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Peter has briefly given us some help in recognizing false teachers when they show up. Now he spends considerably more column inches telling us what’s going to happen to them. Since God has consistently acted against false prophets in the past to condemn his enemies (2P 2.4-6) and to rescue his people (2P 2.7-8), he will certainly act now to rescue his people (2P 2.9) and to condemn his enemies (2P 2.9-22).
(Side note: this structure is a chiasm. The Bible contains lots of them.)
Past Examples
God condemned the angels who joined Satan in his rebellion (2P 2.4); he condemned those who rejected the preaching of Noah (2P 2.5); and he condemned Sodom and Gomorrah for a whole raft of sins (2P 2.6; cf Ezk 16.49-50). But even in the Flood he rescued Noah and his family (2P 2.5), and even in his destruction of Sodom he saw, loved, and rescued Abraham’s nephew Lot (2P 2.7) because Lot was grieved by what he saw around him in that wicked city (2P 2.8).
(Side note #2: Observant readers will recognize that these verses also appear in the Epistle of Jude. Older interpreters believed that Jude wrote first and then Peter pulled his words in and rearranged them slightly. They note that Peter says the false teachers “will come,” while Jude says they’re already here. More recent commentators reverse the order. I’m inclined to go with the old guys. But in the end it makes little difference for doctrine or application.)
Present Certainty
Well, then. If God has done these things in the past, then we should expect that he will do them again as we face sly attacks from false teachers. He will rescue us (2P 2.9a), and he will “reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished” (2P 2.9b).
Specifically, he will judge them for their immorality (2P 2.10a) and for their rejection of authority, including God’s (2P 2.10b). Here he repeats two of the three characteristics of false teachers that he identified earlier in the chapter.
Their arrogance and rebellion are displayed by their shameless acts “to speak evil of dignities” (2P 2.10c); whether Peter is referring here to human dignities, such as pastors or government officials, or to supernatural beings, Peter does not make clear. But the parallel passage in Jude (Jude 1.9) refers to the account in the apocryphal Assumption of Moses in which the archangel Michael would not rebuke Satan as they contended over the body of Moses. (Unfortunately that portion of the apocryphal manuscript has not survived. And no, I don’t have much light to shine on it.)
Peter spends the bulk of this chapter on the immoralities of the false teachers.
They “riot in the daytime” (2P 2.13)—that is, they don’t even have the decency (!) to wait until after dark before they start into their immoral behavior. They have “eyes full of adultery” (2P 2.14)—which is to say that every time they look at a woman, they objectivize and sexualize her. They love “the wages of unrighteousness” (2P 2.15)—and here Peter recalls the third characteristic of false teachers mentioned in the first section of the chapter: they’re in it just for themselves.
As a result of the emptiness of their worldview, they are unremittingly disappointing. They are “wells without water” (2P 2.17), a common disappointment in the desert climates extensive in the biblical lands. They promise what they can’t deliver. They appeal to the worst instincts of their hearers (2P 2.18), promising them freedom but in fact leading them into the same slavery that engulfs themselves (2P 2.19).
In the Hebrew Scriptures even Exodus reminds us that life is not about being free from all authority, but about being delivered from an evil master to be placed into service to a good one. If, then, we have escaped an evil master, Peter says, we must not go back. To do so would be worse than if we had never escaped at all (2P 2.21).
There’s a clear application here.
If you’re a Chapter 2 person, there is nothing good down the road on which you’re traveling. Repent and believe now, before things get even worse.
And if you’re a Chapter 1 person, rest assured that God knows you, sees you, and will deliver you from the evil one. Or as Jude says, he “is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy” (Jude 24).
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