<p>1:25 <i>To the only God, our Saviour through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and power, before all time, and now and for always in the future. Amen</i>- The Roman proconsuls were to be called &ldquo;Saviour&rdquo;. But for Christians, there was only <i>one </i>Saviour, the Lord Jesus. The Caesars were frequently called &quot;Saviour&quot;- Josephus thus addressed Vespasian. Hence the radical import of the way that Jude 25 calls the Lord Jesus our <i>only</i> Saviour. &lsquo;Caesar is Lord&rsquo; was the cry of the Roman empire. Pliny wrote that he considered refusal to make the customary gesture to the emperor&rsquo;s statue to be a criminal act punishable by death. But &ldquo;To us there is but one Lord, Jesus&rdquo; the Christ, i.e. Jesus the Messiah of the despised, weird Jewish race.&nbsp;</p><p>Note that God's purpose with us began &quot;before all time&quot;; not just from &quot;the beginning&quot;. We were part of His &quot;eternal purpose&quot; in Christ (Eph. 3:11). Our calling and foreknowledge was not just from some 'beginning', but 'before' that; we were always in God's mind, and He existed with that mind from eternity.</p>