Jude 4

Before of old ordained to this condemnation. Nothing in the Scriptures of the New Testament is more remarkable than the readiness with which the minds of the inspired founders of Christianity, when speaking of the most extreme and aggravated of human sins, or of the deepest injuries inflicted upon the cause of Christ, by human instrumentality, at once recur to the thought of the all-controlling superintendence of God, which they represent as including and covering all human events and transactions whatsoever. Jesus speaking of his betrayal by Judas, (Mark 14:21,) the disciples describing the crucifixion of the Savior, (Acts 4:28,) and now Jude called to testify against the most alarming indications of an internal corruption in the church, are very striking instances. While they fully appreciated the enormity of these sins, they never admitted the idea that any human guilt could be an unlooked-for contingency, interfering with and thwarting unexpectedly the divine designs,—or that any sinner, in his greatest excesses of crime, could really have broken away from the control of that hand by which they regarded the whole moral world as invariably and every where governed.