Judas 1:12

12. In the next two verses St. Jude ranges through nature, through earth, sea, and sky, for images of reprobation for the sensualistic heretics. Rocks, clouds, trees, waves, and stars are collected in expressive disorder of succession, to image their disorderly existence.

Spots Rather, rocks; that is, concealed peaks or breakers on which ships are liable to wreck. The calm, sweet sea, under whose surface these treacherous wreckers were lurking, were the feasts of charity, the agapae or love-feasts of the primitive Church. These were banquets after the Lord’s supper, intended to promote social fraternity in the Church, and to provide a charitable meal for the indigent, who were invited to partake. Wesley’s institution of love-feast was a revival of only the first of these purposes. Strange to say, these social and charitable meals could be kept pure neither from gluttony nor licentiousness, and for that reason were abandoned by the Church and prohibited by her authorities. We hope it is a proof of modern improved morality that no such facts, at our Sabbath-school excursions, picnics, and other Christian socialities, have given pain to the Church.

Feast… fear Perhaps a better rendering would be: Carousing with you without fear, providing for themselves. Even at a sacred feast they had no fear to indulge in excess and license. And by their seductions they were as rocks under surface, dangerous to the unsuspecting mariners.

Clouds Which in a dry region are a sweet promise of a falling shower; and these for awhile seemed rich with refreshing spirituality and benefaction to the Church. But, alas! they were waterless, with no reviving or fertilizing store in their bosom, and soon they are seen to be the image of fickleness and worthlessness, being the sport of the varying winds.

Trees Once fruitful, but now autumnal and stripped of fruit. The phrase, whose fruit withereth, simply signifies autumnal, and so bare of fruit and leaves.

Twice dead De Wette understands doubly-dead to be simply intensive, utterly dead. Alford and others, dead, first, in autumnal fruitlessness, their annual fruit-bearing energy being expended; and, secondly, dead by the subsequent extinction of all vitality. This describes, we may admit, doubly dead trees, but shows not the correspondent double death in the men typified by the trees. On the other hand, Stier and Wordsworth find the twice dead solely in the men, namely, in their original death by unregeneracy, and a second death after conversion by apostasy. This must find its correspondence in the trees in their original fruitlessness previous to the bearing, and a cessation of bearing by the cessation of life. We doubt whether a return to De Wette’s interpretation is not best.

Plucked up by the roots A single word, uprooted; or, as the Greek, more expressively, out-rooted. By the Greek aorist all these verbs contemplate the operations from the standpoint of time after their completion. See note, Romans 8:5; Romans 5:13. It is as if at the consummation of the whole ruin our apostle’s pen describes things as past.

Plucked up Rent from the Church, and, their probation being closed, virtually or really, wrenched from life; no longer cumberers of the ground. Their future and final fate predicted as a past fact.