Sermon Tone Analysis

2 PETER 2

* *

*-How important are school teachers and why? (Holy Spirit; Pastor, etc.)*

*-Literally, what does a false teacher look like?*

*-How can we know what a false teacher looks like?*

*2 Peter 2: False Prophets and Teachers*

*2 *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.

*2* And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.

*3* 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.

*4* 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; *5* 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; *6* 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; *7* and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked *8* (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); *9* then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, *10* and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.

Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones, *11* whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord.

*12* But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant, will also be destroyed in their destruction, *13* suffering wrong as the wage for their wrongdoing.

They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime.

They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, while they feast with you.

*14* They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin.

They entice unsteady souls.

They have hearts trained in greed.

Accursed children! *15* Forsaking the right way, they have gone astray.

They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved gain from wrongdoing, *16* but was rebuked for his own transgression; a speechless donkey spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness.

*17* These are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm.

For them the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved.

*18* For, speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping from those who live in error.

*19* They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption.

For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.

*20* For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.

*21* For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.

*22* What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”

*-What do you think of Peter’s writing?*

*-Compare chapter 1 with chapter 2. (*John Piper: The main point of 2 Peter 1 which everything else supports or elaborates is verse 10: “Brethren, be the more zealous to confirm your call and election; for if you do this, you will never fall.”

Peter wants us to enjoy the certainty of our salvation.

He wants us to be so firmly established in God that we cannot be shaken by any temptation or false teaching.

In 3:17 he draws his letter to a close with this admonition: “Beware lest you be carried away with the error of lawless men and lose your own stability.”

Peter devotes his last will and testament (1:14, 15) to help us be firm and stable and unshakable in our faith.

And now comes chapter 2, and a very significant change in Peter’s approach.

I say a change in his approach, not his goal.

His goal is still to make us firm and stable and unshakable in our faith.

But his approach is very different.

Chapter 1 is mainly an encouragement to avail ourselves of God’s power to lead lives of godliness and love.

Chapter 2 is mainly a warning against the destruction that will befall those who don’t avail themselves of this power.

If chapter 1 is the carrot, chapter 2 is the crack of the whip over our heads.

There are no commands, no admonitions, no imperatives in chapter 2; just pure, terrifying description of what will happen to those who fall prey to the false teachers in the church.

Wherever important truth is at stake, counterfeits will be offered.)

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*-What does a false teacher sound like?

How can we spot a false teacher, according to the text?*  (We may detect them by their exaltation of themselves instead of Christ; their counterfeit talk and “great swelling words”; their emphasis on making money; their great claims that they can change people; and their hidden lives of lust and sin.)

*-The first thing we learn about them is that they are denying the Master who bought them (v1).

What does this mean?*

(As with most heresies, Jesus Christ is in some way being diminished.

Some aspect of his personhood or his work is being denied.

But Peter never tells us what aspect.

In fact, you get the impression from chapter 2 that the error of the false teachers was an error in morality, not doctrine.

But the two are never really separate.

How you live and how you esteem Christ always rise and fall together.

Notice verse 10: “they indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.

They are bold and self-willed.”

They “despise authority” because they cannot stand any controls on their passions.

This helps us to understand verse 1, where it says they deny the /Master/ who bought them.

They don’t want a master.

A master means authority and submission.

But it seems almost impossible that such a thing as arrogant sexual immorality could actually be taught in the church.

What did the false teachers say?

Verse 3 tells us, “In their greed they will exploit you with false words.”

They didn’t just come in and seduce people with good looks.

They taught.

They gave reasons why people should abandon their rules about sexuality.

They probably would have said, “It’s OK for kids to experiment sexually.

It’s OK for a couple to live together out of wedlock.

It’s OK for a husband and wife to gratify their desires with a prostitute or another person’s partner.”

There is nothing new about the contemporary assault on the sanctity of sexual intercourse in marriage.

Jesus wasn’t gone for more than 30 years before false teachers in the church were announcing open sex as a legitimate Christian lifestyle.

You can see it in verse 19: “They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption.”

Sound familiar?

The push for free sex was there long before we had any puritanical or Victorian ethic to rebel against.

The false teachers were taking the grace of God and perverting it into licentiousness (Jude 1:4).

They were saying that what we do with our bodies does not matter, and in fact the more sensuality you pursue, the more you show your true Christian freedom from the law.

In the name of grace and in the name of Christ they perverted Christian moral teaching, and in that way denied the Master who bought them.)

*-Is Peter teaching that believers can lose their salvation?

Note “bought” and vss 20ff.

*

How can these false teachers, who were said to be *among the people, *and whom the Lord had *bought *(/agorasanta, /“redeem”), end up in everlasting destruction?

Several suggestions have been offered: (1) They were saved but lost their salvation.

But this contradicts many other Scriptures (e.g., John 3:16; 5:24; 10:28-29).

(2) “Bought” means the Lord created them, not that He saved them.

But this stretches the meaning of agorazō (“redeem”).

(3) The false prophets merely /said /they were “bought” by Christ.

This, however, seems to read into the verse.

(4) They were “redeemed” in the sense that Christ paid the redemptive price for their salvation, but they did not apply it to themselves and so were not saved.

Christ’s death is “sufficient” for all (1 Tim.

2:6; Heb.

2:9; 1 John 2:2), but is “efficient” only for those who believe.

This is a strong argument for unlimited atonement (the view that Christ died for everyone) and against limited atonement (the view that Christ died only for those whom He would later save).

* (*Peter is not teaching that God’s elect can lose their salvation.

He is most definitely teaching that church members can be lost, and people who make outward professions of faith and even begin to clean up their lives can turn away from Christ and be lost.

But in verse 22 he explains to us in a proverb that we should not be overly surprised at this: dogs characteristically return to their vomit; and no matter how clean you make a pig on the outside, if it is still a pig, it will return to the mire.

In other words, those who leave the way of righteousness, never to return, simply show that their inner nature had never been changed.

This was Peter’s way of saying what 1 John 2:19 says, “They went out from us, but they were not of us, for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that it might be plain that they are all not of us.”

Or as Jesus said, “He who endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10:22).

Or as Hebrews puts it, “We share in Christ if we hold our first confidence firm to the end” (Hebrews 3:14).

Or as Paul says, “I preached to you the gospel which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved, /if/ you hold it fast” (1 Corinthians 15:1, 2).

The whole New Testament is agreed: there is no salvation apart from persevering faith.

And persevering faith always works itself out in the way of righteousness.

Therefore, to abandon the way of righteousness is to exclude oneself from salvation.