Well do please keep your Bibles open and turn with me to 2 Peter chapter 2. At the end of chapter 1, Peter commended the Bible, the Scriptures, as the only reliable source of authoritative Christian teaching by which we may grow toward godly maturity. And as he did so, he found it necessary to defend himself and the apostolic message that he preached against the accusations of false teachers. Chapter 1 verse 12, for example, you get to see the allegation. He and the other apostles were peddling cleverly devised myths; that’s what he is responding to. And so instead, Peter reminded his readers, reminded us, that the apostolic message is founded on eyewitness testimony and rooted in the infallible, inspired, prophetic word now contained wholly in the Scriptures.
And now today as we turn to chapter 2, Peter moves out of that defensive posture and he goes on the offensive. In particular, in verses 1 through 10, our passage for this morning, we’re going to see Peter issue a warning and a promise. A warning and a promise. The warning is about the false teachers themselves. He wants us to see them coming. To know what to look for. To be on our guard against them. To be ready. And the promise is an assurance to the Lord’s faithful people that those who deal in deceptive teaching will in due course certainly face divine judgment, and yet the Lord knows how to rescue His children. And in verses 9 and 10, Peter sort of sums up and draws his conclusions. If you look there, you’ll see these two aspects of this passage spelled out clearly. Verses 9 and 10 – the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment. Rescue and judgment. Warning and promise. Those are the big ideas that Peter is going to deal with in these opening 10 verses. We are going to come at them under two headings. First, we will consider the danger identified in verses 1 through 3. The danger of the false teachers. The danger identified. And then secondly, 3 through 9, the destruction promised. The danger identified and the destruction promised.
Before we do that, let’s bow our heads in prayer and then we’ll read the passage together. Let us pray.
Almighty God, how we pray now that You would speak Your Word in power in the blessing of the Holy Spirit to all our hearts, for Jesus’ sake, amen.
2 Peter chapter 2 at verse 1. This is the Word of God:
“But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.”
Amen, and we praise God for His holy Word.
Well as we said at the close of chapter 1, remember, Peter spoke to us about the inspiration of the Old Testament scriptures in particular. But of course he reminds us in chapter 2, verse 1, that right along with the ministry of the inspired and infallible, prophetic word of the Old Testament age, there were false prophets who also arose among the people. And that, Peter tells us, that same situation continues to obtain. Things haven’t really changed. “False prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you.” So get ready. Be prepared. To be sure, we’d all like, I think, only ever to focus on the positive teaching of the Gospel. We’d all much prefer to confine the ministry of the Word to the great central verities of the Christian message. The glory of the triune God. The mystery of the union of the two natures in the one person of the Lord Jesus Christ. The wonder of His obedience and blood. The full provision God has made in Christ of salvation by faith alone in Christ alone. And many of the other central glories of the Christian Gospel. Certainly these ought to describe the burden of any faithful ministry just as they describe the burden of the Bible as a whole. And yet, Peter reminds us here, doesn’t he, that however much we might prefer it to be otherwise, there remains a sobering responsibility to call out false teaching and to equip the church to guard against it. And that’s why, in the first three verses of chapter 2, that’s why they are a bit like, you know, one of those “Wanted” posters you sometimes see the police put out there with an artist’s impression on it. You know what I’m talking about? Here is the criminal they are looking for. It’s a composite picture based on credible reports. Here are the main features of their prime suspect. That’s what Peter is doing here. He offers us a composite picture – not an artist’s impression, an apostle’s impression you might say, of the false teachers and what we all need to be on the lookout for. Here in the first place then, is the danger identified. The danger identified.
The Danger Identified
If you look at the passage carefully, you will see Peter highlights three things, really three sets of things, to be on the lookout for in particular. Number one, he notes the distinguishing marks of their message. The distinguishing marks of their message. Number two, the distinguishing marks of their method. And finally, the distinguishing marks of their morals. These are the three criteria by which Peter wants us to assess the faithfulness of any public teaching ministry. We have to look at the message, the method, and the morals.
False Teachers: The Distinguishing Marks of Their Message
Let’s think about the first of those – their message, in the first place. Verse 1, Peter says these false teachers “bring in destructive heresies.” Now hang on a minute, Peter. Isn’t that the very nature of heresy? They’re always going to be destructive. Heresy is destructive by definition, right? Well our English word, “heresy,” here in this passage, is a transliteration of the original Greek word. But the modern term as we use it has taken on something of a technical definition that it did not have when Peter originally wrote. And so today, a “heresy” is a theological error that departs from the truth with soul destroying consequences. That’s heresy. But when Peter first used the word, it really only meant any opinion that deviated from the norm. It did not necessarily entail error. And that’s all Peter would have been saying if he’d merely used the word translated in our passage as “heresy.” But the problem with these false teachers is not that they have simply adopted an otherwise entirely allowable minority position on some secondary point of doctrine. That’s not the issue.
No, the concern is their teaching is like a constant stream of water under the foundation of your house. It is corrosive to the foundations. It is destructive, he says. And if you don’t address the problem – this is the point – that steady stream of corrosive teaching flowing into your life will bring the whole edifice of Christian truth crumbling to the ground. If you knew there was a constant stream of corrosive, destructive water flowing under your house every day, you don’t just shrug and go, “You know, we’ll get to it sometime. No big deal!” You realize, “This is urgent! If I want my house to stay standing, I’ve got to deal with this problem!” And that is Peter’s attitude; he wants it to be our attitude to false teaching. This is urgent. We have to deal with the problem. It is destructive and corrosive and deadly.
And notice why their message is so very corrosive. Look at what he says about it in verse 1. They bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them.” The Master who bought them is a reference, of course, to the Lord Jesus Christ and to His cross, by which He secured redemption for sinners. The phrase builds on the imagery of the Old Testament scriptures where God redeems His people, Israel, His enslaved people. He buys them back out of bondage and sets them free. That is the metaphor. And so in the same way, Christ pays the manumission price of our freedom at the cost of His life’s blood. And Peter is saying at some point these false teachers claimed to have been in fact bought and redeemed and purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ. He was their Master, they said, and He has bought them and set them free. They had made a profession of faith in the crucified and risen Christ. They joined the local church. They said Jesus was their Master and He has bought us back from slavery.
But now – and this, I think for Peter, is especially shocking – now, these same men who made such a bright profession of faith in the blood and righteousness of Christ were denying this Jesus whose death, they said, was the purchase price of their deliverance. So it’s not just that they’re teaching is wrong, you see. Peter is telling us, no, they knew better. They knew better! They got the Gospel. They grasped who Christ was and what Christ has done. He is the Master who bought them at the cost of the cross. And now, they are denying Him. Probably, given the number of references in this letter to the second coming of Christ, part of their denial had to do with rejecting any idea that Jesus was ever going to return. Perhaps it has something to do with either His full and true humanity or His real and absolute deity. But whatever the specifics, their false teaching was not a peripheral matter. It was a basic rejection of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a repudiation of the only One who can save us.
And let me say this plainly before we move on. It really doesn’t matter what else you believe. No matter how faithful it may otherwise be to the Scriptures, if you don’t believe that Jesus is the “eternal God who became man and so was and continues to be both God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever,” who obeyed for us and bled for us and died and rose and reigns and is returning for us – if you repudiate the center of the Christian Gospel, the person and work, the resurrection, reign and return of Christ, however moral you may be, however prayerful, no matter how high a view of the Bible you may have, if you deny “the Master who bought us” you will face what Peter in our text calls “swift destruction.” Swift destruction. Get this wrong, you see, and the whole foundation of Christian truth comes tumbling down. Everything, everything rests on this foundation. What do you make of Jesus Christ? What do you make of Him? His life, His death, His cross, His empty tomb. Those are the great questions that will decide your eternal destiny. That’s what he’s saying. What do you do with Jesus? The distinguishing marks of their message.
False Teachers: The Distinguishing Marks of Their Method
Secondly, the distinguishing marks of their method. We can deal with this very briefly. Look at verse 1 again. Look at how they went about propagating their dangerous opinions. Peter says they will “secretly bring in destructive heresies.” In verse 3, he tells us in their greed they “exploited their hearers with false words.” It is one of the distinguishing marks of theological error that it rarely makes a big splash. Generally speaking, it does not broadcast its differences from the orthodox norm. Instead, it uses subtlety. It insinuates itself. It appears plausible and its advocates are nice guys with winning personalities. And they seem so very reasonable.
False Teachers: The Distinguishing Marks of Their Morals
And then notice, in the third place, the distinguishing marks of their morals. Their message, their methods, their morals. One of the ways to spot false teaching is to look not only at the content of what is being taught or at the underhanded, manipulative methods being used, but to look at the morals it produces. Look at the fruit in the lives of those who embrace this stuff. “By their fruit, you shall know them.” In the churches to which Peter was writing, it gave rise, he says, to “sensuality.” Do you see that word in our text? And not just in the lives of the false teachers but in the lives of many who followed their sensuality. The reference later on in verse 6 to Sodom and Gomorrah and to defiling passions or the lusts of defiling passions in verse 10, tell us that the sensuality here is a clear reference to sexual immorality and perhaps even a reference in particular to homosexuality.
And this too is a word we badly need to hear today. Isn’t it? After all, we live in a context of unprecedented sexual confusion. Pornography is as pervasive as oxygen it seems. Defining our sexuality has become, in our culture’s mind at least, fundamental to the way that we are supposed to identify and define our most basic selves. And all around us, Christians, churches, even whole denominations are capitulating to the pressure to concede ground to the LGBTQI cultural consensus. Think for a moment about the mainline churches in our country – denominations like the PCUSA or the Episcopal Church in the United States. They now ordain openly gay clergy and joyfully conduct same-sex weddings. For the most part, the sexual ethics of the LGBTQI+ movement have been embraced wholesale in these communions. But that’s not where they started.
When the PCA, our denomination, was formed in 1973 and we withdrew from the PCUS, many of the churches that remained in the old denomination were just as conservative as we were, especially on matters of personal and sexual ethics. But today, you can scarcely find a PCUSA congregation where that remains the case. And how did it get to this point? It happened further upstream, you see, with the rejection of the inerrancy and authority of Scripture; with the denial of the supernatural; with the rejection of the bodily resurrection of Christ. That’s where it started. And at the time, some people said, “Well these are doctrinal matters and they’re too complicated for us, too stuffy. We’re simple Christians and we don’t really need to be concerned about precision and clarity and accuracy in these detailed matters of theology. Let’s leave that to the egg-headed theologians in their ivory towers! What difference does it make to us?”
Well here’s the difference it makes. Look where it’s led. Follow the stream down a little ways, Peter says. It begins with a denial of the Master who bought you and it results in sensuality and the lusts of defiling passion. Here’s the danger identified. Do you see it? You can spot false teaching by these three distinguishing marks. Their message – they deny the Master who bought them. The fundamentals are being refused and changed to suit their preferences. Their method is covert, subtle, secret, manipulative, exploitative. And their morals – in the end it leads to sensuality, to sexual sin, and to the lusts of defiling passions. The danger identified.
The Destruction Promised
Now look at verses 3 through 10 where Peter spells out in the second place the destruction promised. The danger identified, now the destruction promised. At the end of verse 1, Peter said of the false teachers they’re bringing upon themselves “swift destruction.” At the end of verse 3 he says, “their condemnation is not idle and their destruction is not asleep.” Just as an aside, notice the way he personifies condemnation and destruction there as though they were individual agents who are not sleeping and are not idle. What is he really saying? He is saying the Lord Jesus is not idle; the Lord Jesus is not asleep! The just Judge, the Master you deny, He sees you! He sees you! And justice will be done one day. He’s sounding an alarm. I hope we’re listening.
And to make sure that we are, Peter uses three examples of God’s judgment in verses 4 through 8. Do you see the three examples? First of all he mentions the angels. “For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until judgment” – so the angels, they fell into sin. Presumably he’s referring to the fall of the angels at some point prior to the dawn of human history. And God has consigned them to some sort of limited existence while they await the final judgment. Angels will be judged, not just people. And then verse 5, he points to the ancient world in the days of Noah whom he calls a herald or preacher of righteousness. Noah preached the only way of salvation to his generation and none but seven members of his own family were spared in the ark from the judgment of the flood. And then in verse 6, there are the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, reduced to ashes under the wrath of God for their sexual sin, rescuing only righteous Lot who was distressed, Peter says, by the sensual conduct of the wicked.
These are the three examples of God’s swift and terrible judgment to which Peter appeals. Actually, verses 4 through 10 are one long run-on sentence at the head of which stands a single, “if.” The ESV, our version, helpfully explains the point by inserting an “if” at each clause. “If the angels…If the ancient world…If Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed…” And then he draws his conclusion in verse 9. The answer to the “if” statements is a “therefore” or a “then.” If God did not spare the angels, if He did not spare the ancient world, if He did not spare Sodom and Gomorrah but rescued Noah and his family, rescued righteous Lot, “then,” verse 9, “the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.”
So the promise is two-fold. There is a possibility of rescue and the certainty of judgment. The possibility of rescue and the certainty of judgment. Everyone will encounter one of these two. Everyone here, everyone listening, everyone watching at home will encounter one of these two. Either divine rescue in the Lord Jesus Christ or divine condemnation and wrath as the Lord Jesus, as King of kings and Judge of all the earth, pronounces sentence at the last day.
The Possibility of Rescue
Quite often, false teaching is attractive, isn’t it, because it seems to offer a plausible pathway to compromise with the world. It shows us a way not to have to remain on a collision course with our neighbors and our culture. That’s appealing. And rejecting it means we stay on our present heading, on a collision course with our culture. And that means trials. It’s going to cost. But Peter wants to reassure his first readers if you stay firm and faithful to the Lord and reject false teaching, that is going to be costly, there will be trials that come your way, but “the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials.” Hold the line. Stay on course. Do not be led astray or blow and tossed by every wind of doctrine. Yes, it’s going to cost you if you refuse to water down your Gospel convictions to accommodate your neighbors’ and friends’ preferences. But your hope is not in the approval of the world, is it? You’re not following Jesus in order to acquire the praises of your peers, are you? You’re not a Christian in pursuit of cultural influence only, surely! That’s not where our hope must lie. If that’s what you’re looking for, well then the false teachers certainly can help you. But if you are a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope must rest in His rescue alone. He is the Master who bought us. He’s coming back to get us, to bring us home, that we may be with Him where He is forever. That’s our hope. Isn’t that our hope? So live and believe and teach and proclaim a message that takes careful aim at that target and never stray from it. There is suffering coming, follower of Jesus, there is, but the Lord knows, never forget, the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials.” That is our hope. Let us fix our eyes there.
The Certainty of Judgment
And yet, on the other hand, Peter says there are those he calls the unrighteous – the false teachers and those who follow them – and they, look, they gain a following. They may ride the crest of a wave of popularity. They may entertain the great and the good and garner great material prosperity, enjoy a measure of cultural notoriety. But don’t’ be deceived when you see all of that. Just because you can find their books in Walmart doesn’t mean they should be believed and followed. All is not as it first appears. “God keeps the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment.” What is He saying? He is saying they are reserved for wrath. Isn’t that chilling? Reserved for wrath. Look, these false teachers, they might be rolling in cash, they might fill football stadiums with their message, they might sell many, many books, they might appear on Oprah. All may look golden in their world, but the truth, Peter says, is that they are kept under punishment until the day comes when public sentencing takes place at the tribunal of the Lord Jesus Christ in the great and terrible day. Do not follow them. That’s where their teaching will lead you.
The path that Jesus asks us to walk is costly, for sure. The path of error and destructive heresy is much, much easier. It’s much easier. Peter wants us to see the final destination of each trajectory, each pathway, and then to ask ourselves, “Which path am I on?” Which path are you on? Which path am I on today? Remember the words of the Lord Jesus Christ who calls us to, “Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter by it. But the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life and those who find it are few.” Which path are you on today, this morning, here? Which path are you on? By which gate will you enter? Enter by the narrow gate. Do not deny the Master who bought you. Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord knows how to rescue the godly.
Let’s pray together.
God our Father, we bow before You and we praise You that You are the holy One and that in Jesus Christ, the Judge of all the earth will do right, rescuing the ungodly and reserving the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment. Help us to know which path we are on and to be sure that we are resting upon Christ alone. For we ask this in His name, amen.