Alright, so 2 Peter 2. We're back in there again. We've been in this chapter a couple of weeks at least talking about the false teachers and the way that Peter talks about them. He's going to kind of expand on some stuff as he goes along here. But as you remember, starting at the beginning of this chapter, he's talking about the false prophets, the false teachers. You can recognize them in verse 1, he says, by the way that they teach, that they deny the Master who bought them. They deny various aspects of the person and the work of Jesus Christ. And that's really the gospel itself, right? So they're denying aspects of the gospel. And so the first way to identify a false teacher is to identify if their teaching is false. If their teaching is false, you can therefore conclude that they are false teachers. Make sense? You can also see other things that ought to get our attention that may not necessarily prove them to be false teachers teaching wrong doctrine, but would certainly put them in the same category. And you see in verse 2 and 3 there that they follow their sensuality. They do whatever feels good and they teach that everybody else should do whatever feels good. a distinct sexual immorality and a depravity in that arena that is often made manifest. And we know that in the news, even in our day, about various teachers and what the Hillsong guys have started going through that now. Right? That various of their teachers are doing stuff with their secretaries and youth group girls and all that kind of stuff. And so, this is something that Peter says you can look for and it will often manifest itself. And the third thing in verse 3 is about their greed. About the money. These things are each going to be expanded upon in some way or another in the rest of the chapter. But we can see this stuff here as we're looking at it, that Peter introduces the idea here with these kind of these three ways of recognizing false teachers. Now, last week we ran from verse four through halfway. in verse 10 talking about all these examples that Peter gives that demonstrate two things. And it's summarized in verse 9. God knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment. That's really what we talked about last week in those verses in between there. He gives the examples that God didn't spare the angels who sinned before the flood. He knows how to hold them in gloomy darkness until judgment. He didn't spare the ancient world, but He could preserve Noah. As He destroys the whole world, Noah and seven others in the boat, He can preserve them. And He speaks about Sodom and Gomorrah and how He could condemn them and at the same time rescue righteous lot. And this is the examples that Peter gives us. And therefore, the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, how to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment. And that is true especially, see the first half of verse 10? true especially of those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority. Now, you can make this statement broadly and generally about all believers, not just about false teachers, right? God knows how to keep the godly to preserve them, rescue them from trials, how to save them through to the day of judgment and beyond. God knows how to do that with the righteous. And the unrighteous, the unregenerate, the unsaved, He knows how to keep them for punishment. And this is now going back into speaking about those false teachers, especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passions and despise authority. This is one of those things about false teachers that has everything to do with their teaching. If they despise the authority, they reject the authority. The authority where? The authority found where? In the Word. This is where the authority is. And this is what Peter has been saying since the beginning, pay real close attention to the stuff that I'm writing to you, that I'm telling you. That's Peter telling them and us to pay attention to the scriptures. The false teachers to one degree or another deny the Lord who made them. They deny the work and the person and work of Christ or at least some aspect. And they're doing it because they despise the authority of the Bible. They don't want the Bible to be the final authority. Ultimately, most of them, I would say, want themselves to be the final authority. Right? And so sometimes you see that manifested in centuries-long claims by organizations to hold the keys to the kingdom, like Peter did, right? Like, for example, the Catholic Church. They claim authority higher than Scripture. They would argue to you that it's equal with Scripture, but it's higher because the things that the Pope says that he says are new revelation from God, those are things that sometimes contradict the Scripture. And so principle of revelation, newer revelation, is superior to older revelation. It can replace certain aspects. If there's a dispute between old revelation and new revelation, the new revelation gets the primacy. And so you get this kind of despising of authority in the large organized church things that go over centuries, and you've got it in the individual teachers. who themselves will often claim things like that. Like, God spoke to me and I've got a word for you. Right? They have their experiences and they have their thoughts. Those are supposed to supersede the Scripture in the way that they talk about it. So in v. 10 there, this is what he starts to transition back to. We're going to talk today, at least start in the second half of v. 10, maybe try to get most of our way through v. 16. And this is just a series of statements here that we'll try to group together and consider as Peter puts them together. So 2 Peter 2.10, the second half of that verse, he says, "...bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones." Whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord. But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant will also be destroyed in their destruction. Suffering wrong is the wage for their wrongdoing. They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime their blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions while they feast with you." We'll pause there for a second. He starts talking here about them being bold and willful. How do we see them being bold and willful? They don't tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones. What do you suppose that is? Angels. I think the glorious ones are angels. We see some similar statements. If you keep your finger here and flip to the book of Jude, we'll go back and forth with Jude and Peter. They actually say many of the same things in this context, in this section here. So in Jude 8, he says, "...yet in like manner these people," these false teachers that he's talking about, "...also relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones." What's an example of this blaspheming the glorious ones thing? He says in verse 9, when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, The Lord rebuke you. But these people, these false teachers, blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively. See how that sounds so much similar to what Peter is saying, right? Blaspheming the glorious ones Whereas, even Peter says, 2 Peter 2, 11, whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against the angels, these fallen angels, against the demons before the Lord. I think that Jude and Peter are talking about the same thing, this thing that we don't really We don't really know much about from the scripture, but evidently there was something known about Michael the archangel disputing with the devil over the body of Moses, according to Jude. Now what we do know is what Jude tells us is that the archangel Michael arguably amongst the elect angels, those that are not fallen, would seem from Scripture kind of like the most powerful of the angels. He's called the archangel, the chief angel, the head of the militant angel class, if you would. Is he equal with the devil? We don't really know. But he doesn't presume to blaspheme. He doesn't presume to say anything against the demons who are trying to argue with him about the body of Moses. What's that whole argument about? We don't really know much, if anything, about that. But what we do know is what Peter and Jude are both trying to demonstrate to us, is that false teachers make bold statements about things that they don't know anything about. And this evidently was going on back then as it does in our day. It's one thing to see the demonized person and to pray to the Lord to release them from the demon. It's another thing to think that I have the authority and the power to command the demons to do what I want them to do. Heard anybody do that or heard of anybody doing that? It's one of the evidences of being a false teacher, just outright false teacher. They're rejecting the authority of God who is the only one who has authority over the demonic realm. They can't even identify this. They claim that they can, but the reality is they cannot identify what's a demon and what's not a demon. Because there's no method in the Scripture given to us about how to identify a demon. You can't be certain about that. Jesus was certain about that all over the place, wasn't he? He knew the demons all over the place. I always think about the one example about there was the guy that was deaf and mute, right? He couldn't hear, he couldn't talk. Physical ailments that anybody around would have thought that's some sort of physical thing. Jesus knew it was a demon. Cast the demon out, the guy starts talking. How'd Jesus know that? Jesus is the one who has authority over all that sort of stuff. How do we know that? We don't. When we think we do, Peter tells us that we're forsaking our right place in the order of authorities. V. 11, angels are greater in might and power, but yet even the angels... Angels are greater in might and power than we are. Yet, they don't pronounce a blasphemous judgment against these demons. They don't presume to be the judge or the commander of the other angels. So why would we do that? Should we do that? No, we shouldn't do that. in order to leave you, is it Zechariah 3? If you guys want to see that thing about Moses and the body and the archangel, Paul says it's in Zechariah 3 somewhere? 2? 3? 3, 1, and 2. Okay. Phil? I'm just curious, do you guys believe in this time that there's people that are It does seem like at that time period at least they had some recognition. Well, I think that there's times when we can have a pretty good suspicion about it. like the guy with his son that he throws himself into the fire and stuff like that doesn't seem to have a physical ailment component to it. And although you could assume him to have epilepsy, but. then they thought much more. We in our modern minds with our modern medicine tend to think that things that possibly are demonic aren't because we got a therapeutic answer to everything, right? Everything from mental illness to epilepsy to all the rest. And so we as modern people tend to think less about the supernatural and more about the temporal. But, yeah, they did seem to have some ability to recognize something. Jesus never really told any of them, no, you got it wrong, it's not a demon. So, man, in our day, and maybe I've seen this a few times, and maybe some of you guys have seen things that, like, you're pretty sure that this person's demonized by their action, by their words, the things they're saying, all kinds of different things about it. may be able to recognize that, but yet, nonetheless, there's no instructions in the Scripture about how to recognize it. So even if we could take a guess about it, what are we supposed to do about it? Yeah, well, pray over the person. Pray that the Lord would do something. Ask the Lord to cast out the demon like He did in the past, if it's a demon at all. Those kinds of things I think are real. I think they're biblical. Peter goes to this that in the context of this whole thing, the guys who are claiming that they have some authority over the demon world to not only recognize all this stuff without any sort of error, but to command it, there's where the real problem is. They reject the authority of God, who is the only one who has authority over the angels, and presume to somehow take authority over angels, which is too much. It's too much. It's beyond the Scripture. Byron? Byron? Right. Right. Yeah. and dignitaries. These supernatural forces. But I guess cultural cognizance is kind of the goal and everything. Timothy. Yeah, yeah. Being a combination of a more religious and at the same time a more superstitious, non-scientific minded sort of people, they definitely notice and think about and talk about things in a way different than we would. in our day. So, I don't know that I've ever heard an unbeliever accuse a preacher of the Gospel of being possessed by demons. But that's regularly what they accuse Jesus of then. Just the mindset of the culture is just so much different. Right. There's lots of other accusations that come in our day, but I don't think I've ever heard that one. So it is a demonstration of just a different mindset that they had for sure. Yeah, Ivan? Well, I was just going to say as far as identifying demons, could you look at it like this? Either God is your Father, or the devil is your Father, right? You just said that. Some people have a child with God, and you have a child with Satan. So if you're a child with Satan, you are demon possessed, Yeah, even that I couldn't tell you where the line is, right? But you're right. They're definitely of their Father the Devil if they're not of Christ. There's only two choices. You've got God your Father or the Devil your Father. The Devil your Father, I think that you're at least You're at least influenced by demonic forces, if not every unbeliever possessed by one or more demons, it's hard to say. But definitely for sure there's this influence that, you know, you could identify that about just about anything, you know. any unbeliever, because the Scripture is so clear about that. Jesus is so clear about the connections there. So, kind of in our day, what we see and hear in this thing that I think Peter is telling us is evidence of false teachers is those that claim that they can, you know, cast out a demon, they can control the demons, they can command the demons. They even do this, like, it's one thing to be able to identify or think that you can identify the demon when the person's acting like the guy possessed by a legion of demons. Even in our day, we'd probably take a good guess about that. He speaks with a voice that sounds like he claims to be demons. He's got multiple demons in him. He can break the chains. He's all crazy, right? Like there's a lot of things there. Well, that's kind of a lot of evidence. Maybe even we would be able to recognize that. But you hear this especially amongst the prosperity teachers, that they can identify different demons like the demon of alcoholism. The demon of drug abuse, right? The demon of whatever thing that's actually sin that they don't want to tell you that you're a sinner and you need to take responsibility for it and you need to repent of it. They blame it on some new name demon that they invented and they call it a demon. And then they claim that if you give them enough money, you believe in them personally, they themselves can remove that demon from you. I command the demon of sexual immorality and pornography to leave our building. You know, they do that kind of stuff. Who's that? I don't know, but is he one of those guys? Of course. Of course, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that kind of stuff. That's not brand new, but in the history of all things, it's a little bit new. But like the preachers are, this is one of those ways you get to listen. Is this false teacher like making up a bunch of demons and claiming that he has authority and he's doing all this, right? Does he look like this? Jude and Peter are both warning us about this thing. Virginia? Yeah, that. Like the spirit of anger, the spirit of depression, the spirit of anxiety, the spirit of whatever thing. Right. They misidentify what should be known as sin and call it some spirit of something. Ultimately, it makes it to where you're not responsible for what you're doing. It's some other spiritual outsider, outside force. I think whether they're doing this knowingly or not knowingly, what it creates is a situation where you can't identify that spirit of whatever and you can't get rid of it, you need me to get rid of it for you. See how they're despising the authority of the Scripture? They're denying the work of Christ in regeneration where you get a new heart and God changes you from the inside out so that you lose your lack of self-control and your outbursts of anger. See, they're denying all of that and instead claiming something like, I have the special ability to identify that you have the spirit of anger and I have the power to control that spirit. Now, they don't say it with all of the calmness and seeming logic of what I just said. You know, they got the music going and they dance around on stage and they're yelling and screaming and everybody's excited about it. The mood music and the smoke machine and everything helps. with you believing those suggestions. But that's sort of the modern thing. Peter and Jude both talk about this, about them, that these false teachers, you know, they claim to have some sort of power in this way. In verse 12, 2 Peter 2.12, he says, these like irrational animals, Speaking about the false teachers again. "...irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant, will also be destroyed in their destruction." What a list of descriptions, right? The guy who is up there ranting and railing and all about this stuff, and you've got a demon, and you've got a demon, and you've got a demon, like as if it's Oprah's book club or something. Everybody's got a demon. They're going on and on, and they're pumped up, and people are excited, and everything's set. The stage is set. Everything's just right. What are they really? The reality is that they're like irrational animals. They're just kind of saying whatever happens to come out of their mouth, whatever they feel like the crowd wants to hear, whatever they can get a reaction from, right? Jude says something similar about them. in Jude 10. These people blaspheme all that they do not understand and they're destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively. They think that they know things. They think that they're identifying this stuff, which is coming out of their own imagination. And like animals, they're just acting on instinct. That's in contrast to them learning the truth and teaching the gospel. That's nothing that happens by instinct, right? Nobody comes into this world knowing the gospel. That's nothing. It's something that you've got to learn. It's something that you have to have discipline to develop into your teaching. It's something you have to spend time working on. Not like just some animal going up there and just barking whatever that makes everybody in the crowd go, yay. Evidently, this has been going on for a couple of thousand years. Maybe not with smoke machines and laser light shows and Led Zeppelin in the background, Nonetheless, Peter and Jude both know about it. And how similar it sounds, doesn't it? To what I'm describing, maybe? How similar it sounds to the realities of what's going on around us. This is bad stuff. And he says it, Peter says it, Jude says it, these ones who are ignorant will be destroyed in their destruction. They're going to be destroyed by all that they thought that they knew. They're gonna be destroyed by this. Some of them are gonna be found out to be fraud. Some of them are gonna be exposed as false teachers. Some of them are gonna lose everything because of that. Some of them are gonna be exposed as false teachers and people, because they are hearing what their ears wanna hear, they're being tickled with their ears and they're being told what they wanna hear, will continue to go and give money and not stop, which is unbelievable, but that's how it is with the unregenerate. Yeah. And people, those characterized, they can't see that, that we have a holy spirit within us. We don't have a spirit of anxiety, a spirit of depression, a spirit of... That was an old nature of these things. Yeah, it's an interesting thing, isn't it? It's an interesting thing that, yeah, they don't really, they don't really rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to make the change, despite the fact that they're supposedly much more Spirit, Spirit-inclined thinking than we would, they think we have. But yet they don't turn to the Lord to deal with those things and admit what the Scripture says they are, which is sin, because they're commanded differently. Yeah, they want to do something different. So all of that stuff. I think most of us would walk into something like that and go, Yeah, there's something wrong here, I hope. Phil? It's kind of complicated because there are people who do have mental issues that can be caused by certain imbalances and whatnot. And also we do know, we are told in the Bible how the devil's wounds are. He's the voice. And so it gets kind of complicated at times, and I do think that the Holy Spirit is going to help me understand sin and judgment and righteousness. If I'm listening to Him, He'll correct me when I'm sinful, but that may not mean I don't have depression. That doesn't mean that those things happen always because of the devil. We know that God is involved in all this stuff. But I think sometimes we are listening to the wrong voice. And we need to recognize that and know that's not from God. That's not helpful. I even need to repent if I'm listening to it. and your voice is very guiding me out of this. I just have to wait for it. But it's okay for me to say, I'm in despair. I don't know what to do. Because that's the way this is all about, right? So I think we're really talking more about false teaching. It's not being recognized as teaching. Timothy Smith Yeah, in the context here of 2 Peter, it's all about the false teachers. How do you identify the false teachers? One of these things is that they're bringing in destructive heresies. One of those is that they somehow have command over the spiritual realm. which is simply not true. And so, yeah, there's lots of things to be said about this, about, you know, some things that they want to claim to be demonic or something. They're, well, taking the preponderance of the evidence in the Bible, I think we could say safely the majority of them are related to sin. However, not all of them are. There are times when it's understandable why somebody would be sad. depressed when i want to get out of bed tomorrow but you know there's things that they could be said about that that are helpful biblical but the thing that's not helpful in biblical is you got the spirit of depression and you need to pay me some money so i will cast the demon out of you That's definitely what Peter's talking about. And these who are teaching these kinds of things and claiming this kind of stuff are the ones that are these irrational animals. They're just saying whatever comes to their mind first and unknowingly or perhaps knowingly blaspheming, according to verse 12, about matters of which they're ignorant. How do we know they're ignorant? Because everybody's ignorant. That's how we know they're ignorant. The Bible gives us no way. to 100% with 100% certainty know what we're doing as we dabble in the spiritual realm that we can't see, that we have no experience in, that we didn't come from, right? And so we know that they're ignorant because everybody's ignorant. They're gonna be destroyed in their destruction. Verse 13 says, they'll suffer wrong as the wage for their wrongdoing. It's kind of the continuation of that same thought. God knows how to hold them back for judgment. Don't be mistaken. They will one day be called before God to give an answer for, why did you claim all this authority that I never gave you? See, false prophet, right? You said you spoke for me and you didn't. False teacher. You said you had authority and you had wisdom and knowledge and you didn't. You were just making stuff up. I mean, what a day to think to stand before the Lord. That by itself is enough to make me not want to stand up here and talk to y'all at all, ever. That's the kind of judgment that's going to come. One day they're going to suffer wrong as the wage for their wrongdoing. In other words, they're going to suffer the punishment. Now, going on in verse 13, they count it pleasure to revel in the daytime. Their blots and blemishes, reveling in their deception while they feast with you." What does this sound like? What do you think this means? It could be sexual sin. Yes. Some of it could be sexual sin. There's that kind of depravity. There's other stuff they're even doing among you. They're reveling at daytime. They're out in the open. They're demonstrating it, right? Here's how Jude writes about it in verse 12. He says, They are hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves. The love feast wasn't, in this context, most commentators say that the love feast is not some sort of orgiastic, sort of pagan, ritualistic thing that was going on with the Gentiles at the temples in the various Greek cities. Not that. This was the feast, even the Lord's Supper gathering, the fellowship meal, the time when the Christians who loved one another got together and demonstrated their love for one another by feasting together. This was a good thing. The churches were known for this. They liked spending time together. Weird. Without all the sexual craziness that went on in the rest of the world at the time about these kinds of things. So these guys, these false teachers count it pleasure to revel in the daytime. They're they're blots and blemishes there. They're there. They are. Like, they're wrong. They're black spots. They don't fit in. They're not righteous. They bring some level of unrighteousness to these things, according to 2 Peter verse 13. They're blots and blemishes reveling in the deception while they feast with you. They're feasting with these guys who are the Christians, the love feasts as Jude calls it. They're there. They're participating. They're acting like they're one of you. But they're really among you as like sheep, wolves dressed up as sheep, right? They're shepherds feeding themselves. If you had a wolf, why would a wolf, if he were smart enough, dress up like a sheep to go in amongst the sheep? Why does he do that, if he did that? So that he would blend in with the sheep so that he could Eat them, right? Shepherds feeding themselves. In what kind of manner? They're devouring the sheep. They're devouring the people. By their bad teaching, their bad practice, their bad lives, they're drawing others to join them. Now, this has grown very popular in our day. And I'm just trying to use modern examples of this sort of thing, right? Skin tight jeans. Cool guy hair. Relevant story topics. There's all kinds of preachers doing this kind of stuff, right? They're using the music. They're using the look. All of it. They're trying to be the popular preacher guy. You guys remember Mark Driscoll? Remember him? He was a reformed pastor of a church in Seattle, a group of churches. He's a founder. They started the Acts 29 Missionary Network, and there's churches still today that were planted through that network. We know some guys in town who started their church as part of that network. And he was actually a pretty decent teacher, wrote some books, all kinds of different stuff. But he had this way of like, wearing the tight shirt thing, and then the way he talked. He would cuss a lot. He was known for swearing in his sermons. He was kind of edgy. The whole thing, the whole Seattle grunge scene came to life in Mark Driscoll and this church. Eventually, some different stuff got him in trouble about plagiarizing some stuff and other things, but he wanted to be edgy. And he got a lot of attention from that. National attention. You've got to imagine where we are in Denver, as hard as it is to get people to come to church here. If I used a little bit rougher language, and sometimes the language is pretty rough, but if I actually went on with swearing and talked about how hot my wife was and all kinds of stuff like he was doing, and we put in a cool coffee bar and we had a building with lots of stainless steel in it, We played some grungy sounding music instead of the folksy stuff that Chris likes. I mean, that's what's going on. What is Peter describing? I think Peter's describing this. They're bold, they're brazen, they count it pleasure to revel in the daytime. They come in amongst you and they sort of bring an element of the world into the fellowship. not just like they come from the world where all of us do come, but like they want to encourage the pursuit of some aspects of the world. You see the difference? I think that's got to be what Peter's talking about. And he's writing this to these Jews who are spread out all over the place, but you've got these guys coming into the churches, and they're trying to push themselves, and they're trying to draw attention to themselves by being a little bit on edge, talking a little bit more about grace and a little bit less about the law. Not that we don't do that, but you see, they're not talking about how we should be. They're talking about how we can be. They're not talking about what should we do to glorify the Lord as much as they're talking about what can we do to push the envelope? How much can we get away with? That's what they're doing. Yeah. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. They're out there looking for the unstable. Right. Yeah, it all flows in there. That's exactly what Peter's talking about. Yeah, self-indulgent lust machines. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And the actual real false teachers are not only false teachers. Most of them are false converts. They're not believers there. And so they really have nothing other than the sinful nature. This is basically what he's saying. Yeah. Right. And I'll put things on a continuum. I mentioned Mark Driscoll. I don't necessarily think that most have great evidence to say that he's not a believer. His teaching wasn't as false as some other things could be. So I don't know about him. So there's a continuum about this. Some guys adopt some of these things and they look somewhat like false teachers, but they might not be. But then again, they might be. I don't want to be in the gray area. where there's this uncertainty. There's a few things that make me think that there's some suspicious things about this guy. Right. That's one of those things. Right. Yeah. And unfortunately, most of that I'm not sure that you'll be able to see. outwardly publicly, but as you start to examine a guy's life, you might be able to figure some of this out. One of the biggest sins is, he keeps talking about this, you have this unmistakable sign, evidence, when a guy falls into sexual sin, and it becomes public, everybody knows about it, but that's real clear, and he talks about that, that clearly here. But there's also this other stuff that they're often so full of pride and arrogance. You see that in the way that they're willing to claim that they have some authority over the demon realm. Right? What is that? That's pride and arrogance. So this is another kind of sin that can be seen and becomes obvious. But yeah, the sexual immorality, this eyes, verse 14, eyes full of adultery, Yeah. Yeah. It is, yeah. The extravagant lifestyle of many false teachers is another very big thing. And we're drawn to it, you're right, because we kind of want that. We think that that represents success. We want to be a part of it. We want a piece of it. It appeals to our flesh too. And so if we're not cautious about that, we can be drawn into those things. Right. It's interesting to me that that that Peter really has to talk to the church in a lot of detail. We have to discuss these things because by by almost by new nature, Christians who like to give lots of grace can be easily drawn into the false thing. In some ways, it's not the worst thing ever, but we are supposed to be innocent as doves and wise as serpents, foxes. We're supposed to be wise and we're supposed to believe people but still recognize that there's sin in the world. The funny thing is that the world itself recognizes its own false teachers. You notice this? Speaking about the extravagant lifestyle. You guys know this, in the last couple weeks, Breonna Taylor's mom had a press release thing. She's the cop that got killed in her own apartment. What's that? Yeah, she had the boyfriend that was dealing drugs and the cops came in and busted and shot, shot and killed her by accident. But she got shot, you know, and there was a bunch of riots from all of that. And the BLM guys came out and BLM, you know, Breonna Taylor and all that sort of stuff. She's one of the names on the banners that they carry and stuff like that. Breonna Taylor's mom comes out and goes, you know what? After the after the founding lady of BLM bought that three or four million dollar house in upstate New York, she goes, you know what? These guys are just a bunch of frauds. So these guys are a bunch of frauds. They claim to be helping out people who are victimized by the white supremacy and all that sort of stuff. And we haven't heard word one from them. We haven't seen a thin dime. That lady's out there buying a house. Like, the world can recognize hypocrisy in their leaders, and we ought to be able to recognize the hypocrisy in our leaders, too. Incidentally, they're the same kind of evidences, right? How comfortable should we be in you know, being really outspokenly supportive of a man running for president who's been sexually immoral, whether it's Bill Clinton or Donald Trump, just to throw them both in the same basket, right? So are we Christians first or are we something else first? And so this sort of stuff, Peter brings all of this up, right? Byron was talking there about verse 14. These false teachers have eyes full of adultery. They're looking for the opportunity to commit adultery. I mean, just outrightly, straightforwardly. Some of them get caught, I think, in the age of the Internet and stuff. They get caught at a more regular pace than they used to. This has always been the case. They're just insatiable for sin. They're enticing, unsteady souls. This is what they're looking for. They're hunting. That's what they're there for. Like what? Like sheep in wolves' clothing. They're looking for the weak one. They're looking for the one who's easily duped. They're looking for the trusting one. They're like the guys who go and find the widows and try to figure out how to take all their money from them. It's all the same group of people. They have hearts trained in greed. They are accursed children. They're like kids who have no choice but to just, like they just have no self-control other than enough control to sometimes hide a lot of it. But this is what they're trying to do. This is their purpose. Can we always identify what somebody's purpose is? Not always. We can judge the fruit, but we can't always guess about the motive. But when the fruit turns really bad with a combination of bad teaching, wrong doctrine, claiming authority that they don't have, pride and arrogance, Right? The following of the sensuality and then the greed when you got all of that. We really need to examine what's going on. We really need to understand these things if we're going to listen to or follow any of these guys. They have, according to verse 15, forsaken the right way. They've gone astray. They've followed the way of Balaam, the son of Baor, who loved gain from wrongdoing but was rebuked for his own transgression. A speechless donkey spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet's madness. Anybody know this story about Balaam? Anybody remember what this was about? Yeah, this is in Numbers chapter 22, 23, 24 is where we read the bulk of the story. But this is the Midianite king. I think he's the king of Moab, sorry. Moabite king Balak, who knew of Balaam, who was a prophet for hire. He sent for him and wanted him to come and curse Israel. Balaam said, I can't curse Israel unless God tells me to curse Israel. Well, the guy comes two or three times and Balaam continues to tell him no. But you get every indication from the story that Balaam's just trying to get Balak to offer him more money. He wants money. That's his ultimate purpose. He finally decides to go. God finally says that he can go. Interesting, he's a real prophet. God speaks to him. Isn't that funny? God's actually speaking to him, you read in Numbers 22. It says that God came to Balaam at night and said to him, if the men have come to call you, rise and go with them, but only do what I tell you. Only do what I tell you. So Balaam got up the next morning and started to head off to Balak. And was he going to do what God told him to do? No. How do we know that? because as he was going along the way, the angel of the Lord blocked the pathway and the donkey that he was with saw the angel, but Balaam couldn't see the angel and the donkey wouldn't move. He beats the donkey. Move, you dumb donkey, right? He wouldn't move. He wouldn't move. He finally just sits down. And then the Lord lets the donkey talk to Balaam, restraining his madness. What are you doing to me? I'm your good donkey. I've always gone, you know, where you want me to go. And why are you hitting me? And then the angel appeared to Balaam. He seems to have repented. But he goes, and he wants to try to curse Israel the way that Balak wants him to, but he can't. God kept him from doing that. However, we read in Deuteronomy 23, and this will just be real quick here, Deuteronomy 23, verses 4 and 5, this little tidbit of commentary, They hired against you Balaam the son of Baor from Pethor of Mesopotamia to curse you. But the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam. Instead, the Lord your God turned the curse into a blessing for you because the Lord your God loved you. You see, they hired Balaam and Balaam wanted to do that. It was God who kept him from cursing Israel. It's a weird story and there's a lot of things that could be discussed about that. It's described and discussed later in the Old Testament scriptures as well about different things. But Peter brings it up for this one purpose. Balaam was about the money. And Balak, the king of Moab, knew it. That's why he tried to hire Balaam to come as a prophet and to curse Israel. But God prevented him from doing it. See, the only reason why he didn't do it, according to verse 16, was that he was rebuked for his own transgression. A speechless donkey spoke with human voice and restrained that prophet's madness. His madness was that he was a prophet who thought that he could get away with selling false prophecy to a king who wanted to pay to hear what he wanted to hear. Tell me how much like the false teacher that is. You got a bunch of people who want to pay a guy to tell them what they want to hear, and he wants to go tell them what they want to hear so that they'll pay him and pay him handsomely in many cases. That's all about the false prophet. You see, they're all about this. The money goes hand in hand with the adulterous eyes and the wrong attitude and the blaspheming of authority and the teaching of wrong doctrine. It all goes together. Peter just continues to hammer on those things to try to help us to identify those either out there or more importantly, those who might come in among us who would look to do those very things. I think another thing that's really interesting about that story is as you read through it with Brown, the prophet guy, it's hard to tell if he's not a prophet of God. If he talks how he talks, like he talks to the king, I can't say anything or anyone. The Lord, help the Lord, tells me, but then it says also in the Old Testament that they fought a war before they got into Canaan with, I think it was the Midianites, whatever, Moses, the king, Balaam, Moses. And they killed that king, and they also killed Balaam's son of Beor. He was involved in a war there, and what they did was they enticed them into Yeah, he made up the other plan with the king. He speaks the name of Jesus about people, and it gives you that creeps. Because what Jesus is talking about, that's the whole thing that he says. It's a different Jesus, a different spirit, a different gospel. I think the reason these people get called away is because they're ignorant. They have not had good teaching, and they have poor. It's just like we do. And so they're really easy to fool. The guy looks sincere. Yeah, there's a lot that should be obviously wrong. Right. It is. It is a bit creepy. And there's different examples like that. Yeah. Like the best the biggest asset I think most of these false teachers have is confidence. So everybody loves somebody who's confident. Even if I don't know what you're talking about, I'm sort of drawn to confidence. I can gain confidence from your confidence. And so it's like the best asset these guys have. They've got charismatic personalities, all these different things. And I think that was going on in that day. And ultimately Peter's been walking us through step by step about this stuff, different examples, different ways of saying it, but it all comes back to the same stuff. All these false teachers are operating in the flesh. Here's how we should know it, and we need to be able to recognize them. I hate to invite this sort of thing, but it's not just that we ought to be able to recognize Todd White on the internet clips and see the weird stuff that he's up to. You guys ought to put me against this. Anybody else who steps up here, too. And at some point, anybody who walks in here and presumes that they're some sort of a teacher of anything, right? Anybody who wants to persuade you of one thing or another. We've had people like that come and go through, maybe not these doors in particular, but symbolically through these doors, right? So we've got to be aware of all of that stuff. And so, yeah, that's where we'll stop for today, verse 16, and start with 17 next week a little bit, and probably think about maybe finishing up the chapter. But I think that a few weeks on this stuff isn't a bad thing. This is a good third of Peter's letter here, the stuff that he really wanted them to know. So let's pray. Lord, I thank you here this morning for gathering us, for giving us a place to meet again, chairs to sit in and... a pleasant environment to hear your word, Lord. I thank you for teaching us. I thank you for giving Peter all of this to write down and giving it to us so that we can look at it and discuss it and study it, Lord. I pray that we would be wise enough to recognize the false teachers, even if they were among us, Lord, but certainly not to be drawn away into following them from where we are now, Lord. I pray that you would protect us in these things, that we might even be able to have opportunity, perhaps, with others that we know that are trapped in these things, that are drawn into them, to be able to take them to the scripture and ask them the question if their thing doesn't look more like this than it should. Lord, I thank You for giving us these ideas, these evidences of false teachers and false prophets. Protect us, Lord, from being false teachers or believing in any following them. Let's pray that we would glorify You in the way that You've told us to this morning. And thank You again for our time in Your Word. In Jesus' name, Amen.