The Master and the Lord

Jude 4—5

The Master and the Lord

What Jude meant by the two titles --- and the name your modern Bible swapped into verse five

Yahuah is the Owner who redeemed you; His Son was the price.

--- The Standing Stone ---

Behind “LORD” in your Bible lies a hidden name --- in the Hebrew it is Yahuah Psalm 83:18**; Yahuah is the Father** Isaiah 63:16**; Yahuah is the only God, beside Him there is no other** Isaiah 45:5**; therefore Yahuah the Father is the only true God, leaving no room for a second or third person** 1 Corinthians 8:6**.**

Reference Piece

Restoring the Name

How the title “LORD” came to cover the name Yahuah in your Bible

see the reference section at the back of the book

1.1 --- The Claim Laid on These Two Verses

Open most modern Bibles to Jude 4 and you will read that the false teachers were “denying our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” --- every title piled onto the Son, who is made the one and only Sovereign. Turn to the next verse and many of those same Bibles tell you it was “Jesus” who “saved a people out of Egypt.” Put the two together and the message is plain: the Son is the only Master, the only Lord, and the very God who led Israel out of bondage. Two verses, one sweeping conclusion. So let us hold both of them up to the light and read them slowly, because the case does not survive a careful look.

1.2 --- Two Words Your Bible Prints as One

The English word “Lord” in verse 4 is hiding two different Greek words. Read it as the King James preserves it:

Jude 4

For there are certain men crept in unawares… ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.

The first “Lord” is the Greek despotēs --- the absolute owner, the master of a household who holds his servants by right of possession. Our word “despot” comes straight from it. The second “Lord” is kyrios --- a much wider word for anyone in a place of authority. Jude did not repeat one word; he chose two. He gave the Father despotēs and added the word “God,” and he gave Yahushua kyrios. The King James keeps the seam exactly where Jude put it: “the only Lord God” is one figure --- the Father --- and “our Lord Jesus Christ” is another, joined by a plain “and.” That is two, not one.

And here is what the modern editions did to it: they dropped the word “God” out of the verse. Their text reads “our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ,” folding both titles onto the Son and erasing the Father from the sentence altogether. Someone cut the seam out. The older English keeps it in plain view.

1.3 --- A Word for Owners, Not a Word for God

So which one is the despotēs --- the absolute Owner? Start with what the word itself proves, because it is not a word for God at all. It is a word for an owner. Of its ten appearances in the New Testament, five name ordinary human masters --- the men who owned household servants: “servants… under the yoke count their own masters [despotēs] worthy of all honour” 1 Timothy 6:1, and the same of believing masters 1 Timothy 6:2, and again in 2 Timothy 2:21, Titus 2:9, and 1 Peter 2:18. A slave-owner in Ephesus was a despotēs. So the word can never prove godhood; it proves possession --- that someone holds you as his own. That is the first thing to say to anyone who points at it as a badge of deity.

Now follow the word to the places where it does name the true God, and watch who wears it. Simeon, blessing God, said, “Lord [despotēs], now lettest thou thy servant depart” Luke 2:29 --- the Father. The assembly prayed, “Lord [despotēs], thou art God” Acts 4:24 --- the Father. The souls under the altar cried, “How long, O Lord [despotēs], holy and true” Revelation 6:10 --- the Father. Every time it names the true God, it names the Father. The Son is read into the word in only two verses in the whole New Testament --- this one and its sister in Peter --- and never because the text declares it, only because the reader carried the assumption in with him.

Scripture assigns the Owner’s role without confusion. The Owner is the One who redeems --- who buys back what belongs to His family --- and the blood that does the buying is the price He pays. Those are two roles, never the same one. Read the sister verse with that in view:

2 Peter 2:1

…even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.

Read it the way the whole of Scripture reads redemption. We are “bought with a price” 1 Corinthians 6:20, and that price was “the precious blood of Christ” 1 Peter 1:18—19. The Lamb is slain, and His blood “redeemed us to God” Revelation 5:9 --- to God, the destination, not to the Lamb. The Owner who buys is the Father; the price He hands over is the Son. So when Jude names “the only Master [despotēs], God,” he is naming the Owner --- Yahuah --- and when he adds “our Lord [kyrios] Jesus Christ,” he is naming the One whose life was the price. The false teachers deny both at once. That warning does not fuse them into one; it sets them on opposite sides of the same purchase.

1.4 --- The Word That Fits Too Many Heads

Now take up the word the whole argument leans on --- kyrios, “Lord.” If that word carried deity wherever it fell, look where it falls. A Roman governor used it of the emperor: “I have no certain thing to write unto my lord [kyrios]” Acts 25:26 --- that “lord” is Caesar. Peter used it of a husband: Sarah “obeyed Abraham, calling him lord [kyrios]” 1 Peter 3:6. Mary used it of a man she took for the gardener: “Sir [kyrios], if thou have borne him hence” John 20:15. The woman at the well used it of a stranger: “Sir [kyrios], thou hast nothing to draw with” John 4:11. Caesar, a husband, a gardener, a stranger --- every one of them kyrios. The word is a hat that fits a great many heads. It marks rank, not nature. You were told that “Lord” proves the Son is God. Your own Bible calls Caesar by the very same word.

1.5 --- Made Lord, Not Born Lord

And when Yahushua is called kyrios, Scripture tells you flatly where the title came from. Peter preached it on the day the assembly was born: “God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord [kyrios] and Christ” Acts 2:36. God made him Lord. A lordship that is made and handed over is not an identity that always was. Paul says the same thing: God “highly exalted him, and given him a name” so that every tongue should “confess that Jesus Christ is Lord [kyrios], to the glory of God the Father” Philippians 2:9—11. The lordship was lifted up to him by Another, and it points back to the Father’s glory. Yahushua is Lord because Yahuah made him Lord. That is the opposite of being Yahuah.

1.6 --- The Same Word --- and the Verse They Changed

Now set the two verses side by side and look at nothing but the word. In verse 4 “Lord” (kyrios) sits on Yahushua. In verse 5 the same “Lord” (kyrios) sits on the One who brought Israel out of Egypt:

Jude 5

I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not.

It is the identical Greek word in both lines --- and that is the whole point, and it is no one’s doctrine. It is the plain text. A word that names the Son in one sentence, the deliverer of the Exodus in the next, Caesar in another book, and a husband in another, is a title of rank, not a divine name. So no one may hold up “Lord Jesus” in verse 4 and say it proves he is Yahuah: the word simply does not carry that weight, no matter whose mouth it is in.

And verse 5 hides one more thing your modern Bible will not tell you. Lay it beside the King James and the text itself has been changed. Where the older English reads “the Lord,” many newer editions print “Jesus” --- “Jesus, who saved a people out of Egypt” --- a verse rebuilt to make the Son the God of the Exodus, and most who read it never learn it once said anything else. Here the honest fact must be told plainly: the surviving copies of this verse do not agree. Some read “the Lord,” some “God,” some “Jesus.” They are so divided that no one alive can tell you with certainty what the single original word was --- and that uncertainty is itself the answer. You cannot build the deity of the Son on a verse whose very word is in dispute, least of all when the disputed reading is the one that happens to serve the doctrine.

It is worth knowing, too, that the name printed as “Jesus” here --- the Greek Iēsous --- is the very same name as Joshua; the Greek Scriptures call Joshua “Iēsous” Hebrews 4:8. So even the reading that names a man does not, by the name alone, name the Messiah. But the firmest ground needs no quarrel over copies at all. The Hebrew Scriptures say it without a break: Yahuah brought Israel out of Egypt. “I am Yahuah thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt” Exodus 20:2 --- He says it of His own hand, again and again. No variant in a late manuscript, and no swapped name, overturns what Yahuah declares He Himself did.

1.7 --- The Reading That Needs Nothing Added

Now turn the two verses over and read them forward, with nothing carried in --- and watch how easily they say the very opposite of the doctrine laid on them. “The only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ”: there is one God, the Sovereign Owner, the Father; and there is one Lord, Yahushua, the Master appointed over us, whose own life was the price of the purchase. That is no strained reading forced onto the words. It is, almost line for line, the confession Paul states outright: “to us there is but one God, the Father… and one Lord Jesus Christ” 1 Corinthians 8:6. Jude 4 is that same confession turned into a warning --- and the false teachers deny both halves of it at once: the one God who owns them, and the one Lord who was given as their price.

Verse 5 lies down just as quietly. “The Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt” is Yahuah --- the one Saviour, who brought Israel out and who judged those who would not trust Him. One God who saves and who reckons; one Lord appointed beneath Him. The verses never reach for a third; they rest on two --- and only one of the two is God. A reader who came to Jude without the doctrine already in his pocket would never dig a Godhead of three out of these lines. He would find exactly what Jude wrote: the only Sovereign, and the Lord that Sovereign made.

Conclusion

The Verdict

Hold the two verses together and the doctrine built on them falls apart while you watch. Jude gives the Father the Owner’s title and the name “God”; he gives the Son the title “Lord” that Yahuah Himself bestowed. The word that was supposed to weld them into one is the same word Scripture spends on Caesar and on a man at a well. And the One who saved Israel from Egypt is Yahuah, exactly as He always said --- whatever a later hand wrote over His name.

The only Owner is God the Father; the Lord beside Him was made Lord and given as the price. A title was never a name.