2 Peter 2: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Peter warns that false teachers will appear among his readers, just as false prophets appeared among Israel, secretly bringing in destructive teachings and exploiting people out of greed. He points to three past cases (the angels who sinned, the flood in Noah's day, and the burning of Sodom and Gomorrha with Lot rescued) to show that the Lord knows how to rescue the godly and how to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment. He then describes these teachers at length: their greed, their wild living, their empty boasting, and their likeness to Balaam. He closes by saying that people who escape the world's filth through knowing Christ and then get caught in it again end up worse off than they were at the start.

Claim by Claim

1. 2:1
   • There were false prophets among the people.
   • There will also be false teachers among you.
   • The false teachers will smuggle in destructive heresies.
   • The false teachers deny the Master who bought them.
   • The false teachers bring swift destruction upon themselves.
2. 2:2
   • Many will follow the false teachers' sensual excesses.
   • Because of these followers the way of truth will be spoken evil of.
3. 2:3
   • Out of greed the false teachers will exploit you with fabricated words.
   • The judgment pronounced against them long ago is not idle.
   • Their destruction does not slumber.
4. 2:4
   • God did not spare the angels that sinned.
   • God cast the sinning angels down into hell.
   • God delivered them into chains of darkness.
   • The sinning angels are being kept for judgment.
   • This is stated as a condition: if God did this.
5. 2:5
   • God did not spare the ancient world.
   • God preserved Noah as the eighth person.
   • Noah was a preacher of righteousness.
   • God brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.
6. 2:6
   • God reduced the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes.
   • God condemned those cities to overthrow.
   • God made those cities an example to those who would afterward live ungodly.
7. 2:7
   • God rescued Lot.
   • Lot was righteous.
   • Lot was worn down by the licentious conduct of the lawless.
8. 2:8
   • That righteous man lived among them.
   • He saw and heard their deeds.
   • Day after day he tormented his righteous soul over their lawless deeds.
9. 2:9
   • The Lord knows how to rescue the godly out of trial.
   • The Lord knows how to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment.
10. 2:10
    • The Lord especially keeps for punishment those who walk after the flesh in the lust of defilement.
    • The Lord especially keeps for punishment those who despise lordship.
    • These people are daring.
    • These people are self-willed.
    • These people are not afraid to blaspheme glorious ones.
11. 2:11
    • Angels are greater in strength and power than these people.
    • Angels do not bring a blasphemous accusation against them before the Lord.
12. 2:12
    • These people are like irrational animals born by nature to be captured and destroyed.
    • They blaspheme matters they do not understand.
    • They will themselves be utterly destroyed in their own corruption.
13. 2:13
    • They will receive the wages of unrighteousness.
    • They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime.
    • They are spots and blemishes.
    • They revel in their own deceptions while they feast together with you.
14. 2:14
    • They have eyes full of adultery.
    • Their eyes cannot cease from sin.
    • They lure unstable souls.
    • They have a heart trained in greed.
    • They are children of a curse.
15. 2:15
    • They have forsaken the straight way.
    • They have gone astray.
    • They follow the way of Balaam.
    • Balaam was the son of Bosor.
    • Balaam loved the wages of unrighteousness.
16. 2:16
    • Balaam was rebuked for his own transgression.
    • A speechless beast of burden spoke with a man's voice.
    • The beast restrained the prophet's madness.
17. 2:17
    • These people are wells without water.
    • These people are mists driven by a storm.
    • The gloom of darkness is reserved for them forever.
18. 2:18
    • They speak great swelling words of emptiness.
    • They lure people through the lusts of the flesh.
    • They lure people through wantonness.
    • Those they lure are people who had escaped from those who live in error.
19. 2:19
    • They promise those people liberty.
    • They themselves are slaves of corruption.
    • Whatever overcomes a person, to that thing the person is enslaved.
20. 2:20
    • The condition is stated: if they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
    • The condition is stated: if they are again entangled in those defilements and overcome.
    • Then their last state is worse for them than the first.
21. 2:21
    • It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness.
    • That is better than, having known it, turning back from the holy commandment delivered to them.
22. 2:22
    • What has happened to them matches the true proverb.
    • The proverb says a dog returns to its own vomit.
    • The proverb says a washed sow returns to wallowing in the mire.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

2:1

"The people" is a standard term for Israel, so the sentence sets Israel's old false prophets alongside the false teachers expected in the church. "Lord" here is not the usual Greek word but despotes, the word for the owner of a slave (our word "despot" comes from it), and "bought them" is the language of the slave market: the picture is of slaves disowning the man who paid for them. "Heresies" translates haireseis, which meant chosen opinions and the parties or factions that form around them, not yet formal doctrinal error; "damnable" renders a word meaning simply "leading to destruction."

2:2

"The way of truth" is more than a figure of speech: the earliest followers of Jesus called their movement "the Way," so the phrase names both a manner of living and the group itself. "Pernicious" translates a word for unrestrained, shameless indulgence, particularly sexual.

2:3

"Make merchandise of you" is literal: the verb is the one used of a merchant trading in goods, so the readers are the stock being dealt in. "Feigned words" are manufactured, made-up arguments. The second half personifies the sentence and the destruction as two figures who are neither dawdling nor asleep.

2:4

"Cast them down to hell" translates a single Greek verb built on Tartarus, the name in Greek mythology for the pit below the underworld where rebel gods were imprisoned. It appears nowhere else in the Bible, and it is not the ordinary word for hell. "The angels that sinned" points to a story the first readers knew well: the divine beings who took human wives in Genesis 6, a brief episode expanded at length in the book of 1 Enoch, which circulated widely in this period. Greek manuscripts differ here by one letter between "chains" (seirais) and "pits" (sirois) of darkness.

2:5

"Noah the eighth person" is a 1611 idiom, not a rank or a title. It means Noah along with seven others, that is, one of eight people brought through the flood: Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives. "A preacher of righteousness" is not said of Noah in Genesis; it comes from Jewish retellings of the flood story current in the first century.

2:6

Gomorrha is the KJV's spelling of Gomorrah. The two cities are destroyed by fire in Genesis 19. "Ensample" is simply an older form of "example," and "overthrow" is the standard word for that catastrophe, a complete tearing down.

2:7

"Conversation" in 1611 English meant a person's whole conduct and way of life, not talk. "Just" here means righteous, in the right, rather than fair-minded. Lot is Abraham's nephew, living in Sodom in Genesis 19.

2:8

"Vexed" was a far stronger word in 1611 than it is now. It meant tormented or worn down, not merely annoyed. The verse is a parenthesis: the writer's main sentence runs from verse 4 to verse 9 as one long "if God did this, then the Lord knows how to do that."

2:9

"Temptations" translates peirasmos, which covers any trial, test or ordeal, including hardship and persecution, and is not limited to enticement to do wrong.

2:10

"Government" in 1611 meant authority or lordship in the abstract, not a civil administration; the Greek word is the quality of being lord. "Dignities" is literally "glories," and is generally taken to mean angelic or spiritual powers, though the writer never says which beings he means. "Presumptuous" here means daring and reckless rather than rude.

2:11

"Railing" means abusive, insulting speech. Who the angels decline to accuse is genuinely unclear in the Greek: "against them" could mean against the glorious beings of verse 10 or against the false teachers themselves, and readers have taken it both ways. Some manuscripts do not have "before the Lord."

2:12

"Natural brute beasts" means simply animals, described in the Greek as creatures acting on instinct and bred to be caught and killed. The end of the verse turns on one word, phthora, which means both moral rot and physical destruction: the thing they are corrupted by is the thing that destroys them.

2:13

"Riot" in 1611 meant wild feasting and revelry, not a public disturbance. Formal banqueting belonged to the evening, so drinking parties in broad daylight marked a person as dissolute. "Spots... and blemishes" reverses the language used of sacrificial animals, which had to be without spot or blemish to be acceptable. In "sporting themselves with their own deceivings" the manuscripts split between two Greek words that differ by a single letter, apatais (deceivings) and agapais (love feasts, the shared meals of the church); the KJV follows the first, and "while they feast with you" keeps the meal in view either way.

2:14

"Eyes full of adultery" is literally "eyes full of an adulteress": eyes that see a possible conquest in every woman. "Beguiling" translates a hunting and fishing word meaning to bait a hook or a trap. "Cursed children" is a Hebrew-style idiom, "children of a curse," meaning people who belong under a curse, not children someone has cursed.

2:15

Balaam's story is in Numbers 22 to 24: a foreign seer hired for a fee by Balak, king of Moab, to curse Israel, who found he could only bless them. Later tradition blamed him for luring Israel into sin instead, which is the angle taken here. "Bosor" is the KJV's spelling; the Hebrew Bible calls him son of Beor, and many Greek manuscripts read Beor here as well.

2:16

The incident is Numbers 22:21 to 35, where Balaam's donkey sees the angel blocking the road that Balaam cannot see, and is given speech to say so. "Dumb" means unable to speak, with no suggestion of stupidity, and "forbad" means held back or restrained.

2:17

The Greek word is for a spring or a well, the kind of water source travelers in a dry country plan a route around. One that has run dry is not a small disappointment but a dangerous one. Storm clouds that pass over without dropping rain work the same way: promise and no delivery.

2:18

"Vanity" in 1611 meant emptiness rather than conceit, so "great swelling words of vanity" are inflated words with nothing inside them. "Wantonness" is the same word rendered "pernicious" in verse 2, unrestrained indulgence. The manuscripts differ over one word in "clean escaped": some read ontos, actually or genuinely escaped, and others read oligos, barely escaping, which would make these people recent converts still in flight from their old life.

2:19

"Servants" translates the ordinary Greek word for slaves, not hired workers. The saying at the end of the verse comes from warfare and was a commonplace: a defeated man became the legal property of the man who beat him, so whatever masters you owns you.

2:21

"Delivered unto them" uses the technical term for handing on a body of teaching intact from teacher to pupil, the same word behind "tradition." The point is that the command reached them whole, not that someone rescued them.

2:22

The first proverb is Proverbs 26:11. The second is not in the Old Testament; close versions of it appear in the Story of Ahikar, a tale that circulated widely across the ancient Near East, and in Greek collections of sayings. Both animals were unclean under Jewish law, so calling someone a dog or a pig was already an insult before the proverbs added the vomit and the mud.