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[Music] Welcome back for our last day of looking through 2nd Peter chapter 2.
We've been talking about the danger of false teaching all through this week. And
Peter ends with very strong words about false teachers.

Verses 17 to 22, let's begin with those and then look at them more closely. Look
at this entire chapter in fact today more closely. 17 to 22 he writes, "These
men are springs without water and mists driven by the storm.

Blackest darkness is reserved for them. For they mouth empty boastful words and
by appealing to the lustful desires of sinful human nature, they entice people
who are just escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom
while they themselves are slaves of depravity.

For a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him. If they have escaped the
corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are
again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were
at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way
of righteousness than to have known it and then to have turned their backs on
the sacred command that was passed on to them.

Of them the Proverbs are true. A dog returns to its vomit and a sow that is
washed goes back to wallowing in the mud. " And Peter gets pretty serious about
this.

He says, "These false teachers, they promise what they don't have, so don't
listen to them. " He says, "These false teachers, they pray on the weak, so
don't listen to them. " He says, "These false teachers, they're worse off at the
end than at the beginning, so don't listen to them.

" He says, "It would have been better for them not to have known the way than to
have known it and turned their backs on it. " I believe he's talking about
people who came close to God without really believing and now they've hardened
their heart against believing and they have actually increased their judgment
and the hardening of their heart. Don't listen to them, he says.

You know where they're headed. You know what they're all about. You know what's
in their hearts.

Don't listen to them. Even though they appeal to some pride in your life, even
though they make you feel like you can have something in your life, don't listen
to them. Now let me just look back with you.

As you look back through this chapter, some of the greatest areas of false
teaching that have been in the church for 2,000 years are mentioned in passing
in this chapter. Here's what to especially watch out for. It talks about four
things.

First, at the beginning of the chapter, Peter says, "False teachers deny the
sovereign Lord who bought them. " They deny the Lord, who Jesus is, who God is.
Most heresies, false teachings, have some denial of the nature of God in them
because by denying God's nature, you open yourself up to all kinds of lies.

By trusting God's nature, who God really is, you strengthen yourself for living
the truth. When you misunderstand who God is, you misunderstand everything else.
When you begin to understand who God really is, you start to understand
everything else.

So they deny the Lord who made them. Most of the isms, the false teachings that
are out there, deny the truth of the Trinity, or the truth of who Jesus is, or
the truth of Jesus' divinity. They deny the sovereign Lord.

He says the second thing about false teachers is there's these stories that they
have made up. They just make it up. They say it confidently, but they have made
it up.

Just because someone says something with confidence doesn't make it true. But
this is the game of false teachers. They say it with confidence, and so you
think it must be true.

I couldn't say even what I really believe with that much confidence or say it
that well, so it has to be true. They're so confident. No, they're just a good
salesman, good saleswoman.

They're not telling the truth. It's stories they made up. The third thing that
you see about these false teachers that we've seen for 2,000 years in false
teachers is they despise authority, and they prey on that in people's lives.

None of us like having somebody else tell us what to do. This is true from
preschool. We don't like anybody telling us what to do, and false teachers prey
on that.

God can't tell you what to do, so it's attractive to have somebody minimize,
despise the authorities in your life. They love to do that kind of thing. And
then the final thing he says is they appeal to lustful desires.

Whenever somebody puts a religious cover over a selfish desire, it has the
greatest of appeal because people think, "Well, I want it. I've wanted that all
my life, and now God says I can have it, so I'm going after it. " It's
interesting.

If you look at these four things I just mentioned that they deny God, they have
these stories they've made up, they despise authority, they appeal to lustful
desires. When you look at these four and you remember the first sin, you can see
these four in the first sin. The first sin in Genesis, it's the original lie.

It's the lie in which all other lies are based. The sin of Adam and Eve in the
garden when the serpent came and said, "You should eat of that fruit of the tree
that God told you not to eat from. " And they ate of it, and because of it, sin
stained the entire human race.

It's the original heresy. Eat of the fruit of that tree. And it's the seed of
all other heresy.

Look at how the four things we just talked about are in that original sin. They
deny the Lord. That's what the serpent did with Eve.

He comes and says, "Did God really say you shouldn't eat of that tree? Did God
really say that you'd become like him? " Here's the lie that's behind that.

The lie that's behind that is you can do whatever you want. If you deny God and
who God really is, that means you become God, you become ruler, you become
leader of your life, and that means you can do whatever you want with your life.
The reason people want to deny authority and deny the Lord is because they want
to do whatever they want.

So go ahead and eat of the fruit. Go ahead and commit that sin. How could God
keep that from you?

The only reason he'd keep it from you is because he knows how much pleasure it's
going to give you or because he doesn't really love you. That's the seed of
heresy. And then stories they have made up.

The serpent looks at Eve and says, "You will not surely die. " That was a
straight out lie. There may have been some half-truth in it.

She would not physically die immediately, but she spiritually died along with
the entire human race. It was a worse death than she could imagine. So in
heresy, it's not just you can do whatever you want, it's you can believe
whatever you want.

Just believe what you want and it makes it true. It's amazing, the books that
you read where people have written out heresies today. You are God.

You can trust in yourself. How ridiculous to believe that you're God. If you
were God, you could change the world.

If you were God, you could forgive all sins. If you were God, you could make
your problems better. You can't even do that.

You'll believe whatever you want and it makes it somehow true. Well, if there's
strict night in front of me and I believe that it is somehow candy and I take
that powder and I eat it, it's still going to kill me no matter what I believe.
It's one of the most foolish lies that's out there, but many people buy this
lie.

It's the seed of heresy. And then the fact that they deny authority that
happened in the first sin. Satan came to Eve and said, "God knows what's going
to happen if you eat of that fruit of that tree.

You're going to be like God. That's why he doesn't want you to eat of it. You'll
be the authority now in your life.

This is the lie, not that you can do whatever you want or believe whatever you
want. This is the lie that you can be whatever you want. You can be God.

You can fill in whatever you want to do, whatever you want to be. " And there's
plenty of people out there who will confidently tell you that lie, but it's just
a lie. You're God's creation.

You're God's child. Why would you want to be any more than that, by the way?
Only because you want to live a selfish life.

No, you don't want to be whatever you want. You want to be what God has made you
to be. That's where the joy in life is.

And then finally, Peter says these false teachers appeal to lustful desires.
That's what Satan did in the first lie, in the first heresy. Eve saw that that
fruit was good for food.

It was pleasing to the eye. It was desirable to make one wise. Those lust of the
flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, those pleasurable,
lustful, terrible lies that have ruined so many lives.

And this is the lie. Not that you can do whatever you want or believe whatever
you want or be whatever you want. This is the lie that you can have whatever you
want.

It's not going to hurt you. You can have whatever you want. Well, you sometimes
can take it, but when you take it, it ends up destroying you.

It ends up hurting everyone around you. When Eve and Adam ate of that fruit, the
destruction that came upon them was immediate. The destruction that came upon
all of human history was immediate.

They had no idea of what was going to happen. That is the terror of false
teaching. And so in my life, in your life, what we have to watch out for is
these four things.

The lies that we hear that tell us you can do whatever you want. You can believe
whatever you want. You can be whatever you want.

You can have whatever you want. Don't buy the lie. The truth.

The truth is God is the one that you're looking for to do what he wants in your
life. You want to believe what he says for your life so you can be what he wants
for your life so you can have what he wants for your life. And the only way to
do that is to trust him, to recognize that what he wants for your life is better
than what you want, far better than what you want, because he knows more about
you, more than what you can be and do than you could possibly know.

He knows more about the future than you're ever going to know. He knows more
about eternity than you can possibly know. And so you can trust him for what you
do and believe and be and have because he's more trustworthy than even yourself.

He's the one who loves you the most, even more than you love yourself. He is the
one who loves you the most. So let's trust him right now.

Father, we trust you. We trust you right now in your love for us. And we pray
that instead of getting caught up in these false teachings that would cause us
to trust ourselves or to think that we could, that we trust you, the love you
have for us, the life that you have for us.

That's where we start. And then we pray that we would build our lives on your
truth. We pray it in Jesus' name.

Amen. Well, join us next week as we end our study of the book of Second Peter.
We're going to look at a third way to live the kind of faith that lasts.

A third truth you got to have in your life is you got to look forward and not
backward. We're going to talk about it this next week.