work of the Holy Spirit.

7. Spiritual Refreshment

   Doctrine which is stored in the human spirit becomes the basis of the Christian spiritual refreshment (2 Corinthians 7:13). When we speak about being spiritually refreshed, people often confuse this with some emotional thing that they have drummed up. When you are spiritually refreshed you will have an emotional reaction. It will be a thrill. It will be a blessing. It will be a joy to your being. Spiritual refreshment means the doctrine in your human spirit has built a frame of reference in your mind. So you have divine viewpoint. That's what refreshes you spiritually. It means that doctrine has developed some values and some standards for your conscience. That refreshes you spiritually. It means that doctrine has given you some vocabulary so that you can recall spiritual phenomena. That's what causes spiritual refreshment. It is the human spirit that is the source of this spiritual refreshment.

8. The New Creature

   The living human spirit is the new creature that Scripture refers to in 2 Corinthians 5:17.

9. The Work of the Human Spirit

   What does the human spirit do? Well it works upon our souls in certain very dramatic ways. This is why it is essential that: one, we have a living human spirit; and, two, that it be filled with doctrine. The human spirit sends doctrine to the Christian's self-awareness to produce occupation with Christ. Our souls, through the mind, inhale Bible doctrine. That's what you're doing right now. You're sitting and the perceptive side of your mind is inhaling doctrine. Then the human spirit enables the soul, because you have stored what you inhaled in the perceptive mind. You have stored this in your human spirit. Your human spirit cycles that back up to the directive side of your mind, and it exhales it as awareness or preoccupation with Christ. I think you're all acquainted with the diagram. The mind has a perceptive side and a directive side. We take in the truth. The human spirit is in the fullness of a cube. The truth is stored here and then cycle backed up. That's what we're talking about. This has effects upon various facets of our soul:

   1. The Mind

      First, it affects your mind. It affects the fact that you have self-awareness in your mind, and the self-awareness in your mind causes you to get off of yourself, and to get onto preoccupation with Christ. It is what comes up from the human spirit that enables you to do this.

   2. Thoughts

      The human spirit sends doctrine to the mind of the soul to develop divine viewpoint thinking. You inhale the doctrine into your perceptive mind. You store it in the human spirit. Then you exhale it in a godly thought life. These are your thoughts which are now captured for Christ as the result of your human spirit feeding up doctrine. You will never be able to control your thoughts, and you will never be able to keep your thoughts from ranging over all those ugly things that our minds can preoccupy themselves with unless there is information in the way of doctrine coming up from your human spirit to give your thoughts direction according to God's viewpoint.

   3. The Will

      You also have a will, and the human spirit sends doctrine to the will of the soul to enable it to obey God. You inhale into the mind. You exhale into the will. If there is no supply of doctrine to your will, you will act in self-will rather than according to the will of God. It isn't going to do you any good to tell your children. "Do what the Lord wants you to do." It'll do you very little good to come to a point in your own life where you have a decision to make. You have a problem to deal with. For you to go to somebody, and for them to say, "Just yield yourself to the Lord. Do what the Lord wants you to do." If you do not have doctrine feeding up to that will, you are not going to know what the Lord wants you to do. He is not going to shout voices from heaven. He's not going to yell down to you, "Hey I love you, when you do things the way I want you to do them." No, you're not going to have any of that. However, God the Holy Spirit is going to feed your will with directions from Him, but not if there's nothing in the human spirit. This is a crucial part of your being.

   4. Emotions

      This is a big one: The human spirit is also the means of controlling your emotions, for it feeds doctrine to the emotions of the soul. Because of this, you come to appreciate God, and you come to appreciate people, including your opposite number, and your friends. It prevents your emotions from dominating your soul and telling your mind what to do. If the emotions are not controlled by doctrine cycling up from the human spirit, the person will go into carnality and into satanic control. When the emotions are cut loose from the control of doctrine, they always create havoc in the soul. If you are running around the house raging and screaming and shouting and yelling; if you're carrying on over every little insignificant thing; or, if you're so emotionally unstable you can't do a thing, it is because something has stopped doctrine from flowing to your emotions. Either you don't have it in the human spirit, or there is sin in your life that is unconfessed which has stopped the flow of the Word of God so that your emotions can be controlled. There are more psychotics and more neurotics in the world because of this one thing alone--that the emotions have no stability because the individual has no divine viewpoint for controlling those emotions. I'm telling you that the Word of God works. We are not drawing for you some imaginary picture that somebody has invented of how we can function in life. This is the way God made us, and this is the way we operate. When we get the doctrine, our emotions are a joy to live with. When we don't get the doctrine, it's a great misery, mostly self-induced.

   5. The Conscience

      The human spirit sends guidance to the conscience for divine viewpoint values and standards. It frees our mind from the standards of Satan's world. It overrides all of our own background which includes our own prejudices and our own opinions. That's very valuable. A lot of attitudes among Christians are being equated with God's viewpoint, which are simply our personal background, our personal preferences, and our personal prejudices. There are a lot of Christians who think it is terrible to play baseball on Sunday afternoon, or who think it is awful to go swimming on Sunday afternoon. I have often discovered that the people who think it is terrible to play baseball on Sunday afternoon don't like to play baseball on any afternoon. The people who think it is awful to go swimming on Sunday afternoon don't care to go swimming anytime, or for that matter, not even to take a bath. They just don't like water. Yet, they have deep feelings about the spirituality of this matter. That's a subtle little tricky thing. You will never control that unless you have God's viewpoint in the human spirit being passed up to your soul so that you can have a conscience that has values and standards that indeed are God's point of view, and not your own prejudices, opinions, and preferences.

   6. The Old Sin Nature

      The human spirit frustrates the old sin nature. Without the flow of Bible doctrine into the soul, the old sin nature will take control. Failure to confess sin will cut off the flow of doctrine through your soul, and it will give the old sin nature an opportunity to distort your soul. You who could be the greatest most attractive person in the world become the ugliest gremlin that ever took breath. Unless you frustrate the old said nature, it will make you ugly. It is the human spirit which is God's instrument for frustrating this and making you the beautiful people he intended you to be as believers. With the old sin nature in control, you will fluctuate back and forth between human good on one side and all of your little sins, big and great, on the other side.

Jude 20

Bible Doctrine

The early church gathered in services for the explicit purpose of sharing doctrine (Acts 2:24). The pastor-teachers in the Word of God are commanded to be sure that they perform their job of teaching the Word (2 Timothy 4:2-4, 1 Timothy 4:16, 1 Timothy 4:6 and 13, and 1 Timothy 1:6). Christians are warned against failing to respond to doctrine and they are warned against being subject to false doctrine (Ephesians 4:14, Matthew 15:9, Hebrews 13:9). We are not to be subject to the doctrine of demons, to false doctrines. Christians are told to exercise positive volition to the commandments of God in order to experience His blessing (John 15:10, John 14:21-24). You may pursue those verses at your leisure, but as you read through the Scriptures you will become aware that there is a monumental emphasis upon knowing and obeying Bible doctrine. This is not just an incidental exhortation. It is a major thrust, and it is constantly presented as the number one thing with which we are to preoccupy ourselves.

Why such an emphasis? Because it affects the life of the soul which determines our inner motivation and then our outward conduct. It is what is in that human spirit that makes all the difference. And if it is empty, then we are one kind of person. If it is filled with God's doctrine, truth, teachings, and viewpoint, then we are God's kind of person. That's why the emphasis on learning the Word. The proper functioning of your whole spirit, soul, and body is dependent on the positive response of sound doctrine. Notice I said that "the proper functioning of your spirit, soul, and body." A lot of people would feel a whole lot better physically if they took their spiritual vitamins. You ought to have enough good sense to take your vitamins for your physical body. If you don't, then you'll notice it as you go along in the years, and you'll get decrepit, and we'll start having to move in softer chairs and armchairs to be able to take care of you. Now you can avoid all that by doing two little things. You can start taking vitamins, and you can start taking exercise. You can also get some sleep. All of that will help keep you around considerably longer and in a whole lot better shape. That will make you more pleasant to yourself and to others. The Bible says that exercise is good but godliness is more important. It is equally important, if not more so, to take your spiritual vitamins in order to sustain and to feed that human spirit. That is the Word of God. Thus the emphasis upon that part of our being.

However, what happens in our human spirit affects how you feel physically. When you are in a good spiritual condition with the Lord, it has a good effect upon your physical well-being. And when you are spiritually out of sorts, it finds expression in your physical body and structure too.

Christians and Apostates

Jude says, "But you," in contrast to these mockers in all these ways, "beloved," and this the term for believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. The Father loves the Son with an infinite love. Because you and I are in Christ, the Father also loves us (Ephesians 1:6 and 1 John 2:2). We have a relationship. That's what Christianity is. We do not have a religion. "You beloved. Building up yourselves on your most holy faith." The word "building up yourselves" is present active participle in the Greek and it actually means "to build upon." It starts with the little proposition "epi" which means to build upon. The Christians are to take the responsibility, the necessary steps, for your own spiritual development. You are to build up yourselves on your most holy faith. Now what's he referring to? Well, he's speaking here about this spiritual maturity structure in the soul that each of us is to erect. God supplies the means for this spiritual maturity in your soul. He supplies it through the doctrine that He's given us in the completed canon of Scripture, through the pastor-teacher, through the local church assembly program, and so on. You as a Christian are to erect this spiritual maturity structure in your soul for the glory of God.

In Acts 20:32, the Apostle Paul is speaking to the Ephesian pastor-teachers and he declares, "And now brethren I commend you to God and to the Word of His grace which is able to build you up and to give you an inheritance among all of them who are sanctified. The final words of the Apostle Paul to a group that he would never see again are, "I leave you with that which is going to build you up to spiritual maturity. I commend you to the Word of God." So it is the Word of God that a Christian is to be preoccupied with and to use in building up spiritual maturity. It is present tense which means it is our constant lifelong task.

Remember that the Scripture says that "to him that has shall more be given; to him that has not shall be taken that which he has." The principle which is declared in that Scripture is that the Christian life, the spiritual life, is constantly an action life. It is never static. You who have spiritual maturity and are moving along will receive more spiritual maturity. You will go on to super spiritual maturity. You who have not, by denying yourselves the Word of God or being resistant to it will lose the thing you have. Your spiritual maturity, such as it is, will gradually deteriorate. It is constant because it is present tense. It is our constant task to be building ourselves spiritually which means constantly taking in the Word of God. It is active which means it is something that we do. We are doing the building and it says to build upon yourself; that is, you do it for yourself. The soul is edified into a structure of maturity.

Spiritual Maturity

1. Grace Orientation

   We begin with the fact that as we search the Scriptures for what constitutes spiritual maturity, we are told that grace is at the core of it. A Christian is to come to the point where he has grace orientation in his soul. He understands that the life that we live as believers depends entirely on who and what God is, and not on something that we are. The Apostle Paul, closing the book of Philemon, in verse 25 says, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit." The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your human spirit. Grace orientation is a facet of spiritual maturity. The Christian who is oriented to grace is the Christian who can relax in what God has done for him.

2. Relaxed Mental Attitude

   There is also a relaxed mental attitude side to this pentagon. The relaxed mental attitude means that you are a Christian who is operating free of mental attitude sins. You are free of the hatreds, the revenge tactics, and the competition. More Christians wreck their relaxed mental attitude because they have to compete with each other.

3. Mastery of the Details of Life

   Another very vital portion is the mastery of the details of life. That means that you have control over all of the essential factors of your life. I notice this as a major problem in local church ministry because when we get to the summer months, once the kids are out of school, in our affluent society, people can move and they can go and they can run back and forth as they please. There is something about the last day of school that signals to everybody that it is now abandonment time. It is now happy go-go time. Everybody becomes a real go-go artist. It's easy enough for us to think about having a mastery when we are in poverty, but it is something else to be able to control ourselves in prosperity.

4. The Capacity to Love

   This spiritual maturity structure also has the capacity for loving God, the opposite sex, and your friends. It is the Word of God that again gives us the direction for loving. It is the Word of God that gives us the signals to our radar that we have met and locked our radar on the right person that God has for us in marriage.

5. Inner Happiness

   The final facet is inner happiness, the happiness within our souls that comes as the result of what God gives us and what the Lord places within us. This means a happiness that is free of spiritual calluses so that we can express ourselves again in the joys through our emotions that God bestirs.

There's a lot more to say on this. If you want to learn about this in detail, go to the series of study on the spiritual maturity structure of the soul. I just want to point out to you that this is what Jude is referring to. He's telling us, as he winds up this letter, that if you want to meet apostasy, the first thing you do, beloved, is to build yourself up on your most holy faith on the basis of your human spirit where your most holy faith is stored in the form of doctrine. This is the thing you build upon that structure--your human spirit and doctrine. That's the basis with all of its compartments and all the storage of truth. That's the foundation upon which you build this spiritual maturity structure. It is by means of your own responsibility to see to it that you receive the Word of God.

"But you beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith." The Christian who has this in his soul will be nobody's fool when it comes to spiritual things. He will know what he's doing. He will be able to control his life. He will be stable. He will be able to take people, situations, and events in stride. I commend to you the constant working upon your spiritual maturity. It might not be a bad idea to take them one segment at a time. That's what Jude is trying to tell us. Get with it! Expose yourself to the Word. Probably all of us would benefit by going back to study number one in the basic doctrines series. We need to study systematically and learn again. You would get worlds out of it. I guarantee you would get worlds out of going through the series from base one. This is what we're talking about. So don't leave this study and say, "Yes, that's right and that's nice." But walk out of here saying, "What am I going to do about it? How am I going to sustain myself? How am I going to keep this human spirit filled because that's the key to the whole thing?

Dr. John E. Danish, 1973

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