2 Peter 2

1But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, and so bring swift destruction on themselves.

2Many will follow their sensual ways, and because of them the way of truth will be slandered.

3In their greed they will exploit you with made-up stories. Their condemnation, pronounced long ago, is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.

4For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but threw them down to Tartarus and handed them over to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept for judgment;

5if he did not spare the ancient world, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, along with seven others, when he brought a flood on the world of the ungodly;

6if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes, making them an example of what is coming to the ungodly;

7and if he rescued righteous Lot, who was worn down by the sensual conduct of lawless people—

8for that righteous man, living among them, was tormented in his righteous soul day after day by the lawless deeds he saw and heard—

9then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment,

10especially those who follow the flesh in its polluting desire and despise authority. Bold and arrogant, they do not tremble to slander the glorious ones,

11whereas angels, though greater in strength and power, do not bring a slanderous judgment against them from the Lord.

12But these people, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct born to be caught and destroyed, slander what they do not understand, and in their destruction they too will be destroyed,

13suffering wrong as the wages of their wrongdoing. They count it a pleasure to carouse in broad daylight. They are stains and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions while they feast with you.

14They have eyes full of adultery that never stop sinning. They lure unstable souls. They have hearts trained in greed. They are children under a curse!

15They have left the straight road and wandered off, following the way of Balaam son of Bosor, who loved the wages of wrongdoing.

16But he was rebuked for his own lawbreaking: a donkey that could not speak spoke with a human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness.

17These people are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. The gloom of darkness has been reserved for them.

18For by uttering arrogant, empty words, they use the sensual desires of the flesh to lure people who are just escaping from those who live in error.

19They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of corruption. For people are slaves to whatever has overcome them.

20For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, their last state has become worse than their first.

21It would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than to know it and then turn back from the holy commandment that was handed on to them.

22What the true proverb says has happened to them: “A dog returns to its own vomit,” and, “A sow that has been washed goes back to wallowing in the mud.”