2 PETER CHAPTER 2 - CONTEMPORARY ALIGNED VERSION (SPIRITCODE)

1. There were false prophets around then just as there will be false teachers around you, cunningly devising their dangerous heresies, denying that Jesus is the Lord who redeemed them, and setting themselves up for sudden and decisive ruin from God.

2. But crowds will flock to them and do the lethal things they teach, causing mockery to be made of the truth.

3. Because of their greed and smooth talk they will use you for their own greedy gain, but the sentence has already been served on them and their judgment sits ready and waiting for them.

4. God did not spare the angels that sinned in the first instance, but set them aside in the darkness of Tartarus, chained up and awaiting final judgment.

5. And he did the same to the ancient wicked civilization in Noahs’ time, wiping them out with the flood, but saving Noah, who preached the message to them of how to live a life that is right before God;

6. And God also turned Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, thereby judging their sinful lifestyle, and setting them forth as an example of others who would follow in the same sort of ungodly living,

7. Meanwhile he delivered the good man Lot, who was continuously being harassed by the depraved behavior of the people who lived all around him.

8. (Because a good man like that trying to live in amongst that decadence, and seeing and hearing the things that were going on, would suffer dreadful torment in his soul every day).

9. God knows how to protect good people from that kind of trial and temptation, and he also knows how to reserve a time and place of trial, sentence and final consequence for evil-doers.

10. He is mostly concerned about the immoral self-centered offenders committed to wickedness, who do not care less about lawfulness and those that govern it. They presume to be above all that, and boast in saying whatever they like about anyone who has any place of authority.

11. On the other hand, angelic beings, who are greater in power and might than any human being, would not dare to ridicule or even criticize a higher authority in the sight of God.

12. But these ignorant bullying brutes are fit for nothing more than to being locked up and left to rot. They rant and argue against matters that are way beyond their foolish comprehension, and they will perish in their own misery.

13. They will get what comes to people who indulge in outrageous depravity in broad daylight. They are an ugly blot on the pleasant landscape of Christian fellowship because of their grave and grievous deception.

14. Their eyes sensuously devour all that they take in, addicted to immorality, and always aiming to seduce vulnerable people. They are well practiced in the art of manipulation. They are a curse to everyone.

15. They know what it is to do the right thing, but they have recklessly thrown all that aside. They have adopted the evil craft of Balaam, the son of Beor, who would sell out anybody, just to get his hands on more money.

16. But he was severely rebuked for this iniquity. A donkey, speaking with a human voice barred him from delivering an insane and spiteful prophecy about God’s people.

17. People like this are like dry empty wells, wispy waterless clouds, destined to an age of imprisonment in a mist of deep darkness.

18. But when they present their smooth and pretentious spiritual sales talk routine they seductively set a trap for the poor person who has only just been rescued out of their own downhill life of error and deception.

19. While they promise to set other people free they themselves are enslaved by their own corruption. When people like this begin to influence you, they can end up running your life.

20. And when people like this, who have come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior, and get set free from a corrupt worldly culture, turn around and get caught up and enslaved again by that same culture, their end is worse than their beginning.

21. It would have been better for them not to have ever known the way of living right before God, than to know and then reject the most wonderful and holy thing God could have given them.

22. But it has happened to them, just as the Proverb says; ‘The dog goes back to taste the vomit it just threw up’, and ‘the pig that just got nicely cleaned up has jumped straight back into the mud.’