There were false prophets, too, among God’s people. So, among you, there will be false teachers, covertly introducing pernicious ways of thought, and denying the Master who redeemed them, to their own speedy undoing.

Many will embrace their wanton creeds, and bring the way of truth into disrepute,

trading on your credulity with lying stories for their own ends. Long since, the warrant for their doom is in full vigour; destruction is on the watch for them.

God did not spare the angels who fell into sin; he thrust them down to hell, chained them there in the abyss, to await their sentence in torment.✻

Nor did he spare the world he had first made; he brought a flood on that world of wickedness, preserving Noe, who had borne witness to holiness, and only seven others with him.

The cities of Sodom and Gomorrha, too, he punished with utter ruin, turning them to ashes, for an example to the godless of a later time.

Yet he saved Lot, an innocent man who was overborne by the violence and the wantonness of his wicked neighbours;

eye and ear could testify to his innocence, although he lived among men whose lawless doings, day after day, wrung that blameless heart.✻

The Lord does not find it difficult to save his true worshippers from their trials, while the wrong-doers must await the day of judgement, marked down for torment;

those especially, who follow the defiling appetites of their corrupt nature, and make light of authority. So bold are they, so obstinate, that they are not afraid to bring in new and blasphemous ways of thought,✻

whereas angels, with a strength and a capacity far above theirs, do not bring on themselves any charge so abominable.✻

Such men, like dumb creatures that are born to be trapped and destroyed, sneer at what they cannot understand, and will soon perish in their own corruption;

they will have the reward their wickedness has deserved. To live in luxury while the day lasts is all their pleasure; what a stain they are, what a disfigurement, when they revel in the luxury of their own banquets, as they fare sumptuously at your side!✻

Their eyes feast on adultery, insatiable of sin; and they know how to win wavering souls to their purpose, so skilled is all their accursed brood at gaining its own ends.

They have gone far astray, leaving the true path, and following the path of Balaam the son of Bosor, the man who was content to take pay in the cause of wrong,

and was rebuked for his perversity, when the dumb beast spoke with a human voice, to bring a prophet to his senses.✻

They are wells with no water in them, clouds driven before the storm; the lot that awaits them is darkness and gloom.

Using fine phrases that have no meaning, they bait their hook with the wanton appetites of sense, to catch those who have had but a short respite from false teaching.✻

What do they offer them? Liberty. And all the time they themselves are enslaved to worldly corruption; whatever influence gets the better of a man, becomes his master.

That they should have been rescued, by acknowledging our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, from the world’s pollution, and then been entangled and overpowered by it a second time, means that their last state is worse than the first.

Better for them, never to have found their way to justification, than to have found it, and then turned their backs on the holy law once handed down to them.

What has happened to them proves the truth of the proverb, The dog is back at his own vomit again. Wash the sow, and you find her wallowing in the mire.✻