Welcome to Bible Project podcast.

We're in a short series on the New Testament letter of Jude, or as we've been calling it,

the letter of Judah.

Judah planned to write a letter to his Jewish messianic community about their shared

salvation in Jesus.

But instead, he had to drop everything and write a letter

dealing with the crisis happening in the church. Jude said, I've got to put out of fire because

there's these people that have come into the house church communities and they're going to ruin you

and ruin the integrity of our witness to Jesus as a community.

Jude doesn't pull any punches as he warns about these men, yet he writes about them in a very

different way than we might. He quotes stories from the Hebrew Bible that illustrate the deep

ancient patterns that these men are participating in, and then he expects us, the reader, to just understand these patterns because we've spent

so much time meditating on these very stories.

He does what, Second Temple Jewish Hebrew Bible nerds that follow Jesus, would do?

They see the world through the patterns and the characters and stories of poems, the Hebrew scriptures.

Today we look at how these dangerous men are like three characters in the Bible.

Kane, that's the firstborn of Adam, who kills his brother Abel.

Balam, that's the pagan sorcerer who's hired to curse Israel, and Cora.

That's the Levite who leads a rebellion against

Moses and Aaron, rejecting God's chosen leaders. What links them together is subtle in the Hebrew

Bible. These are three stories of people who themselves made bad decisions, but then they

bring other people into their deception.

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