In Matthew 10:16, Jesus said to his disciples, “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” In a dangerous world, we who follow Jesus have been commanded to cultivate wisdom, or shrewdness, that imitates a crafty serpent. And yet, unlike the serpent, our design is not to sneak in and destroy for our own gain, so we must have shrewdness combined with the innocence of a dove. We must have pure hearts toward others, but not be naïve about the evil in this world and how it will attempt to destroy us. Naivety, which I would define as an inability or unwillingness to see evil for what it is, is not a virtue. If anything, it may be one of the greatest vices of the modern church. For it is by our naivety that we allow untested leaders into positions of prominence. It is by our naivety that we equate their big online platforms with faithfulness. And it is by our naivety that we allow them to slip into our churches dangerous ideas that will, over time, unravel the fabric of the gospel.
False teaching is not a threat that exists only out there in the obvious places, such as the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses or the local Mormon ward. It is a threat that also arises from within the church, and because it does it can easily slip past our defenses and take root in our hearts. How can we recognize it and so be on guard against it? Fortunately, Jesus told us how in Matthew 7:16: “You will recognize them by their fruits.” And I believe that is what Peter is teaching us here in the second half of chapter 2 of his letter. Do you want to be able to spot false teachers? Then look for these kinds of fruits, and then guard yourselves accordingly. So how do we train ourselves out of naivety? What are the fruits that we should look for to spot false teachers so that we can be aware of who they are and how they operate? Their fruit includes both their own personal character and how they influence others. Peter addresses these two matters—the character and influence of false teachers—before turning at the end of this passage to their apostasy from the faith. So as we unpack this text today we will note the fruit of false teachings in those three categories: character, influence, and apostasy.
So notice, first,
Peter led out this chapter by identifying false teachers as marked by arrogance, lust, and greed. In verse 1 he said they would even deny the Master who bought them (showing their arrogance). In verse 2 he mentioned their sensuality, or sexual deviancy. And in verse 3 he said “And in their greed they will exploit you with false words.” Here in verses 10b-16 he follows the same three vices in the same order: arrogance, lust, and greed.
False teachers are marked by arrogance. In verse 10 Peter says they are “bold and willful.” Of course, boldness is a good thing, when it is properly directed by humble submission to God. Give me a whole generation of bold Christians who know where they stand on the authority of God’s Word and will not be moved from it! But the boldness exhibited by false teachers is a boldness that is undirected by wisdom or humility. It is arrogance, a misplaced self-assurance that is spiritually deadly. And it manifests itself in failing to take spiritual reality seriously. Verses 10-11 are probably the most difficult in this passage, but let’s pay attention and see if we can discern Peter’s meaning: “Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones, whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord.” Who are the “glorious ones”? It seems they are fallen angels, or demons. Two arguments support this. One is that they are distinguished from good angels in verse 11. Another is the parallel with Jude verses 8-9, which mentions Michael the Archangel and a dispute he had with the devil over the body of Moses. The point Jude makes is conceptually parallel to what Peter is saying here, with Michael representing “angels” and the devil representing “the glorious ones.”
Okay, so now that we have an idea of the figures in these two verses, what in the world does Peter mean when he says false teachers do not tremble as they blaspheme the fallen angels? I think Peter means that false teachers do not reckon properly with the power of the demonic realm. They don’t tremble at the idea of opening themselves up, by their sinful thoughts and behavior, to the influence of demonic powers. Have you ever considered the fact that, when you align your thinking and behavior with Satan, he gains more power over you? It seems to me that the phenomenon we often call “demon possession” and that we see in the New Testament is better described as “demonization,” or the incremental growth of demonic influence over people as they personally embrace more and more the lies that come from the demonic realm. There are real spiritual powers seeking to destroy us, and we must take them seriously. The false teachers Peter identifies here do not fear the power of the devil, and they do not fear sharing in his inevitable condemnation, so they go on their merry way allowing the darkness to overtake them more and more. In other words, whereas Ephesians 4:27 warns us not to give the devil a foothold, these false teachers scoff at the danger and run headlong into demonic influence. By stark contrast, even angels, who are greater than demons in power, don’t take their power lightly. They don’t pronounce blasphemous judgments against them in their own power. Instead, they entrust their fate to the Lord. As verse 12 points out, false teachers, scoffing at spiritual forces they don’t understand, are like irrational animals whose purpose is to be caught by hunters and destroyed. They posture themselves as capable of teaching spiritual truth to others, but in truth they are clueless. False teachers are marked by arrogance.
But that’s not all. False teachers are also marked by lust. The middle of verse 13 reads, “They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, while they feast with you.” In Peter’s day, as in ours, it was customary for “reveling” to take place in the darkness of night. Nighttime is the expected setting for wild parties, drunken revelry, and sexual deviancy. But these false teachers are so bold as to practice these things in broad daylight. They openly practice sexual immorality all the while continuing to gather with the church for feasting at the Lord’s table. Peter speaks of this as “reveling in their deceptions,” or openly enjoying the fact that they are given over to sin even while claiming to follow Christ. The open acceptance of sexual immorality is evidence of a seared conscience. Peter goes on to say in verse 14, “They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. They entice unsteady souls.” Every woman they encounter they perceive as a sexual object. Do not miss this point: in the New Testament, false teaching is regularly associated with sexual immorality. Let that be a warning to us in a day when many voices within the church are calling for a revising of our historic Christian sexual ethic.
A few years ago Lee and I, on a trip to Salt Lake City, visited the home of Brigham Young, the second president of the Mormon church, where we heard the account of his fifty-five wives, many of whom he married on the pretense that they were widowed and thus had no one else to care for them. Lee and I were there with Timothy O’Day, our church planter in that area, and one of us raised the question about Joseph Smith, the first president of the Mormon church and the man who introduced polygamy into the movement. But there was a big difference between Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Smith did not marry as many women as Young did, but when Smith first started the practice of polygamy, he started by claiming that some women in the Mormon church who were already married belonged to him. The young Mormon ladies who were giving us the tour of Brigham Young’s house answered our questions about Joseph Smith by saying that he married these women because their husbands had been sent away on missions, and thus these women needed to be taken care of in the meantime. Okay, explain to me in what possible universe that makes any sense. In what moral universe is a married woman required to go to bed with a church leader as part of an arrangement in which she is being cared for while her husband is away? Even King David, in the fog of his own sin with Bathsheba, had enough sense to be ashamed of what he had done and tried to hide it! But this wicked practice on the part of Joseph Smith is now being openly defended by naïve adherents to the Mormon faith today because they are deceived by false teaching, and their sexual ethic has been warped as a result. False teaching often goes hand-in-hand with sexual deviancy, and false teachers themselves, such as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, are often marked by sexual immorality in their own practice.
And we are still not done. False teachers are not only marked by arrogance and lust, but also by greed. In verse 14 Peter says, “They have hearts trained in greed.” It’s as though they have disciplined themselves into the habits that cultivate greed as they pursue worldly gain. Verses 15-16 compare them to Balaam, a prophet who was hired by Balak king of Moab to curse the people of Israel in Numbers 22-24 but instead ended up blessing them instead. Even though the ESV calls him “Balaam, the son of Beor” (as his name is given in the Old Testament), the Greek actually doesn’t say “Beor”; it says “Bosor,” which is not a name known elsewhere in Scripture. It sounds similar to “Beor,” but it also sounds very close to a Hebrew word: basar, which means “flesh.” I think Peter is subtly playing on the name of Balaam’s father to speak of Balaam as “son of the flesh,” as opposed to being a man of the Spirit. Peter speaks of the moment in the Balaam story when Balaam the prophet is on his way to meet Balak king of Moab, and the angel of the Lord is standing right in front of him with his sword drawn. Balaam’s donkey can see this, but Balaam is blind to this spiritual reality, and eventually the donkey is empowered to speak to Balaam words of rebuke. The point Peter is making is that Balaam, reputed to be a prophet, was actually blind to spiritual realities that a donkey could see!
The point of bringing up Balaam is that the Balaam story gives subtle hints that though he was a prophet who received revelations from God, his true motives were not spiritually oriented but earthly. He was a man who was greedy for personal gain, and thus is rightly called “son of the flesh.” The same is true, Peter says, of false teachers. They are more eager to enrich themselves, to enhance their own standing in the world, than they are to honor Christ and care for his church. The love of money, which is the root of all kinds of evil, has corrupted them.
Arrogance. Lust. Greed. Watch for these fruits, and beware of those who bear them. Beware of men or women with platforms who build large ministries and yet have little or no personal or doctrinal accountability. Beware of leaders who have never demonstrated a willingness to submit themselves to authority. Beware of teachers waving rainbow flags who are willing to bless sexual deviancy and promote a new sexual ethic within the church. Beware of the prosperity gospel preacher whose vision of following Christ is tied up almost entirely with earthly success, money, and the treasures of this age. You will recognize them by their fruits, and those fruits are demonstrated, first and foremost, in their character. It’s no accident that in the two major passages that list qualifications for elders (1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-9), the vast majority of qualifications pertain to personal character, because character is paramount in church leadership.
But it’s not just personal character that constitutes the fruit of a false teacher. It’s also the effect he has on others. So that brings us, second, to
Imagine that you are wandering through a desert, your throat is dry, and your lips are parched with thirst. If you came upon a natural spring, or if a rainstorm suddenly blew in over you and dropped a torrent of rain, you would rejoice. Everything your body cried out for was delivered to you in the form of refreshing water. But what if you saw a spring in the distance and raced toward it, only to find it had dried up? Or what if apparent storm-clouds gathered over your head, only to be blown along past you without ever dropping any rain? You would be deeply disappointed when the reality did not match the appearance. That’s how false teachers operate, according to Peter in verse 17: they are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm. They make grand promises, but deliver nothing that is of real spiritual value.
So their influence is not for good. It is for evil. Verse 18 reads, “For, speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping from those who live in error.” “Those who live in error” is a reference to the unbelieving world. “Those who are barely escaping” then refers to new converts to the Christian faith, those who have just now learned a new way of life as a result of the gospel and are moving away from their former sinful patterns of life. So what do false teachers do to these young believers? With their bold, confident personalities and their gravitation toward sexual deviancy, they seduce them back into a pattern of sin. New believers are often the lowest hanging fruit for false teachers. Their convictions are not fully settled. Their habits of life are not fully set. They are normally more open to deception than believers who have had years to put down deep roots into truth. Along come false teachers, who sound like trustworthy, authoritative teachers and the force of whose personalities can feel overwhelming, telling these new converts that the path of discipleship is not really hard like you thought it was going to be. Sure, most Christians believe that sexual activity outside of marriage between a man and woman is sinful, but I’m here to give you a more enlightened perspective: it turns out that unbelievers have been right about sex all along, and we Christians need to get on board with them for the sake of our public witness. You don’t want unbelievers thinking that we are backwoods fundamentalist legalists, do you? Doesn’t our mission to the world demand that we update our teachings and at least meet the world halfway on some of these things?
When I was in college in the early 2000’s a few classmates of mine started raving about a new book that had just been published, written by a leader of a new movement called “the emerging church.” The author was Brian McLaren, and the book was called A New Kind of Christian. If you want to encapsulate the arrogant rebelliousness of the movement that was once called the emerging church, just consider how well that book title does it. The church of Jesus Christ has been around for 2,000 years, and all of a sudden at the turn of the twenty-first century some middle-aged American is going to come along and tell us about a new (and presumably improved) kind of Christian, one who is far more in touch with the spirit of the age, and thus far more “missional” in a postmodern world. Well, the emerging church lasted about six years and then fizzled into nothing as it simply merged with liberal Christianity that had come before it. It was one more attempt to accommodate the Christian faith to cultural winds. And it should come as no surprise that its leaders in that span of years all came to embrace same-sex marriage and to question or reject historic biblical teaching on a range of subjects, including the final judgment and the doctrine of hell. And that’s precisely why they became so morally deviant: they eliminated or revised the biblical teaching on God’s judgment. That is exactly what Peter’s opponents were doing as well in denying the reality of the second coming of Christ.
So when Peter says in verse 19, “They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption,” he means that false teachers promise freedom from a future judgment, resulting in freedom from moral restraints in the present. After all, if there is no day of reckoning coming, how can we even define the difference between good and evil now? But this promise of freedom is empty. They imagine they are free, but in reality they are slaves of this present age, destined for the destruction that will come for it when Christ does, in fact, return. By sowing doubt about God’s standard of righteousness, false teachers lure immature believers into destructive patterns of life. The fruit of their character is not only deficient, but so is the fruit of their influence on others. And God despises those who exert such influence on his church.
And so that leads us naturally into a third category of fruit of false teachers:
The false teachers Peter calls out in this chapter are not merely misguided believers. They are unbelievers who have infiltrated the church and spread anti-gospel influence. And God will not allow his church to be attacked this way without answering. Peter has already written of the forthcoming judgment of false teachers in verses 4-10, and he has made references to it throughout this passage already. In verse 12 he said false teachers are like irrational animals who are tracked down by hunters and destroyed. In verse 13 he said they will suffer wrong as the wages of their wrongdoing. In verse 14 he called them “accursed children,” or those who are under the curse of God, destined for his wrath. And then in verse 17 he said, “For them the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved.” It is clear from all these statements that these false teachers are not in Christ, even though they appear to be so outwardly. And that’s what verses 20-22 show us.
In verses 20-21, Peter argues that these false teachers would have been better off never having known the way of righteousness (the gospel and all its implications for life) than, having known it and publicly embraced it, to then to turn away from it. In verse 22 he pictures them as dogs who return to sniff and eat up their vomit and pigs who return to rolling in the mud after they have been cleaned off. In both cases, the point is that, having gotten rid of their filth, they come right back to it. These are fitting images for people who profess faith in Christ, who identify publicly with the church through baptism, and then who subsequently run back into the sinful practices of the world with whole-hearted embrace. As Peter says (quoting Jesus from Matthew 12:45), the last state of these people is worse than the first.
Why is it worse? Why would it be better for them never to have heard the gospel at all than to hear it, profess to embrace it, and then fall away from its truth? It could be that knowing the truth of the gospel and then deliberately sinning against that truth has the potential to sear one’s conscience and harden one’s heart to such a degree that repentance becomes virtually impossible. Or it may be that those who have heard the gospel and spurned God’s grace held out in it will be judged more severely than those who never became familiar with it. I think it’s likely both. Those who fall away from the faith are more hardened in heart against truth and are subject to much more severe judgment as a result of their fully informed rebellion against God.
In his earthly ministry, there was only one person about whom Jesus ever said it would have been better for him if he had never been born (Mark 14:21), and that is Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed him. Judas was a man who was as close to Jesus as one could possibly be without actually knowing him. According to Jesus in Matthew 7:22-23, “On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” There are no more terrifying words in all of Scripture than those. I plead with you, if you feel the internal attraction to sin pulling you away from truth, seeking to sear your conscience against God, or if you feel the pull of certain teachers who claim the name of Christ but promote doctrine and behavior that dishonors him, let those words ring in your ears over and over, and learn how to tremble before God again.
We must be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. Naivety is no virtue, as the numerous warnings against false teachers in Scripture show us. Recognize the fruits of false teachers. Look at their character. Look at their teaching and influence. Watch for them, over time, to fall away completely from the truth of the gospel and harden themselves against it. Train yourself in the skill of biblical discernment.
And here I want to reiterate once more what I said in the last sermon I preached: the best way to guard yourself from the influence of false teaching is by submitting to the authority of a solid local church and trusting the leadership of faithful pastors. We live in the information age, and there are endless resources in the online world that can be aids in your spiritual growth. But let those resources be supplemental. Let your steady diet be the ordinary means of grace God provides through the local church. Don’t hang around the periphery of the church. Move in to the center of the church’s life, and I promise you, that will be the safest place for you. Amen.