Untitled Sermon

1. The genuine article

2 Peter 1:1–2

Fakes are a nuisance. Fake artists make fools of collectors, fake financiers embezzle millions at the expense of honest investors, fake scientists inflate their own reputations by riding on the back of other people’s hard research. In some other areas of life, though, fakes are not merely a nuisance but actually pose a serious threat. There is, for example, the potential damage caused by religious fakes. The obvious ones, those who are in it just for the money or the prestige, can be avoided without too much difficulty. Harder to uncover, but much more destructive in the end, are the well-meaning but muddled individuals who pass on a mixture of easy platitudes, biblical-sounding phrases and a view of life that is twisted out of any recognizable biblical shape. Such Christian con-men are the reason Peter wrote this letter. They not only prey on people’s wallets or good nature; ultimately they can wreck our eternal destiny, since a false gospel tells lies about God.

Fakes lie at the heart of Peter’s concern in this letter. He mentions false prophets and false teachers (2:1). They turn out to be false disciples (2:15), teaching stories they have made up (2:3). It is an alarming prospect, and we might be tempted to think that these words apply to darker days than our own. Peter is insistent, though, that ‘there will be false teachers among you’ (2:1), and he is writing this letter to ‘stimulate you to wholesome thinking’ (3:1). He is alerting his readers to the ever-present danger of being fooled by, or even becoming, Christian fakes. His urgency is caused by the nearness of his own death (1:13–15), which will mean an inevitable severing of one more link in the chain that bound the early church to the authentic message that Jesus taught. Peter’s reason for writing is to enshrine that teaching decisively, so that after his death no group or faction can claim that he was the originator of their perverted gospel.

Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,

To those who through the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours:

2 Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

These first two verses follow the standard opening to an ancient letter, but they also begin to crystallize Peter’s concern. He wants us to ensure that the Christianity which we have received, believed, lived and passed on to others is the genuine article and not a substitute. Peter isolates four areas where we should check what we believe against what he believes: where our gospel came from; whether it is as good as the original; what difference it makes in real life; and the doctrine it teaches. In other words, we need first to check our gospel’s origin, then its quality, thirdly its results, and fourthly its content.

1. The genuine apostle: the gospel’s origin (1:1a)

Peter presents himself in the normal way at the start of the letter, and explains his credentials. From its first word, this letter claims to be the authentic writing of an apostolic eye-witness of Jesus’ life, teaching, death and resurrection. Jesus had called Simon (literally ‘Simeon’) among his first disciples,3 and made this rough-hewn individualistic fisherman into someone he could use as a leader, a ‘fisher of men’ who would ‘feed my sheep’. Simon took a long time to learn, and the gospels stare unblinkingly at his frequent misunderstandings of Jesus. But he still made sure that Mark wrote it all down to encourage every generation of slow-learning disciples.5

Jesus renamed him Peter, ‘the rock’, because he had acknowledged that Jesus was ‘the Christ, the Son of the living God’. Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ Quite clearly, Peter was going to be significant in the history and authority of the church. He dominates the first half of Acts as strongly as Paul dominates the second, and he proved as vital to the racial spread of the gospel as Paul was to its geographical spread.7 Peter took the initiative to include Samaritans and Gentiles as Christians, and although he never made those decisions alone, it is clear that his fellow apostles knew that Jesus had given him this door-opening responsibility. Significantly, once Gentiles believed and the Council of Jerusalem decided that it was possible to be a Christian without becoming a Jew, Peter had made his greatest speech and does not appear again in the book of Acts. He had discharged his role.

Simon Peter emerges as a man of enormous courage and tenacity, strengths he would need as he was repeatedly beaten and imprisoned for his faith. He left the church in Jerusalem under James’s leadership so that he could evangelize in Corinth, Pontus-Bythinia and, less happily, Antioch. By the time of 1 Peter he is in ‘Babylon’,9 meaning the imperial capital Rome. The New Testament does not record his further work and death, but later Christian writers touch on it. Irenaeus says that Paul and Peter founded the church in Rome together, although this is unlikely since Paul wrote to the church in Rome which he said he had not visited, and since Acts records Paul’s first arrival in Rome to be greeted by existing Christians.11 The early church historian Eusebius simply states that Paul and Peter cooperated in this period. There is reasonable certainty that he was martyred with Paul under the Emperor Nero. The Roman historian Tacitus records Nero’s ghastly pleasures. ‘Derision accompanied [the Christians’] end: they were covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and, when daylight failed, were burned to serve as lamps by night.’13 Babylon indeed. Our letter was written on the eve of Peter’s death, ‘because I know I will soon put [my body] aside, as our Lord Jesus has made clear to me. And I will make every effort to see that after my departure you will be able to remember these things’ (1:14–15).

Peter describes himself in two ways which define his position between God and the church: he is a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ.

a. Simon Peter the servant

In one sense, to describe himself as Jesus Christ’s servant simply says that he is a willing disciple, as all Christians should be. Jesus has said that on the last day our only true self-description will be as ‘unworthy servants’, because our best still falls below God’s perfect requirement.

Yet Peter’s focus here is less on his humility than on his God-given authority. In the Old Testament it was seen as a position of great honour to be owned by God as his slave, and Israel rightly took enormous pride in being called the servant of God. So seriously did they take it that one Israelite could not sell another Israelite into slavery; both were already slaves, God’s slaves.17 Israel’s leaders, judges, kings and prophets were all called God’s servants because they did his will and must therefore be obeyed; and even a pagan king, Nebuchadnezzar, could be called God’s servant because he helped the Jews to return from exile.19 Over the decades, though, Israel’s leaders increasingly fell short of the ideal, and prophets began to speak of the one who would come in the future and be God’s perfect Servant.

When Peter calls himself a servant … of Jesus Christ, he is claiming as special a role within the church as Isaiah, Jeremiah and even David had within Israel. Nor is Peter alone, for Paul and Timothy, James, John and Jude claimed the same title with the same power. When Peter claims to be the servant of Jesus Christ, we must pay attention to his message.

b. Simon Peter the apostle

Secondly, Peter calls himself an apostle of Jesus Christ. Again, this is a word with a wide range of meanings. The Greek word apostolos means a messenger commissioned to a task by a particular person. Uniquely, Jesus Christ is ‘the apostle … we confess’, because he was sent (literally, ‘apostled’)23 by God to save us. In a much broader sense, Barnabas, Silas, Titus and Timothy are apostles, and Andronicus and Junias are ‘outstanding among the apostles’,25 who are ‘those itinerant missionaries who were recognized by the churches as constituting a distinct group among the participants in the work of spreading the gospel’. In that loose sense there are still ‘apostles’, or ‘sent Christians’, today, working as evangelists, missionaries and church-planters.

Normally in the New Testament, ‘apostle’ has a third meaning, referring only to a precise group of twelve among Jesus’ followers, who had been commissioned by Jesus as his representatives. When the decision was made to replace Judas, they looked for ‘one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.’28 To be called an apostle, it was not enough merely to have seen the risen Jesus, for Paul mentions five hundred people in that category but does not call them apostles. Paul himself could claim exceptional entrance only because of his personal commissioning by the risen Jesus on the Damascus road.30 It was a group to which many people wanted to belong because of the prestige of being a named and commissioned delegate of the Lord Jesus.

That unique group and its teaching are irreplaceable and authoritative, and they stand in the grand line of God’s delegates and spokesmen. In the Old Testament there are five great commissioning scenes where God’s agents are ‘sent’ to his people. God said to Moses, ‘I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.’ He said to Gideon, ‘Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?’ He asked Isaiah, ‘ “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!” ’ He commanded Jeremiah, ‘You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you.’ He warned Ezekiel, ‘Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me.’ In that sense (God’s directly commissioned delegates), God’s apostles are an exclusive group. It is not surprising to find that the New Testament linked apostles and prophets in unique authority, the church being ‘built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets’.33

Peter’s self-description as an apostle of Jesus Christ is thus a second high claim. At a time when there were calls to replace, supplement or question the apostolic gospel, he writes as a direct source of that gospel, and he will use his letter to call the Christians back to it. He is claiming to be the New Testament equivalent of an Old Testament prophet. We face the same pressures today as Peter’s readers did then. The gospel is seen by some as inadequate to meet the needs of modern men and women, and as requiring radical redrafting to be relevant. It will be important to acknowledge, along with Peter’s first readers, that apostles in his tightly defined sense do not exist today, and to draw a sharp line between apostolic authority and our submission to that authority. We may call Christian leaders today ‘apostolic’ if they teach the message the apostles taught, but it is misleading to call them ‘apostles’. Neither the questions of a secular society nor supposed new revelations from God permit us to alter the content of Peter’s apostolic message.

c. Simon Peter the servant and apostle of Jesus Christ

When Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, he said, ‘I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger (apostolos) greater than the one who sent him.’ The reason for Peter’s importance and authority today lies not in his intellect or personality, but in the one who sent Peter to us as an apostle, the one of whom he is now a servant, Jesus Christ.

2. The genuine Christian: the gospel’s quality (1:1b)

Peter and his fellow apostles, who actually knew and heard Jesus, undoubtedly benefited from that experience, and it was wonderful that those who had actually crucified Jesus could hear from Peter that they could be forgiven. We, however, live two thousand years from those events, and many people question their relevance. Distance seems to make the message less significant. Even Peter’s first readers felt this, for he writes to reassure them that despite their remoteness from the gospel events, they (and we) are as privileged as the apostles. Peter does not identify his readers in either letter, and their open address to all Christians makes them timelessly relevant. This has led to their common title, ‘catholic epistles’.

a. You have received a faith …

How does someone become a Christian? One person might say, ‘Because I believe,’ and another, ‘Because God chose me.’ According to Peter, both ways of stating it are correct. On the one hand, we believe. It is a fundamental definition of a Christian that he or she is a ‘believe-er’; that he or she ‘has faith’ (the two words have the same root in the Greek). By ‘faith’ here, Peter could mean the objective facts of ‘the faith’, but it is more likely that he means to stress the subjective ‘faith’ in Jesus Christ that is the inward reality of every live Christian. But Peter also knows that it is not our feeble faith that holds us close to God. It is God who does all the holding, and that is the reality behind the word received. The Greek word lanchanō comes from politics, and was used of the appointment of government officials, ‘of persons who have a post assigned to them by lot’. Here it implies that the fact that any Christian believes at all is evidence of ‘the sheer fairness’39 of God. Christians who survive a lifetime of trouble are not evidence of their own resilience and toughness; rather, they see increasingly clearly that any progress has been God’s doing, and not their own.

b. … as precious as ours …

Marvellously, Peter says that this faith was the same experience that the first Christians had, and that everything they found precious in the gospel these Christians find as precious too. The superficial differences are vast. Above all, he writes as one of the apostles (indicated by ours) to non-apostles. But he also writes as a Jew to Gentiles, and as a first-generation Christian to those who will be alive long after his death; in fact, to people like us. Yet the youngest Gentile Christian has received a faith as precious as ours, first-century Jews and apostles though they were. Can anything speak of God’s wonderful impartiality more than the truth that we stand in the same relation to him as did all the generations of believers in the past? They may be giants and inspiring examples, but how gracious of God to fling open the doors of his heaven so wide as to include absolutely anyone who has faith!

c. … through the righteousness of our God and Saviour

One word Peter uses sums up everything he has said so far—righteousness. He is using the word slightly differently from the way Paul uses it. This is not the righteous declaration God speaks over his people; it is the righteousness which God is in himself, his character, his moral uprightness and utter impartiality. ‘As in 1 Peter (2:24; 3:12, 14, 18; 4:18), so in this Epistle (2:5, 7–8, 21; 3:13) the word has the ethical associations which we find given to it in the Old Testament.’ Peter says that this fairness of God guarantees that what he received and believed is what his first readers later received and believed, and indeed, what we receive and believe. God’s righteousness ensures that men and women, Jew and Gentile, first-century and twentieth, all receive the same message and offer from God.

3. The genuine experience: the gospel’s results (1:2)

The third area Peter wants his readers to check is the difference genuine Christianity makes. He says that it gives grace and peace … through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

a. Grace and peace

New Testament writers frequently started their letters by taking over the standard secular way of opening a letter. Grace (charis) normally meant no more than ‘hello’, but they coupled it with the usual Hebrew greeting, peace (šālôm, shalom; both greetings are still used today in Greece and Israel respectively) to produce a new and beautiful idea. It acknowledged that the church in a particular place would contain both converted Jews and converted Gentiles. Peter employs this greeting to show from the outset that grace and peace are at the heart of what he believes and what the Christians are slipping away from. They are what Peter longs and prays for them to experience.

Grace means the generous heart of God who determines to treat sinful men and women as he lovingly wishes rather than as they actually deserve. It is God the Father’s sovereign good pleasure, totally unmerited by us, which raises us from the ash-heap to a throne of glory. It is the servant-like manner of God the Son who became a man, lived, taught, died, rose again and reigns for us. It is the humble work of God the Holy Spirit who equips us to love and serve him now with his grace-gifts (charismata), and who is the down-payment for the day when we shall be changed into the likeness of Jesus Christ himself. The gospel is grace, God’s good pleasure to delight in people who do not deserve it.

The immediate result of God’s grace is that his rightful anger at our disobedience is appeased, and that we have peace with him. That is achieved through the death of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Ever since Adam and Eve were banished from Eden after their attempt at moral autonomy, humans and God have not been at peace; Jesus said we have been in a state of barely disguised hostility. Yet the hope of peace with God runs through the Old Testament,43 and was won by the cross, as the risen Jesus demonstrated. ‘On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you!” ’ That becomes Peter’s message in Acts: ‘the message God sent to the people of Israel, telling the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all’. As a result of being reconciled to God by the death of Jesus on the cross, we have peace with God. But we also have peace with one another. Peter spoke those words to the Gentile Cornelius as the gospel was suddenly extended to those who were outside the racial Jewish fold. Peter and the other apostles thus extend this greeting to all Christians, including us, for if we are Christians the gospel is doing its work and God is re-creating his people under his rule. If we slip away from the message of grace, we forfeit peace with God and face only his anger.

b. Knowledge

Peter says this grace and peace come through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. Knowledge is another important term in his letter. It is possible that Peter means the knowledge that God has of us, but in view of the way the word-group is used later (1:5, 8, 16, 20; 2:20–21; 3:3, 17–18), it is much more likely that he means the knowledge we have of God. Peter uses two related but distinct Greek words for ‘knowledge’. Gnōsis is the word he uses for ‘information knowledge’ (1:5–6; 3:18; and as a verb in 1:20; 3:3). As he makes clear, that is the kind of knowledge which we can add to or grow in by being better informed about God and his Word. We can have that kind of knowledge by understanding Bible passages, reading good books and being well taught. But it is dangerously easy to be a well-informed non-Christian who misses the key ingredient, which is Peter’s other word for ‘knowledge’, epignōsis. It has the sense of ‘personal knowledge’, the knowledge of a husband or wife or good friend that goes beyond knowing things about them and actually knows them. Knowing God is so momentous that Peter uses the word almost with the meaning of being converted (1:2, 3, 8; 2:20; in 2:21 twice as a verb). This is an essential foundation, for if we do not know Christ himself then it is empty to know about him. Peter is not making any point about intelligence or stupidity, because this is a knowledge that God gives. Such an amazing gift of grace and peace can come only through a personal knowledge of God himself, face to face and person to person; and that genuine personal knowledge of God is guaranteed only if we remain within the authentic gospel. Our deadly danger, as Peter is going to tell us, is that we might prefer to exchange that truth for a lie.

4. The genuine Christ: the gospel’s content (1:1b–2)

Just as water flowing from a pure mountain spring can be polluted by a chemical works downstream, so an initially pure gospel can be polluted by muddled teaching—and a polluted gospel is a powerless gospel. In these verses Peter makes four extraordinary statements about Jesus, the man he knew as a close friend, and he designs them as indicators of the purity of our message’s content.

a. Jesus is the Saviour

Our Saviour Jesus Christ is a frequent phrase on the lips of Christians. But it is awesome in its meaning, as we can see by turning the phrase on its head and asking, ‘What is it that Jesus saves us from?’ Peter gives clues in his use of this surprisingly rare New Testament term. He calls Jesus ‘Saviour’ five times (1:1, 11; 2:20; 3:2, 18) and talks of ‘salvation’ once (3:15). These highlight the three tenses of salvation: past, present and future. Of the past, Peter says we have ‘been cleansed from [our] past sins’ (1:9), and he attributes that work to our Saviour Jesus Christ (1:1). Of the present, he says that genuine Christians ‘have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’ (2:20). Of the future, he writes that Christians need not be concerned about the apparent delay of the second coming, because ‘our Lord’s patience means salvation’ (3:15). We can say, then, that Jesus Christ has saved us, because those sins which defiled us in God’s sight have been cleansed away. We can say that he is saving us, because he protects us from the influences in the world which pull us away from him. And we can say that he will save us, because on the day of judgment the only safe place to hide will be behind the cross. Of those three meanings, it is that third sense of ultimate salvation which will dominate Peter’s letter.

b. Jesus is God

Peter goes further than saying Jesus is Saviour—he says he is our God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Some find these words too strong to be simply about Jesus Christ, and say that Peter is distinguishing between two persons of the Godhead: God and Jesus Christ. Most scholars today think this unlikely. Peter attributes full deity to Jesus. Yet there is subtlety in his position, for only a few words later he makes another distinction, the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. Just as it is clear in the first case that Peter is speaking of one person, there it is equally obvious that he is speaking of two: God the Father and Jesus Christ. Quite clearly, Peter is articulating in an early form what later became recognized as orthodox Christianity: ‘the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Ghost [Spirit] is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God’.

It is quite right for us to affirm that Jesus Christ is God, and quite right for us to affirm that Jesus Christ is not all there is to God. In his lifetime on earth he accepted and described himself with Old Testament titles for God, such as ‘shepherd’, ‘bridegroom’, ‘rock’ and ‘vinedresser’; his teaching had an authoritative note which had not been heard since God spoke at Sinai; he spoke, acted and promised as only the God of Israel could. Yet he submitted himself to the will of ‘the Father’, he prayed to ‘the Father’ and spoke of going to ‘my Father’.53 The balance was striking at the end of his life on earth, when he said, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’, but did not quibble when Thomas recognized him as ‘my Lord and my God’. As the first Christians read their Old Testaments in the light of what had happened, they saw that they lived at the time of ‘ “Immanuel”—which means, “God with us” ’.55 Peter shares this clarity, for he will call Jesus ‘God’, but he will not call God ‘Jesus’. Peter does not directly mention Jesus’ humanity here, but the truth that God the Son really became a man who was a first-century Jewish carpenter called Jesus still breathes through his letter. He mentions Jesus by name nine times, as he had been used to doing to his face for three years; and as he remembers what happened in that time (2:16–18), and what Jesus said (e.g. 3:10, alluding to Lk. 12:39). One of the most remarkable features of the titles Peter gives Jesus is that he writes about one of his closest friends, and yet recognizes him as God.

c. Jesus is the Christ

This combination, ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’, is so normal that it is difficult to recapture how radical it must have seemed to Peter and the other first Christians as they used it in their teaching and praying. Christ (Greek christos, literally, ‘anointed one’; in Hebrew, māšîah, ‘Messiah’) was the name used for the one who would fulfil all the Old Testament hopes. Prophets, priests and kings were anointed with oil to show that they were dedicated to God as his servants, but the Servant would be the Messiah, the one above all others who would fulfil God’s plan. When Peter first dared to breathe the phrase, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’, he was breaking wholly new ground in Israel’s dealings with God by identifying this man as the fulfilment of God’s plan for humankind. Of course, Peter did not fully understand what he was saying; and when Jesus immediately explained that he must suffer as the Christ, Peter rebuked him, thinking that the Christ should be a glorious king. Jesus insisted that death was his destiny, and after his resurrection it was that sense of inevitability that began to control the first Christians’ thinking. It became the heart of Peter’s message to the crowd on the day of Pentecost: ‘This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him … God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact … God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.’ The risen Jesus is the glorious, lordly Christ precisely because he went the way of the cross, and it is that to which Peter and the other apostles are witnesses.

d. Jesus is the Lord

Lord (kyrios) was the standard translation in the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Old Testament) for the Hebrew name of God, Yahweh. To call Jesus Lord among people who knew their Old Testaments, then, was to say that Jesus was present all the way through the history of Israel as their covenant Lord. Whenever Christians read that the Lord did such and such, they were to understand Jesus as acting there. How else could they explain Jesus’ thinking through Psalm 23, ‘The LORD is my shepherd’, and coming to the conclusion, ‘I am the good shepherd’?

They would also be aware that the titles ‘Saviour’, ‘Lord’ and ‘God’ were used in contemporary religious groups and political circles as titles for the Emperor. To use them of Jesus was therefore to make a decisive stand against all the other claimants for Jesus’ crown. This would have sounded ludicrous to non-Christians, because the cross of Christ does not resonate with apparent heavenly glory, any more than his whipped body wearing a fool’s crown and robe resonates with political glory. But such is the wisdom of God that it turns such apparent foolishness into wisdom, and such apparent weakness into glory.

This fourfold description of Jesus is important because it puts him at the focal point of human history. As God, he guarantees that his words and his works cannot be replaced or revoked; as Christ, he fulfils all the Old Testament promises; as Saviour, he died on the cross for our salvation in the past, present and future; and as Lord he claims the right to our individual love and obedience—notice how Peter calls him our Lord.

There is a constant temptation to separate these four titles. Michael Green writes that 2 Peter ‘was written to people who claim Jesus as Saviour but do not obey him as Lord. That appears to be the reason why the writer significantly combines the roles of Lord and Saviour’ (1:11; 2:20; 3:2; 3:18). These two titles go together. It is only because Jesus is the Lord that he can be the Saviour; and if he is the Saviour then he owns those he has saved, and he has the right to be their Lord. The words are inseparable. The reason this is so central to Peter’s letter is that the false teachers are denying the future coming of Jesus Christ. Peter reminds the Christians that the Judge on judgment day will be Jesus, and the Saviour on judgment day will be Jesus. On that day Jesus will be, visibly and finally, both Lord and Saviour. As a result, we should live in gratitude for his salvation and in obedience to his lordship. He is ‘the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him’.

This description of Jesus is the wonder of the message Peter spoke on the day of Pentecost, where themes of Saviour, Lord, God and Christ emerge and intertwine.

‘Let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.’

… The people … were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’

Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.’

With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’

Lucas, R. C., & Green, C. (1995). The message of 2 Peter & Jude: the promise of His coming (pp. 28–42). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.