We can have some good food here, but I'm telling you, when you go out there in the country, it just seems like they, I don't know what they do, they empty all their shelves or something and they bring it and it is just on the tables all over the place. Needless to say, we had enough to eat and it was a grand occasion, a grand occasion. I would like you to open your Bible with me tonight to 2 Peter.
As we finish up the second chapter of the book, dealing with false teachers and how they're described, really this is an astonishing chapter it seems to me, from the language that is used by Peter. It is among the strongest language you will find anywhere in the Bible. It is language that is inspired by the Spirit of God and written by an apostle of Jesus Christ, but it is language that is very forthright, very clear.
It is language that denounces in explicit terms the nature of those who are false teachers. You'll remember that Peter was a man of passion and action. Certainly his temperament, like the temperament of all of us hopefully, was somewhat moderated by his growth in Jesus Christ, his coming to know the Lord and then his growth, but the man himself, I think, is still very evident in this chapter.
We have here something of an old salt, it seems to me, a crusty fisherman, sanctified by the grace of God, but very upset by the presence among some of the believers in that day of false teachers. He was alarmed by their presence and their activity as they sought to undermine new converts in particular and as they attempted to lead astray God's children. I wonder if there's that kind of passion among us today regarding this sort of thing. There needs to be. There needs to be.
I wonder if at times the thinking in the world about pluralism, that there are many shades and hues of truth doesn't affect us so that we don't have as strong a feeling as we ought to have regarding those who are false teachers, those who are apostates. It is wonderful to be tolerant, and as the people of God there ought to be a certain tolerance about us, but there ought never to be a tolerance of that which is false and that which leads people astray from the truth into error.
In this chapter Peter uses several methods to describe to us these teachers who were attacking the work of Jesus Christ and His person. He tells us early in the chapter that they denied the Son of God, they denied His deity, they denied that He bought them, they denied His blood atonement, the sufficiency of His sacrifice for sins, and because of this they themselves were bound for eternal judgment.
As this chapter goes on he piles word upon word and phrase upon phrase until finally he overwhelms us really with language denouncing and describing these people. As he comes to the middle of the chapter and toward the end he draws several pictures to create an image in our minds regarding what they are like. He goes back in the history as we saw last week and he talks about Balaam and Balaam's willingness to sell his services as a profit for money.
Numbers 22 through 24, he is killed in Numbers 31, that's where you find the record of Balaam. He is mentioned in the New Testament by Peter and Jude, by John in the book of Revelation warning against the error of Balaam, the way of Balaam, the teaching of Balaam. Balaam was a man who was willing to sell his religion and his practice of his religion for a price and Peter is saying so are the apostates.
With them the bottom line is what they can get out of it, whether it be money or if it be promiscuity and that sort of fleshly satisfaction. Then he draws upon a picture from nature and finally he draws upon a picture from commerce reminding us that they entice, just like a fisherman entices the fish so these people entice others into their ways. The bottom line is this, that these false teachers had this one primary concern and that was satisfying their own lusts and greed.
Now he concludes the chapter with several verses that record for us a couple of parables that give us further insight into the true spiritual condition of these frauds who are passing themselves off as Christians. I'm going to read tonight from the NIV, the New International Version, you follow along with whatever you have there. I'll start in verse 19, it says, they promised them freedom while they themselves are slaves of depravity for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.
If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them.
Of them the prophets, the proverbs are true, a dog returns to its vomit and a sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud. Well this is a text of scripture that like some others has been greatly disputed in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Basically there are two positions.
One position would say that the verse 20 in particular refers to people who have truly been saved, they've come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ, their sins have been forgiven, they've escaped corruption in that sense, and then after having been genuinely saved they in some manner or way turned their back on all of that and they were entangled again in some of the sins of their former life and as a result of that their end is worse off
than if they had never even heard the gospel in the first place. So that position would assume that one can lose salvation. The other position and the one that I adhere to is that it's not talking about genuine Christians. The language there is strong language but I believe that it comes short of describing a genuine Christian. Now if one wishes to debate the language itself one then should go to the rest of scripture and let other scripture shine the light upon this.
And the fact is that as you go to scripture you find that the scripture assures us that one who has genuinely trusted the Lord Jesus Christ though he indeed may stumble and fall into sin again will come out of that. Not only that he may stumble into sin again but that does not cause him to lose his salvation. Salvation is a gift of God's grace, it is not by works. It is therefore also kept by God's grace and power. It is not lost by our works.
Let's begin tonight as we look at this text with the two parables that conclude the chapter. The first one says a dog returns to its vomit. Peter here draws upon two animals in his proverbs. Both animals by the way, interestingly, were considered unclean by the Jews. They were both animals of instinct of course and in that sense we are reminded of what Peter had said earlier in verse 12 of this chapter where he compares the false teachers to that kind of animal.
He says they are like brute beasts, irrational creatures of instinct. And now he describes them by using parables about beasts that act out of instinct. The first is the dog and Peter here seems to be drawing upon proverbs 26 and 11 where the writer of proverbs says basically the same thing. The picture here if you have ever been around a dog is accurate. It's not exactly a pleasant proverb, however accurate it be, in fact it is a rather disgusting picture.
If there is anything that will make you get rid of Fido, it is when he fulfills this proverb. It's a rather ugly scene and it does happen from time to time. But the disgusting aspect of it is exactly what Peter was drawing on because he wants us to realize that what these false teachers are and were doing was also very disgusting as far as he was concerned as disgusting as what the dog did. And then he talks about a sow. This morning in Storden, Minnesota we were in hog heaven.
One of the men in the church farms 1500 acres and if I understood him right, in the course of a year he raises 12,000 hogs. That's a lot of pork. It's a lot of smell too, I'll tell you. But I'm told Storden reflects that in the summertime. Thankfully we were there in the winter. I didn't think to ask him if hogs had changed in the last few years.
I know that 30 years ago when we raised them what it says here is true and I assume it's still true because whatever evolution has done, chortle, chortle, it hasn't improved the nature of hogs. Those still are hogs and the sow that is washed off will go back to wallowing in the mire. It used to be in the 4-H club and never did take hogs to the 4-H fair. It took sheep. But I had some friends who had hogs and they would scrub those creatures.
I mean literally they would get brushes out until they glistened. They were actually almost pretty. I'm not going to comment anymore on that but they were amazing how clean they were and presentable. But I'm telling you as soon as they turned their backs those hogs went over to wherever they could find a little bit of mud and they would lay down in and they would begin to root in it and they would go right back to the mire. And the reason they did that is because they're hogs. They're just sows.
And it says here that a sow after washing just returns to wallowing again. Well the point is that it's the nature of these beasts, it's their nature now of the dog and of the sow to do just what he describes. The nature is unchanged by whatever they've experienced whether it is regurgitation or it is being washed. Their nature remains the same and it's the nature that determines the actions. What they are is finally proven by what they do. That's his point.
And so reversing ourselves now to talk about these people he was saying that these teachers were outside the people of God, they did not know God, they had experienced no regeneration, they had no divine nature within them, whatever they professed, whatever they said their experience was and the proof of that was the fact that their lives were characterized by immorality and by greed.
Teachers saying it makes no difference what they say they've done or what they say they've experienced, the proof of the pudding is in the way that they live. The nature has remained unchanged. That's his point of illustration here regarding these false teachers. They, they, they is used here several times and the critical question is who are they?
If you trace it right back through the chapter you find that the most plausible explanation in the context of the whole chapter as well as in the grammar of the preceding, the immediately preceding verse is that the they are the false prophets from back in verse one. That's who they are. These false prophets are called pigs and dogs, unclean animals. Nowhere are God's genuine children ever called unclean animals in a picture or an illustration. Peter uses another picture of them.
What is it back in his first epistle? What does he say that we are? You remember? He says that we're sheep, one of the clean animals as God distinguished them. He says that we're like sheep as God's people but here he compares them, these false teachers who were apostates, to unclean animals. Now he says regarding them that they had in some way known the truth of God.
It says that they had escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the word that he uses there means a full knowledge. Now whatever else Peter may mean there, he does not mean that they had a saving knowledge. The point seems to be that they understood fully who Jesus was and they understood the truth about his death and his resurrection. They had an intellectual understanding of all of that.
They knew him in that sense and there was some benefit in their lives of that kind of knowledge. There was at least an exterior cleansing of the defilement in their lives. They got washed like a pig might get washed. Outwardly things were cleaned up a little bit but they had deliberately chosen to turn away from a full experience of what they knew. He says they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome.
So the fact is that they turned away from the world and they came to this knowledge of Jesus Christ, who he was, why he died, why he rose again. There was no inward change of nature in that knowledge but they understood it. Nevertheless having understood it, they deliberately turned their backs on it and went back to where they were before.
They used their knowledge, they used their entrance among God's people by what they had professed previously to begin now making money and satisfying their lusts off of religion. It's a powerful potent picture here of an apostate teacher. He's not merely describing the converts of these people, he's talking about the teachers themselves. He says in verse 19 that they had promised a certain freedom to these ones who were brand new converts apparently to Christianity. It was a false freedom.
Basically what they said to these people who were just genuinely moving out of the corruption of the pagan world was, hey, you can live the way you want to live. You can do your own thing. If it feels good, go ahead and do it. They may even have said as some of the people did in Rome, go ahead and sin. There's no condemnation with that. If you sin, it just magnifies the grace of God. True freedom of course is not liberty to live that way. True freedom is liberty to live God's way.
True freedom is not being free from any restraint. One cannot live without restraint of some sort. The most damning of all enslavements or restraint is slavery to self, doing what one wants to do. True freedom in Jesus Christ is the kind of freedom that sets us free to do the will of God. That's genuine freedom. He says not only that, but these apostates who had turned away from what they knew proved themselves to be enslaved. They proved themselves to be enslaved.
They felt better after what they had experienced, like the dog might feel better after vomiting. They may have looked better externally, just like a sow would look better after being washed, but there had been no inward change. It was all exterior. All exterior. He says because of this, their end is worse than their beginning. And truly it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than to have experienced what they have.
Because they have known the truth and deliberately turned from it, bringing greater judgment upon themselves than the judgment that comes upon those who have never known. But they multiplied it. Not only did they themselves make that mistake, but then they were seeking to lead others in error, thus compounding their damnation. So Peter says it would have been better had they never known.
Warren Rimsby says, temporary reformation without true repentance and rebirth only leads to greater sin and judgment. He says in verse 21, and the last part of the verse, well let me just read from the beginning of it. It says it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it, and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. What is this holy commandment, the sacred command?
I think the best answer to that is that it was the summation of the message of the apostles of Jesus Christ. It's the whole message, the holy commandment that focuses upon the person and the work of our Lord Jesus Christ in all of his glory. It was passed on to them in some sense. They had had a grasp of it, intellectually at least, and yet in the end they turned their backs upon it. The result was that they enjoyed their sin less and incurred greater judgment from God.
I think that Jesus tells us a parable in Luke chapter 11 that's sort of a parallel to this. I want you to turn back there with me. His theme here is not particularly that of false teachers so much as people who go through a less than genuine conversion. It is one that is only external. It is self-reformation, not internal regeneration. Verse 24 of Luke 11, when an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.
Then it says, I will return to the house I left. When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in there and live there. The final condition of that man is worse than the first. In this parable that Jesus is telling, he's simply underscoring what Peter later said. That is that self-reformation in the end accomplishes nothing but greater problems and greater judgment.
Self-reformation doesn't make it. A few years ago, there was a great emphasis on moral rearmament, was the term of the cult as it was back in the 30s and 40s, up with people. You remember when that was the fad a few years ago? Up with people. They had concerts all across the United States. Millions of young men and women in particular were attracted to these rather clean-cut men and women who led these concerts and this movement up with people. The whole idea of it was self-reformation.
In the end, it doesn't change the heart. That's exactly where people who are in liberal theology have so much problem. They seek the cause of wickedness and evil in the environment and they seek it because we're not paying enough tax dollars and they say that evil comes because of prejudice and it comes from here and it comes from there. Ultimately, evil comes from the heart of man, from man's nature. He's a sinner.
And there is no salvation for man apart from becoming a new creature in Jesus Christ. Religion that advocates self-reformation and self-worth and self-realization and self-actualization and all of that will always be popular in the world. But it's not a religion that will ever deliver one soul to heaven, not one. The regeneration of the heart is essential for one to see the kingdom of God. Jesus said, unless you're born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God.
I suppose one thing that we can say regarding this is that you and I need to be careful regarding the ministries that we support. Occasionally, someone will say to me that they listen to so-and-so on television. And I try to be gentle. You don't like to be critical. But on the other hand, you want to warn people that so-and-so may not be what so-and-so says he is. We need to be cautious regarding those ministries that we support.
We want to have nothing to do with counterfeit ministries that are not preaching the holy commandment, the sacred command, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. I think it would be appropriate, too, to ask the question of all of us tonight, have you experienced yourself a genuine spiritual regeneration?
I think a danger of growing up in a Christian home and an evangelical church is growing up with a lot of knowledge, being able to use the language and say the prayers and sing the songs, but not have a genuine experience with God. And if tonight the Spirit of God is probing and poking at that area of your life, and you're not certain about that, then as Paul says to all of us, I exhort you to examine yourself.
And if in fact you have not assurance that you've truly been born again of God, I would invite you to come and talk with me or to one of our pastors, seek out a spiritual counselor who can walk back with you through your spiritual journey. J. Vernon McGee was a great preacher. How many of you ever heard Vernon McGee in person? There's quite a few of you. How many of you heard him on radio or in person? That's many more of you.
Dear brother and gifted exposer in his own interesting way, I suppose, as only an Oklahoma boy can do it. But Vernon McGee was preaching one time regarding the prodigal son, except that he turned around and he called it the parable of the prodigal pig. And in the sermon he contrasted the prodigal son who left his father's house and went to the pig pen, then came to himself and went back home.
But the prodigal pig who was there in the pig pen went with the son back home but ended up going back to the pig pen. And after listening to that, one of his fans, an Evelyn C. Sanders, wrote a poem based upon it and I saw this and I thought, well, this would be good to close this particular section of 2 Peter with. It's entitled, A Pig is a Pig. Come home with me, said the prodigal son. We'll sing and dance and have lots of fun. We'll wine and dine with women and song.
You'll forget you're a pig before very long. So the pig slipped out while the mama was asleep, shook off the mud from the mire so deep. When his neck was a bow so big, he's gonna show the world a pig's not a pig. With his snout in the air he trotted along with the prodigal son who was singing a song. It must be great to be a rich man's son. He would surely find out before the day was done. It didn't take him long to realize his mistake. He had been scrubbed and rubbed till his muscles ached.
He squealed when they put a gold ring in his nose and winced with pain when they trimmed his toes. He sat at the table on a stool so high, a bib around his neck and a fork to try, while the prodigal son in his lovely robe kept feeding his face, so glad to be home. When the meat came around the pig gave a moan. It looked too much like the kind of his own. He jumped from his chair with a grunt and a groan, darted through the door and headed for home.
His four little feet made the dust ride high, for he didn't stop till he reached that stye. It's what's on the inside that counts, my friend, for a pig is a pig to the very end. Let's pray together. Dear friend, are you one of God's sheep? Have you been born into his family, become clean inside and out? The fact is that all of us were like that dog or that sow, unclean, unrighteous, without God, separated from him. But God in his wonderful grace provided a way for us to be cleansed.
A very simple way, though a very costly way to him, he provided for our cleansing through the death of his only son. Through Christ's suffering and death, you and I can be forgiven, because he suffered in our place. And he rose again with eternal life, mighty to save any who would come to him. And you can know the meaning of having a new nature, of becoming a new person by placing your faith in Jesus Christ.
It doesn't come through self-reformation, self-help, turning over a new leaf or any of that sort of thing. You and I can clean up the exterior, we can start over again, we can try harder. But the fact is that we need to have a new heart. And that new heart is a gift from God when we trust Jesus. If you've never trusted him before, would you do it tonight, placing your faith in him? Just tell him that you do, that you understand that he died for you and rose again.
You're trusting him alone to be your Savior. Ask him to give you that new heart, the new nature, a genuinely new beginning. And if that is your heart's decision tonight, would you be willing to testify to that just by lifting your hand and looking up at me and then putting your hand back down?
Tonight you're saying, I am choosing this evening, I am deciding this evening by God's grace to place my faith in Jesus Christ, my self-reformation, all of my efforts have fallen far short, and I know that he alone can save me, I can't save myself. Is that your choice, your decision? Is God leading you to that point of trusting him? Let's stand together.
Father, we live in a world that is filled today even more than Peter's world was with ingenuine teachers, apostates who have turned their backs on the truth and are using religion as a means to their own ends. I would pray that you would guard us as your people, as your children, that we might not fall prey to any of that. We might have discernment as we're on guard. And I pray that you will make us good passers-on of the truth.
I pray that despite the apostasy that is rampant around us, we as your people may hold forth the holy commandment, may hold forth the word of life, and others may understand and come to a genuine knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Father, we thank you for the new nature. We thank you that you have changed us from being a prodigal pig to being sons, sons of God. May we this week walk as your children with all of the dignity, the humility, the genuineness, and the love that befits a child of God.
Thank you for this evening and our being together, the joy of fellowship. Now, Lord, we go out as missionaries. We go out to share the truth, bless us, fill us with the Holy Spirit as we serve you this week and that way. In Jesus' name, amen.