Slaves to What Masters Them

Read aloud

Peter describes the false teachers as springs without water and mists driven by a storm. They promise refreshment but cannot provide it. Behind their impressive words lies an appeal to sensual desires, especially among people just escaping a life of error. Peter says the blackest darkness is reserved for these teachers.

They promise freedom while remaining slaves to depravity. A person is enslaved to whatever has mastered him. Permission to follow every desire is no freedom when those desires rule the life of the person offering it.

Peter then gives a severe warning. Those who have escaped the world’s corruption through knowing Jesus Christ, yet become entangled and overcome again, end in a worse condition than before. They have known the way of righteousness and turned away from the holy commandment given to them. Greater knowledge has brought greater responsibility.

The warning concerns a return to the corruption that once held them, not merely a difficult day in the struggle against sin. It should make us take rejection of Christ’s way seriously. Religious knowledge and past reform cannot make an ongoing surrender to evil safe.

The closing proverbs make the danger vivid: a dog returns to its vomit, and a washed sow goes back to the mud. Outward escape from a filthy setting does not itself cure the desire to return. Peter’s readers must refuse teachers who offer freedom while leading them back into bondage.