EPISODE 173 2 PETER CHAPTER 2 "An Apostolic Rant"

Welcome to Share the Word. Thank you for joining us as we continue to deliver the good news of the gospel chapter by chapter. In today's podcast, Paul goes much deeper into the details of the false teachers that have been an obstruction to the ministries of the apostles from the very start. Today, he focuses on 2 Peter. 2 Peter chapter 2: An Apostolic Rant. I hate to admit this as someone who spent quite a time preaching from and teaching about the New Testament, but it wasn't until we started Share the Word and I've been going through these writings systematically, looking for the big ideas in each chapter, it wasn't until this exercise that I fully realized just how much of the New Testament scripture addresses the dangers of false teachers.

I keep coming to chapter after chapter after chapter where the biggest idea is exposing false teaching and blasting false teachers. I mean, it's everywhere. In fact, 26 of the 27 New Testament writings address this issue and warn of this threat. If you don't want to run into such negativity, you'd better confine yourself to the 25 verses in Philemon. There's just no escaping the fact that Jesus' apostles, who were largely responsible for producing the New Testament, and the Holy Spirit who inspired them, were extremely concerned about the impact of false teachers on growing Christianity. Why?

Because Christ had called the apostles to be the foundation of the Christian church, and they took that calling seriously. That's why there are so many warnings to watch out for false teachers in their writings. That's why the false teachers of the first century are so often called out and roundly denounced, while we read stunning pronouncements of God's judgment coming for them, as in today's chapter. And that's also why we see the urgent calls from the apostles to the next generation of Christian leaders, those who would follow them, to remain strong and faithful to the truth.

We've already seen that the New Testament books we've looked into so far, how almost from the outset, false teachers were openly challenging the gospel of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus, like the Judaizers in Galatia, for example, or in Corinth, and how Gnostic heretics wormed their way into churches around Ephesus and Colossae, trying to undermine and alter crucial doctrines like the deity of Jesus Christ and his dual nature. The apostles John and Paul, and now Peter, were determined to expose and condemn these guys and their wrong ideas. The influence and threat of false teachers to the Christian faith, they compared that to cancer and gangrene. Jesus himself forewarned these disciples that false teachers would arise and compared them to wolves looking to ravage God's flock. They did arise, as we know, and they keep arising in every new generation.

Throughout church history, it's been like an endless game of whack-a-mole to keep up with them, expose their errors, and protect God's flock. Peter, like Jesus and the other early Christian leaders, clearly understood this danger, and 2 Peter chapter 2 is a double-barreled assault on false teachers who were threatening Christianity then. I expect that if you're listening to Share the Word because you want to understand Christianity better, or maybe you're someone who has recently decided to follow Jesus, when I talk about false teachers, you may be wondering just who the apostles would classify that way, and more importantly for us, who exactly they would see as false teachers on the scene in our day. This chapter is right up there with the most concentrated and hardest-hitting assault on false teachers anywhere in the Bible.

So it's a good place from which to sketch out ways that we should be able to identify them. It honestly, to me, reads like a rant, and it's pretty hard to neatly outline a stream of consciousness rant. Peter keeps coming back to the same few dominant ideas over and over, so they are what we'll focus on during this podcast. You can't miss the idea in chapter 2 that false teachers will often out themselves by their own immorality and greed. Listen to how Peter puts this in chapter 2, verses 2 and 3. Many will follow their evil teaching and shameful immorality, and because of these teachers, the way of the truth will be slandered.

In their greed, they will make up clever lies to get a hold of your money. But God condemned them long ago, and their destruction will not be delayed. Then in verses 13 and 14, he comes back to this again. They love to indulge in evil pleasures even in broad daylight. They are a disgrace and a stain among you. They delight in deception.

Even as they eat with you in your fellowship meals, they commit adultery with their eyes, and their desire for sin is never satisfied. They lure unstable people into sin. They are like well-trained greed monsters. I put the greed monsters part in there myself, but it says they are well trained in greed. I remember a heretical pseudo-Christian cult I ran into when I was around 20 years old. It was founded by a guy named David Berg, who was an ordained pastor and who broke away from a very evangelical denomination.

He called his followers the Children of God. The Children of God sounds wonderful, no? It grew very large, actually, in the 1970s and 1980s, international, actually. One of its central ideas was that all sex is good, not just marital sex in a committed relationship, but any sex, any sex, sometimes even with children, sometimes even with people in your own family. Berg deliberately twisted the truth that God is love into sex with other people, anyone really, is a wonderful expression of God. The Children of God started in late 1960s in California, not surprisingly, and was tailor-made, I think, by Satan to appeal to young people attracted to the free love hippie movement, the cultural revolution that was going on at that time.

They used a technique called flirty fishing, literally, that's what they called it, flirty fishing, very effectively to lure young adults into this group. That's how I ran into them, actually. I remember the day a friend and I were approached at a store by a couple pretty attractive girls inviting us to spend some time with them at a nearby campsite. They made it sound like an opportunity to meet a lot of cool people and talk about current issues and so on. I had no idea what it was about at first, but after asking some questions, they told us they were part of a beautiful spiritual family called the Children of God. If you're wondering, we didn't follow them to that meet-up, and not because I didn't want to, but because I had another obligation that night, thank God.

But for those who did get sucked in, once you were into that cult, you moved to a commune somewhere where your head was filled with twisted ideas David Berg came up with. You worked for their industries for free. There was a lot of sex, all right, but also total control over your life. It drew a lot of young people in. It screwed up a lot of lives. David Berg is a classic example of a modern false teacher who, in Peter's words, was teaching shameful immorality, luring unstable people into sin.

Another example I've run into was the so-called Unification Church. This began in South Korea, but grew to have millions of members all over the world. The founder was a man called Sun Myung Moon. The official name of the organization is the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. Its stated goals were about bringing harmony and unity to all mankind. Moon's teachings actually synthesized Eastern religious concepts with Christian ideas as he twisted them together.

They claimed to be based on the Bible, but also that the Bible itself was incomplete, and that something Moon himself authored called the Divine Principles was also inspired scripture. In the Unification Church, Moon regarded himself as Christ, as the Messiah. He said he came to complete what Jesus didn't accomplish, namely, the unification of the world and the universal salvation of all of its inhabitants. He didn't deliver on those promises, surprise, surprise, but did manage to get fabulously wealthy in their pursuit. The so-called Unification Church was not a church at all. It was a mind control cult focused largely on raising money and gaining power for its founder.

At its peak, it owned vast real estate holdings. It owned banks. It owned large companies. It owned media, even the Washington Times, very influential newspaper in the U.S. You may have run into young followers of this cult. We call them Moonies now.

They often were hanging around airports or bus stations trying to raise money for the cult by selling flowers or candy, telling you that it was all for world peace organizations. The big money, though, came from scamming wealthy people in Korea and Japan, where the religion became very influential. They promised people healing or supernatural conflict resolution or business success in return for significant financial contributions. Thankfully, their heyday is over now after some very large lawsuits came about. But Moon was a perfect example of a charismatic false teacher who, as Peter put it, in their greed make up clever lies to get a hold of your money. If you're unfamiliar, when verse 15 says, they, that is the false prophets, have wandered off the right road and followed the footsteps of Balaam, son of Beor.

Who love to earn money by doing wrong. Peter's alluding to an account in the Old Testament book of Numbers about a one-time prophet of God who was willing to curse the nation of Israel after they escaped from Egypt because of a significant bribe offered him by an enemy king. People do crazy, short-sighted, God-angering stuff for money, even people who should know way better. That's the moral of the story. Greed is a powerful, corrupting force, and it corrupts even apparent men of God. In America, I've seen and continue to see many false teachers using the influence they gain over people to take advantage of them one way and another.

I've named some of the worst of them in the past in other podcasts. Biblically and ethically sound Christians, especially leaders who have an audience, who are respected by the public, should not be hesitant at all about calling these people out. The New Testament writers certainly were not. Sadly, one of the worst results of false teachers being exposed for shameful immorality or exposed for living like Russian oligarchs off money they've scammed from their followers is that, as Peter puts it, because of them, the way of truth is slandered. He means because of them, legitimate ministries get painted with the same tainted broad brush. Because of them, true Christianity gets a bad name.

That's because few unbelievers have or even care to have the discernment to know the difference between false teachers who use religion as a cover to take advantage of people and authentic ministries of Christ who operate with integrity and from conviction. So genuine Christianity, unfortunately, which Peter simply calls here the truth, gets slandered because people lump all of us together. Anytime they hear the name of Christ, their mind says, Hey, it's a big scam. So it's not just the people who get sucked into these false religions and cults who are ultimately hurt. That would be bad enough. It's also those who do not have the discernment to tell the false from the genuine.

So they will never listen to the gospel message or check out a good church or click on a Christian podcast because they've been so turned off by the many cases of religious counterfeits, false teachers. So a couple things to be alert to we've covered here. False teachers use their influence sometimes for immoral purposes, and they also are often motivated by greed and use their influence over people to enrich themselves. Here's another thing that jumps out at me in chapter two that Peter mentions mid-rant, something I wish I knew more about. Listen to this. He's speaking again of false teachers he despises when he says, They are proud and arrogant, daring even to scoff at supernatural beings without so much as trembling.

But even the angels who are far greater in power and strength do not dare bring from the Lord a charge of blasphemy against those supernatural beings. Those false teachers, though, are like unthinking animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed. What's that all about? Before I tell you what I think it's about, I want to also quote a very similar passage from the epistle of Jude. Whatever Peter is talking about, Jude is also talking about. Listen.

In the same way, these people who claim authority from their dreams live immoral lives, defy authorities, and scoff at supernatural beings. Even Michael, one of the mightiest of angels, did not dare accuse the devil of blasphemy, but simply said, The Lord rebuke you. But these people scoff at things they do not understand, like unthinking animals. They do whatever their instincts tell them, and they bring about their own destruction. I don't know exactly who Peter had in mind, what he had seen or heard about in his day that he describes in this way, but his words bring to mind things I have seen in my time. I have seen spiritual performers who claim to have special power in the spiritual realm, who make a big show of calling out demons or even the devil himself, challenging and scoffing at these unseen powers of darkness the Bible says are very real.

Their act is about convincing people that they've been given by God supernatural insights into the unseen world, to convince the naive they are somehow spiritual giants that demons fear. In reality, they're just showboaters. It's an act. In reality, they don't even understand these things at all, or they would never be so presumptuous. Both Peter and Jude say, Don't you realize even the most powerful supernatural beings in heaven, like the archangel Michael, a being vastly more powerful than any of us, would not dare himself revile the devil, his counterparts on the dark side of the spiritual world, these one time, as they are called, glorious beings. Even the mightiest angel would never assume to do what some false teachers do.

But Michael called on the Lord to rebuke them. I've seen this over and over. Very theatrical, egotistical showmen brashly calling out Satan or his demons in disrespectful ways, scoffing at them, acting as though they themselves have authority over them, all to impress their easily impressed audiences. You can mark them down as frauds and false teachers. Peter is saying real men and women of God are not like that, actors on a stage impressing the easily led by building up an aura of their own spiritual power. No.

Real servants of God are marked by humility. They take spiritual warfare very seriously. They know evil forces are very real, powerful, not anything to toy with. They are certainly not for spiritual performance art. The last point I'll extract from Peter's rant here against false teachers is an obvious one, but the most damning one. The kinds of people Peter has in view, the kinds of people he is scorching here in this chapter, are people who can profess to be speaking on behalf of Almighty God, all the while putting out false information, spiritual lies that lead people to hell.

Remember, prophets were people who were God's mouthpieces in the past, people through whom God delivered important messages to people. At the end of chapter one, Peter was describing the means by which God had delivered His Word, the Scripture, and it was through His true, trusted prophets, prophets who were moved by the Holy Spirit and spoke from God. That's how he put it. But he then opens our chapter by saying, But there are also false prophets in Israel, just as there will be false prophets among you. Those who cleverly teach destructive heresies and even deny the Master who bought them. Tell me, what could be more a serious sin than pretending to speak for God while deliberately misleading people?

Pretending to speak for God while telling people only what they want to hear, discounting what God has actually said, contradicting what God has put in His Word. When Peter references false prophets in the Old Testament times who misled the people of Israel, I think he's probably thinking about Jeremiah and Ezekiel's generation. Those two true prophets of God had to contend with a bunch of false prophets in the last days of the nation's existence. God had sent Jeremiah and Ezekiel to warn his people that judgment was coming unless they repented and turned back to Him. They didn't, and a judgment tragically came. The one big reason they didn't was that there were false prophets who were all the time contradicting Jeremiah and Ezekiel's messages from the Lord.

False prophets scoffingly dismissing them, saying, Don't worry about that doomsday preaching of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Everything's going to be fine. Our God's not going to allow destruction to come on us and on our land. Just relax. So when Peter writes, There were false prophets in Israel, just as there will be false teachers among you who will cleverly teach destructive heresies and deny the Master who bought them, he's warning there that there are false prophets even bold enough to contradict God's very Word, deny things Christ Himself taught. Not all false teachers are greedheads or sex perverts taking advantage of naive followers or ridiculous showboats putting on religious acts.

Some just pull on their clerical garb every Sunday, climb into pulpits and tell people, You really don't have to believe what the Bible says about this or that. We know better than to take it so literally now as unsophisticated people did in the past, who tell people, Pay no attention to those Bible thumpers who still warn about judgment coming and insist that their narrow ideas about Jesus are the only way you can be saved. Remember, God is love, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All I am saying now is that sometimes false teachers unmask themselves, and they don't look anything like the obvious charlatans we would expect. Sometimes they are pastors who, in reality, are unbelievers and audacious enough to contradict God's Word.

Sometimes they are university professors or prominent authors or TV talk show hosts who are arrogant and self-assured enough to ridicule those of us who believe God will do what He says He will do. These are every bit the false teachers as the more obvious types Peter has been denouncing. In verses 4 to 10, he reminds his readers and us—we need the reminder—that if God judged rebellious angels and threw them into hell, he says, into gloomy pits of darkness, where they're being held for the day of judgment, and if God judged the world in Noah's day with the great flood, and God judged Sodom and Gomorrah, raining down fire and turning those immoral cities into heaps of ash, and He did, then the day of judgment we're told about in God's Word that is yet ahead will, in fact, arrive. It's coming for you, he says to these false teachers. Don't misunderstand him.

Peter's intent as he rages against the false teachers here is not to turn them around. There's no call for them to change their ways. This is not intended to be remedial for them. He finishes his rant by saying, These people were well acquainted with the truth, but instead, instead of believing it, leading others to it, they regarded it so little that they decided to use it to take advantage of people. These people will turn others away from it out of their own arrogance for their own purposes. These people, he says, their doom is certain.

They'd be better off if they'd never even had any knowledge of the truth, Peter says. To them, he's saying, Make no mistake, judgment is coming for you. The purpose is really, what Peter's so riled up about is the need to alert young Christians he's writing to, as amazing as it seems, that there will be people like this among them, people posing as Christian leaders, posing as spiritual teachers, who are in fact the worst kind of children of hell. There's no way to spin 2 Peter chapter 2 for any feel-good endings. There's no silver lining here. But this is God's word for our time as well as it was for Peter's time.

Beware of spiritual impostors, false teachers, false prophets. They are often the devil's most effective tools to turn people away from God's truth. This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. Get a hold of your money. I love that, because the false teachers throughout history have and continue to use religion for their own benefit, whether it's financial or otherwise.

Their focus was twisting the truth just enough to lead believers away from Christ. Remember the better way. No, the best way to identify false teachers is to know the truth of God's word. Continue learning. Continue listening. Ask questions.

Read. Study. The lies of the dark can't stand the light. So the more you know, the less chance these false teachers will have to keep you in the dark.