Jude 3–11

False Teachers

³My dear friends, I was doing my best to write to you about the salvation we share in common, when I felt the need of writing at once to encourage you to fight on for the faith which once and for all God has given to his people. ⁴For some godless people have slipped in unnoticed among us, persons who distort the message about the grace of our God in order to excuse their immoral ways, and who reject Jesus Christ, our only Master and Lord. Long ago the Scriptures predicted the condemnation they have received.

⁵For even though you know all this, I want to remind you of how the Lord^a once rescued the people of Israel from Egypt, but afterwards destroyed those who did not believe. ⁶Remember the angels who did not stay within the limits of their proper authority, but abandoned their own dwelling place: they are bound with eternal chains in the darkness below, where God is keeping them for that great Day on which they will be condemned. ⁷Remember Sodom and Gomorrah, and the nearby towns, whose people acted as those angels did and indulged in sexual immorality and perversion: they suffer the punishment of eternal fire as a plain warning to all.

⁸In the same way also, these people have visions which make them sin against their own bodies; they despise God’s authority and insult the glorious beings above. ⁹Not even the chief angel Michael did this. In his quarrel with the Devil, when they argued about who would have the body of Moses, Michael did not dare to condemn the Devil with insulting words, but said, “The Lord rebuke you!” ¹⁰But these people attack with insults anything they do not understand; and those things that they know by instinct, like wild animals, are the very things that destroy them. ¹¹How terrible for them! They have followed the way that Cain took. For the sake of money they have given themselves over to the error that Balaam committed. They have rebelled as Korah rebelled, and like him they are destroyed.