2 Peter 2

Today’s Passage: 2 Peter 2

This is the hardest chapter in Peter’s short letter, and it is also the reason the letter exists. Having spent chapter one telling these believers that God has given them everything they need for life and godliness, and having sealed it by insisting that the prophetic word did not come from the will of man, Peter now turns and tells them why he has laboured that point so hard. There were false prophets in Israel. There will be false teachers in the church. He says it as flatly as a man states the weather. And then, for twenty-two verses, he describes them: what they smuggle in, what they are after, how they behave at the table, and where they are going. The chapter has three movements. First a short announcement of the danger, verses one through three, ending with the reminder that judgment on such men was settled long ago and has not gone to sleep. Then a long argument from history, verses four through ten, built on three of the oldest judgment stories in the Bible, angels who sinned, the world of the flood, and the cities of the plain, and threaded through them the rescue of Noah and of Lot, so that the whole thing lands on one sentence: the Lord knows how to rescue the godly, and He knows how to hold the unrighteous. Then the long portrait, verses ten through twenty-two, where Peter names what these men actually do to a congregation, follows them back to Balaam, and ends with two proverbs about a dog and a sow that are among the most disturbing lines in the New Testament. Read it slowly. It is not a pleasant chapter. It was not written to be.

As you read, hold this: The Lord knows how to rescue the godly and to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgment, and the men who promise you freedom while serving their own appetites have never been free at all.

2 Peter 2:1–4 (BSB)

¹ Now there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. ² Many will follow in their depravity, and because of them the way of truth will be defamed. ³ In their greed, these false teachers will exploit you with deceptive words. The longstanding verdict against them remains in force, and their destruction does not sleep. ⁴ For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them deep into hell, placing them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment;

Notice first that Peter is not surprised, and he does not want you to be. “Now there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you.” Among the people. Among you. Not prowling outside, not shouting from the pagan temples, but inside, sitting down, holding a cup. The Old Testament is full of men who said “thus says the LORD” when the LORD had said nothing, and it never took a foreign invasion to produce them; Israel grew its own. So will the church. And see how they work: they will secretly introduce destructive heresies (αἵρεσις) hairesis, pronounced HYE-reh-sis. Strong's G139, a chosen opinion, faction, heresy. Hairesis did not begin as a religious insult. It comes from the verb meaning to take or to choose, and in ordinary Greek it meant a choice, and then a chosen course, and then a party or school made up of people who had chosen the same thing. Josephus uses it of the Pharisees and Sadducees quite neutrally, and Luke uses it of “the sect of the Nazarenes” without heat. That original sense is the sting of it here. A hairesis is, at bottom, an opinion somebody picked. Set that against what Peter has just finished saying in chapter one, that no prophecy of Scripture ever came about by the prophet’s own interpretation, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. There is the whole contrast in one word. Revelation is received; heresy is selected. The false teacher’s message has an author, and the author is himself. And Peter adds an adjective that will not let us treat this as a matter of taste: these are destructive choices, opinions that ruin the people who hold them. It is a mercy that God did not leave His church to a marketplace of opinions where every teacher hawks his own preference. He gave us a word from outside ourselves, fixed, given, not up for selection. Hold to it. . Nothing is announced. No one stands up and declares that he intends to overturn the faith. It comes in sideways, a little at a time, carried along by a warm manner and a gift for speech, and by the time anyone names it the thing has roots. Then Peter says something that ought to make us stop: “even denying the Master who bought them.” Christians who love this book have read that clause differently, and it is worth being honest about it. Some take it to mean that these men stood inside the confessing church, under the name of the Master they claimed as their owner, exactly as a whole nation came out of Egypt under a redemption while many in it never believed a word of it; Moses in his song asks the same people, “Is He not your Father and Creator?” Others read it as a plain statement that the purchase price of Christ’s blood was set down for all, and that these men repudiate the very Master who paid it. Do not build a system on it either way. It is one clause in a hot denunciation, and Peter’s own point is not subtle: whatever they claimed, they are bringing swift destruction on themselves, and verse two tells you the cost to everyone else. Many follow them. And the way of truth gets a bad name in the mouths of outsiders because of them. That is what Peter grieves over. Not an argument lost, but the honour of the gospel dragged through the street, and a crowd of ordinary people walking behind a man who is going over a cliff.

Verse three tells you the engine. “In their greed, these false teachers will exploit you with deceptive words (πλαστός) plastos, pronounced PLAS-toss. Strong's G4112, moulded, fabricated, made up. Plastos appears exactly once in the New Testament, right here, and it is the word a potter’s world would use. It comes from the verb plassō, to mould or shape by hand, the verb Paul uses when he asks whether the thing formed can talk back to the one who formed it, and it is the root behind our word plastic. So a plastos word is a moulded word. It has been worked and shaped and pressed into a pleasing form by human hands, and it was made rather than received. Peter has been contrasting two kinds of speech for a chapter and a half now. On one side, “we did not follow cleverly devised fables” and “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” On the other side, this: words a man shaped himself, to fit his hearers and to fit his purse. And notice that moulded words are not necessarily crude. Quite the opposite. Something moulded is smoother than something quarried. The test of a teacher has never been whether his sentences are beautiful, and a congregation that judges by polish is exactly the congregation Peter is worried about. Ask instead whether the man is handing you something he received or something he made. Praise God that He has not left us to guess. He put His word in writing and told us to search it. .” Peter has watched them long enough to know what is actually driving the machinery, and it is not a passion for new ideas. It is money, and the appetite that money serves. The verb rendered exploit is a trader’s word; it means to make merchandise of something, to work a person for profit the way a dealer works a market. That is the horror of the sentence. The congregation is not the audience of these men. The congregation is the stock. And then Peter turns from them to the God who has already ruled on the matter: “The longstanding verdict against them remains in force, and their destruction does not sleep.” Read that as the comfort it is meant to be. When you watch a smooth man prosper by damaging the flock and nothing at all seems to happen to him, the temptation is to conclude that nothing ever will. Peter says the verdict was entered long ago and has never been suspended, and he pictures the sentence not as forgotten but as awake, watching, unhurried. God is not asleep at His post. Then verse four begins a long sentence that will not finish until verse nine, and it opens with the oldest example there is. “For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them deep into hell, placing them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment.” The word behind cast deep into hell is built on Tartarus, the deepest pit the Greek world could name, and Peter uses it once and never again. He tells us almost nothing about what these angels did, and we should not invent it. What he tells us is the outcome: creatures of enormous dignity, nearer the throne than we have ever been, sinned and were not spared. Sit with that soberly and without a shred of satisfaction. If rank in creation did not shield them, it will not shield a well-spoken teacher, and it will not shield any of us.

2 Peter 2:5–9 (BSB)

⁵ if He did not spare the ancient world when He brought the flood on its ungodly people, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, among the eight; ⁶ if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction, reducing them to ashes as an example of what is coming on the ungodly; ⁷ and if He rescued Lot, a righteous man distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless ⁸ (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)— ⁹ if all this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.

Now watch what Peter does with his history, because he is doing two things at once and most readers only notice one. Yes, he is stacking up judgments. The angels were not spared. The ancient world was not spared. Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned and reduced to ashes “as an example of what is coming on the ungodly,” which is a hard sentence and Peter means it to be. But look at what he threads through the middle of every one of them. God preserved Noah. God rescued Lot. In the flood account he does not simply say that the world drowned; he says that Noah, “a preacher of righteousness,” came through it “among the eight,” which is a very small number to set against a whole world and is exactly why Peter mentions it. In the Sodom account he does not stop at the ashes; he takes two verses to tell you about one man being pulled out. The rescues are not asides. They are the point of the argument, and the reason the whole long sentence can land where it lands in verse nine. God has never yet had to choose between judging the wicked and keeping the righteous. He has always done both in the same act.

And then there is Lot, and here we must be honest, because Peter says something about him that the book of Genesis does not obviously prepare us for. Three times in two verses he is called righteous. He is a righteous man distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless; he is that righteous man, tormented in his righteous soul. Read Genesis and you meet a man who chose the well-watered plain and pitched his tent toward Sodom, who ended up sitting in its gate, who offered his own daughters to a mob at the door, who had to be taken by the hand and dragged out of the city because he lingered, and whose story ends in a cave in a way no one would defend. That is the man God calls righteous. Do not rush past it and do not tidy it up. Peter is not rewriting Genesis; he is telling you how heaven read a life that the earth would have scored very low, and he adds the detail that makes it credible, that day after day the man was tormented inside by what he saw and heard. He never got comfortable. He never stopped grieving. That was the seed of God in him, and God saw it, and God counted him righteous and sent angels to haul him out by the hand. If that does not move you, consider what it says about the tenderness of God’s assessment of His own. He knows what our lives look like from the outside, and He knows what is actually going on inside, and He is not confused about which of us are His.

So the sentence lands: “the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.” Two halves, and we must keep them both. Peter’s first readers were the ones being exploited, and to them the first half is pure comfort. The Lord knows how. He is not improvising. He has done this in every generation since the flood, and He will do it in yours. The second half is not comfort and was never meant to be. The unrighteous are held for punishment on the day of judgment, and Peter has already used the language of chains and darkness and will shortly use the phrase “blackest darkness.” Scripture does not soften this, and we may not soften it either. But neither may we take the smallest pleasure in it, and here the Lord Himself has spoken so plainly that no one need wonder how to feel:

"Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Lord GOD. Wouldn’t I prefer that he turn from his ways and live?" Ezekiel 18:23 (BSB)

That is the tone. If God does not relish the ruin of the wicked, then a chapter like this one must never be read with relish either. Peter writes it grieving, as a shepherd who has counted the sheep and found some of them following a wolf.

2 Peter 2:10–13 (BSB)

¹⁰ Such punishment is specially reserved for those who indulge the corrupt desires of the flesh and despise authority. Bold and self-willed, they are unafraid to slander glorious beings. ¹¹ Yet not even angels, though greater in strength and power, dare to bring such slanderous charges against them before the Lord. ¹² These men are like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be captured and destroyed. They blaspheme in matters they do not understand, and like such creatures, they too will be destroyed. ¹³ The harm they will suffer is the wages of their wickedness. They consider it a pleasure to carouse in broad daylight. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deception as they feast with you.

Peter now stops describing the danger in the abstract and gives you the portrait, and the first two strokes belong together: they “indulge the corrupt desires of the flesh and despise authority.” Appetite and contempt. Those two run together far more often than people expect, and the order matters. A man who has decided to keep his appetites will very soon need a doctrine that excuses them, and the first thing such a doctrine must dispose of is anyone with the standing to say no to him. So authority becomes the enemy, and he learns to speak of it with a curled lip. “Bold and self-willed,” Peter says. The words describe a man who has lost the capacity to be checked. And then a strange and quiet detail that is easy to skim: “they are unafraid to slander glorious beings. Yet not even angels, though greater in strength and power, dare to bring such slanderous charges against them before the Lord.” Peter does not explain who these glorious beings are, and there is no profit in speculating. His argument does not depend on identifying them. It depends entirely on the contrast. Beings of real might, who actually know what stands behind the curtain, will not throw around a reviling word in the presence of God; and here is a man in a house church in Asia Minor, who knows almost nothing, talking about the unseen world with total confidence and no reverence whatever. Loudness is not authority. It never was. The holiest people you will ever meet are usually the most careful with their speech about things they have not been shown.

Then comes the hardest image in the portrait, and it must be handled with care because it can be misused. “These men are like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be captured and destroyed. They blaspheme in matters they do not understand.” Peter is not saying that some people are less than human. He is saying that a man who has surrendered his judgment to his instincts has thrown away the very thing that makes him more than a beast. He speaks about God the way an animal moves through a field, driven, unreflective, and with no notion of what he is walking into. Verse thirteen fills in the picture: they think it a fine thing “to carouse in broad daylight,” which in a world where such behaviour belonged to the night is Peter’s way of saying that shame itself has gone. And then the sentence that would have hurt the most. “They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deception as they feast with you.” As they feast with you. The church’s own common meal, the table where believers ate together and remembered the Lord, and these men are sitting at it, being fed, enjoying themselves, working the room. Peter uses the words blots and blemishes on purpose. They are the very words used of a sacrifice that is unfit for God, and Peter has already told these same congregations that they were redeemed by the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or spot. The contrast is deliberate and it is devastating. Keep hold of who Peter is angry for. Every stroke of this portrait is drawn from the vantage point of the flock: what these men take, what they say to get it, and where they sit while they do it.

2 Peter 2:14–18 (BSB)

¹⁴ Their eyes are full of adultery; their desire for sin is never satisfied; they seduce the unstable. They are accursed children with hearts trained in greed. ¹⁵ They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam son of Beor, who loved the wages of wickedness. ¹⁶ But he was rebuked for his transgression by a donkey, otherwise without speech, that spoke with a man’s voice and restrained the prophet’s madness. ¹⁷ These men are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them. ¹⁸ With lofty but empty words, they appeal to the sensual passions of the flesh and entice those who are just escaping from others who live in error.

“Their eyes are full of adultery; their desire for sin is never satisfied; they seduce the unstable.” Peter says it plainly and moves on, and we will do the same, because the sin is named here in order to warn a congregation, not to be examined. Two things in it must be seen. The first is that appetite of this kind does not fill up. “Never satisfied” is a settled description, not an exaggeration; a man on this road is not walking toward a destination where he will finally rest, and he does not know it. The second is the word unstable, and it tells you exactly who gets hurt. These men do not go after the settled and the mature. They go after the newly converted, the shaken, the lonely, the person whose footing is not yet sure. Peter says their hearts are trained in greed, and the verb is an athlete’s word for a body drilled by long practice into doing a thing without thinking. This did not happen to them in an afternoon. It was learned, the way a skill is learned, one small compromise at a time until the whole reflex ran on its own.

And so to Balaam, which is the exact analogy Peter wants, and the reason he wants it is that Balaam was not a fraud. He was a real seer who really heard from God and who genuinely could not curse what God had blessed. His problem was never his gifting. It was that he “loved the wages of wickedness,” and he kept going back to the same king to see whether the price had improved, until he found a way to earn it by teaching Moab how to bring Israel down from the inside. That is the way these teachers have taken. A gift for spiritual things, run as a business. Then Peter reaches for the detail everybody remembers, and it is not there to entertain us: “he was rebuked for his transgression by a donkey, otherwise without speech, that spoke with a man’s voice and restrained the prophet’s madness.”

"Then the LORD opened the donkey’s mouth, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you that you have beaten me these three times?”" Numbers 22:28 (BSB)

Weigh what Peter is doing with it. The prophet is the one with the madness, and the beast is the one who sees the angel and speaks the sense. God stopped that man with the one voice he could not dismiss as a rival, and the whole scene is a mercy dressed as an absurdity. He is still capable of it. He will use anything to stand in the road of a man He is trying to stop, a child’s question, a failure, an illness, a stranger’s remark, and He is not too proud to be laughed at while He does it. Then two pictures for what these teachers actually deliver. “Springs without water and mists driven by a storm.” In a dry country there is no crueller disappointment than a spring you walk to and find empty, and a cloud that races across the sky without dropping rain is a promise the land can see and never receive. That is the whole indictment in a phrase: enormous promise, nothing given. And then, once more and without softening, “Blackest darkness is reserved for them.” Peter will not let us look away from where this ends. Say it soberly, say it as one who is warning and not as one who is scoring, and then move on, because verse eighteen tells you who is being hunted: those “who are just escaping from others who live in error.” The new ones. The half out of the water. Peter’s heart is with them the whole way through this chapter, and so should ours be.

2 Peter 2:19–22 (BSB)

¹⁹ They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves to depravity. For a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him. ²⁰ If indeed they have escaped the corruption of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, only to be entangled and overcome by it again, their final condition is worse than it was at first. ²¹ It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it and then to turn away from the holy commandment passed on to them. ²² Of them the proverbs are true: “A dog returns to its vomit,” and, “A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud.”

Start where Peter starts, with the advertisement. “They promise them freedom (ἐλευθερία) eleutheria, pronounced el-yoo-ther-EE-ah. Strong's G1657, freedom, liberty, the state of a free person. Eleutheria was one of the great words of the ancient world, and it was not a vague feeling. It was a legal status. A free man in a Greek city was one who was not owned, who could not be bought or beaten at another’s pleasure, who had standing in the assembly and a name of his own. Every slave in the empire knew exactly what the word meant, and knew what it would cost to buy it. So when the New Testament takes this word up, it is never talking about the absence of obligation. Paul says it is for freedom that Christ has set us free, and then in the same breath tells us to stand firm and not be encumbered again by a yoke of slavery, which shows that in his mind freedom is a position you were bought into and can be talked out of standing in. That is precisely the counterfeit these teachers were selling. They took the noblest word in the language and used it to describe a man doing whatever he felt like, which the ancient world would have called not freedom but licence, the behaviour of someone with no master and no self-command at all. Real freedom in Scripture always has an owner attached to it. We were purchased at a price by a Master who is good, and being His is the only condition under which a human being has ever been free. , while they themselves are slaves to depravity.” That is the pitch, and it has never been improved on in twenty centuries. Not come and sin, which nobody would buy, but come and be free. Free of the old rules, free of the narrow people, free of a conscience that keeps interrupting. And Peter answers it not with an argument but by asking you to look at the salesmen. Are they free? Look at the appetite that never fills, the eyes that cannot rest, the greed drilled into the heart until it runs by itself. That is not a free man. That is a man being led. And then he states the principle in a sentence a child could carry: “For a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.” Whatever has beaten you owns you. There is no third option in Peter’s world, no neutral middle ground where a person belongs to nobody; you will serve something, and the only question ever on the table is what.

And that principle has teeth in both directions, which is why Peter states it as a general rule rather than an accusation. Anything that masters (δουλόω) douloō, pronounced doo-LOH-oh. Strong's G1402, to enslave, to bring under bondage. Douloō is the active verb behind the noun doulos, a slave, and it means to bring someone under bondage, to make a slave of. Peter puts it here in the perfect passive, which in Greek describes an action completed in the past whose result is standing right now. The sense is not “he sometimes gives in” but “he has been enslaved, and that is his present condition.” It is a diagnosis of status, not of behaviour on a given day. The same verb runs through the New Testament in both directions, which is the thing to notice. Paul says that having been set free from sin, believers have been enslaved to God, and he apologises for the language as a human way of putting it, because he is aware it sounds strange to say that the free are slaves. But it is the honest shape of things. The gospel does not offer a man ownership of himself; it offers him a change of owner, from a master who devours to a Master who bought him with His own blood and calls him a son. Every other freedom on offer is a change of cell. Sit with that, and then look at the two masters, and give thanks for the One who paid. a man makes him its property. The teacher who promises liberation is himself owned by the appetite he is preaching, and he cannot free anyone from a cell he is living in. Notice, too, that no one enters that servitude by intending to. Nobody chooses slavery. A man chooses one indulgence, and then the second is easier, and after a while the choosing stops and something else is doing the deciding, and he still uses the language of freedom about himself because the words have not changed even though he has. That is why Peter has spent a whole chapter on flattering speech. The chains here are not forged in a moment of open rebellion. They are talked on, one lofty and empty sentence at a time.

Now verses twenty through twenty-two, and we will not hurry them, and we will not blunt them. Read the words again exactly as they stand. If they have escaped the corruption of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, only to be entangled and overcome by it again, “their final condition is worse than it was at first. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it and then to turn away from the holy commandment passed on to them.” Let that stand at full height before you reach for anything to put beside it. Peter is saying that there is a state a person can arrive at which is worse than never having heard, and that for such a person ignorance would have been the kinder outcome. Do not soften it. Do not explain it away. Whatever else is true, God has put that sentence in the Bible for people who read the Bible, and it is meant to make the hair stand up on the back of the neck. Our Lord said something with the same weight about a house swept clean and put in order, and how the final plight of that man was worse than the first. Scripture does not treat proximity to the truth as automatically safe. It can be the most dangerous place a soul ever stands.

Now, having let it land, we must be honest about the second thing that is also true, because the Bible teaches it just as plainly: God does not lose one of His own. Jesus said of His sheep, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one can snatch them out of My hand.” Peter himself, in his first letter, says that believers “through faith are shielded by God’s power for the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.” So how do both stand? Here is where we must let Peter guide us, because he does not leave us to guess. He supplies his own guardrail in verse twenty-two, and he chose it deliberately. He does not say these men were changed and then changed back. He says: “A dog returns to its vomit,” and, “A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud.” Look hard at that pair. Neither animal became something else and then reverted. The dog was always a dog, doing exactly what its nature does. The sow was genuinely washed, and the washing was real, and she was cleaner coming out than going in, and none of it touched what she was. She never stopped being a sow, and so the mud was never behind her; it was only, for a while, off the outside of her. That is Peter’s own picture of the men he has just spent twenty-one verses describing. Real reformation. Real cleaning. No new nature. And the first proverb he takes straight from Solomon, where the point is exactly the same:

"As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly." Proverbs 26:11 (BSB)

Peter also hands us two more guardrails in this very letter, one before this chapter and one after it. Before it he wrote:

"Therefore, brothers, strive to make your calling and election sure. For if you practice these things you will never stumble," 2 Peter 1:10 (BSB)

And after it, when the warning has been delivered and he turns to the congregation with his final word:

"Therefore, beloved, since you already know these things, be on your guard so that you will not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure standing." 2 Peter 3:17 (BSB)

Notice the direction of both. Neither one is written to make a believer doubt whether God will keep him. Both are written to put him to work. Strive to make it sure. Be on your guard. That is what a warning is for.

Even so, let us not pretend this passage is easy, because it is not, and Christians who love Scripture and hold the same confession have read the mechanism of it differently. Some take the plain view that these are teachers who had real knowledge and real external reformation without ever being born again, and they point out that Peter’s word for knowledge here is the strengthened form, the same word he used in chapter one for a true knowledge of Christ, and yet the proverbs at the end tell us what these men always were. Others notice carefully what Peter says they escaped: not the wrath of God, not the guilt of sin, but “the corruption of the world,” the moral filth of the surrounding culture. A man can be lifted clean out of a sewer of a life by contact with the Christian community, its morals, its friendships, its light, and never once have been made new inside; and if he goes back, he goes back with his conscience seared and every warning already spent, which is precisely why his final condition is worse. Still others say the warning is real as a warning, one of the ordinary means by which God actually keeps His people, so that the very fear it produces in a true believer is part of how he is preserved to the end. This study will not settle the mechanism, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But mark this carefully, because it is the one thing that must be said: on none of these readings is there a person truly in Christ who is finally lost. There is no reading available in which the Father’s hand loses one that was given to Him. John put the whole matter in a single sentence about men exactly like these:

"They went out from us, but they did not belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But their departure made it clear that none of them belonged to us." 1 John 2:19 (BSB)

And now one pastoral word, and only one, because this passage must not be cheapened. If reading these three verses has frightened you, take that fear seriously enough to do something with it, and then hear this: the person Peter is describing is not frightened. That is the whole point of the portrait. The man in this chapter is bold, self-willed, unafraid, carousing in daylight, past shame, past correction, talking about the unseen world without a tremor. Fear has left him entirely. A conscience that is still trembling is a conscience that is still alive, and God has never yet turned away a soul that came to Him afraid. Do not use that as a pillow. Use it as a door. Go to Christ with the fear itself, ask Him to search you, and then get up and strive to make your calling and election sure, which is the exact instruction Peter gives.