2 Peter 2:8

2 Peter 2 is a warning against false teachers who would bring destructive heresies into the churches, as false prophets once arose among God’s people. Their teaching gave licence to sin, and it went with a denial that Christ would come or that judgment was real, the scoffing Peter answers in 2 Peter 3:3–4. The believers were also under pressure from outside, and it was hard to keep to a godly life while the wicked prospered for a while. A day of judgment was already a familiar idea, both from Jewish writings about the end and from the Gentiles’ own notions of divine retribution, and Peter grounds it in what God himself has done.

His answer is one long sentence that runs from verse 4 to verse 9. It opens with “For if God spared not”, sets out three judgments God has already carried out, and reaches its conclusion in verse 9. The reasoning moves from the greater to the lesser. If God judged angels, a whole world and two cities, then his judgment on human deceivers is certain. He shows no partiality (Romans 2:11), and after death every person faces judgment (Hebrews 9:27). Two of the three examples also hold a rescue, so the same history that warns the ungodly comforts the godly. From verse 10 Peter turns to describe the false teachers themselves (2 Peter 2:10–22).

Peter begins with the highest creatures. Angels are powerful, heavenly beings, and when some of them sinned God “spared not” them. The verb for sparing, pheídomai, means to treat leniently or to hold back, and with the simple negative ou, “not”, it tells us that God’s judgment fell on them in full. Their power and their former privilege were no shelter. If that is how God dealt with angels, the false teachers have every reason to fear.

“The old world” is the world before the flood, of which Genesis says that “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5–7). It was full of violence and corruption. Peter calls it “the world of the ungodly”, and the adjective asebḗs means irreverent, impious, wicked. God “spared not” that world, vast as its population was. Other nations kept their own stories of a great flood, and Scripture alone gives the reason for it, which was God’s righteous answer to human sin, and tells of the one righteous family he kept alive.

The flood, kataklysmós in Greek, was a deluge that cleansed the earth, and it destroyed every living thing on the land except Noah and those who were with him in the ark (Genesis 7:23). It came “upon the world of the ungodly” as the just consequence of their wickedness. The prophets look ahead to a day of the LORD in the same way (Isaiah 2), and Jesus named the days of Noah as a sign of what the world will be like at his coming (Luke 17:26–27).

Sodom and Gomorrha stood in the plain of the Jordan, near what is now the Dead Sea, and their wickedness was so great that the cry of it had come before the LORD (Genesis 18:20). He destroyed them by fire (Genesis 19:24–25). Peter describes it with three strong words. The verb behind “turning into ashes” is tephróō, which comes from the Greek word for ashes and means to burn something up completely. “Condemned” is katakrínō, to pass sentence against, so the fire was the verdict of a judge on real guilt. “Overthrow” is katastrophḗ, the word from which English has “catastrophe”, and it means an overturning, a complete ruin. The cities were turned from living places into a wasteland.

God also gave their ruin a lasting use by making them “an ensample”. The Greek hypódeigma means something shown as a pattern, and here it is a pattern that warns. Their end is a standing exhibit of where ungodliness leads, set up by God for every later generation. Jude says the same of them (Jude 1:7), and Jesus used Sodom as a warning too (Luke 17:28–30). The verb for “live ungodly”, asebéō, is the action that belongs to the “ungodly” of verse 5. It means to live irreverently, against God’s standards, which was the life the false teachers were promoting with their licentious doctrine.

Beside the ashes of Sodom Peter sets a rescue. “Delivered” is rhýomai, to rescue or snatch out of danger, and the man rescued is Lot (Lṓt in Greek), Abraham’s nephew. Lot had chosen to live in the fertile plain near Sodom and in time settled inside the city (Genesis 13:10–13). Abraham had interceded for Sodom (Genesis 18:23–32), and God, who tells the righteous from the wicked exactly, brought Lot out before the fire fell. The first psalm draws the same line between the way of the righteous and the way of the ungodly (Psalm 1:1–3).

In verse 9 the long sentence arrives at its point. “The Lord” is kýrios, the master who has supreme authority, and he “knoweth how”. The verb is eídō, here in the form oíden, which properly means to see and is used for knowing. Peter says that the Lord knows how, so the knowledge in view is practical. He sees each situation fully and has both the way and the power to act in it, as he proved with Noah and with Lot.

“The godly”, eusebeís, are the reverent, those who live as God wills. To “deliver” is again rhýomai, the verb used for Lot’s rescue in verse 7. The Psalms say the same: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him out of them all” (Psalm 34:19), and the LORD loves justice and will not forsake his saints (Psalm 37:28).

These verses speak of God’s judgment, and the New Testament tells us who will carry it out. The Father has committed all judgment to the Son (John 5:22), and Jesus is the one ordained by God to be the judge of the living and the dead (Acts 10:42). He himself said that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment than for a city that rejects his message (Matthew 10:15). He has triumphed over the powers of darkness (Colossians 2:15), so the angels reserved unto judgment are under his authority.

The same Lord is the deliverer. Where the angels rebelled, he obeyed the Father even to the death of the cross (Philippians 2:8). He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), a lamb without blemish and without spot (1 Peter 1:19), the just who suffered for the unjust (1 Peter 3:18), and the righteous servant of Isaiah (Isaiah 53:11). Lot was grieved by the sins of others. Christ bore them, being made sin for us so that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21). God raised him from the dead (Acts 2:24), which is the greatest deliverance of a righteous one. He offers to sinners a way of deliverance that the fallen angels were never given.

So the rescues in this passage are pictures of a greater one. The ark was the one way through the flood, and Jesus is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6). Peter himself ties the flood to baptism and to salvation through the resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 3:20–21). Those who are in Christ are free from condemnation (Romans 8:1) and are saved from wrath through his blood (Romans 5:9–10). Noah’s uprightness and Lot’s were real and imperfect, and the righteousness that saves is the righteousness of God, which comes through faith in Jesus Christ (Romans 3:22). The wages of sin is death, and eternal life is the gift of God through him (Romans 6:23).

These verses give us a God who is the same in every age. He judged angels, a world and two cities, and he has kept those judgments on record so that we would know what he will do. When deceivers flourish and wrong goes unanswered for a time, the answer is already written here: they are being kept for a day God has appointed.

The same verses show a God who keeps each of his people in view. Eight people in a drowning world and one household in a burning plain were known to him and brought out. If the sin around you wears on you as it wore on Lot, that grief is the mark of a heart that belongs to God, and he sees it. Noah’s life shows that godliness can speak as well as obey, and Lot’s story carries a caution alongside its comfort, since settling close to ungodliness cost him dearly. The Lord who knew how to deliver them knows how to deliver his people now, whether by ending a trial or by carrying us through it.