For [while] speaking great highflown words of vanity, they allure with [the] lusts of [the] flesh, by dissoluteness, those who have just fled those who walk in error,
This verse shows how false teachers get their hold on people. It names their tool — loud, impressive talk used as bait — and it names the person most likely to be caught.
Everything hangs on one word. Where the ESV says these boasts are "folly," other translations say "vanity." It does not mean these men are vain.
They are able to speak great, swelling words, but "of vanity," that is, emptiness, like a puffed up balloon.
The failure is not only that the words are hollow. They also move people in a direction.
"Great swelling words" is God's own description of the empty human speech that sways thousands. They are words of emptiness. Instead of bringing souls to Christ and the knowledge of redemption, they lure them through the lusts of the flesh.
The words and the sensuality are not two separate charges. The talk is what makes the sin look acceptable.
They appeal to people with "great, high-sounding words of emptiness." Such talk casts a spell over worldliness and the lusts of the flesh, and so they lure those who have just escaped from evil. The passage does not say that these people have come under the convicting power of the truth, or that God has drawn them. But at least they have a conscience about evil.
Translations differ here. Older ones said these people had escaped completely. The ESV says they are only "barely escaping."
The words mean "those just (or, a little) escaping," not "those clean (or, really) escaped," as the older Greek text has it. In verse 20 the verb form is past, but in verse 18 it is present.
One word changes the picture. These people are still on the move — and it matters what they are moving away from.
By this they trap the souls they are watching for: those who are just escaping from others who live in error. Some people are troubled that the company they keep is bad, so they look for something else. These men are ready with both appeals to the flesh and high-sounding religious talk, to lure them into this swamp of corruption. Notice that these people are not said to be escaping from corruption, but from those living in error.
The seducer does not create the appetite. He finds it already there.
They prophesy only for money, and the effect is that they lure people through the lusts of the flesh. Remember: for every form of temptation there is some matching response in our nature. There is something in us that answers to what Satan puts in front of us. We could not have believed this could come in among people who profess to be Christians, unless God Himself had said so. But He has warned us so that we may have our eyes open to it, and be on our watch to guard against it day by day.
The danger is not only loose living. Some teaching is built to leave room for it. Kelly compares older English wordings of two verses with what they really mean.
Take three plain examples of false teaching that lower the standard of holiness and make room for the lusts of the flesh. 1. Sin is not "the transgression of the law," but "lawlessness," which refuses all subjection to God... 2. What excuse for evil is not covered by "so that you cannot do the things that you would" in Galatians 5:17? Its real meaning is quite different: "that you should not do the things that you would" or desire.
The young in faith are the natural target. They are still learning who to trust.
When proud boasting takes the place of the truth as it is in Jesus, it is no wonder that underneath they use the lusts of the flesh to lure those who are only just escaping from people who walk in error. The young are especially open to danger from these seducing ways in the people they trust for teaching and example. The promise of liberty sounds good to their ears.
Yet the same writer notes that inexperience is not the worst handicap here:
The newest believer in Christ, only just escaping, is quick to sense what is vile and turns away. Older ones are dulled and deadened by theories that excuse error or evil.
- Empty — "Vanity" means emptiness. The words are swollen like a balloon. God calls such speech hollow, however many thousands it sways.
- Dressed — That hollow language casts a spell over worldliness and makes the lusts of the flesh sound respectable.
- Barely — The prey are not settled believers but those just escaping — and escaping from bad company, not yet from corruption itself.
- Answered — The bait works because every temptation finds something in our nature that answers it. God warned us so that our eyes stay open day by day.
- Lowered — Watch for teaching that lowers the standard of holiness and makes room for the flesh. The newest believer often senses it before the older one, dulled by theories that excuse evil.
promising them liberty, while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom a man is subdued, by him is he also brought into slavery.
Peter is describing teachers who work inside the church. They pull people in with one of the most attractive words in any language: freedom. The verse exposes the sales pitch by pointing at the salesmen themselves.
These teachers aim at people who have just pulled away from a bad crowd. One writer notices what Peter does not say about them:
Some people are worried that the company they keep is bad, so they look for something else. These men are ready with appeals to the flesh and with high sounding religious talk, to lure them into this swamp of corruption. Notice these people are not said to be escaping from corruption, but from those living in error. How different it is for those who seek to escape from the guilt and folly of their own sins. These men would have no message for such.
One writer names the suggestion hidden inside the promise.
One of Satan's wretched deceits is to suggest that subjection to the Lord is bondage. So his agents promise liberty, while they themselves are slaves of corruption. Corruption has overcome them, so they are held in its bondage. Their loud cries of freedom are only meant to bring others into their own slavery.
Peter does not argue with the promise. He looks instead at the men making it.
The young are especially open to danger from these seducing ways in the people they trust for teaching and example. The promise of liberty has a fair sound to their ears. But the apostle points his finger at the fatal spot. It is not now, and never is, the place of God's children: these men are real slaves of corruption. No swelling words can hide the evil or excuse it. They cannot hide the enemy at work, even from the simplest believer. "For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved."
The second half of the verse states the rule: whatever beats you owns you. Man's idea of freedom runs straight into it.
Take liberty as an example. How wide the gap is between man's thought and God's on this very point. To man, liberty means willfulness — every check taken off the human will. It ends in the very worst form of corruption, and in people turning away from God... The apostle Peter shows this plainly. In the days we live in, the loudest boasters of liberty were themselves miserable slaves of corruption. (2 Peter 2:18-19.) We are called to "liberty," but not a liberty for the flesh to act, but for us to serve.
If being overcome is slavery, real freedom cannot mean an unchecked will.
The liberty of the saint is not licence to do his own will. If anything could have taken away the liberty of the Lord Jesus, it would have been stopping Him from always obeying the will of God. Everything that moves in the sphere of man's will is sin... True slavery is being enslaved by our own will. True liberty is having our own will set aside completely. When we are doing our own wills, self is our centre.
The promise is not stuck in Peter's day. It comes back whenever someone offers to free you from the Bible's authority:
Liberty! That word has a very familiar sound. Has someone not said to you, in effect: "Why be a slave to a Bible you imagine is inspired? Why not take the enlightened modern view? Treat it as an ordinary book — a classic, and interesting of course, but with no authority from God. Then your mind is free of its chains, and you can move about in the vast fields of modern speculation." Oh, how tempting the offer! And how deadly it works among well-meaning people with unsettled minds. They have just fled from those who walk in error and from the filth of the world. They are reformed, but they are not born again. It opens a way before them, high class and scientific, that leads right back into the old corruption they had just left.
- The bait. Liberty is offered to people who have escaped a bad crowd but not their own sins — reformed on the outside, not born again.
- The lie. The offer hides one suggestion: that being subject to the Lord is bondage. The loud cries of freedom only drag others into the speaker's own slavery.
- The test. Peter does not debate the promise; he points at the promisers. Men held in bondage cannot hand out freedom.
- The rule. Whatever overcomes you enslaves you. A will with every check removed is not liberty but the deepest slavery.
- The true freedom. Christ frees us, not so the flesh may act, but so we may serve. That is the liberty we see in the One who always obeyed God's will.
For if after having escaped the pollutions of the world through [the] knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, again entangled, they are subdued by these, their last state is worse than the first.
This verse is often read as a warning that someone truly saved can be lost again. But this verse sits in a chapter about false teachers, and commentators ask how far a person can escape without any change of heart. (The writers quoted use older translations: "pollutions" where the ESV says "defilements.")
One writer answers with two blunt questions.
Are they Christians at all who are spoken of? Is a dog, or a washed sow, a sheep? Everything depends on who the "they" are. "If, after they have escaped," and so on. If we read the whole chapter, we see clearly that the "they" are "false teachers among you." Jude describes the same people as natural men, who do not have the Spirit… The difference between mere knowledge and saving faith is very important. It does not say they had believed.
The escape described here is real, not pretended.
The spread of scriptural knowledge and gospel light often has an amazing influence on the conduct and character of people who have never known the saving, life-giving, freeing power of the gospel of Christ… Many gross habits may be given up, many "pollutions" laid aside, under the influence of a merely intellectual "knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ," while the heart itself has never really been reached in a saving way. When people shake off the influence of gospel light, they always plunge into greater depths of evil. That is true even when the light never went beyond their outward conduct.
Peter used the same word earlier in the letter, but with a different object.
But now notice the difference, pointed out in this same letter, where there was true faith. He speaks of people for whom that knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord was truly eternal life. He describes them as "having escaped," not the pollutions merely, but "the corruption that is in the world through lust" (chapter 1:4). Here the soul's need had been met by God… The heart is changed with a new nature. New desires and new affections have come in. And there is no proverb that if a sow is turned into a sheep it will go back into the mire.
The pictures Peter uses next — the dog and the washed sow — show how deep the change went.
They escaped the "pollutions of the world," but not the world itself… Reformation can free a man from the world's pollutions. New birth alone can turn us from the world itself. Conversion turns us into sheep. The nature of a sheep is clean. That of a sow is unclean… A sow delights in mud and filth. You may wash its skin, but its nature stays unchanged. So you may reform and make religious the sinner by an external application of the word of God. But if he is not "born again," he will return, in nearly every case, to his former habits.
Commentators differ over whether this verse describes the false teachers themselves or the people they mislead. One writer traces how the promise of liberty does its work.
The false teacher promises him liberty. With his great high-sounding words of vanity he cuts the slight mental leash that held him back. And there he is, back again in the old ways of sin — whether vomit, uncleanness generated from within, or mire, uncleanness from outside.
Why is the last state worse than the first?
By a professed knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, they have escaped the pollutions of the godless world on the outside. But they have no genuine faith in Him personally, so they dare to bring the same pollutions into their religious profession. They are caught in their own net, entangled and overcome. The end of this is necessarily worse than their first condition, for they have added to it the corruption of the pure truth of the grace of God in Christ Jesus.
So who should this passage worry?
Press on everyone the importance of making sure work of it, so that the knowledge of the truth may not merely affect their outward conduct, but reach the heart and give that life which, once possessed, can never be lost. There is nothing in this passage to frighten the sheep of Christ. But there is much to warn those who put on the outward look of sheep for a time, and inwardly have never been anything but the dog and the sow.
- Knowledge — the people here had knowledge of Christ, not faith in Him; the text never says they believed.
- Escape — that knowledge produced a real escape from the world's defilements, but only an outward one.
- Nature — chapter 1 describes a deeper escape, from the corruption inside. Only new birth gives it, and a sheep does not return to the mire.
- Entanglement — false teachers promise liberty and cut the thin restraint that reform had placed on them. The old appetite takes over.
- End — the last state is worse because the old pollutions come back inside a religious profession and corrupt the truth of grace. The sheep of Christ are not in view here.
For it were better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known [it] to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.
Peter has just described teachers who once escaped the world's filth by knowing Christ, only to be trapped in it again. Now he weighs the cost, and one question drives the verse: how can knowing the truth leave someone worse off than never hearing it?
One commentator explains what this way is, and why walking it bears fruit these men never bore.
The way of righteousness is Christ made known in the gospel. But the truth and the life go with the way when a living faith takes it, and fruit of righteousness follows only through Jesus Christ, to God's glory and praise. In these men there was nothing but the soil of fallen nature growing thorns and briers. So the end is all the worse for a beginning of outward training and cleansing.
Peter's word here is knowledge, not faith. The same writer weighs what knowledge is worth, and what Scripture never says about these men.
Even the most accurate knowledge, however desirable, is not the essential thing. The essential thing is faith working by love, and giving our bodies over as servants of righteousness, which leads to holiness. Scripture never states or even hints that these false teachers were born of God. They had professed the name of the One who secures everything good to the one who shares the divine nature — and to that nature they had always been strangers.
So why did they turn back? One writer points to what was missing inside them, and to what they wanted instead.
The holy commandment delivered to them was never mixed with faith in their souls. At last they turned back from it, so that they might do their own will and gratify their evil desires.
The word "holy" is chosen with care. Another writer notes what it stands against.
In the early part of the chapter the subject was the godly and the ungodly. Here the subject is the holy commandment, set against what these evil teachers tried to bring in, and did bring in.
Why should knowing make things worse? Because light comes with responsibility attached.
Whatever measure of light men may have through the goodness of God, they are to be faithful to that light. The measure of that light is the measure of their responsibility on the day when they must give account to God… Men may have the truth, and boast about having it. But if their conduct denies it, then it would be better for them not to have "known the way of righteousness." The higher their privileges have lifted them, the more terrible their fall will be.
There is a second reason the end is worse than the beginning. These men did not fall back in private. They carried the old filth into their religion.
By a claimed knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, they have escaped the pollutions of the godless world on the outside. But they have no real faith in Him personally, so they dare to bring those same pollutions into their religious profession. They are caught in their own net, tangled up and overcome. The end of this is bound to be worse than their first condition, for they have added to it the corruption of the pure truth of the grace of God in Christ Jesus.
Many readers hear this verse as a threat to their own security. Everything turns on who "they" are.
It is not what I say, but what does it say? Are the people spoken of Christians at all? … Everything depends on who the "they" are. "If, after they have escaped," and so on. Read the whole chapter, and we see clearly that the "they" are "false teachers among you." … It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness. The difference between mere knowledge and saving faith is very important. It does not say they had believed.
- Way. The way of righteousness is Christ made known in the gospel. Living faith walks it, and only then does fruit follow.
- Knowledge. Accurate knowledge is not the essential thing. Faith working by love is. These teachers had the first without the second.
- Commandment. They received the holy commandment but never mixed it with faith. In the end they turned back from it to do their own will.
- Weight. The light people receive sets the measure of their responsibility. The higher the privilege, the harder the fall.
- Reality. Peter never says they believed. The warning targets profession without life, not the security of a believer.
But that [word] of the true proverb has happened to them [The] dog [has] turned back to his own vomit; and, [The] washed sow to [her] rolling in mud.
Peter closes the chapter with a proverb about a dog and a sow — people who seem to leave sin, then run back to it. Does this describe a Christian who lost salvation, or someone who was never changed at all?
Peter calls it "the true proverb." One writer shows where the first half comes from, and why Peter's use of it cuts deeper.
What picture could show disgusting impurity better than "The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire"? We hear of the dog returning like this in Proverbs 26:11, where it describes the fool returning to his folly. It says this even more strongly of the man who once knew clearly the good news of Christ and the truth of God in a general way. The better the knowledge, the worse it is if corruption follows.
The dog and the sow are not the same picture twice. One goes back to what came out of it; the other goes back to what surrounds it.
Such is dog nature that it has the unpleasant habit of returning to its own vomit. Such is sow nature that however well washed it loves the mire and plunges into it at the first opportunity. A person may have an enlightened mind and reformed outward actions. But without that basic change of nature which the new birth produces, he falls an easy victim. The false teacher promises him liberty. With his great high-sounding empty words he cuts the slight mental leash that held him back. And there he is, back again in the old ways of sin — whether vomit (uncleanness generated from within) or mire (uncleanness from outside).
Notice what Peter says about the sow: she was washed. Something real happened to her outside. Nothing happened to her inside.
Who vomited? The dog. And who went back to the vomit? The dog. It was a dog all the time, never a clean animal. The sow was washed, but she was still a sow — only washed, never made a clean animal, never anything but a sow, not a sheep. You cannot wash a sow into a sheep. Before the washing she was a dirty sow. After the washing she was a clean sow, as long as some outside restraint held her back, such as a rope. She soon gnawed through that rope or broke it, and back she went to wallow in the mire, because she was still a sow. Her nature was unchanged.
The same warning hits religious respectability in every age. Some people treat church membership as a cover for a life that never changed.
A lady in Florida told me the other day that a man could do anything he liked. Drunkenness, immorality — anything, as long as he belonged to a church. That whitewashes him. But remember: to whitewash is not to wash white. People whitewashed the tombs of the dead, and in a moral sense they whitewash people today. Only the blood of Jesus washes white — yes, whiter than snow.
The whole meaning turns on who these people are. Read the chapter from the start and there is no doubt.
Are the people spoken of here Christians at all? Is a dog, or a washed sow, a sheep? Everything depends on who the "they" are. If we read the whole chapter, we see clearly that the "they" are "false teachers among you." What a picture of every feature of false teachers, from that day to this. The difference between mere knowledge and saving faith is very important. It does not say they had believed.
Believers do stumble. But Scripture never puts a stumbling believer among these two animals. It uses a different picture for him.
The point of the picture is that the sow has an unclean nature and delights in the mire. You never saw a sheep wallowing in the mire. You may have seen a poor sheep fall into a ditch and bleat to be taken out. That is the case of a backslider. But a child of God is never called a dog or a sow. The people Peter speaks of had never been born again. They had never received a new life or nature — they had only been reformed on the outside.
- Nature. The dog goes back because it is a dog; the sow goes back because she is a sow. Behaviour follows nature, and nothing here changed the nature.
- Washing. The sow was washed — clean on the outside, improved in morals, respectable in religion. To whitewash is not to wash white.
- Restraint. What held the sow was a rope, not a new heart. False teachers cut that leash with promises of freedom, and the old life resumes.
- Knowledge. These people knew the good news, but they never believed. The better the knowledge, the worse the ruin that follows.
- Sheep. Peter's "they" are the false teachers, not the flock. A believer who falls is a sheep in a ditch, crying to be lifted out — never an animal happy in the mud.