2 Peter 2 : Living by the truth

AJM Holy Trinity December 2002

Introduction

Good evening. This evening we are looking at 2 Peter chapter 2. It’s an amazing and terrifying passage. He pulls no punches. It’s got the lot: threats of damnation, graphic descriptions of punishment, savage irony and a breathtaking set of original insults. It isn’t very nice. It isn’t polite. It isn’t English. A lot of people would say it just isn’t, well, Christian.

So what do we do with it? Other than quake in our boots, that is? I must say as I stand here that I really don’t like all these passages about the dire and dreadful things which will happen to teachers who get their teaching wrong. They give me sleepless nights. We live in a world where everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and that’s fine, I’m happy to tell you mine. But God, as he speaks through Peter, doesn’t quite seem to see it like that. He doesn’t really seem to allow, well, much margin for error. Being a teacher in the church is obviously a high risk occupation. I’m thinking of retraining for something safer with better representation – being a firefighter, for example.

Let’s pray. Father we ask as that as we consider these words you would help us to recognise the truth and live by it. Amen.

The importance of knowing and growing in the truth

The first and most obvious question is, what exactly was going on in this church or churches to which Peter was writing? What is it that causes him to be so concerned and so angry? Let’s begin by reminding ourselves what he’s said in chapter one, because usually if you want to blow someone up in a letter you make sure you prepare the ground carefully before you actually light the blue touchpaper.

Knowing and growing

In chapter one Peter began by talking about knowledge. Verse 2, may grace and peace be yours through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. Verse 3. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us. He reminds them they have been chosen to enter the eternal kingdom of Christ. And he tells them they mustn’t take their places for granted; they need to confirm their reservations by growing. Knowledge of Christ produces growth in Christ, and growth in Christ produces effective ministry and certain salvation. That was his first main point.

What we know

Having reminded them what knowledge does, he went on to talk about what knowledge is. If knowledge is the foundation of our Christian life, what is it that we know, and how can we be certain about it? He tells them. The Christian faith is not a myth or a story or a philosophy, it isn’t a nice idea: it’s based on facts. Peter himself had first hand access to the facts. He was there with Jesus, he listened to his teaching and witnessed his resurrection. He was there when the audible voice of God himself said that Jesus was his own son. And all this is as told by the prophets and set down in scripture.

The problem : false teachers who corrupt the truth

So that’s chapter one. We can know the truth and we can grow in the truth.

Then he starts again. Chapter 2, verse 1. But (and it’s going to be a big but!) there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. The problem is, if Peter and the scriptures teach the truth, there are a bunch of false teachers in this place who are corrupting it. Those are the ones he’s out to get.

It’s not a new problem that Peter is describing. Throughout the Old Testament we read of false prophets, men who told the people what they wanted to hear, who made the message comfortable and made themselves popular. This is inevitable. If God spoke to the people through intermediaries, there’s an obvious danger that the intermediaries will mishear or distort what he said. Or even that they will offer their own message and pretend to have it from God. And this is what is happening here. How can these early Christians be sure that the teachings they hear really come from God? How do they tell the source of inspiration is the Holy Spirit and not the imaginations or hidden agendas of the speakers?

This is the book of Deuteronomy, written probably by Moses in about 1400 BC. Chapter 13, vs 1-6:

If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a miraculous sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder of which he has spoken takes place, and he says ‘let us follow other gods .. and let us worship them’, you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer.…That prophet or dreamer must be put to death, because he preached rebellion against the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery; he has tried to turn you from the way the Lord your God commanded you to follow. You must purge the evil from among you.

Notice that this warning is directed against those prophets who announce a miraculous sign or wonder which then takes place. These prophets look and sound spiritual. They claim to have the power of God, and to be moved by the Holy Spirit. And it isn’t immediately obvious that they are fraudulent.

The same thing was still going on in 600BC, in the time of the prophet Jeremiah. Peter could in fact have got the whole of this chapter out of chapter 23 of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was one of the most reluctant and miserable prophets of the Old Testament, up against false rivals who offered popular messages which made no demands on the hearers but led them further and further away from God both spiritually and morally. Mostly the false prophets told them it was fine to live just as everyone around them lived, offering false hopes, condoning immoral living, promising peace and protection, and saying they had received dreams and words from the Lord. And God thunders through Jeremiah that he did not speak through them, that he just isn’t that accessible. He threatens the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah, and screeches that his word is not a dream or a delusion but like fire, like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces. He speaks, in fact, in the same kind of tone and using the same kind of language that Peter adopts here. Look it up when you get home. It isn’t nice.

So Peter’s not talking out of his hat. He sees the beginning of a familiar process here amongst these Christians. It’s happened loads of times before, and it will happen loads of times again. Just as there were false prophets, there will be false teachers. I don’t think he’s making a big distinction between prophets and teachers here. Prophets are people who speak the word of God. Teachers are people who explain the word of God. Both deal with truth and with knowledge of the truth. Both can lead people astray. These false teachers will secretly introduce destructive heresies. That is, what they teach will look and sound OK. Its poison will be hidden. The reason it will look and sound OK is because it will echo the voices which are already there, make sense to the mindset of the culture. God’s word is like a hammer which breaks a rock; it speaks out against those things which draw people from God. True prophets have usually been unpopular because they speak out against what sounds good and attractive. The messages of false prophets are destructive; but they don’t look destructive, they look good. Some, Peter goes on, will even deny Jesus, and will bring destruction on themselves. Peter nearly did that himself. He knows what he’s talking about.

The consequences : losing the way of truth

So that’s what will happen in these churches, quite likely is happening already. What will the consequences be? Well, verse 2, many will follow their shameful ways and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. The first Christians were called not Christians but followers of the Way. Peter here calls it the way of truth. In chapter one he emphasized that knowledge of God is not just something which you have, it’s something which changes you. He pursues the same theme here. The truth isn’t just something you have, it’s something you follow. The source of all knowledge and of all truth is God, and to embrace knowledge and truth is to follow a path which leads to God. It’s a circular process. Truth flows out from God, catches us up like the incoming tide, draws us back out to sea towards God, cleansing and changing us as it goes. The choice for the people Peter is writing to is between this way of truth and the shameful ways of these teachers. The shameful ways of the teachers are based not on the truth but on the stories they have made up. The way of truth which Peter teaches, on the other hand, is based not on cleverly invented stories, but on Christ himself and on the scriptures which reveal him.

For the false teachers themselves the consequences will be absolutely dire. In the next section, verses 4 to 10, Peter goes to town. As it’s the reliability of the word of God which is at stake, it’s to the word of God he turns to explain what will happen. He gives three examples of the harshest biblical punishments he can think of. God, he says, is not a softy. Think of the rebel angels. Satan rebelled against God and fell from heaven like lightning, and God prepared a lake of burning sulphur where he would be tormented for ever (Rev 20.10). Jesus himself said it would be an eternal fire (Mt 25.41). He became the first ever false teacher, and the deceiver of all the rest. I quite like it that the word Peter uses for hell here isn’t any of the usual ones. It’s Tartarus, the name given in ancient Greek myth to hell, and conjuring up all sorts of fictitious associations on top of the usual biblical ones. It’s as if he’s saying if they want myths, they can have them! The word Tartarus carries stories of snake-haired monsters, of vultures which tear at your open liver, of the endless task of pushing rocks uphill, of standing parched and starving in water which disappears when you try to drink some, surrounded by fruit which the wind tosses out of reach when you try to grab some. That’s what made up stories really promise.

As if that’s not enough, he goes on. That’s what God did to the angels. But he does it to people too, if the crime is great enough. In the time of Noah God inundated the entire world. We are used to seeing scenes from Bangladesh and Mozambique, of raging floodwaters sweeping away whole communities, of people clinging to rooftops and trees. Those are floods. But what Noah and his contemporaries got was the mother of all floods. 40 days to drown the entire earth, 150 days with it all underwater, and another 150 for the waters to go down again. Result: the most mass destruction of life the world has ever seen. That’s what God does to the ungodly.

And then on, to the famous Sodom and Gomorrah, razed to the ground for immorality by a rain of burning sulphur. Like Tartarus, the word Peter uses for ‘burnt to ashes’ doesn’t come anywhere else in the Bible. It’s the word used in one of the contemporary accounts of the destruction of Pompeii, as the cloud of burning ash and poisonous gases descended on the town and buried everyone in it alive. I’ve been there, I’ve seen the houses where the people were buried, where they were dug up centuries later, and found to be turned to stone. Those, says Peter, are the kinds of things God does to those who abandon the truth for a lie.

Painting it as it is

Well, all that seems a bit over the top. Surely these teachers can’t be so bad that God is thinking along those kinds of lines again? Well, Peter says they are. And the next section, from verse 10 to verse 16, explains why. These people are not disagreeing about whether baptism should be at birth or in adulthood, whether everyone should speak in tongues or only some, or whether it is better to give all one’s money away or to keep it and steward it wisely. These people, despite their fine claims, are totally corrupt. They get drunk in broad daylight, they turn the Christian meal of fellowship into an orgy, they commit adultery and seduce the unstable, and they line their own pockets with appeals for money. They are like the prophet Balaam, who was so way out of tune with God that his own donkey did better.

The results of their teaching are even worse than they are themselves. Verses 17 to 22, Peter is going to prove it. But what amazes me here is how he does it. In every sentence he echoes some bit of scripture. It’s as if he’s saying OK then, if you want to teach, let me show you how you do it: let me use truth to expose your untruth. So, what are these false teachers like?

Verse 17. They are like waterless springs and mists driven by a storm. That’s the poetic language of Jeremiah, lamenting that the people have turned away from living water and are trying to drink from their own cracked wells, that the prophets will be scattered like chaff driven by the desert wind (Jer 2.13, 13.24).

Verse 18. They entice people who are just escaping from the errors of the world into the truths of the Christian faith – the word entice comes from the word for fishing. That’s the language of Jesus, who said to the disciples that he would make them fishers of men (Mt 4.19).

Verse 19. They promise freedom but are slaves to their own desires. That’s a reminder of Paul to the Galatians, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery (5.1).

Verse 20. They entangle new Christians in traps, so that if they lose their way they are worse off at the end than they were before they heard the gospel in the first place. That’s an echo of Jesus’s warning that if a person is delivered from an evil spirit but not filled with the Holy Spirit, the demon will return with 7 of its friends, and the final state of the man will be worse than the first (Mt 12.43-45).

The whole of the section from verse 10 to verse 22 is in fact shot through with biblical overtones like this.

Look back to verse 13. They are like blots and blemishes. That’s a reminder of the sacrificial language of the Old Testament, where animals offered had to be without blot or blemish ( eg Lev 1.3); and of Jesus, the lamb who was without blemish (eg 1 Pe 1.19).

Verse 14, they are experts in greed – literally, they are trained in greed. The word trained comes from the word for gymnasium. This is the language of Paul, who urged the Corinthians to go into strict training to compete in the Christian games and win the prize of eternal life (1 Cor 9.24-27).

And finally, verse 22. They are like dogs returning to their own vomit – that’s a quotation from Proverbs (26.11).

Everywhere Peter is using the language of scripture to condemn these prophets who distort scripture; mocking them in their own false style and exposing the reality behind their claims. This must be one of the finest passages of irony in the whole Bible. It’s as if he said, you accused me of telling fairy stories. Let’s just look at the stories, shall we, and see exactly which bits fit who? Let’s just look at the things you do, shall we, and see which bits of scripture they match up with? If you want to claim the authority of God, let’s use the words of God to explore the authority you say you have, shall we? If you want to be spiritual, let’s be spiritual, shall we? It’s a masterpiece. This is what we can do with the word of God, he says.

Why does it matter so much? Following the way of truth

I think we’re beginning to get a bit nearer to understanding just why it is that Peter has got himself into such a state about all this. His careful statement of the power and authority of the word of God in chapter one, and his sustained use of scriptural allusion throughout chapter two, give it away. If I had to say in a sentence what I think Peter is on about, I would say it’s about knowing and living by the truth. The first Christians were known as followers of the Way. In verse 2 Peter called it the way of truth; in verse 21 he calls it the way of righteousness. We must know the truth, but it is not enough to know it; we must live it. It must lead us somewhere. And the only place it can lead us is to God, the place it came from to start with. Truth flows out from God; truth draws us back to God. And as it draws us closer to God, it makes us become like God. But it can’t do that if it is corrupted and undermined by teachers who pretend to be spiritual but who offer not the way of truth but a shameful way (verse 2), who have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam (verse 15). The consequences of false teaching will be that people are led astray - that they will end up worse off than they were before they became Christians in the first place, like the man delivered from demons.

Now it seems a bit surprising that Peter should compare the state of the new Christians who have been led astray to the state of a man delivered from demons and then possessd by 8 more. Peter seems to be saying this isn’t just an issue of understanding or not understanding, believing the right things or the wrong ones. It isn’t even just an issue of living the right way or living the wrong way. He seems to be suggesting that it isn’t fundamentally either an intellectual matter or a moral one. He seems to be suggesting it’s a spiritual one. There’s another dimension to this, and only if we grasp that can we see what the issue really is. I’m a teacher. I know that I make mistakes. But all the same, I don’t expect God to chain me in lakes of sulphur with Satan himself. Either Peter is seriously overdoing it, or there’s more to it than meets the eye. It was the same with Jeremiah – everyone thought he was over the top. And with Jesus, who was incensed by the Pharisees, the teachers he clashed with so often and so rudely, insulting them just as graphically as this. Why? Why does it matter quite so much?

I think the answer lies in the concept of truth. It is the way of truth that is at stake here. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life. Truth is a spiritual issue. God is truth. Truth is the underlying principle of reality itself. Scripture is powerful because it contains the truth. It is a Spirit-filled outpouring of the truth, just as Jesus was a human incarnation of the truth. The opposite of truth is deceit. Lies. The father of lies is Satan, the devil. And so it is a massive understatement to say that truth is something you understand or misunderstand. Truth is much bigger than that. Truth is spiritual reality. Truth brings life, and untruth brings death. Truth leads us to God, and untruth kills us. Truth isn’t about facts and opinions. Truth is about reality itself, who God is and why Jesus came. If you grasp truth you grasp God; if you reject truth you reject God. That’s why it matters. It matters in the exactly the same way that the cross matters. It matters because Jesus bought us, as Peter says in verse one.

What of us?

Now to the 64,000 dollar question. What does that mean for us?

Well, I don’t think it means you need to worry about whether those of us who stand up here are leading you up the garden path. I don’t even think it means you need to watch out for the next cult leader and avoid listening to him. So what does it mean?

Know the scriptures

Let’s think back a moment to the time this letter was written. Most of the people for whom it was intended did not have access to the scriptures. Many couldn’t read. Those who could read couldn’t afford the luxury of written parchments. This carried on for centuries. In the Middle Ages, if I remember right, you could maintain a small private army for a year on the amount of money it would cost you to commission the copying of one book. Then because people weren’t educated, for centuries they weren’t allowed to own Bibles even if they could afford them. Even up to the 16^th century, only the clergy were allowed to own Bibles, and even then they were only available in Latin, long after anyone understood it. And so people relied on the teaching they received in church. When the teaching was corrupt the whole church went astray. There’s a story about one 16^th century priest who was given his first copy of the New Testament on the day of his ordination. He read it, and exlaimed in horror, either these are not the scriptures, or we are not Christians! In Africa today the same situation applies; many people can’t read, and many of those that can can’t afford Bibles. We discovered last summer that even some of the evangelists who lead churches don’t possess Bibles. That’s why we are writing a discipleship course based on scripture memory for use in Africa. They can’t know the truth and grow in it if they have to rely on teachers who may not know what it is.

Now none of this applies to us. We simply don’t know how lucky we are. We all have Bibles, and we can all read them. You can check everything I’ve said today by looking in here. That’s not where the threat lies.

When Moses and Jeremiah warned against false teachers, they knew that what these teachers offered sounded attractive. The lifestyle they suggested even seemed to work. The reason was because what they offered was what the world around them offered. And perhaps for us these voices are more dangerous than the voices of false religious leaders. We don’t get most of our teaching directly from individuals who stand up in front of us, we get it indirectly from the world we live in. Every society has its own way of defining how we should live. Every society has its own understanding of the truth, and ours is no different. In our case a whole media industry beams these voices into every home, offering a set of values which is vastly different from those of scripture. Mostly people accept the values they are fed by these false voices. But they are voices which drag us from the way of truth.

So, how do you know what is right? How do you know what you should believe and what you should not? When you read books or say your prayers or listen to Bible teachers, how do you know what comes from God and what doesn’t? How do you know which are the eternal values God wants you to live by and which are just the deceptive dreams of the times you live in? When you pray, and something feels right, how do you know if it is? How do you disentangle your convictions from your emotions? How do you make decisions? When someone offers you a word or a picture from God, how do you know if they have got it right? There are so many voices, and it is so hard to disentangle the right ones from the wrong ones. How do you know which voices to trust?

Well, one thing is obvious from this passage. It doesn’t take a genius to see that if you understand the truth, you can’t be deceived by lies. A biblical mind is the best protection we can have. If we know the scriptures, and if we have a mind which is filled with the truth, we will ride the waves to God. If not, well, Peter is right. We may well drown. So please, take the Bible seriously. Read it every day. Discuss it every week. Talk to your friends about it. Let it change you. As Paul said, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12.2). That way, you’ll be fine. And I won’t end up flooded, turned to stone or chained in a lake of fire. Amen.