Rescue and Wrath

Sermon transcript

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.

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