When we walk with the Lord in the
light of His Word, we
are
the survey study of the scriptures, seeing how
the various books fit together.
And if you ever want that thrill, take
the course on Old Testament Survey by Mr.
Tatum.
If Mrs. Price doesn't have it, I know
she'd be glad to order it for you
and have it sent to you.
Then he also wrote the course The Holy
Spirit at Work.
It used to be called The Other Comforter,
but now The Holy Spirit at Work, and
I know we have copies of that on
hand.
He wrote a lovely course called Messianic Psalms.
I remember the joy that came to my
heart when I studied that course during the
Second World War.
And then there's another course, Bible Prophecy.
Unfortunately, it's been so popular we can't keep
it in print, so you won't be able
to buy that one right now, but if
you'd like to order it, we'd be glad
to take an order and we expect it
to be off the press soon again.
And then he's presently writing a course on
the Gospel of Matthew, and we'd be glad
to take advance orders for that, too, or
at least notify you when the course is
ready.
Have I skipped any, Brother Ernie?
He's in an uncooperative mood this morning.
Now, shall we turn in our Bibles to
2 Peter, please?
2 Peter chapter 2.
We'll begin reading with verse 1 down to
verse 10.
2 Peter chapter 2, verse 1, But there
were false prophets also among the people, even
as there shall be false teachers among you,
who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even
denying the Lord that bought them, and bring
upon themselves swift destruction.
And many shall follow their pernicious ways, by
reason of whom the way of truth shall
be evil spoken of.
And through covetousness shall they with feigned words
make merchandise of you, whose judgment now of
a long time lingereth not, and their damnation
slumbereth not.
For if God spared not the angels that
sinned, but cast them down to hell and
delivered them into chains of darkness to be
reserved unto judgment, and spared not the old
world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a
preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon
the world of the ungodly, and turning the
cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned
them with an overthrow, making them an example
unto those that after should live ungodly, and
delivered just Lot vexed with the filthy conversation
of the wicked.
For that righteous man dwelling among them in
seeing and hearing vexed his righteous soul from
day to day with their unlawful deeds.
The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godless
out of temptation, and to reserve the unjust
unto the day of judgment to be punished.
But chiefly them that walk after the flesh
in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government.
Presumptuous are they, self-willed, they tremble not
to speak evil of dignity.
Now if you'd like to look at your
outlines, we'll review the ground we've been over.
We're reminded that this epistle has to do
with false features arising in the latter days,
and so Peter started his epistle with the
wonderful provision that God has made for us
as the people of God, and our responsibility
to grow in the Christian faith to become
strengthened in the faith that we might be
able to meet this false teaching.
Last night we heard Peter express his determination
to continually remind the people of God of
these truths, and then we have that wonderful
passage in the last verses of chapter one,
the trustworthiness of the message that has been
delivered to us.
Closing with a wonderful statement as to the
inspiration of the Old Testament scriptures.
Now at the bottom of the page you'll
notice the outline for today, the rise of
false teachers predicted, verses one through twenty-two.
First of all, their doctrine in verse one.
Secondly, their immorality and their greed.
Verses two and the first part of verse
three.
Then their doom, the latter part of verse
three.
And then he gives three Old Testament examples
of God's judgment on apostasy, and draws certain
lessons from that.
The Lord is able to deliver the godly
and to reserve the ungodly to punishment.
Now we'll turn to the passage itself.
He begins with verse one and says, but
there were false prophets also among the people,
even as there shall be false teachers among
you.
You say, now what is the connection here?
Well, in the previous verse he had been
speaking about the prophets of God who had
been raised up in the Old Testament period
to give us the word of God.
These men who pointed forward to the glorious
reign of the Lord Jesus.
But having spoken of the prophets of God
and of their inspired writings, he remembers, yes,
but there were false prophets back there in
the Old Testament too.
There were men who stood up and professed
to speak in the name of God, but
they were false prophets.
And they didn't speak the word of God,
and the net result of their ministry was
to draw people away from faith and dependence
in the living God.
And so that's the connection in chapter two.
Peter says, there were false prophets also among
the people, even as there shall be false
teachers among you.
Now I think that's a very interesting shift
there.
He says there were false prophets, there will
be false teachers.
Why did he say that?
Why didn't he say there were false prophets,
there will be false prophets?
Well in a very real sense, the prophetic
ministry was associated with Israel in the Old
Testament, and the ministry of teachers is associated
with the church in the New Testament.
Now somebody will say to me, just a
minute, there were prophets in the New Testament,
and that's true.
He gave some apostles, and he gave some
prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and
teachers.
There were prophets in the New Testament period,
but why doesn't Peter speak of them here?
There were false prophets in the Old Testament,
even as there shall be false teachers among
you.
Well I wonder if this isn't an indication
that the prophetic ministry of the New Testament
would cease after the word of God came
in complete form.
Of course that's exactly what I believe.
I believe that the apostles and the prophets
who were given were for the early days
of the church.
The apostles were men divinely commissioned by God,
and their message was authenticated with signs and
wonders and diverse gifts of the Holy Ghost.
We don't have apostles like that today.
We don't need them today because we have
the word of God, and God doesn't authenticate
his word today with signs and wonders and
diverse gifts of the Holy Ghost.
There were prophets in the early days of
the church.
They would get up in the local assembly,
and they would speak, and what they spoke
was the word of God.
But supposing a man got up in your
assembly today and said, now brethren, I have
a message from God.
It's not found in the Old Testament, and
it's not found in the New Testament.
In fact, this is something fresh.
This is something new.
This is something that nobody's ever heard before.
What would you say to him?
You'd say, well I hope you'd say, sit
down brother, we don't want to hear it.
We believe that we have in the word
of God the faith once for all delivered
unto the saints.
Jude verse three.
And so the prophetic ministry has ended as
far as the New Testament period is concerned,
and we have teachers today.
There were false prophets in the Old Testament.
There will be false teachers among you.
Notice that.
There shall be false teachers among you.
I'd like you to notice that the men
of whom we're going to speak this morning,
they're not gangsters, they're not hoodlums, they're not
outrageous sinners as we think of it, or
men grumbling down in Skid Row.
These are professed ministers of Christ.
These are men who have supposedly taken what
they call sacred vows, and here they are
undermining the authority of the word of God.
You know, when I read these verses this
morning, earlier this morning, I had to chuckle
to myself.
I thought of the great ecumenical movement that's
going on today, and I thought, poor Peter,
he surely wouldn't have fitted in very well
in the ecumenical movement today.
As they would say, Peter didn't have the
ecumenical spirit.
That's true.
And I hope we don't have it as
far as this movement that's going on in
the world today.
There is a true ecumenical movement, the unity
of all true believers in the Lord Jesus
Christ, but of course this ecumenical movement is
an outward unity produced mechanically and by human
skill at the expense of the great truth
of the word of God.
There's inevitably a compromise of divine truth.
So there were false prophets also among the
people, even as there shall be false teachers
among you who privily shall bring in damnable
heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them.
These men are clever.
Don't take that away from them.
They're subtle, they're tricky, a way of coming
in with their damnable heresy.
Now, just let me give you some illustrations
of that, and I think it'll make it
very, very clear.
Last night I referred to a book written
in 1963 called Honest to God, written by
the Bishop of Woolwich, one of the bishops
of the Church of England.
I'd like to read to you two more
quotations from that book.
Denying the Lord that bought them.
He says in one place, in practice, popular
preaching and teaching today presents a supernatural view
of Christ which cannot be substantiated from the
New Testament.
He says, it says, this preaching today, it
says simply that Jesus was God in such
a way that the terms Christ and God
are interchangeable, but nowhere in biblical usage is
this so.
The New Testament says that Jesus was the
Word of God.
It says that God was in Christ.
It says that Jesus is the Son of
God, but it does not say that Jesus
was God.
Simply like that.
This book, Honest to God, is one of
them.
Well, I guess it's the best selling book
as far as religious titles in secular bookstores
today.
It's going over like wildfire.
Let me read you another quotation from Bishop
Woolwich.
As far as I know, he's never been
put out of the Church of England.
He's still sailing along magnificently and people are
bowing at his shrine.
Here's another quotation, but even when it is
Christian in content, the whole scheme of a
supernatural being coming down from heaven to save
mankind from sin in the way that a
man might put his finger into a glass
of water to rescue a struggling insect is
frankly incredible to man of this age.
The idea of a God coming from outer
space and invading this planet of ours to
save mankind, he compares it to reaching down
into a glass of water and picking out
a struggling insect.
And he said that will never do for
man come of age.
Yet church people continue to explain the atonement
in some such terms as this, picturing the
interplay of two personified parties.
And now he's going to give us an
account of the way fundamentalists still think.
And of course, then he's going to ridicule
it.
Here's the way we think.
The relationship between God and man has been
broken by original sin.
Man could not pull himself up by his
own shoestrings, and thus the only hope of
restoration was from God's side.
This isn't what he says.
This is what he says we say, and
of course it's true.
Yet it was from our side that things
had to be put right.
It appeared hopeless, but God found the answer,
for in Christ he himself became man, and
as man reconciled us to himself.
Now listen to what he says about that.
This construction, no doubt, gives expression or projection
to genuine and deep-seated reality, and as
myth should not be thrown out, but as
an objective transaction supposed to have been accomplished
outside us in time and space, it speaks
today to remarkably few.
To fewer, indeed, than the Christmas myth.
This is exactly what Peter is speaking about
in verse one of chapter two.
There shall be false teachers among you who
shall bring in damnable heresies, denying even the
Lord that bought them.
Well, if that isn't a denial of the
Lord, I don't know what you'd call it.
But you know, this is popular today.
This is what people want to hear today,
and I guess you're not well read in
many theological circles unless you understand Bishop Woolwich
and take a patronizing view toward his book.
All right, now it says, denying even the
Lord that bought them.
What do you think about that?
Does that mean these people were saved?
No, it doesn't mean that at all.
There's a difference in the Bible between purchase
and redemption.
All men have been bought, but not all
men have been redeemed.
You remember in Matthew chapter 13 and verse
44, we read about the man who found
a treasure hidden in the field, and he
went and sold all that he had, and
he came and bought the field.
Well, we believe that that man is the
Lord Jesus Christ.
We believe that the treasure hidden in the
field is Israel.
We believe that the field is the whole
world.
And he bought the whole world.
It doesn't mean all the world is safe.
All are purchased, but all do not have
the brand mark of redemption upon their forehead.
Only those who have been saved by the
grace of God, who have known the cleansing
value of the blood of Christ, are redeemed
to God.
So this doesn't even suggest that these people
were ever converted, these false teachers.
In fact, the passage proves quite conclusively that
that is not the case.
Even denying the Lord that bought them, and
shall bring and bring upon themselves swift destruction.
Now, secondly, we notice their immorality and their
greed.
Verse two, it says, and many shall follow
their pernicious ways.
And that word pernicious means lascivious, and it
has to do with the low standards of
morals that they propagate.
Well, you say to me, surely the Bishop
of Woolwich doesn't propagate low standards of morals
in his book.
May I read you a third quotation?
This is what it says.
It says, For nothing can of itself always
be labeled as wrong.
One cannot, for instance, start from the position
sex relations before marriage are wrong and sinful
in themselves.
You can never say that.
They may be in ninety-nine cases or
even a hundred cases out of a hundred,
but they are not intrinsically so, for the
only intrinsic evil is lack of love.
In other words, premarital relations, well you just
can't say that they're inherently wrong.
The only inherent wrong in the universe is
lack of love.
In other words, if you go out and
murder a man and do it in love,
it's perfectly alright.
That's really what it boils down to.
And that's a quotation, page 118 from the
book Honest to God, by a Bishop of
the Church of England.
And he still has his title and still
wears his frock.
It says, And many shall follow their pernicious
ways, their lascivious ways.
He's teaching people that this is alright.
And so the congregation goes out and they
live it up, fast and loose.
And the rest of the people in the
community look on and say, Oh, I see
those people are Christians, are they?
Well, thanks very much, I'd rather have my
dog.
And it brings reproach and contempt upon the
name of Christ.
And that's exactly what it says in this
verse.
It says, Many shall follow their lascivious doings,
by reason of whom the way of truth
shall be evil spoken of.
The people in the world don't distinguish between
born-again Christians living in purity and chastity,
and between these ungodly people who have only
a veneer of Christianity.
Well, then the third thing is their greed.
It says, And through covetousness shall they, with
feigned words, make merchandise of you.
I'll tell you, that's really accurate description.
Through covetousness.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that they're in it for
the money.
That's what it means.
It means that they've chosen the ministry as
a lucrative profession.
It means whose God is their belly.
That's what it means.
Or as F.
B.
Meyer once said, Their life is all kitchen
and no chapel.
And listen to that expression, Through covetousness shall
they, with feigned words.
Believe you me, they really know how to
talk.
They are clever in the use of words,
and they know how to trick people and
to deceive them.
And the net result of their ministry is
to make merchandise of people.
There's a modernistic church right near the school,
and the man who used to be the
pastor of that church was very glib, a
great orator, a master of rhetoric.
And one of the men in the assemblies
was talking to him one day, and this
pastor said to him, he said, You know,
he said, I could preach the gospel just
like you fellows, but he said my people
wouldn't have it.
Exactly what he said.
That man has now found his niche.
He's a public relations man for General Motors.
Make merchandise of you, whose judgment now of
a long time lingereth not, and their damnation
slumbereth not.
You know, that's a very expressive language there,
and I don't think we catch the full
force of it here in this English.
But what it really pictures is judgment like
a sword hanging over them, and it says
their damnation slumbereth not.
Their damnation isn't sitting over there on a
chair, nodding its head.
It's wide awake, and it's ready to pounce
upon them like a panther.
That's the thought behind a verse of scripture
like this.
Very expressive.
Whose judgment now of a long time lingereth
not, and their damnation slumbereth not.
And then in the verses that follow, the
Apostle Peter gives three Old Testament examples of
God's judgment upon apostasy.
Three examples of men or beings who left
the bounds that God had assigned to them,
went beyond them, apostatized in a very real
sense in God's judgment upon them.
The first is the example of the angels
that sinned.
It says in verse four, for if God
feared not the angels that sinned, but cast
them down to hell and delivered them into
chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment.
Now, Mr. Tatum has already mentioned this and
has identified this with the events in Genesis
chapter six.
And we might just turn back to Genesis
chapter six.
Now, this is an interpretation.
I believe that it's the correct one myself,
but not all good men are agreed on
this.
So let's just turn to this passage, Genesis
chapter six, beginning with verse one.
It says, And it came to pass that
when men began to multiply on the face
of the earth and daughters were born unto
them that the sons of men that they
were fair, and they took them wives of
all which they chose.
And the Lord said, My spirit shall not
always strive with men, for that he also
is flesh, yet his days shall be a
hundred and twenty years.
There were giants in the earth in those
days, and also after that, when the sons
of God came in unto the daughters of
men, and they bear children to them, the
same became mighty men which were of old,
the men of renown.
Now, the first thing you want to ask
yourself is, who were these sons of God?
Perhaps the usual interpretation is that they were
the sons of Seth, who married the ungodly
daughters of Cain.
But actually that expression, sons of God, is
distinguished in this portion from men.
It says in verse one, It came to
pass when men began to multiply on the
face of the earth and daughters were born
unto them that the sons of God.
And it seems to make a contrast there
between the sons of God and men.
Well, if you turn over to the first
and second chapters of the book of Job,
you'll find that that expression, sons of God,
is used as applying to angels, not to
men.
And it's very clear in Job chapters one
and chapters two.
Chapter one, verse six, and chapter two, verse
one, that the sons of God there are
angelic beings.
If that's the meaning here in Genesis six,
it means that angelic beings left the habitation
that God had ordained for them and came
down to the world and intermarried with the
daughters of men.
You say, but just a minute, doesn't the
Bible say that angels don't marry?
Well, it really doesn't say that.
It says that in heaven they don't marry.
Mark chapter twelve and verse twenty-five.
It says, For when they shall rise from
the dead, they neither marry nor are given
in marriage, but are the angels in heaven.
But I don't believe that the Bible explicitly
states that angelic beings are incapable of marriage,
and there are indications in Genesis chapter nineteen,
the first five verses, that angelic beings are
capable of this type of relationship or similar.
So if that is the case, what is
being taught here is a terrible instance of
abnormal sexual relationship.
And mind you, that's the context through here.
Two out of the three illustrations use linked
apostasy with immorality.
Two of the three link apostasy with immorality.
It's wonderful, isn't it, how the word of
God probes and gets behind the scenes and
sees what the eye of man could never
see.
And so that's the first illustration of a
terrible apostasy upon which God reigned judgment.
It says, For if God spared not the
angels that sinned, but cast them down to
hell and delivered them into chains of darkness
to be reserved unto judgment.
The second illustration of God's judgment upon apostasy
is what took place in the days before
the flood, or the flood, the antediluvians.
It says, And spared not the ancient world,
but preserved Noah with the eighth person, a
preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon
the world of the ungodly.
This is very graphic and very expressive.
We look about us today upon a scene
where the name of the Lord Jesus is
being denied, and where men seem to get
away with it.
They seem to be able to shake their
fists in the face of God, and nothing
seems to happen to them.
But what we're reading here is God's attitude
toward that.
God did it once.
God did it twice.
God did it three times, and God's going
to do it again, too.
He's going to reign out his judgment upon
a scene where his son is so dishonored.
The second illustration is the people of Noah's
day.
Just think of that.
Everyone in the world but Noah and seven
members of his family destroyed.
What is God's attitude toward it?
That tells it very clearly.
That expression, Noah the eighth person, some people
think that means Noah the eighth person since
Adam, and of course that doesn't add up.
But it really means Noah with seven others.
Noah was the eighth in the sense that
there were seven other people saved with him.
And I think that's very expressive, the eighth
being the number of new creation or new
beginning.
Now we find out something in this verse
that we never would have known otherwise.
It says Noah was a preacher of righteousness.
Isn't that lovely?
Who told Peter?
Well, the same spirit of God who wrote
the Old Testament told him here in New
Testament times, and he put it down for
us.
And it's a lovely picture of Noah preaching
to the then known world as he was
building the ark, as he was hammering away
at the ark.
He was preaching righteousness.
He was vindicating God.
God was acting in righteousness and calling men
to repent and to come into the ark.
And so that's a beautiful little touch there.
Noah, a preacher of righteousness.
And then the third instance of apostasy was
a terrible sin of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Two cities of the plain down by the
Dead Sea.
Cities that were guilty of the most vile
forms of sexual immorality.
And it says here that God turned those
cities into ashes.
He condemned them with an overthrow.
He made them an example unto them that
should after live ungodly.
These cities were guilty of the terrible sins
of homosexuality.
And the name Sodomy comes from the name
of Sodom.
And so complete was the destruction of those
two cities that the archaeologists can look and
they can think that they can see them
down through the waters of the Dead Sea,
but the fact of the matter is nobody
knows exactly where those cities were.
This is God's judgment on men who leave
the bounds of propriety, who leave the bounds
that he has set up for them and
who apostatize.
But then we find something else here, and
that's the information that we get about Lot.
It says, "...and delivered just Lot, vexed with
the filthy conversation of the wicked.
For that righteous man dwelling among them, and
seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from
day to day with their unlawful deeds."
Now, you never would get that impression reading
the Old Testament.
If you were to go back to the
Old Testament and read about Lot, it would
appear to you that he was a status
-seeking profiteer who was trying to make the
best of both worlds.
And what a comfort it is to know
that God saw his heart, and that daily
as he was living there and trying to
sweeten up the scene in Sodom and Gomorrah,
trying to make the world a better place
to live in, yet God saw that deep
in his heart there was a hatred of
sin and a love of righteousness.
He speaks of him here as that righteous
man.
He speaks of him as righteous or just
Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the
wicked.
And what happened?
Well, Lot and his wife and his daughters
were taken almost by force out of the
city before the judgment fell.
And even then, his wife, although her body
was out of Sodom, her heart was still
back there, and she looked back and was
turned into a pillar of salt.
Now, the lesson that the Apostle Peter draws
from this is that the Lord knows how
to deliver the godly out of temptation, and
to reserve the unjust under the day of
judgment to be punished.
It's a day when God isn't acting in
instantaneous judgment upon all the evil and immorality
that we know to be about us today,
and men seem to get away with it.
But God is working behind the scenes, and
his judgment, as we said, is not nodding
its head.
It's not slumbering.
His sword is about to awake.
This is such a vivid description of the
days in which we live that we can
only believe that we are in the days
prophesied by the Apostle Peter.
And then the first half of verse 10,
he says, "...chiefly them that walk after the
flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise
government."
Now, mind you, if you and I were
writing the Bible, we would never dare to
take men who were wearing clerical garb and
speak in terms like that about them, would
we?
The Bible doesn't.
Why?
Well, there's a very good reason.
There's a very good reason.
That is that when a man's view of
God deteriorates, a man's morals deteriorate, too.
You become like what you worship.
And you show me a man who has
low thoughts of God, and I'll show you
a man who's living a low life.
J.B. Phillips wrote a book some time
ago, and the name of it was Your
God is Too Small.
And I believe the trouble with the world
today is that God is too small.
And that's man's heart.
He rejects the knowledge of the true God,
and he starts to carve out idols for
himself.
Four-footed animals, other men, flying things, creeping
things.
So the lower he goes, the lower his
morals go, too.
And the word of God is clear, and
the word of God is incisive, and the
word of God gets to the root of
things.
The word of God knows that when these
false teachers come along and start to downgrade
God, that their morals go down, too, and
they're preaching immorality to the people in their
congregation.
And this is exactly what's going on today.
I have a quotation from a publication put
out by the National Council of the Churches
of Christ.
I wouldn't care to read it here to
you, but it's a publication written for young
people, and it condones immorality.
Put out by the National Council of Churches.
This is the type of thing that Peter
is speaking about in this second chapter of
his epistle.