Sodom and Gomorrah's Eternal Fire

The phrase people fix on is "eternal fire." The word worth stopping at is the one just before it: Sodom is set out as an example.
Jude is building a matrix. In verse 6, angels leave their assigned place and are held for judgment. In verse 7, a city reaches for beings from that place and is burned. Heiser reads these as the same transgression running in opposite directions - the boundary between the divine realm and the human one, crossed downward and then upward. Neither is a story about appetite. Both are about a line that was drawn at creation.
And Jude's purpose in citing them is present-tense. He is not writing history. He is telling a church what the false teachers among them are repeating.
Scripture links:
- Jude 7 - "serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire."
- Jude 6 - The angels "kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day."
These are exhibits, not anecdotes. Jude puts them on display because someone in the room is doing it again.