2 Peter 2

2 Peter 2:1-22

Division 2. (2 Peter 2:1-22.)The progress of evil, and the seduction of false teachers. We come now, in the second division, to look at the development of evil, alas, in what is the professing Church of God on earth; the opposition of the enemy, which we have already learned to be so commonly by imitation of the truth, as well as also by weaving error and truth together, so that the truth shall attract true souls and thus put them off their guard against the error mixed with it. How essentially is the present day a day of such mixture! And how abundant are the sanctions of false prophets at the present time, whether professedly Christian or as nearly as possible assuming a Christian aspect in order to deceive! Man’s will, as we shall find, throughout distinguishes the false prophet, the very thing which the apostle has carefully assured us is absolutely foreign to the true one.

1. Looking back, the apostle reminds those whom he addresses -Israelites, as we know -that there were, there always have been, false prophets among the people. This was not to cease in Christianity, as one might easily think and would surely hope; the brightness and blessedness of God’s grace in it allowing no successful imitation. Nay, says the apostle, there shall be false teachers among you, and that going on to the extreme of revolt against the Master that bought them. He does not say “redeemed.” He has no thought of redeemed people here. Christ has bought everything.

The whole world is His, with all that is in it, and not merely as the Creator, but as the One who has paid an infinite price to get it back, as it were, to Himself.* But purchase is not redemption. What it does imply is the right over them of the One who has made this purchase, a right they may deny, as, in fact, those mentioned would deny it. They would develop a spirit of rebellion which would bring swift destruction, not upon themselves alone, but upon all who followed them. Their ways would be ways of dissoluteness, -their own way manifestly, -but which would cause, by the number of their followers, the way of truth to be blasphemed by those who were professed followers of it.** Seeking their own ends, they would be but merchantmen on their own account, making merchandise, with well-turned words, of the people of God themselves, to satisfy simply their own covetousness, their lust of power, lust of money, lust of fame, every other kind of lust that presses upon man. The judgment upon these was ordained from of old, and, as it were, ready to break forth. The patience of God was not indifference, and the seeming prosperity that they might in the meantime have would not hinder the completeness of their final destruction.
2. The apostle now exhorts those who might be in danger of being carried away by the false pretensions of such as these to remember the judgment which is already passed upon those who in former times walked in the same course of lawlessness and rebellion against the authority of God. The angels who sinned God has cast down to the pit, delivering them to chains of darkness to be kept for judgment -a company which, as it seems by what is said of them, must be kept separate from the more general class of Satan and his angels, who are, as we know, not in confinement as yet, but going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it, Satan himself being the prince of this world at the present time. These, on the other hand, are already in chains, not in hell exactly, which in the force that it has now with us would mean the final place of torment. Here, evidently, is a condition preliminary to the judgment which is at hand for them and for all else, one and the same judgment at the same time. The apostle brings forward again the judgment of that old world out of which Noah, “the eighth person,” -or one among eight, -“a preacher of righteousness,” was preserved, the flood being brought in upon the world of the ungodly.

It is the same example that we have had in the first epistle, and evidently used in the same way: not to dilate upon God’s grace to those thus perishing, but the very opposite -to emphasize their judgment, and that, out of a whole world of ungodly, only eight persons were preserved. Next, he passes on to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah which God had turned into ashes, condemning them with an overthrow, making them an example to those that should live ungodly.* Here, too, was a careful discrimination in favor of the righteous, though it might be only one man who manifested himself really as that.

He, too, was in a place where manifestly he had no call from God to justify his being in it. Righteous man he was, vexed with the evil behavior of the godless, and that from day to day, as in their midst he saw and heard what was taking place. But why was he there to vex his soul with it? Yet, after all, though in Sodom, he was not of Sodom, and the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation while keeping the unrighteous to the day of judgment under punishment. Even in that preliminary prison-house of the lost there must of necessity be the sense of God’s anger abiding upon those shut up there, although the time of full and final apportionment has not come. The apostle emphasizes two things especially as noted among them -the outbreak of the flesh in its grossest character, and the setting aside of all authority.

These two things, of course, necessarily go together; at least, the latter will accompany the former. Thus, then, had God manifested Himself able to destroy on the one hand, able to deliver on the other, and faithful on both sides to His nature and to His word.
3. We have now the full manifestation of these ungodly ones of the last days. The same general character is seen in them, only ripened in the constant resistance to the longsuffering of God, which is salvation, and to the full light which has come in. This is, in fact, what makes the last days so evil: not that, if you look at the mere outward condition, you could always say that it is worse than what the world has been ever full of; but, as we have learnt in Paul’s epistle to Timothy, the evil has wrought in the presence of the truth, to which, in the first place, it had seemed indeed to be in allegiance, and which, in fact, had more or less control. Thus there was a form of godliness while the power of it was denied. Here we have a similar thing, but with a fuller description, and therefore more loathsome as seen nearer at hand.

They are “bold,” “self-willed, they do not fear to rail at dignities,” whereas angels, so much greater in might and power, did not bring railing accusation against them before the Lord.* But these are only as animals naturally, without the constraint of reason or the fear of God, having lost the capacity for communion with Him, and thus all that implied or necessitated continuance at all. They were but as beasts “born to be caught and destroyed,” much lower therefore than the beast, for man cannot sink to them without sinking lower.

These, therefore, railing about things of which they are ignorant, will perish in their own corruption. There is in sin a necessary element of destruction. It has no justification of its existence, no right to live, and the perpetual degradation downward tends necessarily to the same thing. Thus they receive the reward of unrighteousness, being such as count it pleasure to revel in the daytime, not in the night, as men do usually for shame. They have learnt to face the light and defy it. Thus they can take their place even with Christians, while mere spots and blemishes upon all the Christian name; reveling at last in their very deceivings at the superior wisdom with which they trick the more credulous souls around them, their very heart going out in their restless eyes, never ceasing from sin, having the heart practiced in ways of personal gain, following Balaam in his path of old, who loved the reward of unrighteousness and walked, with the very hand of God upon him, in the folly of his own self-seeking.

Thus the dumb ass was used of God in fitting rebuke to him -a human voice, yet with a beast’s nature; but the beast rebukes the man, as even beast nature does. These, then, are “springs without water,” those to whom men look for something but find nothing of what they want -“obscuring mists,” driven by the storm of their own passions, with divine judgment at the back, unto whom the gloom of darkness is reserved forever.

Such is the description of those of whom God’s warning voice would remind men during the time of His longsuffering endurance of them. None must think that He is deceived, or that the judgment which He predicts is a thing that may be slighted or trifled with.
4. And now the effect of all this upon others is specially marked. “Speaking great swelling words of vanity, they allure with the lusts of the flesh those just escaping from those that live in error,” men under a certain power of the truth, convicted in their own conscience, while, after all, the heart is not drawn to or satisfied with the things of God. Men are forced from evil by the conviction of judgment at hand, and this is the well-known character of so many apparent conversions under the chastening hand of God. They are, after all, driven, not drawn; and thus the lusts of the flesh still allure them. They would love to have the liberty which these men promise them, although, indeed, they are but themselves the mere slaves of corruption, least their own masters when they think most surely that they are that. But thus those who “have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” may be again entangled and overcome, men at heart halting between two opinions, although the truth has so far prevailed with them as to compel their separation from the very things that still invite them.

We must note carefully here that those of whom the apostle has spoken in the first chapter are those who have escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. This is the real Christian character.

The heart is satisfied, and satisfied with Christ; and thus they have in them a principle of stability which those spoken of here have none of. They have escaped the pollutions of external things. They have never had their own inner malady healed. Thus, though it be the “knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” that has done this, they are but dogs that turn back to their forsaken vomit, and, like the washed sow, which one surely knows, spite of her washing, will go back to the mire she loves. It is plain, therefore, that the apostle is, in all this, not contemplating that which could be a possibility to any real Christian. They have reformed, as men say; they know the way of righteousness.

They are convinced of that which the light has thus discovered to them; but that is all, and it is plain how in such a condition, when in spite of this they turn back to that which they have left, their last state has become worse than the first. Such, then, is the spreading character of this canker of evil, while at the same time we are made carefully to know how God, has provided for and shields His own.