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Well, friends, please remain standing for the reading of God’s Word.
We continue our consideration of Peter’s second epistle, Second Peter, and tonight we focus
on Second Peter, chapter 2, verses 4 through the first part of verse 10.
I’m going to read from verse 1 through verse 10.
So let us hear God’s holy word.
You’ll find that on page 1208 in your Pew Bibles.
Hear now the word of God.
But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among
you who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought
upon themselves swift destruction.
And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.
And in their greed they will exploit you with false words.
Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell, and committed
them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment.
If he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness,
with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.
If by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, he condemned them to extinction,
making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly.
And if he rescued righteous lot, greatly distressed by their sensual conduct of the wicked.
For as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous
soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard.
Then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under
punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of
defiling passion and despise authority.
The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever.
Let’s pray for the Lord to bless the proclamation of his word this evening.
O heavenly Father, we pray that by your spirit that once again you would give us insight
and wisdom and openness as we consider this portion of your holy word.
And we pray that you would cause our consideration of this passage to bear spiritual fruit in
our lives, fruit that brings glory to your name.
We pray these things, heavenly Father, in Jesus’ name, and all of God’s people said,
Amen.
You may be seated.
Just alert the children to the fact that there are four key words that you folks can be listening
for in my sermon this evening, the words judgment, rescue, wrath, and righteous.
Well, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, if you are a student of the Bible, which you
ought to be, then you know that false prophets and false teachers frequently arose within
the congregation of God’s people during Bible times.
We read of them often in the scriptures.
And if you love the word of God and believe in its truths, then it should be clear to
you that there are sadly many false teachers today in the professing churches of the Lord
Jesus Christ.
And that’s really kind of a thing that ought to cause you to wonder, at least it causes
me to wonder.
I mean, have you ever wondered why God allows the church in this present age to be frequently
plagued by evil and godless men and so many false teachings, so many heresies and errors?
Doesn’t it sometimes seem like the false teachers in the churches are almost invincible, like
the church can’t get rid of them, that they’re always there in one form or another?
Well, on the other hand, oftentimes false teachers, they gain large followings and great
riches, but on the other hand, faithful church leaders and faithful congregations frequently
struggle to survive and they often face fierce opposition from heretics and compromisers
within the church, not to mention persecution from without.
Now beloved, in our text for this Lord’s Day evening, our passage offers true believers
tremendous comfort in the face of false teachers and destructive heresies that often plague
the church.
Because in our text for this Lord’s Day evening, the apostle Peter assures us, his readers,
that God is able to rescue godly men from their trials and he is also able to bring
righteous wrath upon the unrighteous, including especially false teachers who are immoral
and who reject the lordship of Jesus Christ.
In fact, this is the point of the examples that Peter gives in our passage for this evening
and really the key theme of our passage for this evening is summarized by Peter in verse
9, where it says, the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous
under punishment until the day of judgment.
That’s again the central theme, the central truth that is being illustrated in our passage
for this evening.
So in this passage, the apostle Peter offers three examples from redemptive history of
God’s judgment against the wicked, two of which include examples of God rescuing the
righteous from the midst of the wicked.
And those examples are first of all, God’s judgment against the fallen angels, the angels
who had sinned and rebelled against the Lord, and then we have God’s judgment against the
ancient world through the flood of Noah’s day, and finally, Peter mentions God’s judgment
against Sodom and Gomorrah.
And so as we turn our attention to our passage for this Lord’s Day evening, we consider first
of all some examples of judgment and rescue, and that’s the first main point in your sermon
outline, is we consider examples of judgment and rescue.
And again, the first example that Peter gives is God’s judgment against the sinning angels.
It says in verse four, for if God did not spare angels.
Now let me pause there.
When it says for if God did not spare angels, clearly he is continuing the thought from
the previous context, the previous verse, where he speaks of these false teachers and
he says of the false teachers at the end of verse three, for their condemnation from long
ago is not idle and their destruction is not asleep.
And now he gives us examples of how this is the case.
He says for if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed
them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment and so forth.
This is kind of a divinely inspired run on sentence here.
I know Paul is, the Apostle Paul is famous for those run on sentences.
Well, we have one such sentence here in second Peter as well.
And it’s interesting because this is very similar to what we read in the epistle of
Jude.
In fact, this is a parallel to Jude, verse six, I’d invite you to turn there to Jude.
Jude is right before the book of Revelation, Jude, verse six, Jude, verse six says this.
And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their
proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of
the great day.
So again, you see there’s a parallel between Jude and Peter’s second epistle here.
Now this may raise some questions.
You may ask yourself, well, you know, Peter and Jude both talk about these angels who
have been committed to dungeons, committed to hell basically.
Well, if that’s the case, if the demons, if the fallen angels are restricted and confined
to hell, how was it that these demons were so active during the ministry of the Lord
Jesus?
You know, we read of much in the way of demonic possession and oppression in the New Testament
scriptures and how are we to square those seemingly conflicting teachings in scripture
about angels, about the fallen angels?
Well, again, I just would remind us brothers and sisters that we need to be very careful
to avoid too much speculation when it comes to the doctrine of angels or what the theologians
call angelology.
The word of God does give us some information about these glorious spirit beings that are
known as angels, but the Bible offers us really little information about the angels,
especially about the fallen angels.
But as we examine what the Bible does teach us, we can infer that Satan and many other
angels rebelled against God at some point before the fall of Adam and Eve.
But what about the fact that Peter speaks of these angels?
He says of them that they have been cast into hell and committed to chains of gloomy
darkness, again, depicting them as being confined, being imprisoned, being chained in hell.
Well, Dr. Edwin Blum, I think, puts it well when he says, apparently, some fallen angels
are free to plague mankind as demons, while others such as these are imprisoned.
Again, there’s not a contradiction in the scriptures.
There’s perhaps different classes of fallen angels.
And it says of these particular angels that Peter is speaking of in our passage for this
evening that the Lord has cast them into hell.
Now, the word for hell here in this verse is interesting.
The Greek word that is translated here as hell is the word tartarosos.
And Dr. Kistermacher points out, he comments, that God sent the fallen angels to hell, Peter
writes.
He borrows the word hell from Greek mythology, which designated a place called Tartarus and
abode for the wicked.
Peter uses this term not to teach or approve of Greek mythology, but to speak the language
of his readers.
They understood the term to describe that part of hell where the worst offenders were
kept.
So, apparently, these particular fallen angels were the, if you will, the worst among the
fallen angels.
In any case, they are said to have been committed to chains of gloomy darkness, or as the NIV
translates it, putting them into gloomy dungeons.
Either way, these particular fallen angels are pictured as being confined and restricted
under divine judgment.
So why does Peter bring up these fallen angels and the fact that God has confined them and
reserved them for the judgment of the last day?
Well, Peter’s point here amounts to an argument from the greater to the lesser.
You see, the point is that if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, even though
these angels had been initially created as holy beings and had dwelt in God’s direct
presence, if God did not spare them when they sinned, then certainly God will not spare
unrepentant false teachers from his judgment.
And this is intended, brothers and sisters, to be a comfort to the faithful, an assurance
to the faithful that God is not ignorant of the errorists and the heresies and the false
teachers that so often threaten the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, that so often threaten
to upset the faith of God’s children.
God is not ignoring them.
God is not just letting them go, so to speak.
God is aware of them and God will indeed bring them into judgment.
So believer, take comfort.
The judgment of false teachers, false teachers who pervert the truth of God’s word, false
teachers who distort the gospel of Jesus Christ, God’s judgment upon such false teachers is
as certain as his judgment against the fallen angels.
So that’s the first example of judgment that Peter gives.
So then he moves on to mention in verse five God’s judgment against the ancient world,
the pre-deluvian world, the world that existed before the great flood judgment of Noah’s
stay.
We read this in verse five.
It says, if he did not spare the ancient world but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness,
with seven others when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.
So again, this is the second example he gives.
It is clear, friends, that Peter regarded the great flood of Noah’s day to be a real
historical event, not a myth.
And while Peter doesn’t directly deal with some of the questions that evangelical Christians
wrestle with today, for example, the question of the extent of the flood, was it a truly
a global flood or was it just a large regional flood that wiped out the central trunk of
the human race except for Noah and his family?
Whatever the case may be, the point is that it was indeed a great historical catastrophic
judgment of God that wiped out the entire human race with the exception of Noah and
his family.
It was a paradigm, a type of the ultimate judgment that will come upon the world of
the ungodly when our Lord Jesus returns in glory at the end of this age at his second
coming.
Now I want you to notice a couple of things here from this second example that he gives.
Notice first of all that God brought universal judgment upon the ancient world of the ungodly,
which is a sign that he is most certainly willing and able to bring judgment upon the
ungodly today.
If God has done it before, he is certainly willing and certainly intends to do it again
in the case of the unrepentant wicked.
We also notice that God rescued righteous Noah.
It’s interesting Noah is described here as a herald of righteousness and again there
are some questions about what that means.
Does that mean that Noah actually preached to his contemporaries, that he actually called
his contemporaries to repentance?
Perhaps that is the case or perhaps it simply means that he was a herald of righteousness
in the sense that he is building an ark on dry ground and that in itself was a proclamation
that God’s judgment is coming.
Take heed, take warning, whatever the case may be.
The point is that while God brings his judgment against the world of the ungodly through the
Noahic flood, he also rescues righteous Noah along with Noah’s family, thereby showing
that he is able to deliver the righteous from his judgment and from the ungodly.
So again, this is intended to be a comfort to believers who find themselves living in
the midst of an ungodly world and even in the midst of a church situation where they
are threatened by heresies and false teachings.
But the third example that Peter mentions is God’s judgment against Sodom and Gomorrah
and his rescue of righteous Lot or Lot who is described here as righteous.
We’ll talk about that in a moment.
In verse 6 it says this, if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned
them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly.
Let’s pause there again.
We have here in this example, we have a parallel with the epistle of Jude.
If you turn to Jude, verse 7, we read Jude giving a similar example and this has led
some scholars to believe that Jude and Peter were aware of each other’s writings and there’s
debates about who borrowed from who or was it an actual borrowing or what have you.
However that occurred, we know that the spirit has inspired this and reinforced this example
by giving it, recording it several times in his word.
It says in verse 7 of Jude, Jude verse 7, just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding
cities which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desires serve as an
example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.
Again we see God bringing judgment upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness,
sexual immorality and this causes me to reflect upon what is recorded in Revelation 14 verses
9 through 11.
In that passage we read these words, it says, and another angel, a third, followed them
saying with a loud voice, if anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark
on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath poured full
strength into the cup of his anger and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in
the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the lamb and the smoke of their
torment goes up forever and ever and they have no rest day or night, these worshipers
of the beast and its image and whoever receives the mark of its name.
Now I share these passages with you brothers and sisters again to point out the fact that
though it is not a popular teaching today, it is most certainly true, the Bible, the
word of God plainly teaches the truth of the eternal punishment of the unrepentant wicked
in hell under the fiery wrath of God and of course the only way of escape from the wrath
that is coming, the just and holy wrath of God that is coming against human sin, the
only way to escape that wrath is to turn to the Lord Jesus Christ for Jesus Christ is
the all-sufficient savior of sinners, he is the one who is fully satisfied for all of
the sins of all of God’s elect by his merit and sacrifice, his life, death and resurrection,
he has redeemed wretched hell-deserving sinners like me and like you and indeed he has redeemed
all who by sovereign grace come to believe in him.
But the point is that again in the example of Sodom and Gomorrah, God keeps these wicked
unrepentant cities under judgment but he for the sake of, as was mentioned earlier, for
the sake of the patriarch Abraham, he rescued righteous Lot. Again, God will punish the
unrepentant wicked with eternal fire and if that is the case, beloved, let us take the
gospel, let us strive to support missions and the spreading of the gospel of Jesus Christ
to the lost that they too might hear the glad tidings of great joy, that they too through
sovereign grace would come to embrace Christ and Christ alone for their salvation from
sin and so with this example of Sodom and Gomorrah, we see again God’s fiery judgment
against Sodom and Gomorrah but also God’s rescue of righteous Lot, look at what it says
in verses seven and eight, and if he rescued righteous Lot, now let me pause there and
you may scratch your head and think righteous Lot, are you talking about the same Lot that
we read about in the book of Genesis, Lot who chose to pitch his tent among the Sodomites,
Lot who even when the city surrounded his home in order to protect the angels who were
visiting him, offered to give his daughters to be ravished by the crowds righteous Lot,
again it is somewhat puzzling that Peter describes Lot as a righteous man, the record of Lot’s
actions and behavior in the book of Genesis gives us the impression that Lot was in fact
a weak and deeply flawed man, his choice to live among the Sodomites and some of his other
behaviors demonstrate his moral flaws and his foolishness but at the same time beloved,
we learn here that in spite of his many flaws, Lot at heart was a true believer, he was a
godly man, yes he was weak, he was flawed, he was inconsistent as are all of God’s children
to one degree or another in one way or another and so we learn here that in spite of his
many flaws, he was a true believer, he was distressed by the ungodly behavior of those
among whom he had chosen to live and God had mercy upon him and rescued him in spite of
his flaws, in spite of his weaknesses and imperfections, the Lord rescued him. Now in
verse 5 we learn that God preserved Noah from the flood but here in verse 7 we read
that God rescued Lot and boy did God have to rescue Lot, Lot was very hesitant and
Lot had to practically be dragged by the hand with the angels whom God had sent to him but
God did rescue him and again this shows that God is able to rescue the godly even from
the midst of the ungodly and this too should be a great comfort to you dear believer in
Christ. So in closing what do we learn from this passage? Well again it’s summarized,
the lesson here is summarized in verses 9 and 10 and that lesson is God is able to rescue
the godly and to bring his just judgment upon the unrighteous. God is able to rescue those
who through sovereign grace are godly and to bring his just judgment upon the unrighteous.
Again to read verse 9 and 10, the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and we
face trials and tribulations in this life, we face temptations, we face temptations to
compromise, we face temptations from false teachers and false teaching, we also face
hostility from the world and even at times persecution but the good news is the Lord
knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment
until the day of judgment and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion
and despise authority and when he’s describing those who are indulgent, who indulge the lust
of defiling passion it is likely that the reference to defiling passion is a reference
to the practice of homosexuality or other sexual perversion and scriptures make it clear
that that is indeed a perversion, a distortion of God’s original design and it is an abomination
to the Lord and those who indulge in that and those who make the grace of God an excuse
to indulge in defiling passion and sexual immorality and so forth as well as despising
authority, these false teachers did not want to be under authority, they put themselves
in positions where they were the authority, they were above accountability and again this
was another sign of their rejection of the Lordship of Jesus Christ but the good news
is that God is able to rescue the godly and he will bring his judgment upon the unrepentant
wicked in the end especially those who harass, pester, persecute and lead astray God’s people.
Dear ones, you know that hymn, this is my father’s world, there’s a line in that hymn
that says but though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet. In this present
evil age where the church of Jesus Christ is often by sisms rent asunder, by heresies
distressed as the hymn puts it, in this fallen world where the godly are so often oppressed
and persecuted while the ungodly seem to prosper, in this fallen world where false
teachers and errorists often attract large followings and seem to prosper while the faithful
are often small and struggling remnants, in this fallen world take encouragement from
the truths that we learn from this passage beloved. Dear believer, God is able to rescue
and deliver those who through sovereign grace are in the right with him, he is able to rescue
from their afflictions and he will most certainly bring his righteous judgment upon false teachers
and other godless men who harass and pester and persecute his faithful people. Let us
not be downcast, let us not be discouraged for though we will face tribulation in this
present world, what does Jesus say? In this world you will have tribulation but I have
overcome the world, Christ has overcome the world, greater is he who is in us than he
who is in the world. We serve the one who has overcome the world, we serve the one who
will someday right all wrongs, we serve the one who will ultimately vindicate his elect
and judge the unrepentant wicked. God is holy and just, God is merciful and gracious. Let
us praise him and let us rest in him for he alone is our salvation, amen. Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, sovereign and eternal God, we thank you and praise you for the encouragement
of the scriptures. For Lord, we as your people sometimes face trials and tribulations and
tribulations in this present life. Help us Lord when we do to be comforted by these truths
that you are not ignorant or unaware of our trials and tribulations, indeed you sovereignly
overrule them for our good and your glory. And so help us Heavenly Father to trust that
you are able to rescue the godly from trials and you are able to reserve the unrepentant
wicked under judgment and you will vindicate your people and your cause in the end. We
praise you God for that and we pray that you would bless us now as we close our time in
the word tonight. In Jesus name we pray and all of God’s people said amen. As we close
our time of worship this evening let’s rise and we’ll sing together number 470 when this
passing world.