1"False prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you." Peter sets the present danger inside an old pattern. Israel had false prophets, and the church will have false teachers, and the two belong to the same history. The verb for secretly bring in describes something smuggled in alongside the truth, and the heresies arrive in the company of familiar words. The word for Master, *despotes*, is the word for the owner of a household's slaves, and the phrase 1"who bought them" points to redemption. These teachers deny the very one who paid for them. When a teacher's life contradicts the faith, outsiders slander the faith itself.
Then the argument opens in a single long sentence that runs from verse 4 to verse 9. It is built of three if clauses and one then, and the structure carries the point. The first example is angels, and rank and power offered no shelter. The second is the flood, which holds judgment and rescue in the same verse. 5"Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others." Noah was a herald, *kerux*, a man who announced what was coming, one voice in a world of the ungodly. The third is Sodom, which Peter calls 6"an example of what is going to happen." The past is a pledge of the future.
The pivot is Lot. 7"Righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked." Three times in two verses Peter calls Lot righteous. A reader of Genesis knows how complicated Lot's story is, and Peter points to the distress. Lot was grieved over what he saw and heard each day, and Peter counts that torment as the mark of a righteous soul. It is an encouraging word for believers who live among what troubles them. Being sickened by the evil around you is a sign of life. The rescue was also God's doing, since angels took Lot by the hand.
Then the long sentence lands. 9"The Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment." The word knows carries a note of competence. God is expert at this. He has done it with Noah and with Lot, and he can do it again. The verb for rescue, *rhuomai*, is the verb Jesus put in the prayer he taught his disciples, deliver us from evil (Matthew 6:13). Peter uses it twice in these verses.
The verse does two jobs at once. It warns false teachers, who think their destruction is asleep, and it comforts the faithful, who think they have been forgotten. God can judge and save at the same moment, and the same flood that took the ancient world carried Noah's ark.
Whether the threat is false teaching, a culture that grieves you, or a trial that will not end, the God who knows how has not changed. Ask where you are tempted to think that nobody is awake.
Prayer
Father, you know how to rescue the godly from trials and how to keep the unrighteous until the day of judgment. Protect your church from teachers who deny the Master who bought us. Give us the distress of Lot over what grieves you, and deliver us from evil. In Jesus' name, amen.