2 Peter 2:9-22

CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES

2 Peter 2:10. Despise government.—Dominion. Both self-restraint and restraint of good rules and wise authorities. Those who own no superior. Evil of dignities.—Lit. “They tremble not while railing at glories.” “These men deny the existence of, or irreverently speak slightingly of, those spiritual agencies by means of which God conducts the government of the world.”

2 Peter 2:11. Angels.—See Jude, 2 Peter 2:9. Allusion is evidently to some tradition which has not been otherwise preserved. (But see Zechariah 3:1.)

2 Peter 2:12. Brute beasts.—R.V., “as creatures without reason, born mere animals, to be taken and destroyed.” Omit “natural.” A denunciation of final ruin against these covetous and corrupting teachers.

2 Peter 2:13. Spots.—In a moral sense. Sporting themselves.—Making great show and boasting, as if they were the favourites of heaven.

2 Peter 2:14. Beguiling.—Enticing. Decoying as with a bait. Covetous practices.—Plans of fraud and extortion. Cursed children.—Children of the curse: or children of malediction. They are devoted to execration.

2 Peter 2:15. Bosor.—R.V., “Beor.” From which it is only a dialectical variation.

2 Peter 2:16. Rebuked.—Lit. “But bad a conviction of his own transgression”; was convicted of it. Madness.—Infatuation; conscious and voluntary perversion of mind.

2 Peter 2:18. Great swelling words of vanity.—Exaggeration, unreality, boastfulness, emptiness, are expressed by this phrase. Clean escaped.—Better, “who are just escaped,” “almost escaped.” Such were in special peril of these evil things.

2 Peter 2:19. Servants.—Bond-slaves. (See Romans 6:16; Romans 8:21.)

2 Peter 2:20. They have escaped.—It is not clear whether the deluded ones, or those who delude them, is meant. Probably the latter. “The fullest clearness of spiritual vision had not protected these heresiarchs from the temptations of their sensuous natures.”

2 Peter 2:22. The form of the proverbs is participial. “The dog returned to his own vomit; the washed sow to her wallowing in the mire” (see Proverbs 26:11). “In both cases stress is laid on the fact that there had been a real change. The dog had ejected what was foul; the sow had washed herself; but the old nature had returned in both cases. These who after their baptism returned to the impurities they had renounced, were, in the apostle’s eyes, no better than the unclean beasts. In the union of the two types of baseness we may, perhaps, trace a reminiscence of our Lord’s teaching in. Matthew 7:6” (Plumptre).

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— 2 Peter 2:9

Denunciations of the Libertines.

I. Confidence in God’s over-ruling.—“The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly.” This involves His recognition of the ungodly, and visitation of them in judgment. The sway and triumph of evil in the world is most perplexing to God’s people; it would be altogether overwhelming if they could not be sure of the Divine overruling with a patience that can wait for fitting opportunities. Delayed judgment is never any sign of indifference, nor is delayed deliverance. As Christ said to impatient disciples, so God again and again says to His people, “My time is not yet come, but your time is always ready.” The overruling of God is even more important than His ruling. It meets us just where we feel our chief difficulty.

II. Denunciation of vices.—The things which naturally follow as the outcome of false teaching—

(1) impurity,
(2) self-assertion,
(3) railing,
(5) wanton and luxurious living,
(5) covetousness. These denunciations can only with great difficulty be made subjects of pulpit exercise. They must be classed with the imprecatory Psalms. There may come times and fitting occasions for publicly denouncing the characteristic iniquities of a nation or a generation; but such work can only be done wisely by specially fitted men, and men who have gained the right to speak. In small spheres of pulpit service, the denunciation of public sins is apt to be taken as directed to certain individuals; and the personal element produces bitterness rather than conviction.

III. The law that increases Divine judgments.—Privilege enjoyed deepens responsibility. When privilege is abused; when men know and do not; when men who have come out of their sinful life go back to it;—then it is as though the stone on which they might have fallen fell on them. The weight of woe heaps up for those who were once “fair for the celestial city,” but turned back to wilfulness and sin.

SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES

2 Peter 2:9. The Godly Delivered—the unjust reserved unto judgment. There are only two great classes of people in the world—the godly and the unjust. The godly are those who have been born again, made partakers of the Divine nature, and live unto God. The unjust are those who are ungodly, who live to themselves and to the world. God deals very differently with the two classes.

I. His treatment of the godly.—

1. He allows them to fall into temptations, as
(1) solicitations to sin, and
(2) as trials. This he permits (a) to manifest the reality of His grace, (b) to condemn the world, (c) that we may be conformed to Christ.

2. The Lord knows how to deliver them. It matters not what form the temptation may take.

II. His treatment of the unjust.—“God knoweth how to reserve the unjust to the day of judgment to be punished.”

1. The end of all the ungodly is to be punished.
2. God knoweth how to reserve; He is not in haste to punish.—R. M. McCheyne.

God’s Judgments.—In a general way it may be said that the Old Testament is the book of God’s judgments, and the New Testament the book of God’s mercies. There are stories of judgment in the New Testament (Judas, Ananias, Elymas), and there are stories of God’s mercies in the Old; but this distinction marks off the characteristic of each Dispensation. Few hearers get much good from the histories of God’s judgments read to them from the Old Testament, because they are not felt to be matters of personal concern.

1. We ought to learn from them that God will not forget any godly man whatever, but will save him amid the destruction of all around him.
2. With the ungodly it will be otherwise; for them, so long as they continue in their ungodliness, there is neither mercy nor hope, but a certain looking forward to wrath and punishment at the hand of a mighty and offended God. There is no mercy for the obstinate and impenitent sinner. The two great lessons to be learnt from such histories are: the extent of God’s most fearful judgments, and their certainty. For as the word of God’s mercy is sure, so is the word of His wrath. And who are the cursed? All who are living in any known sin; all who are living in forgetfulness of God; all who are not Christ’s people; all who are not showing forth the blessed fruits of the Spirit in their daily lives. Many trust they shall do well, if they keep from the grosser works of the flesh. Some may say, “This is the old story we have heard so often.” But that should give double cause for trembling, seeing the gospel has been slighted so often and so long. God sends merciful invitations to repentance, that men may be saved from the ruin of a wicked world. It is He who will bring to pass the threatenings of His word against all manner of unrighteousness, and ungodliness, and sin.—A. W. Hare, A.M.

2 Peter 2:15. Perversion as Shown in the Character of Balaam.—Repulsive as Balaam’s character is, seen at a distance, when it is seen near it has much in it that is human, like ourselves, inviting compassion, even admiration; there are traits of firmness, conscientiousness, nobleness. And yet the inspired judgment of his character as a whole is one of unmeasured severity. Our main lesson in Balaam’s history must ever be to trace how it is that men, who to the world appear respectable, conscientious, honourable, gifted, religious, may be in the sight of God accursed, and heirs of perdition. Balaam illustrates perversion.

I. Perversion of great gifts.—The inspiration of Balaam was from God. In him Divine powers were perverted—

1. By turning them to purposes of self-aggrandisement. God’s true prophets make no effort to show themselves different from others. Balaam does everything to fix attention on himself. His enchantments were a priest’s man-œuvres, not a prophet’s. He was a self-seeker. Balak struck the key-note of his character when he said, “Am I not able to promote thee unto honour?”
2. By making those gifts subservient to his own greed. His very vaunts show that Balaam half suspected his failing. Brave men do not vaunt their courage, nor honourable men their honesty. By Balaam spiritual powers were degraded in order to make himself a vulgar man of wealth. (Compare the case of Simon Magus.)

II. Perversion of conscience.—Shown in his second appeal to God. He ought to have been satisfied with his first answer. In duty “first thoughts” are best; they are more fresh, more pure, have more of God in them. Balaam’s problem was how to go to Balak, and yet not offend God. He went to God to get his duty altered, not in simplicity to know what it was. All this rests on the idea that the will of God makes right, instead of being right. The second stage is full of hideous contradictions. God permits him to go, and then is angry with him for going. We notice in him the evidences of a disordered mind and heart. In Balaam we see an attempt to change the will of God. His feeling was, God is mutable. What was wanting for Balaam to feel was, God cannot change; what he did feel was only this: God will not change. See also his attempt to blind himself. We see perfect veracity with utter want of truth. He does not deceive Balak with a spell. He would not utter a falsehood, but tries to get away from seeing the truth. Balaam tried a last expedient, and recommended Balak to use the fascination of the daughters of Moab to entice Israel into idolatry; and a more diabolical wickedness could hardly be conceived. The root of Balaam’s sin was selfishness. Balaam’s self—the honour of Balaam as a true prophet; therefore he will not lie. The wealth of Balak for himself; therefore the Israelites must be sacrificed. Even in his sublimest aspirations he never forgets himself.

1. Learn the danger of great powers. It is an awful thing, this conscious power to see more, to feel more, to know more, than our fellows.
2. Mark well the difference between feeling and doing. A man may be going on finely, uttering orthodox words, and yet be rotten at heart.—F. W. Robertson.

2 Peter 2:16. Balaam and the Ass.—An excellent old writer, speaking of Balaam, to whom St. Peter refers in the text, compares him to Redwald, the first Saxon king who professed Christianity, and who set up, in the same church, one altar for the Christian religion, and another for sacrificing to devils. Balaam, beyond, perhaps, any Scriptural personage, was the “double-minded man,” signalised by the apostle James. Balaam was neither an impostor nor a hypocrite. He rather seems to have been a man heartily and honestly bent on the doing of what our Lord declares can never be done: the “serving of two masters.” We must admit that God communicated directly with Balaam, not only giving him orders and prohibitions, but actually furnishing him with the words he was to utter over the Israelites. Perhaps full justice has not been done to Balaam. He had good impulses, which were only unserviceable and abortive because outweighed and counter-matched by covetousness and the love of money. He had a conscience vigorously at work, under whose chastisement his sufferings must have been terrible. Balaam is the nominal Christian of these times, sincerely anxious to stand fair, and to keep terms with disciples of Christ and with men of Belial. When we see men devout in church, and something very different on week-days, we must not set them down as necessarily hypocrites. There is a bona fide struggle to compound with conscience, and run together in the life, man of God and man of the world, as warp and woof—very foolish, no doubt, and impracticable, but not base, not dishonest.

I. Recall to memory the few facts of this miracle.—Whether what happened to Balaam happened to him in vision, or in literal historical fact, the moral and spiritual lessons are exactly the same. There is something to be learned from that strange group on the highway, considered merely as a fact: a wicked man being obstructed in the pursuit of his wickedness by a prodigy. We learn how gracious God is in making the way of transgressors a hard one; just as when Pilate was warned by the dream of his wife, and Saul was warned on the road to Damascus. Regarding the narrative as an allegory, we may see that this is not the only place in the Bible where proud man is humbled and brought to confusion by being outdone and excelled by one of the beasts of the field. How came it that the eyes of the mere brute on which the prophet rode saw the vision of the angel before the prophet himself? There is here a portrait of what takes place in the world, day after day, in all generations. There is hardly a wider gulf between the animal and the man than there is between some unlettered believer in sacred truth and the philosophic doubter or denier of that truth. The difficulty of difficulties in the present state of things is not to exert but to control the faculties of our reason, to persuade ourselves where reason cannot follow, that there reason ought not to try to follow. Faith is the problem of the militant Church. The province of the human mind is to humble itself, to keep the ear wide open, and to be contented that the eye shall remain closed through excess of light. Only when, by nature or through a struggle, the mind prefers listening to understanding, can the glory of Christ crucified be spiritually discerned.

II. This miracle of the text is virtually repeated whenever pride or prescription takes to lording it over some lower rank, guilty of no sins but natural disadvantages.—Illustrated in the history of British colonisation. For many years we considered black and brown and red men to be brutes, and treated them accordingly. Illustrated in our resistance of Providence. We make a miserable blunder whenever we try to force Divine providence, or to urge the events of our lives dead against the angel. If we want to go one way, and our destiny, controlled by guardian angels, is forcing us into another way, our wisdom will lie in succumbing at once. We shall take nothing by contesting it. Things like that living thing under Balaam will crush our foot against the wall, so that we cannot even dismount and walk. Providence will maim us for every pathway but its own.—Henry Christopherson.

ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 2

2 Peter 2:19. Slavery of Sin.—Men would rather be sin’s drudges than God’s freemen, and neglect that service wherein is perfect freedom for that wherein there is intolerable slavery. They will disturb their consciences, violate their reason, impair their health, in contradicting the laws of God, and prefer a sensual satisfaction, with toil here and eternal ruin hereafter, before the honour of God, the dignity of their nature, or happiness, or peace and health, which might be preserved with a cheaper expense than they are at to destroy them.—Charnock.

2 Peter 2:22. The Habits of the Sow.—There is no regeneration for the sow in any amount of washing by water; the ablution over, away she wends again to her wallowing in the mire. Like the canine race (dishonouredly characterised in the same proverb) the porcine is of ill account in Holy Writ. As the flesh of the swine is formally prohibited as “unclean” in Leviticus, so in Isaiah the offering of swine’s blood is, by implication, denounced as almost inconceivably abominable, and the “eating swine’s flesh, and the abomination and the mouse,” are with execration connected together (Isaiah 66:3; Isaiah 66:17). Of the Mohammedans we are assured that nothing in the creed or practice of Christians does so much to envenom the hatred of Mohammedans against them as the fact of their eating pork. Besides its being an offence to their religion, their aversion to the flesh of the “unclean beast” resembles an instinctive antipathy, such as the “idea of uncleanness,” when once it sinks into the feelings, seems always to excite in those whose personal habits are scrupulously cleanly.

The Backslider’s Fate.—The Greek poet tells us of Hecuba not daring for shame so much as to lift up her eyes, or look Polymnestor in the face, because she had been a queen, but was then a poor captive. Common captives can easily lift up their eyes and cry to those who are in prosperity for relief and help, whereas others who have lived at ease can with more ease starve than beg. As a downfall from a seeming height in spirituals into the mire of sin hath more wickedness in it than a bare continuance in sin, so a downfall from a real height in temporals into the mire of misery hath more trouble in it than a bare continuance in misery. They who have made a fair show, or an outward flourish, in the faith, and afterwards fall back, are worse than those who never made any show at all. It is sad for any one to live openly in sin; but for such as have made an open profession of godliness to apostatise, and fall back to sin—this is matter of saddest lamentation.—Caryl.

CHAPTER 3