An Introduction to an Urgent Letter

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BibleProject Podcast

Old Testament, Demons, Christianity, Bible Study, God, Torah, Jesus, Angels, Bible, Satan, Spirit, Theology, New Testament, Jon Collins, Tim Mackie, Spiritual Beings, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 18.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

The Letter of Jude E2 — In the introduction to his letter, Jude (or Judah) shares that he had hoped to write about the community’s “shared rescue” of salvation in Jesus. But urgent problems in the church forced him to send a warning instead. He calls his readers to “contend for the faith once for all handed down,” describing this faith as made up of trust in the story of Jesus and loyalty to Jesus’ way of life. But what is the threat Jude wants them to guard against, and how does he describe it? In this episode, Jon and Tim break down the introduction to the letter of Jude, revealing a multitude of Hebrew Bible hyperlinks and a method of reading Scripture as unified meditation literature.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Bible Project podcast.
0:06.5	We just started a series slowly walking through the short New Testament letter of Jude,
0:12.6	or as we've been calling it, the letter of Judah, a man known to be a brother of Jesus.
0:18.4	The relatives of Jesus participated in the planting of new house churches,
0:24.5	overseeing them, and the letter Jude emerges out of that network. This is one of the earliest
0:30.7	Christian documents coming from the earliest roots of the Jesus movement. The letter itself was an
0:36.7	emergency letter that Jude wasn't planning on writing.
0:40.4	In fact, Jude was working on a different letter, which he mentions.
0:44.3	It's a letter all about our shared rescue.
0:47.0	In English, it's our common salvation.
0:49.3	The thing that we are all connected to and united in and participate in.
0:54.0	How cool would it be to have that letter?
0:56.5	It would have been like an early, messianic, Jewish biblical theology of salvation.
1:01.2	And while we don't have that letter, his biblical theology of salvation leaks out into this letter.
1:07.6	It's on his brain. We're going to see echoes of it. Now, the reason for this letter is to address an urgent matter.
1:13.8	He wants to warn about dangerous people who have snuck into the larger church network.
1:19.2	People he calls irreverent ones.
1:21.9	Most other English translations are going to say godless or ungodly.
1:26.2	Somebody who doesn't think that God exists, but more importantly
1:29.6	doesn't have any authority over them. That's what he's facing. So this is really then the lead
1:34.5	into what the whole rest of the letter is going to be about. The thing is Jude tells us very little
1:39.9	about who these irreverent ones are, what they're up to, what they're teaching. Instead, Jude spends
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