Lecture 29: Second Peter and Jude: False Teachers, Christian Growth, and the God Who Keeps

The lecture, section by section

1. From outward suffering to inward threat

   From Hebrews to Jude the overarching call is endurance, but the pressure changes direction. Hebrews and James address Jewish believers rejected for confessing Messiah; First Peter addresses Gentile believers whose reviling was turning physical. With Second Peter and Jude the assault moves inside: false teachers coming into the churches, and the perseverance now required is perseverance against seduction rather than persecution. Second Peter prepares churches for teachers on their way; Jude, echoing Peter closely, addresses churches where they have arrived.

2. The profile of the false teachers

   Both letters draw the same portrait. They are advocates and practitioners of immorality: many will follow their sensuality; they have eyes full of adultery that never cease from sin, sizing up their own hearers even as they teach; they entice by fleshly desires those barely escaping error, and turn the grace of God into licentiousness. They are arrogant and boastful, speaking out arrogant words of vanity. They are greedy: in their greed they will exploit you with false words, teaching whatever opens the pocketbook, a motivation that, Essex notes, calls contemporary names to every hearer's mind unbidden. They revile the glories, angelic majesties, in some fashion of self-exalting blasphemy the texts describe without specifying. And their end is fixed: their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep, the sergeant already moving down the line toward the unpolished private who keeps daring him to come.

3. Their teaching: mockery of judgment

   Peter unveils the doctrine in chapter 3: mockers will come with their mocking, saying, where is the promise of his coming? They deny God's judgments in the past, deliberately forgetting the flood, and perhaps the judgments bound up with creation itself, and therefore deny his judgment in the future, and Essex marks the pattern: those who dissolve the literality of Genesis 1 to 11 are regularly the same who dissolve the literality of coming judgment. The perennial litany, that a God of love will never finally judge, softened even among professing evangelicals into annihilationism, is exactly the scoffing Peter foresaw; and against it the letter holds up the God whose word made the heavens, drowned the world, and reserves the present order for fire.

4. A book about Christian growth

   The false teachers occupy the letter's middle, but its frame is growth. Applying all diligence, supply in your faith excellence, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, love; be all the more diligent to make certain his calling and choosing you, for the believer cannot cause his election but can, by diligence in the graces God has implanted, gain assurance of it, and, so long as you practice these things you will never stumble. Chapter 3 returns: since all these things are to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, diligent to be found spotless and blameless; and the benediction seals it: grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Growth comes by knowledge and remembrance, the letter's repeated word-roots, of the apostolic testimony and the prophetic word. The purpose: believers were exhorted to grow in Christ in the face of the false teachers and their teaching, and whether the teachers had yet arrived, the application stands for every church since: no congregation is a monastery; they will come, so be ready.

5. The shape, and the shelf

   Essex reads the prologue through 1:4, salutation plus the affirmation that his divine power has granted everything pertaining to life and godliness; the body then exhorts growth and its means, the eyewitness apostles and the more sure prophetic word, warns of the teachers in chapter 2 and of the scoffers in chapter 3, sets God's clock, a day as a thousand years, patience meaning salvation, and calls for the answering conduct, before the doxology, to him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. The shelf: Bauckham's WBC, the one major broadly evangelical exegetical commentary of its generation and enormously influential for good and ill; Hiebert the star, the first volume to own; Schreiner's NAC, outstanding and unwilling to duck; Lucas and Green in the Bible Speaks Today; and Moo's NIVAC, unusually exegetical for its series.

6. Denying the Master who bought them

   Second Peter 2:1: the teachers secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them. Who is the Master, and what is the buying? Jude 4's parallel, denying our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ, fixes the Master as Christ, and with Christ as subject the purchase language everywhere else is redemptive, which strains the temporal-deliverance readings: Lucas and Green's Jewish teachers denying the God who redeemed Israel at the Exodus, or a creation-purchase, or the householder who bought servants for his house. Bauckham reads apostate Christians, genuinely bought, now fallen, exegesis deliberately unencumbered by theology, which a seminary that builds biblical theology cannot leave there. Schreiner's reading, which Essex takes as he took Hebrews 6, is phenomenological: the clause reports their profession, they claimed the Master's purchase, taught for a time as the redeemed, and their denial in doctrine and life brings swift destruction on themselves, exposing the claim.

7. The dog and the sow

   Who are those of 2:20 to 22, who escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior and are again entangled, their last state worse than the first? A generation ago the majority said the new converts of verse 18; today not one of the recommended commentators does: the description belongs to the false teachers themselves, who for a time knew and even taught the way of righteousness and then turned from the holy commandment. The double proverb settles the sense: the dog returns to its vomit, and the sow, having washed, to wallowing in the mire, for a pig scrubbed clean is a pig still; the washing changed the surface, never the nature. It would have been better not to have known the way of righteousness than, having known it, to turn away.

8. The day of the Lord, and the burning

   In 3:10 to 13 the day of the Lord comes like a thief: the heavens pass away with a roar, the elements are destroyed with intense heat, and we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Is this the replacement of the present creation at the end of the millennium, opening the eternal state of Revelation 21, or the transformation and purification of the earth in the judgments preceding the millennium? Moo's discussion, the best on offer, lays out both cases, observes that everything turns on how Isaiah 65 and 66 relate to Revelation 21, and declines to decide; even replacement advocates concede Peter's language stops short of explicit annihilation. Essex, aware he stands alone on his faculty, leans to the view that the day of the Lord names the tribulation period preceding the kingdom, and so reads Peter as transformation; his larger charge is Moo's: premillennial exegesis here carries real theological freight, so know the positions and decide with open eyes.

9. Jude: kept, and contending

   Jude writes to those who are called, beloved in God the Father, and kept for Jesus Christ, and ends, now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of his glory blameless with great joy. Where Peter stressed the believer's diligence, Jude stresses the Godward keeping: those truly his will stand. Yet the kept are commanded to fight: I felt the necessity to write appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints, for certain persons have crept in unnoticed, long beforehand marked out for condemnation, false teachers never wearing the label. And the contending belongs to all believers, not to specialists, for God keeps his weaker saints partly through the contending of the stronger, and every believer with a television has already been called to the front line.

10. The shape of Jude, and the mercy triage

    The prologue explains itself: Jude had been eager to write about the common salvation and was compelled instead to write the appeal. The body reminds, I desire to remind you, you know all things once for all, marching the ancient judgments past the readers, and bids them, remember the words spoken beforehand by the apostles, that in the last time there will be mockers; then the positive duties: building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for mercy. Then the triage for the damaged: have mercy on some, who are doubting; save others, snatching them out of the fire; on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh, mercy toward the person, fear toward God, and sober self-knowledge that the rescuer's flesh answers to the same temptations. The doxology closes on the keeping God.

11. Jude and Second Peter: which came first?

    The overlap between Jude and Second Peter 2 demands a relationship: a common source, or one used the other. Scholarship's instinct, as with Mark among the gospels, prefers the simpler as the earlier, hence Jude first and Peter the expander, a direction complicated for those who ask why an apostle would build on a non-apostle. Essex, with Hiebert, and with Moo leaning the same way, takes Peter first: Jude expressly tells his readers to remember the words spoken beforehand by the apostles, words that match Second Peter 3:3 nearly verbatim, and Jude's whole occasion is that the predicted arrival has now occurred, so he repeats the warning and adds what Peter did not need to give: instructions for treating the infected. Both letters are God-breathed; their differing occasions, warning before and remedy after, are exactly why the church needs both.

12. The quotations, and the pulpit

    Jude cites the Assumption of Moses, Michael the archangel disputing with the devil over the body of Moses, and quotes First Enoch's prophecy of the Lord coming with myriads of his holy ones. Do the citations canonize those books? No more than Paul's Greek poets in Acts 17 and Titus 1 canonized Aratus or Epimenides: at the quoted point the statement is true, certified because a canonical author was carried by the Spirit to use it, and beyond that point neither Essex nor any commentator can say how the truth reached those books. The colorful, traditional language for deceivers, eyes full of adultery, wandering stars, hidden reefs, communicates motivation more powerfully than abstractions, in idioms the audience knew. And the closing counsel: Second Peter and Jude are almost never preached in Bible-believing churches, yet the whole congregation, not the pastor only, must know the teachers, the teaching, the growth, and the contending; so preach them.

1. Peter answers false teaching with Christian growth: supply the graces, and you will never stumble. Why is a growing Christian harder to deceive than a merely warned one, and which grace in Peter's chain most needs your diligence now?

2. Jude's triage distinguishes the doubting, the endangered, and the deeply entangled, and prescribes mercy shaped to each. How can a church practice that discernment without either harshness toward strugglers or naivety about its own flesh?

3. These letters are almost never preached, yet they insist every believer contend for the faith once delivered. What would it look like for an ordinary congregation, not just its pastor, to be equipped as contenders?