From the dawn of time, Satan has had his counterfeit
religions. Humans tend to be a religious species, and Satan is delighted to
give us anything to worship except the truth. If he can get people caught up in
emotional do-goodism and thrilling experience, they’ll follow him straight into
hell. As with Eve in the garden, he offers “superior knowledge” and distorts
God’s Word (“yea, hath God said?”) to convince us we’ve been deprived of some
special esoteric “spirituality.” This can be titillating, heady enticement to
baby believers who want to feel special and like to think they are contributing
to the “good of mankind.” Believers who are looking for excitement rather than
simple reality will fall prey to the glamorous experiences, secret societies
and human-good “help God” projects that are distractions from the
straight-forward, fully executed plan of God. This is arrogance! God’s plan is grace.
There is no salvation or spirituality in human works or wisdom, or in demonic
works or wisdom. Morality does not save. Human scientific achievement does not
save. Legalisms do not save. Jesus Christ saves, by the Work He has already
done on the cross.
Because of “them” (the false teachers who deny the completeness
of the work of Christ), society and religion blaspheme the “way of truth.”
Jesus Christ and Him crucified is the way of truth. No one comes to the Father
but by Jesus Christ (John 14:6). That way is blasphemed, daily, by religious,
self-righteous hypocrites who will say such things as “when a person says to me
that Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation, I don’t wanna hear anything
else he has to say.” I heard a prominent, conservative talk show host who is Roman Catholic
speak those words once, and I haven’t wanted to hear anything else HE has to
say. “They,” the greedy exploiters of our stupidity, were condemned long ago.
Their fate awaits them. OUR job is to not be taken in by them, or allow our
fellow believers to be taken in by their sensuality (KJV: pernicious ways,
self-destructive ways). All this rebellion against the authority of God and
this rejection of His grace to all mankind (even to themselves, for whom Christ
also died) is based in human self-indulgence, which is taken advantage of
(exploited) by Satan to try and usurp the authority of God.
For if God did not spare angels
when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept
until the judgment; if he did not spare the
ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven
others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if
by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to
extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the
ungodly; and if
he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the
wicked (for as that righteous man lived among
them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their
lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the
Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under
punishment until the day of judgment, and
especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion
and despise authority. 2 Peter 2:4-10
In eternity past, the brightest and most beautiful of God’s
Archangels became proud and arrogant and in his sensuality, he rebelled against
his creator. He challenged the authority of the Sovereign of the universe.
About a third of the angelic host bought into his selfish scheme, and joined
him in his rebellion. They had to be evicted from their heavenly positions, and
were given access to earth. This is found in Isaiah 14:12-15, Ezekiel
28:13-14).
These fallen angels, Satan included, are commonly known as
demons. They are more powerful and smarter than humans, but are not omnipotent
or omniscient or omnipresent. They are finite creatures who can be in only one
place at a time. They do not die. They have been alive for eons, observing us. They know
everything about the human psyche and human behaviors, but they cannot read our
minds. They love to influence us for evil, but cannot make us do anything
against our will. They cannot override human volition. They must resort to
trickery to use us for their evil debauchery, and they are experts at that. Their
schemes run the gamut from outright lasciviousness (nasty physical and mental
lust patterns; ugly sins) to self-righteous morality (think: the “green” movement,
which is even being practiced in some local churches today. Think: the “love
everybody and never express an opinion” attitude which brings out belligerence
in those who despise God’s standards. Those are aesthetic sins.) These are
expressions of human good, which is no good, and is promoted by Satan himself,
to distract us from the truth about salvation by faith alone in Christ alone.
The most sexually lustful of those demons, in the years
before the great flood, infiltrated the human race by raping human women or enticing them into
sexual relationships which resulted in the conception of super-human beings (“giants”
Genesis chapter 6). There was rampant evil in the earth. The true human race
was about to be obliterated. The problem? The Messiah must be true human! A
human-angel hybrid cannot save us. That’s what brought about God’s judgment by
flooding the entire world, destroying every living, breathing thing that wasn’t
on the ark with Noah and his family. Satan’s attempt to circumvent God’s plan
by defiling the race didn’t work, and those fallen angels were incarcerated in
chains of darkness until such time as they are let loose “for a little season”
again upon the earth. Those are the ones Peter refers to here, also mentioned in Jude 6, who stand as
examples of God’s judgment on those who rebel against Him and try to distort
His truth.
All the fallen angels were not involved in that pre-flood
infiltration, and are not incarcerated. Many of them are still at large, doing
all the damage they can, such as those who influenced the homosexuals of Sodom
and Gomorrah to dominate the whole society to the point of total annihilation
of those cities. Lot and his righteous family barely escaped that destruction,
with the help of God’s righteous angels. Those same demons who are at large in
the world were influencing the false teachers of the early church to distort
the Word of God and confuse the baby believers who lived by their emotions and
admired pseudo-intellect more than they loved the Lord Jesus Christ. They are
still at work today, using those same tactics, because they know they work with
weak believers who lust for attention and “feeling.”
Peter’s point: God knows exactly how to deal with those
demons and those who are allowing themselves to be used by them. He knows who
they are, where they are, and exactly what each has done to try to prevent lost
souls from hearing the gospel and to prevent saved souls from growing in grace
and knowledge. He has their destiny defined. It is certain. It will occur.
The destiny of the false teachers is also a certainty waiting to happen. Those
who indulge in defiling lusts and who despise authority will meet the judgment of
the Lord Jesus Christ, because they have chosen to reject His grace.
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