So, turn with me once again to the book of Jude. Remember, there's only one chapter, so that makes things easier. In just a minute I'll be reading verses 12-16. Let me just set this up a bit. Jude has just explained that the false teachers that he's been writing about since verse 4, those certain persons who had crept into the church unnoticed to spread doctrinal error and to attempt to promote gross immorality among the saints. These men did what they did because, he says, they did not understand. Jude draws a very important analogy here, pointing out that they were like unreasoning animals. They acted not under the influence of the Holy Spirit, but according to the flesh. And because of this, Jude says in verse 11, woe to them, for they have gone the way of Cain and for pay, they have rushed headlong into the error of Balaam and perished in the rebellion of Korah. And what's the common denominator here between Cain, Balaam and Korah? Well, again, they were utterly devoid of the Holy Spirit and they acted accordingly. This not knowing that Jude ascribes to these false teachers is not the innocent sort of ignorance that we attribute to children, that we might attribute even to adults who have just not yet been exposed to things of the truth. This not knowing was a willful not knowing. They willfully chose to act in accordance with their fleshly instincts as opposed to having any idea or any disposal to act in accordance with the Holy Spirit. They were unsaved. In verses 12 through 16, which we're not going to cover that whole thing tonight, but let me just read that. Jude goes on here to describe these individuals as follows. Read it with me. He says, these are the men who are hidden reefs in your love feasts. And when they feast with you, uh, without fear, caring for themselves, they are, he says clouds without water. carried along by winds, autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted, wild waves of the sea casting up their own shame like foam, wandering stars for whom the black darkness has been reserved forever. It was also about these men that Enoch and the seventh generation from Adam prophesied, saying, Behold, the LORD came with many thousands of His holy ones to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him. These are grumblers, finding fault, following after their own lusts. They speak arrogantly, flattering people for the sake of gaining an advantage. In the first two verses of this passage, in verses 12 and 13, Jude uses six metaphors to describe what these individuals were and are like. These metaphors are actually insults. Truth, yes, but these are intended to help us understand, number one, just how deplorable false teachers truly are. And number two, what we can liken them to in an effort to better understand how they operate and exactly what it is that they enter into the church to do. Let's look at each of them. First, he says that they were hidden reefs in the church's love feasts. It's important that we understand what the love feast was. The love feast was a routine gathering of the church. You see these especially prevalent in the second chapter of Acts, where early in the existence of the New Testament church, There was a fervor, there was an excitement, there was a sense of fellowship, and they would come together periodically. Many people think that this was daily at first, and then it turned into weekly, and then it gradually tapered off. But they would come together for these feasts that they called agape feasts. They would come together to celebrate. the love of Christ, as well as the fulfillment of his promise that he would send the Holy Spirit back who would then lead them and guide them and teach them in the truth. During this meal, at some point, it was customary for them to observe the Lord's table together. And it would most often be followed by the singing of a few psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, as was their custom. The imagery here of these individuals who are described as hidden reefs really doesn't require that much of an in-depth explanation. You know what hidden reefs are. One of the sailor's worst nightmares as he sails on seemingly calm waters into the port is to suddenly find himself on a reef. Coral reefs have taken down many a ship. Reefs can be so thick with coral and that coral is so petrified that even the bottoms of steel ships today can sometimes be cut open by these reefs. You can only imagine the wooden ships that they had back in the day. You'd think you're sailing along on still water only to hit a reef. and have your ship sink not long after. These individuals who had crept into the church unnoticed would have the same effect in terms of causing the unsuspecting to make shipwreck of their faith. This is actually a phrase that Paul uses himself when he's talking to Timothy in 1 Timothy 1.19. Remember there he tells Timothy, he says, "...fight the good fight, keeping the faith in a good conscience, which some have rejected and have suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith." This was really one of the primary objectives of the false teacher. The false teacher was very jealous to begin with. They were unsettled by the fact that other people could have this faith and this confidence in that which they could not have. They were very unsettled to the point where they wanted to bring to shipwreck as many people of the faith as they could. They would prey on the young, inexperienced, unsuspecting, new believers in an attempt to get them to renounce their faith or doubt what it is that they had been taught to believe. Notice also how Jude describes their attitudes, these false teachers attitudes, which explains why they were such a danger during these love feasts. He said that when they attended these feasts, they would feast with the saints without fear, caring for themselves. These feasts were not necessarily overly formal occasions, right? But they were to be taken seriously. They were to be viewed sober-mindedly. In fact, I would argue that this is a necessity any time we gather as Christians to remember the work that Christ has done for us in salvation. These individuals, however, had no fear. In other words, their sin actually emboldened them to the point that they had only one objective in mind, and that is to feed their own flesh. I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but the early church, at least in the first century, they really didn't enjoy communion in the same way we do today. It's kind of sad to say, but the way most churches, including this church, observe the Lord's table is really perfunctory, right? I mean, back in the day, they didn't have these little cups of wine or juice. They certainly didn't eat these little pillows of Styrofoam that we, or whatever it is that we ingest on that day, right? There was no pomp or circumstance or anything like that. They would do this during these love feasts as a natural course or natural progression during the feast. It was much the way Jesus himself did it with his own disciples. They were gathered for a meal. The disciples on that night before, when Jesus was betrayed, they didn't come together and enjoy a communion service. They came together to break bread and to drink wine. And Jesus is like, while you're at it, remember this every time you do this. Whenever you do this, whenever you do what? Come together for some formal communion? No, whenever you do this, whenever you come together to eat and drink, do it in remembrance of me. When you break that bread, remember, that's my body. When you drink that wine, remember, that's my blood spilled for you. And so it had a much deeper meaning. There was a poignancy to it. But these false teachers missed that entirely. They would enter into these love feasts and they would come hungry with ravenous appetites. They'd be more like hogs going over to the slop trough than actually pausing to reflect on what all this meant because they were unable to do that. This is actually, if you'll recall from 1 Corinthians 11, this is what Paul is warning the Corinthians against. In 1 Corinthians 11, in fact turn there, we can learn a great deal about the particular do's and don'ts surrounding this unique kind of meal. First look at verses 20 through 22. Now I'm sure you already know, many in the Corinthian church had actually become notorious for abusing sacred things. probably goes without saying, the Corinthians are one of the few people who actually had a verb named after them. You know what it means to Corinthianize? It means to be in drunken revelry. And so they even have their own, you know, their own verb. How many times have you heard people say, don't be a Corinthian? Maybe not these days, but I mean, I remember that growing up. You know, he was acting like a Corinthian, or he was drunk as a Corinthian, right? But they had grown accustomed, many in the church, to abusing sacred things, and that included the Lord's Supper. Here in verse 20, Paul chastises them, saying, literally, when you come together in the same place, it's not to eat of the Lord's table. He says, you guys have missed the point entirely. Nowadays, when you come together, you're forgetting exactly why it is you're coming together. It's certainly not to eat the Lord's table. And what evidence was there to support that charge? We'll look at verse 21. For in your eating, each one takes his own supper first and one is hungry and another is drunk. And again, you can almost see this as, as hogs, you know, rushing to the slop trough. They were more concerned with getting their own food first, not caring that others were being left out to go hungry. And to top it off, some of them had actually imbibed so much before the meal that they had gotten drunk. They'd lost their senses. And what was Paul's response to this kind of atrocity? Look what he says in verse 22. He says, what? Do you not have houses in which to eat and drink? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? In this I will not praise you." That's a pretty strong indictment. He's basically saying, look, you can eat your sumptuous meals at home. You can pig out at home. You can pig out at home. You can drink as much as you want in the confines of your own home, but you're not gonna come here and make a mockery of what the Lord told us to do in remembrance of Him. And that's what they were doing. If you go back to our text, this is the same concern that Jude expresses about these certain men. These hidden reefs who shove and push their way to the front of the line without shame or fear, caring only for themselves. Now go back to 1 Corinthians 11 and look at verse 33. Here we're told exactly what was expected of those who would attend these love feasts. Paul says in verse 33, so then my brethren, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If anyone is hungry, let him eat at home so that you will not come together for judgment. He's saying, look, at least grab a candy bar on your way out the door. So that when you get here, you're not ravenous. So when you get here, you can control your fleshly impulse to run to the head of the line and act like a pig. He's saying, don't come here so hungry that you can't help yourself. Not caring at all if anyone else gets anything to eat. If you're that hungry, he says, eat at home. He says, when you're here, wait for one another as a token demonstration of the same sacrificial love exemplified in the Lord's own death. Jude's warning here about these types of individuals being hidden reefs. is actually predicated on the idea that such behaviors are easily mimicked by those who are easily influenced by others. And when that happens, a shipwreck of faith is not only possible, but probable. You can imagine, you know yourself that misbehavior is contagious. Right? Steve, you know the discussions we had about a church that you attended years back. where once it was determined that drinking in moderation was okay, it wasn't long before people started extending that boundary of what was moderation, right? Once you give license, a foothold in the church, what happens? Very often it just leads into mayhem. And that's why we have such strict sounding rules in relation to our conduct. Yeah, Irma. So then when they did the Lord's Supper, it isn't like, it sounds like it's different. In other words, back then it was like they had lots of bread and they had lots of wine and they ate. So they didn't come like what we do here, like you said, you take the little cup and you do the remembrance and you do it with the seriousness. No. Yes, that was part of their love feast. It was part and parcel of the love feast. Both. Because during the love feast, the love feast served two purposes. One was fellowship for the saints who loved each other and wanted to come together as Jesus commanded and remember what he had done. But two, it was a way of feeding the poor. And that's why he says, when you come together, wait on one another. In other words, don't act like a ravenous wolf devouring the kill. Wait. Let these poor, let these other people go ahead. No, there was a formal element to it. Yeah, well, what it would be equivalent to, you're all sitting around the table, you're enjoying your meal. And at some point, someone would stand up and say, let us remember the Lord's death. And then at that point, they would each take a piece of bread, and they would go through the motions, certainly. But it didn't have that liturgical sort of perfunctory feel to it. Yes. It was more of an organic, natural form of worship. Because remember, when Jesus did this with his disciples, they didn't pass out little cups, they didn't pass out little pillows of who knows what. They didn't, you know, there was not this liturgical perfunctory feel to it. It was a part of their natural progression of things. Oh, I don't know. Yeah. That's where my knowledge of those things breaks down. Nobody's alive to tell us. But history books are full, you know, first century histories are full of information about these love feasts. Go online and just look up love feast and you'll learn a lot about how these were just organic meetings of the church, you know. They would have had more of a, not a laid back feel, there was sobriety, there was a sense of seriousness. But it wasn't like we go through the motions today. But these hidden reefs, they would come in and just disrupt the whole thing. They would come in and start throwing up obstacles and saying, nope, that's not the way we should do it. We don't have to wait on anybody. They had no fear, Jude says. They were there only to serve themselves. And that we're not to do. Because especially in 1 Corinthians 11, what Paul is actually describing there is one of these love feasts in which the Lord's Supper would be observed. So it's doubtful they even called it the Lord's Supper back then. It was just a remembrance, right? And then by the time it gets introduced into the formal liturgical setting, now this is why you've got the Roman Catholics saying, for example, that there's the transubstantiation of the Eucharist where the bread turns into the actual body of Christ. and the wine is somehow miraculously transformed by the priest's sacerdotal power into the actual blood of Christ, and then you've got the Lutherans who insist that they don't believe in transubstantiation, they believe in consubstantiation, they believe Christ is over, under, and through the elements, whatever that means, and so on and so forth. There's just a heaviness there, a burden, that I don't believe Christ himself ever intended. He said, do this in remembrance of me. That's all he meant by that. Because I know that the Catholics would not allow you to eat before you came to take the supper. And then when they would get ready to leave it for the communion, what they would do is they'd say, I'm not worthy for you to come under my roof. Well, they're talking about the roof of your mouth. But just say the word and I shall be healed. And I could never understand that. And then when I started reading the scripture, and it was the centurion. Right. But somehow that got interpreted as the roof of the mouth. That's kind of like the Pentecostal understanding of, you know, there's a scripture that says, let him who is on the housetop not come down. And they take out of context and say, top, not come down. So that's why they have the bun on top of their head. Yeah, weird stuff. Yeah, John. Well, there would have been a little more formality than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it would just been an opportunity. Jesus commanded, as often as you do this, do what? Eat and drink. do this in remembrance of me. And so they made it a practice when they would have these fellowship feasts, these love feasts, to always remember the command of Christ to do that in remembrance of him, which would include some sort of, I wasn't there, Chris were you? No, Chris wasn't. But there would be an element added to that, involving that, so. Any more details, I really don't know. All I know is these hidden reefs were just causing problems in an otherwise what should have been a very smooth process, right? That's what he's talking about there. Well, moving on, what else does he equate these false teachers to? Well, he says that they were clouds without water. carried along by winds. Now this is really just a reference to the deceptive nature of the false teacher. He's like a cloud that promises rain, but is quickly blown away by the wind. You know, especially in these parts, you see a cloud that looks very promising. You look up in the sky and you see this dark cloud and you're like, your hopes get high, don't they? It's going to rain. And then what happens? It blows away. and you're disappointed. Well, that's what Jude is saying these false teachers were like. They showed great promise. They came in with flattering words. They came in with all these good intentions and good ideas. And then they would vanish after they had done the damage that they came to do. The false teacher that Jude warns his readers about here was not unlike the hireling that Jesus talks about in John chapter 10. Remember the difference he makes there between the contrast he establishes between the hireling and the true shepherd. The hireling is just the guy who's paid to sit at the gate and make sure no sheep get out. But what happens when the wolf comes? The hireling having no love or concern for the flock runs. because he himself doesn't want to be eaten. The true shepherd, though, guards the gate to the sheepfold and won't let the wolves come in because he loves the sheep. He cares for the sheep. These false teachers were very much like those hirelings who inevitably talk the talk, but never really walk the walk. These clouds without rain would promise things that they had no intention of delivering on. or had no ability to deliver on. As I thought about this, my mind was drawn to an analogy that I think is really important for us to stop and think about, because it's really intensely practical. In addition to their emptiness, and their incapacity to deliver what's promised. Jude is also suggesting that false teachers can be identified by that transient nature, this here today, gone tomorrow sort of mentality, as my ADD-addled brain so often operates these days. This got me to thinking about The problem that we see, and I don't know if you've ever noticed this, maybe not. Maybe you've never really considered this, but we have a problem, a real problem with longevity in the ministry. Right? We have a problem with people who see the ministry as just another rung in their career ladder. You know, they'll come into a church maybe this size and they'll stay just as long as necessary before the next larger church calls and then they're off to that. And then it's just climbing the ladder after that. At one time in history, And I think I mention this because he is talking about teachers, those men who come into the church and establish themselves as authorities. They come into the church and establish themselves as being credible and called. But at one time in history, a pastor could be called to a certain church, and he could reasonably expect to serve that body for the remainder of his life, or until the church decided differently. or until things in the church demanded that he could no longer stay, right? Brother Chris, you've been in that situation. Generally speaking, there was no thought given to climbing any sort of career ladder. There was no emphasis placed on moving upward and onward to larger churches with more responsibilities and more pay, for the most part. Serious minded pastors saw themselves placed into a local body by the grace of God to serve in that local body until God said otherwise for the duration. John Calvin, for example, ministered in Geneva for more than 25 years. Charles Simeon. British pastor, served in Cambridge for over 50 years. John Stott. Again, another theologian that was good at one time and then kind of slipped by the wayside, but a faithful minister in his own right. John Stott pastored the same church in London for more than 50 years. Jonathan Edwards. was at Northampton for over 20 years. Martin Lloyd-Jones served at Westminster Chapel in London for more than 30 years. We have contemporary examples of this too. Anybody know W.A. Criswell? W.A. Criswell served the First Baptist Church of Dallas for nearly 50 years. Adrian Rogers. You might not agree with him theologically, that's okay. But Adrian Rogers, another faithful servant of the Lord, served in the same church in Memphis for 30 years. Alistair Begg. He's been at Parkside in Cleveland for 35 years now. 35 years. John MacArthur. John's been serving that church now for 48 years. And he shows no signs of stopping. Talk about the Energizer bunny, right? Speaking of MacArthur, he actually wrote an article in 2015 about pastoral longevity. Let me tell you what he said. He said, pastors of past generations, like Calvin and Edwards, considered a call to a church similar to a marriage. In a sense, they were betrothed to their congregations. and faithfulness and loyalty to that union sustain them even through hard times. Pastors today need to learn from their examples. You need to see churches as more than stepping stones to something bigger. No matter what size the congregation or challenges it presents, you must believe that God has called you to that flock. Even the greatest trouble and disappointment is God's means of humbling you and breaking your self-confidence. We are all truly powerful and useful only when we are weak. Accept the benefits of trials. If you're committed to stay when you arrive and affirm that commitment regularly, you will prepare your heart to endure. That's good advice. That's good advice because I tend to believe that longevity is one of the signs that you're not a false teacher. No man can sustain a ministry of false teaching before someone discovers what's going on, and the whole thing implodes. Just as an important aside here, I would also argue that the same thing should be true of everyone who makes a commitment to a local church. Just like in marriage, there will be things in the local church that we don't like. There will be tough times. But just like in a marriage, what do we do when those things happen? We fix them. And we might limp along for a while as we fix those things, but we fix them. But what do so many today do when they become dissatisfied with the church? They leave. They leave. We have this consumer mentality when it comes to church hopping. You know, that doesn't work. I'm dissatisfied with what's going on there. And rather than be a part of the solution, people just leave, because it's much easier to leave. There's always another church that might better meet our needs, so we just move on. After all, who has the time to be a part of a solution to the problems that churches face these days? That's the pastor's problem. That's the mentality. And I can't tell you Just how damaging to the psyche that is when we as pastors see that sort of thing happening. I mean, we view, I view my ministry here as a marriage. I'm married to you guys. But guess what? You're married to me too. If you signed on as a member of this church, you signed on with a full awareness that you are in covenant relationship with the people here. What is a covenant? It's the same thing as a marriage. A marriage is a covenant. It's an agreement that we are in this for the long haul. We have committed ourselves to this thing called the local church, and we are bound and determined to make it work. Well, getting back to our text, and this is where the text comes in line with what I'm saying. The men that MacArthur speaks of as, you know, having committed themselves to the ministry for the long haul would be just the opposite of what false teachers do. These false teachers would be clouds that promised rain, but didn't deliver. The true teacher, the one who is truly genuinely called will be the one who's full of rain. providing whatever's necessary for the growth and maturation of the flock. One of my favorite examples of this is a pastor named John Fawcett. Anybody heard of John Fawcett? John Fawcett was pastor in a small town in England called Waynesgate. This was during the late 1700s. He's in a small church receiving a pay of 25 pounds a year. That's not a lot of money, even back then, right? 25 pounds a year. He gets a call to go to London to a much larger church with much more pay. He packs up all of his belongings into a wagon. He and his wife decide that The time has come to leave and move on to bigger and better things. And as he's doing this, as he's packing the wagon, the people from the church are coming by and bidding him a very tearful farewell. They were like, what are we going to do without our pastor? Who will teach us? He was so convicted by that that he immediately began unpacking his wagon. He ministered at Waynesgate until his death 35 years later. But he also left us with something. Anybody know what that is? He left us with a hymn. It went something like this, blessed be the tie that binds. our hearts in Christian love. The fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above. Before our father's throne, we pour our ardent prayers, our fears, our hopes, our aims, our one, our comforts and our cares. He stayed for a total of 54 years at that church. 54 years. And when he died, guess what? It wasn't any bigger than when he started. He was just preaching to the children and grandchildren of those that he began preaching to 54 years earlier. Today, according to the most recent poll conducted by Lifeway Research, the average tenure among local church pastors is 3.6 years. Some of you might be saying, well, what are you doing, Pastor? Are you lumping all those people into the category of false teachers? No. No. That'd be unwise and unfair. I don't know why people only last three and a half years at a local church. I'm not going to pretend to know. I'm not going to cast aspersion on a whole group of people. This is not a blanket assessment of that statistic. But I will say this, something's not right. If the average tenure among pastors in this country today is 3.6 years in each church, something's not right. We must agree on that. And I would be willing to conjecture that there are many who do fall into that category of false teacher. There are many who see the ministry as an opportunity for quote-unquote easy money. There are many who go to seminary. Chris, you've seen it. There are many who go to seminary who have no business ever occupying a pulpit, ever. And yet it happens. What are they doing? I can tell you what they're not doing, they're not being faithful to their calling. And that's one of these indicators that one might be a false teacher. Again, that's not a blanket statement, but I think it's really descriptive of those who have this knack for going into a local church body, showing all the promise in the world, and then leaving as much destruction in their wake as possible. That was the modus operandi of these that Jude describes as clouds without rain being blown away by the wind. Kara, did you have something? Somebody raised their hand. Oh, you know what I saw? I saw Emmett's hand stick up. And from this angle, it looks like your hand's sticking up. Never mind. Ginger, did you have something? Oh, good. Yeah, 54 total years. Well, how else does Jude characterize these individuals? Well, he goes on to say that they are autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted. I mean, I hope you can see here, Jude's not pulling any punches. He's actually hurling these invectives at these false teachers for a reason. He wants you to know just how bad they are. And in the vernacular of the day, there's nothing worse than an autumn tree without any fruit. You didn't go down to H-E-B and get your fruit from the produce section. A tree in autumn should be what? heavy laden with fruit. That was harvest time. It's when you went into the orchard and you pulled all the apples and plums and pears. Oh my. No, that's, wait a minute. That's lions, tigers, and bears. But anyway, you pulled all the fruit off the trees. Well, what happens when you have a tree in autumn that's barren? It's not worth anything to anybody. That's what he's saying about these false teachers. They were dead. In fact, he's not content just to refer to them as dead. He calls them double dead. It's just another way of saying that they were really dead. They were dead dead. This is possibly Jude's way of explaining that they weren't dead trees in the sense that a tree dies in the fall and comes back to life in the spring. They were dead to the point where it appeared as though they had been uprooted. Now this could also be a reference to the fact that they were dead in sin and were condemned to die again in the eternal sense, whatever the case. He was saying that there was nothing in these false teachers that was spiritually commendable in any way. Nothing. And he's not finished yet. In verse 13, he continues saying that they were wild waves of the sea casting up their own shame like foam. I don't know how much time you spend at the beach. I haven't spent a lot of time at the beach, but I've spent enough time, you know, at least down in Corpus, which is that really a beach? It's more like a cesspool. It's what it is because you go down there and what do you see? I mean if you go down to the wrong part of the beach The one that they don't clean up, what do you find? You find medical waste. You find dead, rotting carcasses. You find all kinds of things that are just unpleasant. And this foam that he's talking about is really the byproduct of all that detritus, all that refuse just gurgling up, and it causes this foam. You've probably seen it if you've gone to the beach. It just smells. Yeah, it's just brown, icky, yuck is what it is, right? That's what Jude's talking about. He's saying that these false teachers are just like the waves that bring all this filth to the shore. They're constantly stirring things up, stirring up trouble, stirring up doubt, stirring up false teaching, and in the end it all just amounts to wet, rotting, stinking muck. It's the best way he can describe it. Well, he uses one final salvo and it comes at the end of verse 13. He equates the false teachers who had begun infiltrating the church with wandering stars for whom the black darkness has been reserved forever. This is really fitting, I think, as the last thing on his list because it has a ring of finality to it. Have you ever sat out at night and looked out into the night sky and you see the stars? What's one of the, I hope I'm not alone in this, please tell me I'm not, but what's one of the adjectives that you would describe a star with? As you look out into the black night sky and you see this little pinprick of light there, What's one of the first adjectives that comes to your mind? Twinkle. Huh? Bright and glittery, shiny. No. I'm going for something slightly more morose. Desperate is close. That and that, no. Desperate's close. Lonely! Yes, you look up at all these stars and you see they're all separated by light years. Chris is like, no they're not, they're that far apart. Maybe I was being particularly sentimental when I thought about the stars in the night sky, but it's one of the most lonely, hopeless things you can see. I had a tendency to go to Chris and say, no, he's not. He's waving at every star as he goes by. But you look up at the night sky, there's nothing really, if you reflect on that, there's nothing really more somber than to think, there's that star, it's been there, you know, for a long, long, long time, all by itself, against a black backdrop. From my perspective, yes. You're making this much more difficult than it needs to be. In the end, Jude says that these false teachers are like the stars in the heavens. They cross from one point the sky to the other actually they don't we were doing the actual moving right I mean I suppose they do move in their own way but anyway they're they're they're these they're just kind of wandering in the black sky and the false teachers are the same way they're just kind of wandering aimlessly against this black backdrop of sin and it's a really I think it's a really poignant way to describe the false teacher False teacher never finds a home, never finds rest, and always can be seen against the black backdrop of the sin that they harbor. Yeah? Well, we could get into a discussion of astrophysics. A star that's 14 million light years away, right? The photon stream, if that star that's 14 million light years away were to be turned on right now, we wouldn't see the light for 14 million years. Because light years measure the distance that light can travel in a year. Remember, light is just a photon stream that has a beginning and an end. Yeah, and it moves. So when you see a star that's 14 million light years away, right, it takes 14 million years for the light from that star to reach the Earth. Now let me tell you, Don't, yeah, don't muddy the water yet. So let's say that star burned for a thousand years and then went out. You would still see for a thousand more years that photon stream. The stars, a lot of the stars you see in the night sky have burned out long ago. It's just that the light traveling from them to us has not yet finished its course. Okay, now people ask me all the time, well doesn't that defy the young earth theory? No. When God created everything, he created everything in a mature state. I believe that when he created the stars 14 million light years away from us, that the photon stream was immediately intact from beginning to end. He created it in its mature state. Just like he did trees. Trees had rings. You know, Adam and Eve were created as adults. So on and so forth. The animals were created at reproduction age. So, you know, again, it's no big thing for God to do. Remember what you read in Genesis. He said, let there be light. And there was light. It wasn't that we had to wait on its arrival 14 million years. Yeah. So anyway, well, These are the men Jude writes about which Enoch prophesied. And what did Enoch have to say about them? You'll have to wait till next week.