Bishop Keith Butler
Jan 18
These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots. (Jude 1:12)
Jude 1:12 warns about spots in your feasts of charity. That’s a little unclear to those of us in the twenty-first century English-speaking church. What was he talking about?
The Greek word that is translated spot in the King James Bible is spilas. It described an underwater reef, an unseen ledge that could cause a boat to crash. By using the Greek word spilas, Jude indicated there were hidden dangers in their feasts of charity. Feasts of charity weren’t special holiday parties; it was what first-century Christians called their regular meeting. Today, we talk about attending weekly church services, but in the first century, when believers gathered, they met in homes and usually ate together, and they called them love feasts.
Jude pointed out that there were people at their weekly gatherings who looked good, but they were clouds without water. In other words, they looked saved from the outside, but they didn’t have the life of God on the inside. They fit in with the other believers, but they had hidden agendas. These spots, or spilas in Greek, were ungodly men who denied Jesus as the Son of God, who died on the cross and rose from the dead. They claimed to be believers, but they weren’t. Here, Jude called them hidden reefs that could cause a ship to sink.
Beware of hidden reefs! Everyone sitting in church isn’t sold out for the Gospel. Some are there to create confusion and problems! Jesus talked about these kind of people in His parable of the tares in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. He said, “The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way” (Matthew 13:24-25). Just because someone sounds spiritual doesn’t mean they’re right with God. Guard your heart and your mind!