Divine judgment on false teachers

RIVERSIDE INDONESIAN FELLOWSHIP
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Divine judgment on false teachers

Riverside Indonesian Fellowship
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2011 · 30 January 2011

Tonight's text is taken from 2 Peter 2:3-5, "...Their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep; 4 for if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness reserved for judgment, 5 and did not spare the ancient world but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness with seven others when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly."

Scripture is totally the truth of God. That means as a consequence He wants this Word communicated truly. He wants to communicate it entirely and exactly as He gave it, with no omission and no deviation. And because He has given a true Word, He expects it to be truly proclaimed.

On the other hand, the adversary of God and Christ is the devil. And in John 8:44 Jesus said the devil is a liar and the father of it. And so, wherever you have the enterprise of Satan you have an attack on truth. It says in Proverbs 19:5 that a liar will not escape the wrath of God. It says in Proverbs 19:9 that a liar will perish.

And at the end of the book of Revelation, as God puts the final seal on this truth, He says in Revelation 21: 8, "For the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone which is the second death."

God is very much against liars. We've seen that. But there's something even beyond that. It is one thing to tell a lie, it is a far greater thing to teach lies as if they were truth. In Isaiah 9:15 it says that God will cut off the prophet who teaches falsely and "cut off" always means to destroy.

God is a God of truth. That's one of His attributes. And it sets Him against all liars, particularly those who misrepresent Him and misrepresent His Word with their lies. To tell a lie is a serious sin, to teach lies is a more serious sin. To teach lies as if they were the truth of God is the most serious rejection of truth.

Now we've already been introduced to these false teachers and do you remember that we had sort of a basic outline of their portrait in verses 1 to 3? When we get to the middle of verse 10 and go from there to the end of the chapter, that sketch is going to be filled in full color and we're going to know many more details about false teachers.

I read a speech by Ted Turner who said, "The problem in our world today is Christianity with the book of Revelation predicting the world is going to be destroyed by fire and Armageddon. No wonder we're so pessimistic about things, we're carrying this terrible burden that we're all born evil, we're just rotten and no good and Christ had to come down and die on the cross for us so that with the spilling of His blood our sins could be washed away.

Christ was a great guy but I don't want Him to die for me. I used to be real religious until I really started thinking about it. Come on, ease up, lighten up a little. I don't really want to go to heaven anyway. I don't want to walk on streets of gold and gold prices are only going down, the streets would have to be platinum to make me happy. Maybe they should put toxic waste in heaven, because if we get it off the earth and ship it up there it isn't going to hurt the people in heaven."

There are a lot of people who want to mock the reality of future judgment. But Peter was very serious when he wrote what he wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Any man is a fool who doesn't understand that God will not only judge false teachers, but He will judge along with them all who lived and followed their deception.

Let's look at the first point, the promise of their judgment. Verse 1 at the end, "They (the false prophets mentioned at the beginning of verse 1) are bringing swift destruction upon themselves." And then at the end of verse 3 as we also saw in our last study, he says, "Their judgment from long ago is not idle and their destruction is not asleep." There's the promise, twice given.

What does Peter mean by that? Well though false teachers are not yet judged, that is the ones that are alive at the time Peter writes and the ones that are alive at any time someone reads this, including now, though they have not yet been judged, their judgment was planned long ago. That's what he's saying.

Very simply understood it is this, the judgment of liars and deceivers and false prophets and false teachers is all based on the nature of God as a God of truth. You understand that? Because God by nature is a God of truth, He will judge all liars and deceivers.

But I want us to focus tonight, as Peter does, on what happened previous to their judgment at the end. Somebody might say, "Well are you sure God's really going to punish them in a swift and devastating destruction against people who lie and teach falsehood?

The answer is yes, and Peter tells you why. Verse 4, "If God didn't spare the angels when they sinned," verse 5, "And He didn't spare the ancient world, but drowned them all," verse 6, "And if He didn't spare Sodom and Gomorrah when they sinned," then do you think He's going to spare false teachers?

That's his point, that's what happened previously. He takes classic illustrations out of the book of Genesis and they are the precedent for final judgment on the liars and the deceivers and the false prophets and the false teachers and everybody who follows them. Let us begin with the first of those powerful illustrations.

Let's begin in verse 4, "For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness reserved for judgment." I would prefer the word "Since," because this is already written in history, this has already been done. It is an historical fact. The point is, since God judged in the past, then He will surely judge in the future.

Since God judged angels, more elevated beings than we are, when they sinned, why do men think they will escape? Those who deviate from the truth of God, who teach falsehood, who lead people astray and the people led astray by them will be judged in the future just as the angels have been judged in the past.

Back to verse 4, “If God didn't spare angels when they sinned.” This is one of the great realities of Scripture that is really inexplicable in many ways, the fact that angels sinned. We don't know how exactly that happened but we know that God created these angels and they were all before Him in holiness, worshiping and surrounding His throne and adoring Him.

And the highest of them all was an angel named Lucifer who decided that he wanted to be like God. He wasn't content to be lower than God, he wanted to be equal with God and so he led a rebellion. And according to Revelation 12, one third of all these holy angels followed his sin of pride and rebellion.

And so thousands of thousands, myriads and myriads of these beings fell and were doomed to damnation. Today we know them as fallen angels, or demons and evil spirits. Is that what he's talking about here? Let's read on and see. "If God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness..."

Wait a minute; this can't be all those fallen angels. Are all the demons now in hell and committed into pits of darkness? No. Where are they? They're all over the place, they're running around loose. So whatever sin he's talking about here can't be the original fall of angels, because when they fell they were not all imprisoned in hell and committed permanently to pits of darkness waiting their final judgment.

In fact, in Ephesians 6: 12 it says right now you and I as believers are wrestling against demons, doesn't it? “We don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and the rulers of darkness and spiritual wickedness in the heavenlies?” Those are all titles for demons.

So, whoever these beings are, they're different from the demons running around loose all over the world. Notice that phrase "but cast them into hell," which is one word in Greek. The word is tartarosos. What does it mean? He sent them to Tartaros. Here the translators have elected to translate it with the English word "hell" because that's what it was used to refer to.

You remember that Jesus when He talked about hell liked to use the word “Gehenna” because that word gave a picture of what hell was like. Gehenna was the name for the valley in which the dump of Jerusalem was located and it had an unending, burning fire.

He further describes it in verse 4 as having them committed to pits of darkness. The word "committed" here is used, by the way, in the book of Acts twice, 8:3 and 12:4, of turning over a prisoner for imprisonment. This is reminiscent again of Jesus' teaching in Matthew 8:12 when He says that hell is a place of blackness and darkness.

And they are held there, the end of verse 4 says, reserved for judgment. They're like prisoners who are awaiting final sentencing. There's no bail for them. The place is only temporary in the sense that in the Day of Judgment they will go to another place. Revelation 20:10 says the devil and all his angels will be cast into the lake of fire. That's the final form of hell.

So who are these angels and what in the world did they do to deserve this? What kind of atrocity did they commit that forced God to imprison them? By the way, the rest of the loose demons know about this group. And they don't want to go to that place.

Listen to Matthew 8:28-31, "And when Jesus came to the other side into the country of the Gadarenes, two men who were demon possessed met Him as they were coming out of the tombs, they were so exceedingly violent that no one could pass by that road, they were demon-possessed men. And behold, they cried out when they saw Jesus, `What do we have to do with You, Son of God?'"

Listen next, "Have you come here to torment us before the time?" What did they mean by that? They mean, "Are you going to send us now to the pit where our fellow fallen angels are before we're supposed to go?" "Do they know when they're supposed to go?" Oh yeah, they know about the final lake of fire that follows the Great White Throne judgment, and so they don't want to go there and they say, "You haven't come to send us before our time, have You?"

As vile and wretched and wicked and filthy as fallen angels or demons are, they are somewhat restrained in their conduct because they are in constant fear that they might if they overstep their limits be sent to the pit of blackness. And they don't want to go there. And you ask what restrains them to some extent? That does.

"But who are they?" Let's go to Jude 6 and see what they did, because Jude talks about the same thing. "Angels," he says, "did not keep their own domain," they didn't stay where they belonged. "They abandoned their proper dwelling place." They moved out of their place of being, their sphere of life and their nature. They moved beyond the demon sphere.

Well, notice that verse 6 also says, "Those are the ones He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day." So now this is another clue, isn't it? They're some angels who were already fallen, they were already demons, but they moved into some behavior that took them out of the sphere of their normal being.

What did they do? Verse 7 of Jude, "Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way..." Whatever they did was very much like what Sodom and Gomorrah did. What was the gross immorality of Sodom and Gomorrah? And it says in Jude, "They went after strange flesh."

Like the men of Sodom who in Genesis 19: 4-5 lusted (do you remember two angels rescuing Lot?) after angels who appeared in a male form. And the filthy homosexuals of Sodom and Gomorrah lusted after these angels. And that's why God destroyed that place. Listen carefully, as the men of Sodom lusted and went after angels. Similarly also some fallen angels lusted and went after women.

That's the comparison. "Well when did that happen?" 1 Peter 3:20, "They were disobedient when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah." So whoever these fallen angels are who left their proper sphere and lusted after mankind, particularly women, and were then put in prison until the final lake of fire, it happened in the days of Noah. Now we really have a clue. These spirits, by the way, are angels.

Peter calls people souls in verse 20. The New Testament always uses spirits to refer to angels, not men. Let's go back to the time of Noah, Genesis 6. I don't think today is as bad as that time. "Why do you say that?" Because there were only eight believers at that time on the whole world, right before the flood.

Genesis 6:1-2, "It came about when men began to multiply on the face of the land and the daughters were born to them, that the sons of God..." This refers to angels who are called in the Old Testament "sons of God." "They saw the daughters of men and saw that they were beautiful and they took wives for themselves whomever they chose."

So here you have demons taking on a male form and cohabitating with women. "Why did they do that?" John MacArthur teaches that they did it to breed an unredeemable race of demon-men. As long as men were men, Jesus Christ, the God/Man, could redeem them. But if they became a race of demon/men, they were unredeemable, for demons will know no redemption.

And in Genesis 6:3 it says, "The Lord said My Spirit will not always strive with men forever." The lord says He’s not going to take this. It mentions in verse 4 the Nephilim, which could be a reference to the monsters produced out of these unions when the sons of God came to the daughters of men.

And God had to drown them along with the whole world. Those are the demons we talked about. And they were put in permanent imprisonment because of that unbelievable attempt to destroy the capability of Christ to redeem the human race.

Here's Peter's point. If God didn't spare the greater angelic beings who were His special creation, once gathered around His throne, more glorious, more intelligent than mankind, when they deviated from His truth and when they spread corruption, then He surely will not spare false teachers who are lesser beings who teach people to believe lies about Him and His Word and thus try to destroy His redemptive purpose.

That's only example number one of what God is going to do to those, whether they are angel or man, who attempt to deviate from redemptive truth and purpose. Let us next time deal with some other examples from God so that we will live righteously even when false teachers are all around us, Amen?



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