2 Peter 2

¹But there were also false prophets among the people, as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction;

²And many will follow their licentious ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed;

³And in greed, with fabricated words, they will exploit you; for whom the judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction does not slumber.

⁴For if God did not spare angels who sinned, but casting them into Tartarus in chains of darkness, delivered them to be kept for judgment,

⁵and did not spare the ancient world, but he preserved Noah, the eighth, a herald of righteousness, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly,

⁶and he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction, reducing them to ashes, having appointed them as an example of what is coming to the ungodly,

⁷and he rescued righteous Lot, worn down by the conduct of the lawless in their sensuality;

⁸for that righteous man, dwelling among them day after day, by what he saw and heard tormented his righteous soul over their lawless deeds;

⁹the Lord knows how to rescue the godly out of trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment,

¹⁰and especially those who go after the flesh in defiling lust and despise authority. Daring, self-willed, they do not tremble as they blaspheme glorious ones;

¹¹whereas angels, though being greater in strength and power, do not bring against them a reviling judgment from the Lord.

¹²But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct born for capture and destruction, blaspheming in matters of which they are ignorant, in their destruction will also be destroyed,

¹³suffering wrong as the wage of wrongdoing. Counting the daytime carousing a pleasure, they are spots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions as they feast with you,

¹⁴having eyes full of an adulteress and never ceasing from sin, enticing unstable souls, having a heart trained in greed — children of a curse!

¹⁵abandoning the straight way, they have gone astray, having followed the way of Balaam son of Bosor, who loved the wage of wrongdoing,

¹⁶but he received a rebuke for his own transgression: a mute beast of burden, speaking in a man's voice, restrained the prophet's madness.

¹⁷These are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm, for whom the gloom of darkness has been reserved forever.

¹⁸For uttering bombastic words of futility, they entice with fleshly passions, by debaucheries, those who are barely escaping from those who live in error,

¹⁹promising them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whatever someone is overcome, by that also he has been enslaved.

²⁰For if, having escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but again entangled in these they are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.

²¹For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than, having known it, to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.

²²But to them has happened the saying of the true proverb: A dog returns to its own vomit; and, A sow, having washed, returns to wallowing in the mire.