17These men are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them. 18For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of sinful human nature, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. 19They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him. 20If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. 21It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. 22Of them the proverbs are true: "A dog returns to its vomit,"and, "A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud."
Dig Deeper
If you’ve ever used the internet, you’ve probably seen those ads that pop up that inform you that you are the millionth customer on a website or that you have been chosen as a special winner for doing one thing or another. They then inform you that you have won an incredible prize for free. The prizes are usually something pretty incredible too, like a new laptop, a flat screen television, or a vacation of a lifetime. What could be better than winning an incredible prize like that for doing virtually nothing? This is why" free" is one of our favorite words in the English language. Yet, if you look carefully, you will always see a tiny asterisk (*) behind the word free. If you click on it to go claim your ‘free" prize you realize that it was little more than an empty promise. It’s not free at all, despite the promises of being free. In fact, you have to choose from several offers which usually involve having to pick three or four choices from a list of 10 or 15 items. These are things like signing up for subscriptions to a magazine or a paid website. If you do that, you will be taken to another page full of more choices, which are more expensive and involved and find that you have to pick several options from that page. Once you have completed that you will be taken to another page and given 5 or 6 offers, of which you must choose 1 or 2, and the things on this page are usually quite expensive. What you find out is that in order to complete the steps necessary to claim your "free" prize, it winds up costing you about as much as you might have paid for the original prize and obligates you to many other memberships and fees. The promise of a free prize turns out to be quite the opposite.
False teachers are dangerous for two primary reasons. The first is that what they are teaching contains portions of the truth, making it difficult to distinguish it from the genuine truth. The second is that the portion of false teachings that are indeed false, sound so good, promising freedoms and privileges that attract many. Peter’s targets here, no doubt, were impressive teachers who maintained enough of the truth to sound plausible, but Peter is more concerned here with the second aspect of the draw of false teaching. They have made all sort of promises about the freedoms and opportunities available to someone who would embrace their teachings. What Peter is so forceful in point out, however, is that those promises are completely empty. The promise of freedom that they offer turns out to be not just an empty promise, but a trap right back into the slavery of sin that Christians are supposed to have escaped.
Beginning in verse 17, Peter turns from dealing with the character of the false teachers directly to dealing with the impact that their teachings have on others. Peter uses two incredibly colorful and descriptive metaphors to describe the hollow and empty reality of the false teachers. They are, he says, springs without water. Springs were a vitally important thing for a people who lived in and were quite familiar with the desert. A spring could be the only thing that stood between a sojourner and death. So, to come across a what looked like a spring, only to find that there was no water would be devastating. These teachers were like the men of Jeremiah 2:13 who rejected the Lord’s spring of living water to dig their own wells that contained no water. Peter gives another picture of empty promises with the imagery of mist clouds driven by a storm. These clouds though, rather than bringing life-giving water, evaporated and would actually, in that part of the world, be a sign that dry weather was in the offing. Combining these two metaphors gives a clear picture of Peter’s point. These teachers have given the promise of great things but they deliver nothing because their promises are empty.
The fact that they mouth empty, boastful words and appeal to the lustful desires of sinful human nature should serve as a warning that this is not true Christianity. The true calling of the Christian life is to lay down one’s own life and enter into the life of Christ, being fully prepared to go through trials, suffering, and persecution for the benefit of others and to more fully realize the life of Christ in our life. Any teaching then, that is not one-hundred percent consistent with the call to a sacrificial life (Rom. 12:1) is not the real thing. Peter offers further evidence that these teachings are not the real thing. True gospel teaching will find a home in those that are "firmly established in the truth" (2 Pet. 1:12), but these teachings entice people are are just escaping from those who live in error. In other words, they prey on the young and spiritually immature Christians who do not seem to know any better. They turn their heads with their fine-sounding arguments and their empty promises that have no substance. If they were truly offering up truth, then why would it not be accepted by the spiritually mature?
The brand of freedom that they promised (which probably involved both freedom from any real judgment and complete freedom from any real moral constraint) is shown to be what it is by doing nothing more than looking at the lives of the teachers themselves. If they were teaching true freedom then they should demonstrate that freedom. Instead, however, their lives display men who are slaves to their own sin, their own pleasure-focused life, their own lusts, and their constant need for more. A man is a slave to whatever has mastered him, but no Christian should be mastered by anything other than Christ because our life is His.
In verses 20-22 Peter turns to the fate and reality of these false teachers. They had made it. They had entered into the life of Christ and escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Yet, they have turned away from the forgiveness that exists in the life of Christ. Not only have they turned away from and rejected the teaching of the true gospel, they have misled and turned others away as well. The charge against those who would mislead others has always been clear and stiff (Matt. 18:6; Mark 9:42; Luke 17:2). Having known the truth and turned from it leaves them worse off than if they had just never know at all. Peter echoes Jesus’ warning about the state that Israel would be in if she were swept clean by his work but never really embraced it, leaving themselves open to a worse fate than in the beginning (Matt. 12:45; Luke 11:26). He says that it would have been better for not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them.
Their lives have been reduced, in many respects, to demonstrating the truth of two old proverbs. The dog and the sow might have undergone a purging or cleansing, but this never overrides their true nature. They quickly return to familiar habits; the dog returns to its vomit, while the sow returns to wallowing in the mud. The dog had gotten rid of the food that was making it sick and the sow had gotten rid of the mud, but the dog is lured back by its instinct to eat everything and the sow by its desire for the pleasures of mud. Peter has already called the false teachers beasts (2 Peter 2:12), and here his point is clear that they have returned to the lure of sin even though they had been cleansed by the blood of Christ because they valued their own sensual desires over true freedom. There can, perhaps, be no sadder commentary than that.
Devotional Thought
Are you ever enticed with versions of Christianity that offer only good things and prosperity. They are certainly out there. True Christianity demands dying to self. James says that he will show his faith by what he does (Jam. 2:18) while Paul calls us to be living sacrifices (Rom. 12:2). Could you truly make the statement, "I will show you my faith by my sacrificial life"?
No comments:
Post a Comment