What was that, Southern Gospel style? Something like that? Weissau. Let's open our Bibles together to 2 Peter chapter 2 and look tonight at one of the longest sentences in the entire New Testament. There is only one Sumner Wimp in the world. Some people are glad about that and others aren't quite so sure, but I'm glad he was here this morning and ministered to us as a church. Sumner Wimp talked this morning about the same thing he talked about 25 years ago.
And that's really why I wanted to have him this weekend because his message is one that we need to hear. It's a pointed message. It is one that is challenging to us in an area where all of us can stand an occasional challenge and that of our personal witness. And I talked with him afterward and he's going to mail to us this week some of the tracks that he has written.
Maybe those will be here by next Sunday for those of us who made a commitment this morning to pass out 10 of them at least or to invite 10 people. But the track should be here by next Sunday morning. And as he said this morning, as soon as my heart's right, I'm going to write one. But that's going to be a while because of some other things I've got on the docket. I mean not my heart getting right, but my writing. So you know in a few months we may be able to see that happen.
But I was encouraged that the gentleman in our church in the first service came up afterward as a printer and eventually we're going to have Sumner's tracks with our church name on the back of them instead of his track society's name. He's given us permission to do that. And at least until we get some of our own written we'll be able to use those. And that's kind of exciting. So I appreciate that offer by the printer in our church.
Well tonight we want to talk about what is kind of a, in one sense, a depressing theme because it is a theme of doom and gloom. Not for the children of God, but for those who are false teachers. Last week we talked about their presence, just as they were present in the ancient days in Israel, so they are still present today. Somewhat of a different message maybe, but the same idea, the same theme, a denial of God.
And we saw last week that the signs of false teachers include a denial of the deity of Jesus Christ denying the master who bought them. Not only a denial of the deity of Christ, but a denial of the atonement of Jesus Christ, the sufficiency of his payment on the cross for sin. In the sentence that begins in verse 4, it's as though Peter gets started talking about what he wants to say and he's so absorbed in the whole subject that he can hardly stop.
The sentence actually begins in verse 4 and continues at least through verse 9 and actually into verse 10.
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness reserved for judgment, and did not spare the ancient world but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly, and if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly thereafter,
and if he rescued righteous lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men, for by what he saw and heard, that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day with their lawless deeds. Then the Lord knows. Up to this point we've seen the first part of this conditional sentence.
He begins by saying, if God, and then he gets started on his role, but now he comes in verse 9, he says, if God, then he says, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment. Peter seems to be like a sentry that is watching his enemy. His attention is fastened upon these who are false teachers teaching an opposite message from the one he proclaimed.
He says regarding them that they deceive the people of God, as we saw last week. They deny the Son of God. They defame the truth of God. Peter wants us to know that the end of such people, God has already written. God has already determined. He launches into a warning that these false teachers are doomed, but there is a second message that underlies it, and that is that just as God knows how to preserve them for judgment, God knows how to rescue his own from the time of temptation.
These false teachers, he says, cannot ultimately prevail over the plan of God, and one day they face a certain judgment from God for their unbelief and their damage to the souls of others. That is the reason that James says, as he does in James 3.1, my brethren, let not many of you be teachers.
What he means by that is the one who is a teacher, who is an instructor of others in spiritual things, who is a guide to others, is one who will have a more strict judgment because of his accountability for the souls of his hearers. Hell will be a more comfortable place for a man like Adolf Hitler than it will be for a liberal preacher. You mark my words on it. The person who in the name of God and religion leads others in the false direction will in the end have the greatest judgment of all.
That is exactly what Peter is warning. God will judge false teachers because of their sin against him and against his word, and he will preserve his own in the meantime. Notice with me the certainty of God's judgment. At the end of verse 3, he says, their judgment from long ago is not idle and their destruction is not asleep. The certainty of God's judgment. He mentions it again in this chapter.
For example, at the end of verse 12, he says, they will in the destruction of those creatures also be destroyed, suffering wrong as the wages of doing wrong. Then in verse 17, he says regarding these false teachers, for whom the black darkness has been reserved. And he says in verse 20 at the end of the verse, the last state has become worse for them than the first. Some people have the idea that God's long suffering indicates that somehow he is overlooking, but that is not the case.
God is not forgetful. Judgment will come, except God picks the time when it will come. And in chapter 2, again in verse 1, he says that it will come swiftly, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. By the way, that word swift does not mean that it will necessarily come soon. It means that when it comes, it will come suddenly, like a bolt of lightning out of the sky. It's the same idea as when Jesus says in Revelation, behold, I come quickly. The word does not mean that he was coming soon.
It meant that when he was coming, he was coming like that. The suddenness, the unexpectedness of his coming is in view. And that is the case here. He says the judgment of these false teachers is sure. It is swift. It will come upon them at the moment that they do not expect it, and it will take them away to their eternal doom. And then he launches into several historic cases of the judgment of God. These cases illustrate in Peter's mind and for us the fact that God does bring judgment.
The first one has to do with the angels that sinned. If God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them down into hell, literally it says there, but thrust them down to tartar us. An unusual word, a strange word. The question is, who are these angels that sinned that God thrust them down to what are described as pits of darkness or to a place called tartar us that's not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament? Who are these angels? What did they do?
Well, there are some who say that these angels are the angels that fell with Satan when he rebelled against God. Well, that certainly would be true in a broader sense, but often people who use that explanation mean that all of those angels who fell with Satan have been cast down, thrust down powerfully to this pit of darkness where they're reserved for judgment. However, it seems to me that that is not the case.
That the angels, many of the angels that fell with Satan are what are termed by our Lord in the Scriptures as demons. Maybe not to be the case that it's not referring to all of the angels that sinned with Satan. Who are these angels? And what did they do that a particular judgment from God came upon them and described in such unusual languages here? I believe that the preferable explanation is that these are the angels that are mentioned in the sixth chapter of the book of Genesis.
You may want to look back there with me in case you're not familiar with that text. We here find record of Noah and the days before the flood. And it says in the first verse, it came about when men began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they took wives for themselves whomever they chose. The Lord said, my spirit shall not strive with man forever because he also is flesh.
Nevertheless, his days shall be one hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days. And also afterward when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them, those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Unusual phrases used here to describe the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men. When it says they were mighty men of old, men of renown, these are not complementary terms.
These are terms that refer to their notorious wickedness. The offspring of the union that is described here were people who were of unusual, one might even say supernatural strength and power and who were wicked in a way that was beyond the wickedness of the general race of Adam by that time. Men of renown, notoriously evil and wicked in their deeds. There have been two or three different explanations for these phrases that the sons of God took the daughters of men.
But I believe that the best explanation is, it's not without problems in interpretation, but I believe using some New Testament texts including this one in 2 Peter, that the sons of God is in the case of Genesis chapter 6 describing fallen angels who assumed physical bodies as we are led to believe angels may do and that they had the capacity to go into the daughters of men to marry them, to go habit with them so that they produced a race
of offspring that could only be described as half demon and half human. The kind of offspring that Hollywood fantasizes about in some of the more weird movies that they've come up with out of their rather twisted and weird minds in that place. I believe that the angels that sinned in 2 Peter chapter 2 are indeed the angels of Genesis chapter 6. Not all of the angels that fell with Satan did that. Some of them did.
And because of the vileness, the unnaturalness of their particular rebellion, God judged them by sending them down to this place called the pit of darkness to Tartarus where they are chained and reserved until their final judgment will come. Now there's another text I want to turn to that I think sheds additional light on this and it's found in the book of Jude. And Jude also is talking in these verses about God's judgment. He warns about it in verse 5 in ancient Israel.
But in verse 6 he also mentions some angels. He says, and angels who did not keep their own domain, that is their first estate, the sphere of existence that God assigned to them is the thought. But he says they abandoned their proper abode. This was an act of rebellion. It was throwing off the assignment that God had given to them, a sphere in which to exist. They abandoned their proper abode. He says he has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day.
You say, well it doesn't say anything there about the Genesis 6 sort of thing. We'll go on to verse 7 because actually the sentence continues in the Greek. He says, just like Sodom and Gomorrah. In other words, there was something with these angels that he's just talked about that was like Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these in verse 6, indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh.
He is saying that the angels that are mentioned in verse 6 were guilty of some kind of unnatural immorality of the grossest sort. And I believe again that the only historical record we have of anything like that is found in Genesis chapter 6, in those days before the flood.
And that one of the reasons that God sent the flood and destroyed the whole race at that time, except for those eight who were saved, was because of what had happened in this race, this offspring of supernatural and natural beings that were on the face of the earth at that time. It was the only way that God could deal with it and cleanse the earth of that kind of thing.
By the way, you'll notice, you know what was involved in Sodom and Gomorrah, and you'll notice the kind of identification that kind of activity has in the mind of God. The same kind of thing, so unnatural, so gross in the mind and the purpose of God that he identifies it with these angels that sinned. Well, I don't want to take more time on that. I did want to just give you some explanation of how I understand this verse in 2 Peter chapter 2.
Historically, Peter says God does judge, and here's an example of it. It happened with the angels that sinned. God did not spare the ancient world. He goes on to say, but preserved Noah. So here we have example number 2, the flood. And I think another reason that it is referring to those angels in Genesis chapter 6 is the close identification now with the flood that he's going to go on to talk about. He says God did not spare the ancient world.
This flood of Genesis chapter 7 is an event that Peter mentions three times in his writings. 1 Peter chapter 3 here, and then again in chapter 3 of this book. God unsparingly condemned the whole human race. He did not withhold judgment, and Peter says in the end he will not withhold judgment on those who are false teachers. That's the implication of it. You'll notice that he says that God brought upon that generation a flood. The word literally is here a cataclysm.
That's the English word of the original word. A cataclysm, a deluge. The Greek word means to submerge, to overwhelm, to inundate with water. This was not some localized flood in some part of Mesopotamia, but he is talking about a worldwide flood that dramatically changed the whole biosphere of the earth. The whole environment of the world was dramatically changed and altered by the event that he is referring to here. He brought a cataclysm upon the world of the ungodly.
And then he goes right on to the third historic case of judgment. If he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes. The word destruction here is our English word catastrophe. And so Peter first points to a cataclysm, and now he talks about a catastrophe. He goes on to explain that this catastrophe was a covering of these cities with ashes, or it can mean a burning of them to ashes. It's the only time in the whole Bible you find this term.
Peter is describing what happened in Genesis chapter 19 when God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain because of their exceeding wickedness. By the way, that has never been found by archeologists, and I think there's a very good reason for it. It's buried underwater. I am convinced, and there is some evidence to point to this, that the cities of the plain, including Sodom and Gomorrah, are buried in the southern part of the Dead Sea.
And that if it were possible to excavate below the waters, which is possible now, and there's been some talk of doing this, they will be able to go down and find the ruins of cities, and perhaps even uncover the very cities of Sodom and Gomorrah that God destroyed in what he calls here a catastrophe. In these cases, in each one of them, the emphasis seems to be upon some kind of unrestrained, shameless immorality.
Sodom and Gomorrah, the generation of Adam before the flood, the angels that sinned. You see, he's tying all of this back with the false teachers. He wants to remind us that along with false teaching comes false living, and the kind of immorality that he's already talked about in verse 2, the sensuality of the false teachers. Now, he brings us to a conclusion here about God's judgment in verse 9.
The first one we've already emphasized, and that is that God knows how to keep the ungodly for final judgment. The Lord knows how to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment. Same way that Peter puts this, the strong underlying tone is here that they are right now being punished, but they are waiting for their final judgment.
That is a terrible and awful description of the reality of hell, where the lost are now being punished, but at the same time, God is keeping them until that day when they will be brought before Him the great white throne judgment for their final accounting, and then be cast into the lake of fire that burns forever and forever. God knows how to do that. All there are people who say, well, my God's a God of love. A God of love would never do something like that. Dear friend, God is a God of love.
A God of wonderful love, so much love that He sent His Son to suffer for our sins and to die in our place on the cross to rise again from the dead. Through His dying on our behalf, we might be saved. God loves us so much that literally His Son went through hell on the cross in our place. So great was the suffering of the Son of God, not just physically, but spiritually.
So great was the suffering of His soul that He bore the equivalent of the hell of every human being who's ever lived, eternal hell. You say, how could He do that in six hours on the cross, in three hours of darkness when there was intense suffering? How could He do that in six hours? He could do it because He was the eternal God hanging on that tree. Because He was eternal God as well as human, He was able to endure eternal punishment in that time. That's how much God is a God of love.
But God is also a God of righteousness and a God of wrath, and that is what Peter's illustrating. Our world wants to forget this side of God. Our world wants to believe in a God of love, a God who will never punish sin, but that is not the God who is. That is not the God who lives. But not only does God know how to keep the ungodly for final judgment, but Peter has another theme that he's been putting into the text here, sort of swirling it in.
He says that as God knows how to deliver and to rescue the godly out of trial. And you'll notice he's given us in our text two historic examples of this. One example is Noah, back in verse 5. He calls Noah a herald of righteousness. Noah was a man who proclaimed righteousness in the midst of an ungodly generation, when everyone else had turned their backs on God and just subtracted God out of their lives so that they were ungodly.
No place for God. Noah was a man who stood for God and who proclaimed the truth of God. That's the assignment that you and I have. For we are living in an ungodly generation as well. I believe that we are living in those days that Jesus talked about in Matthew when he said, as it was in the days of Noah. So it will be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man. I personally believe very strongly that we are living in those end time days.
And that we're going to see our culture and our whole world move in the same direction as the days of Noah. And you and I are called by the grace of God to be the heralds of righteousness. To be the proclaimers of the gospel in this generation as Noah was then. God's long suffering waited 120 years in the days of Noah. And he proclaimed the truth to that generation as he built the ark. God guards, God preserves and protects His own in a time like you and I live.
There may be times that we feel outnumbered. Or times when we are intimidated because of the atmosphere of the office where we work or the school where we go. It is wonderful to know that God is there with us and He knows how to preserve us. Right there in that classroom. God knows how to preserve us right there in that place of employment. He's with us to deliver us, to rescue us. He points to another historic example and this one we would not expect.
If we did not have the New Testament record of Lot, we would have said Lot was a man who was lost. You will notice that he uses language regarding Lot here that cannot be but that of a saved man. He says he rescued righteous Lot. Do you remember Lot? This rather selfish man who chose his own way and chose what was best, the nephew of whom? Abraham. And he pitched his tent toward the cities down there in the plains, Sodom and Gomorrah.
So that when he got up in the morning, opened the tent flaps, the first thing he saw was the cities in the plain. And when he closed those tent flaps at night, the last thing he saw were those cities in the plain. And it wasn't long before he went down there and he lived among them. And he packed up his tent and put it away in a crate and he lived in a home. He dwelt among them. That's what it says here. He lived among them. He made his home among them. What a terrible decision he made.
At the same time, while he was living among them, this righteous man, the word righteous means this just man, this man who was justified before God. He believed in the God of Abraham. This man, notice what it says, was oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men. The word oppressed means to be worn down by exhausting labor or being greatly troubled until you just don't know if you can go on. That's where Lot was. You say, well it was his own decision that took him there. Yes it was.
And once he got there, he had to be dragged out of the city before God could put the judgment upon the place. You say, I don't understand that. Neither do I. The fact is that inside Lot, he was a man who was miserable. But isn't it true of all of us that when we choose our own way, inside we're miserable? And sometimes we get locked up in it and there are times we don't know how to get out of it. But at the same time inside, we are just torn apart. And that's exactly what Lot was.
Furthermore, it says in verse 8 that his righteous soul, notice that word again, his righteous soul was tormented day after day, vexed. The suggestion is here that every day that Lot lived in Sodom, he blamed himself for the mess he had gotten himself and his family into. What a sorry way to have to live because of bad, bad decisions. But that was Lot. And we notice even at the end of his life that Lot commits immorality with his own family, a sad thing.
He goes down in the Old Testament as one of the sorriest of all the characters introduced. But at the same time he was a man that God says was righteous. That is justified before God. Carnal, unfaithful, disobedient, vexed, tormented, oppressed. But God preserved him. It says God delivered even Lot. God dragged him out of danger. It's literally what it means. You remember that Abraham interceded before God. He said, oh God, finally just ten people.
Just ten people, Lord, would you withhold your judgment? And God agreed. But not even ten could be found in the city of Sodom. And those two angels who stayed overnight with him and his family dragged him out of the city, his own wife looking back longingly toward the city and the salt and the brimstone coming down upon her and killing her at the very spot. And Lot and his daughters alone being saved from the cities of the plain. But they were saved. God delivered them.
Peter says here you have one man who was righteous, one man who was blessed, one man who preached righteousness and you have another man also saved who was carnal, who was disobedient and who paid the price. Both the child of God and God knew how to deliver both of them, both of them from temptation. There's some people today who say that God knows how to deliver those who are faithful, but if a Christian gets unfaithful, he's gone.
Others would argue to the contrary that God is faithful even when we fail. But who wants to live a life like Lot? Do you want to end your life like Lot did? Do you want to be vexed and oppressed? We can do that. God doesn't cast us away. God knows how to deliver us in the end. But oh, what a price to pay in the meantime. What a waste. How much better in the generation in which we live to be men and women like Noah who are faithful to God and heralds of righteousness?
And who though living in an ungodly age of unbelievable shameless immorality all around us keep ourselves unspotted and unstained from the world and declare the gospel of Jesus Christ to this generation? Let's live so that when Jesus comes we might not have to be ashamed and just make it, just be dragged out against our own wills as it were.
But let's live so that we're looking for our Lord and so that when we stand before Him we'll not have to be ashamed but may have confidence before Him at His coming. Just be men and women of faith and obedience like Noah. Let's pray. It's a tough passage. It deals with some awesome truths about the righteousness of God, God's hatred for sin, God's judgment upon false teaching and false living. But it also tells us of God's faithfulness. Let's thank God for His faithfulness.
Dear child of God, are you tonight living more like Noah or like Lot? Which model are you more like? You can learn that God is faithful to you if you're His child from this text, but you will also see that it can be a terrible waste to live like Lot, to conform to the age of ungodliness. Would you determine in your heart tonight and say, oh God, make me like Noah? Make me a herald of righteousness where you've planted me in this generation.
I hope you will pray that and determine that in your heart right now. Let's stand together. Father God, we live in those days we believe that Jesus spoke about when He said, as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the coming of the Son of Man. We look around us and we see ungodliness on every side. We see false teaching abounding. We see it prospering and being received by the world. We see shameless immorality and we see the judgment coming. So may we live obediently to you, Lord.
And this week as we walk out there in that world, make us a lover of those who are lost. May we like Noah be a faithful proclaimer of the gospel by word and by life so that we might be the instrument that you would use to save some. Father, as we go, we also want to just say thank you for the blessed assurance here that we're going to be preserved.
Just as surely as you are preserving some who are already in chains for judgment, so you are preserving your children to inherit that great salvation that you have purchased for us in Christ. Thank you for that. And thank you for your presence in our lives. In Jesus' name, amen.