Original Meaning

THE IDEA THAT God reserves evil people for judgment is the key idea in this paragraph. Characteristically, Peter mentions the idea both at the beginning (“held for judgment,” v. 4) and at the end (“hold … for the day of judgment,” v. 9) of the section. The concluding words of 2:3 announce this theme: “Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping.” Recognizing this relationship, many commentators attach this warning to verses 4–10 and end the first paragraph with verse 3a.1 In fact, the warning is transitional. It both concludes verses 1–3a and introduces verses 4–10.

The structure of 2:4–10a is simple: Peter writes one long conditional sentence. The protasis (the “if” part of the sentence) is long, extending from verses 4 through 8. The NIV helps the reader of the English text to make sense of it by breaking it up into four parts and repeating the word “if” (the Greek word for “if” appears only in v. 4):

“If God did not spare angels … [v. 4]

if he did not spare the ancient world … [v. 5]

if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah … [v. 6]

if he rescued Lot … [vv. 7–8]

then [v. 9a]:

the Lord knows how to rescue godly men …

and to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgment…. [vv. 9–10a]”

In the four “if” clauses Peter reminds his readers of events in the Old Testament that he uses to draw his conclusions in the “then” clause in verses 9–10a (and note that Peter mentions the Old Testament events in their canonical order). The first three examples are negative; Peter cites famous instances of God’s judgment in order to establish his second conclusion, that God knows how to condemn evil creatures. The fourth example, the reference to Lot in verses 7–8 (as well as the reference to Noah in v. 5b), establishes Peter’s first conclusion, that God knows how to rescue the righteous. The parallel section in Jude 6–7 lacks any reference to God’s rescue of the godly. Perhaps Peter includes this point because his readers are getting frustrated and discouraged at the need to resist the false teachers. Thus he encourages them by reminding them of God’s sovereign protection of the righteous in times of trial and adversity.

Examples of God’s Judgment (vv. 4–8)

IN VERSES 4–6, Peter cites three traditional examples of God’s judgment to illustrate his claim that God will swiftly (cf. v. 1) and certainly judge the false teachers who are beginning to make their appearance. Two of these examples are well known from the Old Testament: the Flood in Noah’s day (v. 5) and the spectacular destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (v. 6). But the first illustration, God’s judgment of “the angels that sinned,” does not immediately bring to mind any particular Old Testament incident. In fact, nowhere does the Old Testament cite an unambiguous reference to God’s judgment on angels.

Some interpreters have thought that passages such as Isaiah 14:12–17 and Ezekiel 28:11–19 may refer to a fall of Satan and other disobedient angels from heaven before the creation of the world and that Peter is alluding to this punishment.2 But a more likely candidate for Peter’s reference emerges when we consider Jewish tradition. A number of writers in the intertestamental period developed a story about angels who sinned and were punished by God at the time of the Flood. The story finds its most developed form in the pseudepigraphical book 1 Enoch, but it is alluded to in several other writings as well. This tradition was not simply made up from whole cloth; the writers were elaborating on Genesis 6:1–4, a passage that tells about “sons of God” who were attracted to the “daughters of men,” married them, and had children with them. In the Jewish tradition we are referring to, the “sons of God” were angels, and their cohabiting with women was a basic reason why God judged the world of Noah’s day.

I think it is likely that Peter has this story in mind. (1) An allusion to the Jewish tradition fits the apparently chronological order of Peter’s examples in verses 4–7: the fall of the angels (Gen. 6:1–4), the Flood (6:5–8:22), Sodom and Gomorrah (chap. 19). (2) In a passage that has many parallels with this one, Jude explicitly quotes 1 Enoch (Jude 14–15; cf. v. 6). (3) Peter probably refers to this same tradition in his first letter when he announces that Christ “went and preached to the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:19).3 (4) Peter seems to echo the wording of that tradition in his language describing the angels’ punishment. See, for instance, 1 Enoch 10:4: “Bind Azazel [a disobedient angel] hand and foot and throw him into the darkness.” Although not clearly taught in the Old Testament, the story is one that Peter seems to assume is familiar to his readers.4

God punished these sinful angels, Peter claims, by “putting them into gloomy dungeons.” The NIV rendering quoted here is not the only possible one; the TEV, for example, says that the angels were “kept chained in darkness” (cf. also KJV and NRSV). The difference is a single Greek word: The NIV accepts the word sirois, which means “pits” or “caves,” while the TEV reads seirais, “chains.” The latter word is what we find in the parallel passage in Jude, where the author speaks of the angels as “bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day” (v. 6). But this very parallel is what suggests the unlikelihood that Peter wrote the same word. For the scribes who copied the manuscripts of the New Testament tended to assimilate the wording of parallel passages. In this case, then, the word seirais, “chains,” has possibly been inserted into 2 Peter by a scribe familiar with Jude in place of the rarer word sirois.

In any case, Peter probably does not want us to think of the angels as literally confined in dark caves or dungeons. The language is metaphorical; he is using a popular ancient conception of the afterlife to denote God’s judgment. Perhaps the metaphor is intended to suggest that God has restricted the scope of the (evil) angels’ activity as a result of their sin.

The presence of a metaphor here is further suggested by the Greek word that lies behind the NIV’s “but sent them to hell.” This word is tartareo, “consign to Tartarus.” In Greek mythology, Tartarus was the subterranean abyss to which disobedient gods and rebellious human beings were consigned. The NJB captures the idea rather literally: “sent them down into the underworld.” Other Jewish writers had already borrowed the language to describe the place were the ungodly were punished.5 The translation “hell,” while accurate enough in some ways, may be misleading. For Peter makes clear that this consigning of the angels to Tartarus is only a preliminary punishment; they are being “held for judgment.” Tartarus in Peter’s conception appears not so much to represent a place of final and endless punishment (as our “hell” often does), but the limitation on sphere of influence that God imposed on the angels who fell.

Peter’s next warning example comes from the most famous judgment of God found in the Old Testament: the Flood in Noah’s day (v. 5). Peter uses similar wording to connect these first two examples: God “did not spare” the angels who sinned, and he “did not spare” the “ancient world” either.6 Peter quickly reminds us that Noah and his family were an exception to this “[world of] ungodly people”; thus God “protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others.” The Old Testament makes no mention of Noah’s preaching, although intertestamental Jewish tradition does.7 But the Old Testament gives a sound basis for this tradition because, as Calvin remarks, “[Noah] tried to bring a degenerate world to a sound state of mind, and because he did so not only by teaching and exhortations to holiness but by his constant and anxious toil for a hundred and twenty years in building the ark.”8

Peter’s reference to the “seven others” who were saved with Noah is intriguing. He makes a similar point in his first letter: After speaking about the “spirits in prison who disobeyed” in Noah’s day, he adds that “in [the ark] only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water” (1 Peter 3:20). The “eight” were Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives (see Gen. 6:18; 7:7, 13). In this first letter, the word “only” suggests that Peter’s purpose in referring to the number is to encourage Christians who are being persecuted by reminding them that the godly are often in the minority. This may be his purpose here as well. The false teachers may be attracting quite a following, and some of Peter’s readers may be discouraged about that. They need to remember that the godly are often few but that God is always faithful to preserve them.

We should not be surprised that Peter moves from the Flood to Sodom and Gomorrah in order to illustrate God’s judgment; the pairing of these two famous disasters was well established. Jesus himself used these two events to warn about God’s sudden judgment on sensuous people (Luke 17:26–29):

Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.

It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulphur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.

Peter’s description of God’s judgment on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (v. 6) is straightforward enough, although we discern again the influence of tradition. According to the Old Testament, God destroyed these sinful cities by raining down sulfur on them (Gen. 19:24). Peter chooses to focus on what was undoubtedly the result of this sulfurous deluge: The cities were “burned … to ashes.” The word Peter uses (tephroo, “reduce to ashes”) was also used by Dio Cassius to depict Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. More to the point, Jewish writers before Peter had described the destruction of the two wicked cities in the same terms. For example, Philo, the first-century Alexandrian philosopher, says that God “consumed the impious and their cities, and to the present day the memorials to the awful disaster are shewn in Syria, ruins and cinders and brimstone and smoke.”9 And as Philo calls the site of the disaster a “memorial,” so Peter also brings out the lasting implications of the terrible destruction; God “made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly.”

But, like the Flood narrative, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah also has a positive side. God “rescued Lot, a righteous man” from the disaster, just as he rescued Noah and his family (v. 7). Describing Lot as a “righteous man” may seem like a bit of a stretch. The Old Testament portrays him as, at best, weak and compromising. He was rescued almost against his will, the credit going not to his own virtue but to God, who graciously intervened at the request of Abraham (see esp. Gen. 19:29). Again, however, Peter’s description of Lot lines up with some Jewish traditions, which also portrayed him as “righteous.”10

Yet Peter’s brief characterization of Lot is not without basis in the Old Testament text. As Peter points out, Genesis 19 suggests that Lot did not participate in the rampant homosexuality that characterized the cities and was, indeed, “distressed” by it. While certainly far from perfect, Lot never lost his basic orientation to the Lord. The word “righteous” that Peter uses need mean no more than this. In the New Testament, this word often refers to a person’s status before the Lord rather than to one’s innate moral virtue. Moreover, it is important to note that Peter does not say that the Lord rescued Lot because he was a righteous man. Similarly, it will be not by virtue of their inherent goodness that God will deliver Christians in Peter’s day, or in ours, from the judgment that he will bring on the ungodly. Rather, it will be because of their “knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord” (2 Peter 1:2) and because they are distressed, as Lot was, at the rampant sin around them.

The importance of this last point is evident from Peter’s elaboration of Lot’s “distress” in verse 8. The NIV rightly makes this verse a parenthesis (as does also KJV, NRSV, NASB). Lot “was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard.” The NIV correctly links what Lot “saw and heard” with “their lawless deeds.” But it obscures the fact that in the Greek, the verb “torment” is in the active voice: Lot “tormented his righteous soul.” I want to avoid making more of this than the text warrants. But we recall that Lot ended up in Sodom by his own choice. And Genesis makes clear that Sodom was already a notoriously sinful place when Lot made this choice (see Gen. 13:11–13). Perhaps, then, Peter has used the active voice here to suggest that Lot was himself considerably responsible for the anguish that his “righteous soul” experienced.

The Application of the Examples (vv. 9–10)

WITH VERSE 9, we come to the end of Peter’s long conditional sentence. The NIV helps the English reader understand this relationship by adding the phrase “if this is so” at the beginning of the verse. If, in other words, the Old Testament shows again and again how God has intervened to judge sinners and save the righteous, “then the Lord knows how to rescue godly men from trials and to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgment, while continuing their punishment.”

Peter’s readers are invited to put themselves in the category of “godly men.” They need to be reassured that their sacrifices in living by God’s rules in an ungodly environment will be rewarded. But what are the “trials” from which they will be rescued? The NIV takes some liberty here, translating a Greek word that is singular (peirasmos) with a plural English word. The Greek word has two distinct meanings. It can mean “temptation,” the inner enticement of sin—as in 1 Timothy 6:9 (where Paul warns that “people who want to get rich fall into temptation”)—or it can mean “trial” or external affliction—as in 1 Peter 4:12 (“Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering”).

If the word means “temptation” here, then Peter is probably promising rescue from temptation to sin, such as Lot experienced in Sodom (see NASB).11 But Peter’s two other uses of peirasmos both mean “trial” (1 Peter 1:6; 4:12), and this is the more common meaning in the New Testament. Some commentators who adopt this meaning think that Peter is referring to the great trial of faith that will occur at the end of history.12 There is much to support this idea; as Bauckham notes, “Since the Flood and the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah are prototypes of eschatological judgment, the situations of Noah and Lot are typical of the situation of Christians in the final evil days before the Parousia.”13 But while Christians are no doubt in the last days, I think Peter would at least have allowed those days to go on for some time. Thus I think he includes in the “trial” here all those challenges to faith that Christians experience in this world.

In the second part of the verse, Peter draws his negative moral from the Old Testament examples he cites in verses 4–8: “The Lord knows how … to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgment, while continuing their punishment.” Along with most contemporary English versions, the NIV finds Peter here promising not only a future judgment for the unrighteous but also a punishment that is already underway. This is not the only way to take the Greek here, however, and the KJV, for instance, speaks only of future judgment: “The Lord knoweth how … to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished.”14

Many commentators think this latter option is correct.15 But two points favor the interpretation assumed by the NIV. The Greek word “being punished” is in the present tense, most naturally suggesting that the punishment is taking place at the same time as the keeping. Furthermore, the combination of present, preliminary punishment and future, final judgment is found also in verse 4, where Peter says that disobedient angels have been put into gloomy dungeons “to be held for judgment.”16 If this is what Peter means, how is that punishment of sinners now being carried out? I will tackle this issue in the “Contemporary Significance” section.

The NIV again follows most English versions by splitting verse 10 into two sentences, putting the first one with verses 4–9 and the second with verses 11ff. This is a good decision. The first part of verse 10 is tied grammatically to verse 9, as Peter gives an example of those “unrighteous” who will be judged. But verse 10b, which is not tied grammatically to the first part, shifts the focus to a more extended description of these unrighteous people.

In verse 10a, then, Peter brings us back to the beginning of the chapter. In verses 1–3, he warned about false teachers; in verses 4–9, he cited Old Testament examples to support his claim that they would be condemned; now he suggests that prominent among these false teachers destined for condemnation are the very people who are disturbing his readers’ churches. Peter contents himself with two general characteristics of these unrighteous false teachers: They “follow the corrupt desire of the sinful nature,” and they “despise authority.”

The NIV rendering of this first description is too mild. Peter piles up some very strong words; a literal rendering is “going after flesh in a passionate longing for defilement.”17 The reference is to sexual sin, probably including, in light of Peter’s reference to Sodom and Gomorrah in verse 6, homosexuality.18

The second general characteristic of these false teachers is more difficult to understand. Specifically, what kind of “authority” were these teachers despising? We outline four options. (1) In the second part of verse 10, Peter claims that they “slander celestial beings.” This translation (NIV) is an interpretation of another difficult Greek word, but it is probably correct. The singular “authority” in verse 10a may then be an unusual way to refer to angelic beings.19 (2) Peter may be referring to the “authority” of the church, which the false teachers were refusing to heed as they pursued their own heretical ideas.20 Yet there is little in the context to support the identification. (3) The most important “authority” for Christians is, of course, the Lord. And many interpreters think that it is this authority that the false teachers are despising.21 (4) This third option may be correct, but I prefer a more general reference. In both this verse and in the similar Jude 8, we find the accusation that the false teachers are despising “authority” followed immediately by the charge that they “slander celestial beings [angels].” It makes good sense, then, to see this second accusation as a specific example of the former. “Despising authority,” in other words, is a general charge to the effect that the false teachers are self-willed and rebellious. Peter is not thinking of any specific authority; he is thinking of the principle of authority.

Bridging Contexts

THE MAIN IDEA in these verses comes across clearly: God judges those who obstinately disregard his commands while he protects those who stay faithful to him. But some of the details Peter uses to communicate this point are not so clear. One issue in particular can create difficulty for the interpreter: the influence of Jewish traditions on Peter’s use of the Old Testament. This issue raises a larger hermeneutical question: How, and to what degree, do books that are not in the Bible influence what the New Testament authors believed and wrote? In the following paragraphs, I want briefly to investigate this matter so that we can better understand the details of this passage.

The use of the Old Testament in the New Testament is one of the perennial issues in biblical theology and interpretation. In the past, scholars gave a great deal of attention to the quotations of the Old Testament in the New. More recently, interest has turned to the many places where the New Testament takes up Old Testament themes and passages without directly citing a text. The New Testament writers were so thoroughly versed in the Old Testament that the words and themes from the Scriptures are woven into the very fabric of what they wrote. Scholars therefore speak of “echoes” of Scripture in the New Testament, in which writers convey certain nuances of meaning by implicitly referring the reader to an Old Testament passage or theme. Intertextuality is another term being applied to this phenomenon. It recognizes in perhaps a deeper way than ever before that the Bible is really one book, whose parts can be rightly understood only in light of the whole.22

Complicating this intertextual situation, however, are the layers of tradition that stand between the original Old Testament text and the New Testament author. New Testament writers like Peter were, of course, versed in the Scriptures from an early age. They had heard it read, interpreted, and applied in the synagogue and elsewhere from childhood on. And during that time, they had absorbed many particular ways of reading the Old Testament. Their reading was, of course, decisively transformed by their commitment to Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament. But the new perspective that faith in Christ brought, while transforming their reading of the Scriptures, did not erase every interpretation they inherited from their Jewish background. Many of these traditions play a role in the New Testament interpretation of the Old Testament.

Second Peter 2:4–10a offers a good case in point. In my comments above, I noted at least four places where Peter was apparently influenced in his use of the Old Testament by Jewish traditions:

(1) God’s judgment of the “angels who sinned” (v. 4) probably refers to the Jewish elaboration of Genesis 6:1–4.

(2) Noah’s “preaching” (v. 5), not mentioned in the Old Testament, is recounted in several Jewish books.

(3) The language Peter used to describe the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (“reduced to ashes” in v. 6) is closer to Philo and some other Jewish writers than to the Old Testament.

(4) Peter’s claim that Lot was “righteous” (v. 7) duplicates the description of Lot found in at least one intertestamental Jewish book (Wisdom of Solomon).

I am not suggesting that Peter specifically knew and quoted each of these books or writers—although he could certainly have been aware of most of them. It is rather a case of Peter’s referring to popular teaching that he was familiar with and which is attested by these books. We know that the Jews elaborated Old Testament passages and stories as they handed them down and as preachers and teachers sought to apply them. Some of these elaborations became widespread and were perhaps regularly associated with the Old Testament passages on which they were based. These traditions surface in the intertestamental books mentioned above, and Peter presumably became acquainted with them during his years in the synagogue.

The last three allusions to Jewish tradition are uncontroversial. In each case, the Jewish tradition simply brings out more explicitly a point that is already present or hinted at in the Old Testament stories. But the first allusion is controversial indeed, for here we find Peter referring to a Jewish tradition about angels that is based on what many contemporary evangelical scholars think is a misinterpretation of Genesis 6:1–4. Before I examine this issue, let me expand on the tradition and its basis.

Genesis 6:1–4 reads:

When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

Critical is the identification of “the sons of God.” Most Jews during the intertestamental period thought that these “sons of God” were angels. This tradition of interpretation is found in many places but appears most clearly and most often in the apocalyptic book 1 Enoch. In 6:1–2 of this book, we read:

In those days, when the children of man had multiplied, it happened that there were born unto them handsome and beautiful daughters. And the angels, the children of heaven, saw them and desired them; and they said to one another, “Come, let us choose wives for ourselves from among the daughters of man and beget us children.”

The author of 1 Enoch goes on to describe how these angels did, in fact, cohabit with “the daughters of men” (7:1). From their union came the giants (cf. the “Nephilim” in Gen. 6:4). Furthermore, the angels brought with them sinful practices that they taught their wives and offspring (7:2–6). Prominent among these practices was the art of magic. First Enoch traces the sinfulness of the world to these fallen angels, whom the author often calls “watchers.” They, their sin, and their judgment are referred to many times in the rest of the book.23

The popularity of this tradition would make it a natural choice for Peter to illustrate God’s judgment in the past. And, as we pointed out in the introduction, Peter’s readers, while probably Gentiles, were also well acquainted with the Old Testament. Peter’s use of this tradition, however, creates a problem for those of us committed to the complete accuracy of the Bible. For if this is what he is doing, he seems to be endorsing a Jewish interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4 that many think is not correct. He, in effect, is citing an example of God’s judgment that never took place. And this obviously calls into question the truthfulness of what he wrote.

We have, I think, three possible solutions to this problem. (1) As I have noted in the “Original Meaning” section, Peter may not be referring to this Jewish tradition at all. While the Old Testament does not clearly describe a “fall” of angels, many scholars think that at least two passages might refer to the fall of the chief of the evil angels, Satan: Isaiah’s denunciation of the “morning star” in Isaiah 14:12–20 and Ezekiel’s prophecy against the King of Tyre in Ezekiel 28:1–19. But it is perhaps more likely that these texts use hyperbole to describe the arrogance and downfall of historical human rulers active at the prophets’ time. The much clearer history of the fall of the angels that many of us have in our heads comes not from the Bible but from the great epic poem of John Milton, Paradise Lost, in which he develops the theme at great length.

But even if the fall of angels is not clearly narrated in the Old Testament, something like it is clearly assumed. And Revelation 12:7–9 portrays, in visionary form, the casting out of “Satan and his angels” from heaven after a war with Michael and the good angels. Peter may, then, be referring to this “prehistoric” fall of the angels. We need to keep this as an open possibility, since Peter does not explicitly connect his reference to “angels who sinned” to Genesis 6 or to the time of Noah. But I have also given several reasons why I think Peter probably does have the Genesis 6 tradition in mind.

(2) Peter may be referring to the tradition of the angels of Genesis 6 without intending us to conclude that it is an actual, historical occurrence. In effect, he may be doing what many modern preachers do when illustrating their sermons—refer to a popular, well-known story that is not true but which can be used to make a point. I don’t think we should dismiss this possible solution, though it does have some problems. The most serious is the clearly historical incidents that Peter uses as his other illustrations. The Flood in Noah’s day (v. 5) and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (v. 6) really happened. It would take a supersensitive reader to guess that the first illustration of God’s judgment in the series did not actually take place. Recall, moreover, that Peter is trying to convince his readers of the reality of God’s judgment in the face of false teachers who are treating such matters as “myths” or “stories” (see 1:16). For Peter to refer in this context to a tradition of God’s judgment that could very well itself be labeled as a “myth” would be a dubious strategy. Still, this possibility remains as one seriously to consider.

(3) The third solution is to assume that the prevalent Jewish interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4 in Peter’s day is, in fact, correct: The “sons of God” were angels. Contemporary interpreters of Genesis take three different views of the “sons of God” in Genesis 6:1: that they refer to human beings24 or human princes, to divine beings, or to angels. The first of these views is, in fact, becoming less popular, as it is recognized that the Hebrew phrase bene elohim likely does not refer to human beings here. The second view is popular among interpreters who think that Genesis depends on a widespread ancient myth about the cohabiting of gods and human women.25 But the third also finds a number of supporters, who cite texts like Job 1:6 and 2:1, where the “sons of God” are clearly angels.26

It is admittedly difficult to conceive of angels and human beings having sexual relationships; and this has always been the chief objection to the view that the “sons of God” are angels. Jesus himself seems to suggest that the angels do not engage in sexual relationships (see Matt. 22:30 and parallels). Moreover, Genesis 6:5–8 says nothing about the sin of angels, but it says a great deal about the sin of human beings. Interpreters suggest several ways of getting around these difficulties, but we need not pursue this matter here. What is important is to recognize that, properly nuanced, we need not think it impossible that Genesis 6:1–4 refers to fallen angels who had sexual relations with women.

What may we conclude, then, about Peter’s use of Genesis 6? Perhaps this is a case in which we need to give intertextuality full reign. Peter’s reference to “angels who sinned,” especially in light of 1 Peter 3:19–20, probably depends on a certain reading of Genesis 6. Since we believe that the Bible ultimately speaks with one voice, perhaps we should accept Peter’s interpretation as the true interpretation of the enigmatic “sons of God” text.

Whatever our conclusions on this matter, the text certainly shows how important it is that we interpret Scripture in the light of Scripture, and that we be aware of Jewish traditions that may have played a role in a New Testament author’s use of the Old Testament. Everyone should agree with the former principle, as long as we are talking about the interpretation of the New Testament in light of the Old. Christians have always seen the importance of reading the Old Testament in the light of Christ. But what I am suggesting in the argument above is a little more radical: “exegeting” an Old Testament passage according to the New Testament interpretation.

As evangelical Christians, we believe that God preserved Peter from introducing errors into this reading of the Old Testament through the influence of these traditions. But the ancient Jewish interpretation of Scripture may well preserve accurate interpretations that we can still learn much from. The enigmatic Genesis 6:1–4 story may be one such example of this process.

Contemporary Significance

FINDING CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE in 2 Peter 2:4–10a is not difficult. For the situation addressed is all too similar to the position of the church in the world today. In 2:1 Peter reminded us that “there will be false teachers among you.” And his prediction is certainly applicable to the late twentieth century. Everywhere we look, we find people advocating ideas that the Bible clearly condemns, yet claiming that they are the true way to find God, or “meaning in life,” or spiritual fulfillment. And these religious teachers are often successful, attracting large followings, making a good living for themselves, and garnering lots of publicity. It is this apparent injustice that Peter is concerned about in this passage. How is it that God stands silent as such false teachers twist his truth and lead his people astray?

Peter’s answer is simple: God is not standing silent. Using the examples of the angels who sinned, the world of Noah’s day, and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Peter argues that God is both judging sinners now and will finally condemn them in the future. Note how he mentions the two stages of this judgment at both the beginning of the paragraph (v. 4) and at its end (v. 9):

God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment.

The Lord knows how … to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgment, while continuing their punishment.

The Bible everywhere teaches about a great day of judgment to come, when the righteous will receive their eternal reward and the unrighteous will suffer eternal condemnation. The idea of judgment in this life is not so common, but appears often enough. We think, for instance, of Romans 1:18–32. Here Paul three times claims that God “gave over” sinful human beings to the consequences of the sin that they had chosen (vv. 24, 26, 28). Having turned from the true God to worship idols of their own making, these people were “handed over” to sexual impurity, unnatural passions, and a depraved way of thinking. Having stubbornly chosen their own way in opposition to God, God allows them to continue on the road they chose—all the way to its disastrous end. As the German poet Schilling put it, “The history of the world is the judgment of the world.”

Peter may have these same ideas in mind as he mentions the present punishment that the unrighteous are experiencing. The very sin these people commit, with all its terrible consequences for the health of mind and body, is a form of punishment. Thus Peter encourages us, as we contemplate the ungodly of our day, to look beyond their superficial happiness and success to the inner anxiety, despair, and frustration that lurks just below the surface.

But Peter’s main point is not the means of punishment but its certainty. He wants to assure believers that those who scorn God and teach what is contrary to his truth will not get off scot-free. As Green puts it, “False teaching and false behaviour ultimately always produce suffering and disaster, be it in Lot’s day, in Peter’s, or in our own.”27 Behind Peter’s words is his conviction, shared with all the biblical authors, that God is both righteous and sovereign. Because he is righteous, he cannot let sin go unpunished. And because he is sovereign, he will execute that punishment some day. Indeed, philosophers such as Kant have posited the need for some kind of god precisely in order to ensure ultimate justice in what seems so often to be an unjust world.

There is in all of us that longing for “the right to prevail”; witness the number of books and movies that command huge audiences by portraying the ultimate victory of good over evil. When Luke Skywalker and the rest of the “freedom fighters” finally conquer the evil empire in the last of the Star Wars movies, we have a sense of satisfaction and of justice that God himself has planted within us. The psalmist tells us of just this kind of an experience. Asaph begins Psalm 73 by bemoaning the apparent happiness and success of the wicked (vv. 1–12). His reaction is one that many of us can identify with: “Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure” (v. 13a). But then, Asaph tells us, he “entered the sanctuary of God”—he put himself in a place where he could take God’s perspective on things (v. 17). And thus he was led to “understand their final destiny”: disaster and destruction (vv. 18–28). And lest we think that this is a pre-Christian perspective, listen to what Paul in 2 Thessalonians 1:6, 8–10 tells the Christians in Thessalonica, who are suffering a severe persecution:

God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you…. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power on the day when he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed.

Now some of us may wonder how all this emphasis on judgment fits with other biblical teaching. After all, as Christians, we must guard against a sinful desire for retribution that our Lord warns us about. We are to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us” (Matt. 5:44). But we can love so unreservedly precisely because we know that “it is [God’s] to avenge; [he] will repay” (Rom. 12:19). God has told us not to worry about seeking vengeance, about righting every wrong—he will take care of that. Love for the unrighteous and satisfaction in God’s judgment of the unrighteous go hand in hand in Scripture. Peter’s reminder of God’s judgment of the ungodly should therefore give us satisfaction in the ultimate rightness of this world at the same time as it provides the foundation for a sacrificial love of sinners.

Satisfaction with God’s holy and impartial judgment is, however, only one side of the picture. As Peter reminds us in this paragraph, God not only condemns the ungodly; he also delivers the godly. The Flood destroyed the world, but God rescued Noah and his family. God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, but he rescued Lot. So God will always deliver his people from their trials. Not, of course, that he will prevent his people from experiencing trials. The New Testament is realistic about the difficulties and afflictions of all kinds that believers can expect to face in this life (see, e.g., Rom. 5:3–4; James 1:2–4; 1 Peter 1:6; 4:12). The promise Peter makes is rather that God will never allow his people to be overwhelmed by the trial; as Paul promises in 1 Corinthians 10:13:

No temptation [or trial] has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted [or tested] beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted [or tested], he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

This may also be what Jesus teaches us to pray for: “Lead us not into temptation [or trial]” (Matt. 6:13). God brings trials of various kinds; and, like Noah’s family and Lot, these trials may come as the result of God’s own judgment on the ungodly. God does not promise that his people will be unaffected by such trials, but he does promise that he will deliver them “out of” the trial.28 In other words, God promises to provide all that is necessary to see that Christians emerge from trials with their faith intact and their salvation untouched. Will trials bring Christians physical harm? Yes. Emotional stress? Certainly. Economic deprivation? Often. Physical death itself? Possibly. The New Testament furnishes plenty of examples of all of these. But God, in his sovereign wisdom and goodness, always gives his people “a way out” of these trials: the means to endure and to emerge spiritually strong.

We live at a time when many Christians are succumbing to the siren voice of the “health and wealth gospel.” Christians are promised health and wealth, these preachers proclaim.29 All you have to do is “claim it in faith and it’s all yours!” This “gospel” is certainly a “different gospel” (cf. Gal. 1:6–9). Seizing on certain verses, usually out of context, it ignores the plain teaching of Scripture, that “we must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).

This is not the place to detail all the problems with this movement. But I bring it up because most of us have probably absorbed some of its emphases into the way we look at suffering. We think of difficulties as the exception rather than the norm. As a result, trials can bring a crisis of faith in which we question God’s plan, his love for us, or even his existence. Peter’s matter-of-fact way of mentioning the trials of Old Testament saints as well as of his own readers should help us shift our perspective and view trials as an expected part of life. And it is then that the marvelous promise of these verses can come home to us: God will rescue us from them. Nothing, Peter says in his first letter, can do us any ultimate harm (1 Peter 3:13). God assures us that he controls whatever comes into our lives. He measures the trials we experience, being careful not to allow them to overwhelm us and make it impossible to maintain our godliness.

A subsidiary point to this issue, but one worth making in light of Peter’s emphasis on God’s ability to rescue the godly, is the present confinement of the demons. The “angels who sinned,” Peter reminds us, have been “sent to hell” and are now confined in “gloomy dungeons” (2 Peter 2:4). Clearly Peter’s language is metaphorical; we are not to imagine fallen angels in a physical prison somewhere. But the language does make clear that these angels who fell—the demons—are confined by God in their sphere of activity.

Other biblical passages confirm the same point—most picturesquely Job 1–2, where Satan must ask God’s permission to inflict harm on Job. Knowledge that demons are restricted by God in their activities should be great comfort to Christians. This point requires renewed emphasis in our day, for popular Christian authors, most notably Frank Peretti, have drawn our attention to the influence of demons in our world. Surely we need to be awake to the spiritual conflict in which we are engaged. Too many Christians, because they do not understand the spiritual battle we are waging, are woefully unprepared to fight it. But imbalance is always perilously near when we speak of this subject. As J. I. Packer has said,

When we study demonology, we walk on a knife-edge; at our feet all the time are two yawning chasms of error, into which we can all too easily topple. On the one hand, we can take Satan too seriously, as some in the early church and the Middle Ages did. This will cause us to fall out of the peace of God into morbid fears and fancies … and we shall take up a negative view of the Christian life as primarily a course of devil-dodging exercises and anti-Satanic manoeuvres…. On the other hand, we can err by not taking the devil seriously enough…. Unwillingness to take the devil seriously has two bad effects: it fools men, by keeping them from the knowledge of their danger as objects of the devil’s attacks, and it dishonours Christ by robbing the cross of its significance as a conquest of Satan and his hosts (cf. Col. 2:15).30

Some Christians in our day are making this first mistake; they live in unnecessary fear of the influence of demons on their lives, homes, and families. Yes, demons exist, they are present, and they are powerful. But, as Peter reminds us, they have been judged and “put on a chain” by God himself. As Christians indwelt by God’s Spirit, we need never fear them.

Another point in these verses has a striking application to our own context. Peter goes out of his way to emphasize the strength of Lot’s reaction to sin: He was “distressed by the filthy lives of lawless men” (v. 7) and “tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard” (v. 8). I wonder how many Christians are similarly “distressed” and “tormented” by sin. Perhaps, in seeking to excuse ourselves, we might respond that Lot was faced with a lot more sin than we. But I am not sure that the differences are all that great. The Bible makes clear that the most serious sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was homosexuality.

I hardly need point out that homosexuality has, in the space of a few short years, become an accepted lifestyle in the United States. In my morning newspaper on the day I write these words, for instance, I find an article entitled “Oregon Anti-Gay Votes Delayed Until 1998.”31 The impression given is that some bigoted people in Oregon are trying to legalize their hate. But as I read the article, I discover that the initiative these Oregonians are proposing would “define the family concept as ‘limited to one man and one woman in a marriage covenant.’ ” That doesn’t sound all that radical! Yet it speaks volumes that citizens in our day have to pass referenda to make legal what almost everyone in America assumed to be proper just a couple of decades ago. The evidence that we live, indeed, in a “post-Christian” age accumulates rapidly.

And what is the reaction of Christians to the increasing abandonment of Christian moral norms? Many, to be sure, and to their credit, are responding vigorously, with a loving but firm restatement of the biblical perspective on sexuality. But many of us, I fear, are simply accepting what is happening without any undue fuss or concern. We are not “distressed” or “tormented” by what we see around us. Oh, we may be disturbed by these developments and deplore those who choose an unbiblical lifestyle. But few Christians experience the “torment of soul” that Lot felt as he faced the ungodliness of his society.

Television illustrates the problem better than anything else. I do not need to tell you that a great deal more sex, foul language, and gratuitous violence are found on network TV than was the case a decade ago—not to mention cable TV! Many of us have continued to watch the programs as the sex and vulgarity have gradually increased. The result? Many of us now watch things on TV without flinching that would have greatly distressed us only a few years ago. We are no longer shocked at it; we have become insensitive to it.

This muted reaction to ever more rampant sin is fraught with danger not only for society but for the church. As Cardinal Newman, the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic theologian, put it, “Our great security against sin lies in being shocked at it.” When we are shocked at something, we avoid it at all costs. The sight of a person dying of lung cancer is as potent an argument against smoking as we are ever likely to see. So the sight of sin and the ravages it creates should shock us into avoiding it at all costs. But when sin loses its “shock value,” it can too easily become something we tolerate and then fall prey to ourselves.

Why do we not find more Christians “weeping and mourning” for the sin that rages around us? There are two basic reasons. (1) We care too little about the holy standards of God. Lot, for all his faults, was, Peter tells us, a “righteous” man. A righteous person is in right relationship with God—justified by faith, accepted by God on the basis of the work of Christ. But a righteous person is also one who finds the “mind of Christ” becoming more and more dominant in all his or her thinking and acting (see Rom. 12:2). It is as we internalize God’s standards and values that our horror at the rampant disregard of those values grows. We are not shocked at sin because we do not sufficiently share God’s own horror at it.

(2) We care too little about this world we live in. Lot could not have been distressed at the sin of those around him unless he cared about them. Perhaps the failure of many contemporary Christians to be shocked at sin arises from our disengagement from the world around us. Many social commentators have recently been pointing out the failure of so many modern societies to have any real sense of community.32

There is in the West a tradition of the autonomous person, the “rugged individualist,” who is strong and whom modern technology has, if anything, made even stronger. And Christians have often succumbed to this privatistic tendency. We rejoice (rightly) at being made right with God. We seek to live righteous lives ourselves; we bring up our families to follow in the same footsteps; we worship with like-minded people. We hear of startling differences in lifestyle in the media and know of work associates or neighbors who live ungodly lives. But because we are not really involved with them and with the larger world, we are not all that bothered by their sin. Having barricaded ourselves in our Christian enclave, we are relatively untouched by what takes place outside. But such a privatistic faith is a far cry from the engagement with the world that being “salt and light” requires. And the more we are engaged with the world, the more we will be distressed at the sin we find there.