Peter 2 But there are also false prophets among the people. even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed. By covetousness they will exploit you with plastic words. For a long time their judgment has not been idle, and their destruction does not slumber. For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to Tartarus, and delivered them into pits of darkness to be reserved for judgment, and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly, and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly, and delivered righteous Lot, who was oppressed with the filthy conduct of the wicked, For that righteous man dwelling among them tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds. Then the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust under punishment for the day of judgment. And especially those who walk according to the flesh in the lust of uncleanness and despise authority. They are presumptuous, self-willed. They are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries. Whereas angels, who are greater in power and might, do not bring a reviling accusation against them before the Lord. But these, like natural brute beasts who understand only capture and killing, speak evil of the things they do not understand, and will utterly perish in their own corruption, receiving the wages of unrighteousness as those who count it pleasure to carouse in the daytime. They are spots and blemishes, carousing in their own deceptions while they feast with you. having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin, beguiling unstable souls. They have a heart trained in covetous practices, accursed children. They have forsaken the right way and gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness. But he was rebuked for his iniquity, of dumb donkey speaking with a man's voice, restrained the madness of the prophet. These are wells without water, clouds carried by a tempest, to whom the gloom of darkness is reserved forever. For when they speak great swelling words of emptiness, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through licentiousness, the ones who have actually escaped from those who live in error. While they promise them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption. For by whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than having known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. But it has happened to them, according to the true proverb, a dog returns to his own vomit and a sow having washed to her wallowing in the mire. The grass withers, the flower fades, the word of our God stands forever. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, certainly this denunciation is extreme by the standards of modern rhetoric, no par for the course by the standards of ancient rhetoric. We pray that you would help us to understand its meaning. To see not just Peter's obvious violent antipathy toward false teachers, but to see how this translates into the contemporary church. Father, above all, we pray that we would never be false teachers, that we would listen to the true teaching of your son, who always speaks words of wisdom and kindness and truth. Father, Help us to love Christ and to listen to Him. Open our ears to hear His Word. Show us the example of Noah, who lived in a time of judgment. Help us to follow that example. We pray that You would free us from distraction, that You would help the little ones to sit, open their ears to meet with us in Your Word and over Your Word, we pray. And God's people said, Amen. Our text tonight is a text for our own era because it shows us how to live in a society, in a world that is a world under judgment. It's indisputable, obviously, that Noah lived in a time of judgment. And he was spared, he survived, he got through it. And Genesis tells us, of course, how he got through it by building the ark and so on. But Peter reduces all of that to essentially one statement, that Noah was a preacher of righteousness. So how do you live in a world under judgment? Well, proclaim righteousness. That's an appropriate response to the truth that our God judges and saves. The setting of this judgment is the antediluvian world, right? Fancy Latin word that simply means pre-flood, but sounds cool, so people like to throw it around. Antediluvian world. In this world, something pretty odd was going on. The sons of God, probably, possibly angels, took wives of the daughters of men and produced this race of mighty men, men of renown, that the Hebrew terms Nephilim and that the Greek then translated as giants. And the King James and New King James keep the word giants. Other translations instead keep the Hebrew word Nephilim. The fact of the matter is that everything that's known about this race, or this group of people, whatever they were, is right there in the text of Genesis 6. So, of course, many have said, both among ancient and modern interpreters, clearly this was angels, or better, demons, leaving their proper estate, as Jude has it, taking human wives and producing children who were half-demon, half man. Now obviously that sounds a little bit far-fetched. On the other hand, in nature we do see that beings or species that are close enough to each other can reproduce together. The famous example of well-known the horse and the donkey come together and make a mule. The lion and the tiger come together and make a lion or a tion or a liger. So is it possible that humans and angels are actually close enough to reproduce together? Possibly so. In one sense, the jury is still out. Other interpretations of Genesis 6 are just that the godly line of Seth did what they should not have done, married ungodly women and had children who grew up to be violent crime lords, essentially. However you want to take it, Jude and Peter both tell us that there were some angels who sinned and were cast down into the black pits of Tartarus. Now, if the sin of the angels is not described in Genesis 6, then it's not described anywhere in the Bible. Hence, many or most interpreters throughout history have taken Peter's reference here to the angels who sinned to be these angels who, as Jude put it, went after strange flesh. That is, not strange to us, but strange to them. They were pursuing human women. Successfully so, apparently. and God judged them for that sin, condemned them for that sin, and threw them into the black pits of Tartarus. Regardless of how you understand the sin of the angels, and what you think that's referring to, what you think Genesis 6 means, clearly, what's the point? Both in Genesis 6 and here in 2 Peter 2 verse 4, the point is that in an evil time, God acted. Peter is addressing his letter to the scoffers who will live in the last days and say, where is the promise of his coming? He's not coming back. Come on, people. Has he ever come back? No. Is he ever going to come back? No. So let's just move on from this ancient fable already. That's what the scoffers say. Peter says to those people, you know, the angels sinned, and God judged them. Human beings were awful in Noah's day, and God judged them. So the main point of our passage is clearly this, God's judgments on the antediluvian world that make a point about God's character. Who is our God? He's a God who judges and saves. First point, he didn't spare angels. So if you think that you're a big shot, if you think that your position in the world is sufficiently important to exempt you from judgment, well, think again. Because angels, who are higher beings, greater in might and power, as he says in a minute, those beings were not spared when they sinned. God caught them in the act, essentially, cast them into the black pits of Tartarus. Now, your translation might say chains of darkness. In Greek, the word chain and the word pit only differ by one letter. Jude definitely says chains. Some manuscripts of Peter say pits, others say chains. The book of Enoch that tells the story of these fallen angels in greater detail has both pits and chains. Which, obviously, if you were trying to deal with fallen angels, you too might put them in a black pit and chain them up. So, anyway, that's why I prefer the reading pits. the pits of darkness in this place called Tartarus. Tartarus, we've talked about this before, the lowest and the worst level of the underworld in Greek mythology. And Peter is definitely putting his stamp of approval on that and saying this was not a Greek myth, there is such a place. Tartarus, the bottom level of hell, has black pits in which angels are confined, rebel angels. Now, most commentators say, of course you can't put a chain on an angel. This is figurative language. This means simply that God keeps them on a tight leash, restricts their sphere of action in some way. Now that may be true. Maybe this language is metaphorical. Or maybe it's more literal than we can imagine. But we really don't know. But what's the point? Once again, is being confined to the black pits of Tartarus pleasant? Is it a reward for good behavior? Whatever that means in practice, obviously not. Obviously, this is bad. This is a fate no one wants to have. So God puts them there in these black pits, chained up, as Jude tells us, and he keeps them there until doomsday. Delivered them into black pits to be reserved for judgment. Now, just as in the American justice system, you can rot in jail for a long time, sometimes years, before you ever get a trial and a sentence, So in God's justice system, you can stay in the Black Pits of Tartarus for a long time, now at least a minimum of 4,000 years since Noah's day. You can stay there a long time, again, before you get a trial and a sentence. Let me put it this way. The Black Pits of Tartarus are to hell what jail is to prison. Black pits of Tartarus are to hell what jail is to prison. In other words, this is not as bad as it gets. It gets worse. This is just the temporary holding cell. This is the intake unit of hell where these rebel angels are confined. So what's Peter's response to people who say God won't judge? Well, it's simple. He already has. Most of us, well, some of us with bolder, more aggressive personalities have had the privilege of using this response on people. The snotty kid says, you would never. And you say, I already did. And you take him to the window, and there's his car with all the tires taken off. and locked in the trunk. And the key snapped in half, sitting on the hood. Right, and you say, I told you that if you stayed out past curfew one more time, your car would be impounded for the rest of the summer. There it is. This is Peter looking at the scoffer and saying, God has already judged. You think God won't judge? You think God is all love, all niceness, all therapeutic and interested in being your counselor, not in judging you? Well, you're wrong. God took the rebel angels and he threw them into Tartarus. And by the way, he didn't spare the ancient world either. You could say, well that was angels, they're different, they're on a different plan. So maybe God judges them, but human beings, he's got a soft spot for human beings, right? He became one. To which Peter says, no I don't think so, he did not spare the ancient world. Now it's funny to us, in one sense, to hear someone from what we consider to be the ancient world, describing what he calls the ancient world. But obviously, Peter believed himself to be one of the moderns. He lived at the oldest age Earth had ever been. And he looked back in time two, three thousand years to Noah's flood, and he said that world, the pre-Diluvian world, the pre-flood world, God didn't spare that either. He brought in a flood on the world of the ungodly. And that flood, as we know, was ferocious and intense. Some of you saw the pictures of the flooding in Nebraska this spring, or perhaps had the chance to visit there and see it and the tremendous destruction it caused. Certainly, Right, all of us have had this fantasy. I plug the drain in the bathtub and then I just turn it on and leave it on and I come back the next day and my entire house is filled with water. Now why don't that work? Well the water is far too heavy, even if you don't have any other drains in the house, the water would blow your house to bits. It would just fall apart. The walls can't hold all that weight of water pressing on them. Just think how a flood 40 or 50 feet deep would destroy our city. But actually, scientists tell us that if the earth was smooth, there's enough water in the present day oceans to cover the whole earth to a depth of a mile and a quarter. Two kilometers deep. Here's Noah sailing around endlessly on a sea without a shore. Just the idea of being on a water planet with no land gives me the creeps. God brought a flood on a world and he calls it the world of the ungodly. Now there were eight righteous people in Noah's day. That was it. The whole rest of the world was wicked. That's why Peter calls it the world of the ungodly. The world could very easily be characterized as ungodly because all the righteous people totaled eight. So just think, our church would seem humongous to Noah. Whoa, so many God fears, I can't believe it. God sent this flood on the world of the ungodly again and Peter drags up this bit of ancient history to say this is who our God is. How do you feel about serving a God who would drown everybody? He invites us to come to terms with the character of God. You know, essentially, right, he's asking whether we take seriously the first commandment, or the greatest commandment. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Do you actually believe that somebody who doesn't do that deserves to die? It's the law. It's diagnostic. It shows you your heart. If you don't believe that someone deserves to die for not loving God when they're good in every other way, then you will have a problem with the flood. And you will have a problem with the God who sent the flood. Peter is telling us, this is our God. He flooded the world of the ungodly. And what kinds of things did this flood on the world of the ungodly entail? Well, there was a recent article in the New Yorker magazine about the day the world died. What scientist's best guess is regarding this giant meteor strike that I believe probably took place during the flood. A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world's most powerful computers to model the effects of this asteroid impact. The result was a slow motion, second by second, false color video of the event. So these are the kinds of things. This is what living under judgment was like for NOAA, as best as we can tell from some of the records we've been able to dig up. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about 18 miles deep and lofted 25 trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth's crust rebounded a peak higher than Mount Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion. Instead, the initial blowout formed a rooster tail, a gigantic jet of molten material which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass called tektites, and blanketed the western hemisphere. Sounds pleasant, right? The asteroid vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized earth rock, formed a fiery plume which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within 1,500 miles of ground zero became red-hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about 70% of the world's forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep sea drilling. And you're on a little boat, 450 feet long, with the seven other people in the world watching this. Earth's two essential food chains in the sea and on land collapsed. About 75% of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999% of all living organisms on Earth died. And the carbon cycle came to a halt. Now again, this is just scientists' best guess, looking at what they dig up. What can we say about the reality of God's judgment? It was at least that bad. Maybe worse. So how did Noah get through it? Well, the obvious answer, first of all, is that God saved him. God protected Noah. Right? The ark didn't light on fire just before the rain started. Oh, whoops. Uh-oh, what are we gonna do now? Asteroid didn't hit in such a way that it would cripple the ark Or hurt Noah and send him out to sail this thing with two broken legs God Saved him and that of course is exactly what Peter says God did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah And God saved him as the eighth Peter mentions this as well in 1 Peter. He was a little obsessed or a little interested in this idea that Noah was the eighth man. Why, both times he mentions Noah, does he say Noah was the eighth? It seems pretty clear that he was interested in the significance of the number eight. Seven is the number of perfection. When you add more, you've gone past perfection into what? Ultra perfection? But the seven days of this world are succeeded by the eighth day of the resurrection, the eighth day of the eschaton, the time of the end. Noah as the eighth, seemingly in Peter's mind, is a symbol of God's end time salvation. When that eighth day comes, when the world's week of life is complete, if you will, Then God acts to save, and that's why it's so fitting that he saved eight people. Noah and Mrs. Noah, plus his three sons and their wives. Eight of them, alone on this ark, sailing through the turbulent chaos waters as God unmade the world. So again, will God act to save? Yes, He will. He already has. Will God act to judge? Yes, He will. He already has. Noah's salvation is a sign, an end time sign that God acts to save His people. Those within the ark of the church will be saved even while the world dies around us. Well, that's quite a thought, but to those who don't like it, again, Peter's message is God's already done it. He's very much prepared to do it again. And later on in chapter 3, he'll tell us about the judgment by fire that God has prepared. But Noah's How else did Noah get through it though? What did Noah do? Right, God saved him. And God will save us in a time of judgment. But Noah was not passive in this salvation. Noah, Peter tells us, was a preacher of righteousness. So, many have pictured Noah as a kind of street evangelist. Right, big crowds coming out to see dumb old Noah building this boat. in a desert climate and Noah telling them all, here's why I'm doing it. I'm doing it because God is going to judge it and I'm building a stateroom for you, so why don't you believe and come join me? And people would laugh and throw a rotten eggplant at him and walk away. Probably there's something to that. Maybe the audience came to Noah, maybe Noah went out and found him. All we're told is that he was a preacher of righteousness. And at a bare minimum, surely that means that He presented to the people of His generation a better way. Right? They were all sunk in violence. They had all corrupted God's way. And Noah said to them, it doesn't have to be like this. We don't have to kill each other, and rape each other, and steal from each other, and live the way we're living. We can follow God's way. But I think he didn't preach moralism. Self-righteousness is not righteousness. Noah was a preacher of righteousness. Which means that he was a preacher of Christ because without Christ there is no righteousness. The law won't make anybody a good person. We've all tried, right? It doesn't work. Say to someone, say to yourself, do better, be better. Which is what the law commands. And then tomorrow I'm not better and I didn't do better. So Noah did not preach, do better, be better. He preached, turn from your sin and trust in Jesus Christ. So how do we survive under judgment? With that same message. Noah got through judgment by preaching righteousness. It was his message. It was his habit. So do we need to do street evangelism? Well, we at least need to be willing to speak. Right? Noah didn't get saved by saying nothing. By keeping his mouth shut, when he saw the horrors of the world, and just grimly gritting his teeth and saying, well, flood will be here soon, better just nail another board on the ark. Noah insisted on sticking his neck out. And we will have to too if we want to live under judgment. How to live under judgment, right? The text doesn't tell us Keep your head down. Keep your nose clean. Don't say anything. That's the best way to get through judgment. We would like to think that it is. But Noah shows us a different lesson. He got through judgment by telling the truth to himself and his kids. And they all, miraculously almost, followed Christ in a world gone wrong. Don't expect necessarily that people will believe you when you try to survive judgment by telling them about righteousness. But our call is to be faithful, to imitate Noah, who shows us how to live in a world under judgment. Oh, and live in confidence that God's salvation is coming. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, as we think about the superheated dust and the tsunamis and the floods and Your judgment on this world, our hearts fail a little bit because we know that it's exactly what the world deserves because it's exactly what we deserve. Heavenly Father, please give us the grace to hate sin, to turn from it, and to proclaim righteousness to ourselves, to our families, in our churches, and wherever else we have opportunity. Forgive us for our cowardice and not wanting to stick out our necks. Help us to learn that you don't survive judgment by holing up, but rather by telling the truth as and when you can. We pray these things, Father, in the name of Your Son, who preached righteousness until they killed Him for it. And God's people said, Amen.