The Living Bible (392 page)

2 Peter
2

But there were false prophets, too, in those days, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will cleverly tell their lies about God, turning against even their Master who bought them; but theirs will be a swift and terrible end.
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 Many will follow their evil teaching that there is nothing wrong with sexual sin. And because of them Christ and his way will be scoffed at.

    
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 These teachers in their greed will tell you anything to get hold of your money. But God condemned them long ago and their destruction is on the way.
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 For God did not spare even the angels who sinned, but threw them into hell, chained in gloomy caves and darkness until the judgment day.
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 And he did not spare any of the people who lived in ancient times before the flood except Noah, the one man who spoke up for God, and his family of seven. At that time God completely destroyed the whole world of ungodly men with the vast flood.
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 Later, he turned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into heaps of ashes and blotted them off the face of the earth, making them an example for all the ungodly in the future to look back upon and fear.

    
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 But at the same time the Lord rescued Lot out of Sodom because he was a good man, sick of the terrible wickedness he saw everywhere around him day after day.
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 So also the Lord can rescue you and me from the temptations that surround us, and continue to punish the ungodly until the day of final judgment comes.
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 He is especially hard on those who follow their own evil, lustful thoughts, and those who are proud and willful, daring even to scoff at the Glorious Ones
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without so much as trembling,
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 although the angels in heaven who stand in the very presence of the Lord, and are far greater in power and strength than these false teachers, never speak out disrespectfully against these evil Mighty Ones.

    
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 But false teachers are fools—no better than animals. They do whatever they feel like; born only to be caught and killed, they laugh at the terrifying powers of the underworld which they know so little about;
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and they will be destroyed along with all the demons and powers of hell.
*

    
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 That is the pay these teachers will have for their sin. For they live in evil pleasures day after day. They are a disgrace and a stain among you, deceiving you by living in foul sin on the side while they join your love feasts as though they were honest men.
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 No woman can escape their sinful stare, and of adultery they never have enough. They make a game of luring unstable women. They train themselves to be greedy; and are doomed and cursed.
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 They have gone off the road and become lost like Balaam, the son of Beor, who fell in love with the money he could make by doing wrong;
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 but Balaam was stopped from his mad course when his donkey spoke to him with a human voice, scolding and rebuking him.

    
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 These men are as useless as dried-up springs of water, promising much and delivering nothing; they are as unstable as clouds driven by the storm winds. They are doomed to the eternal pits of darkness.
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 They proudly boast about their sins and conquests, and, using lust as their bait, they lure back into sin those who have just escaped from such wicked living.

    
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 “You aren’t saved by being good,” they say, “so you might as well be bad. Do what you like; be free.”

    
But these very teachers who offer this “freedom” from law are themselves slaves to sin and destruction. For a man is a slave to whatever controls him.
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 And when a person has escaped from the wicked ways of the world by learning about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and then gets tangled up with sin and becomes its slave again, he is worse off than he was before.
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 It would be better if he had never known about Christ at all than to learn of him and then afterwards turn his back on the holy commandments that were given to him.
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 There is an old saying that “A dog comes back to what he has vomited, and a pig is washed only to come back and wallow in the mud again.” That is the way it is with those who turn again to their sin.

2 Peter
3

This is my second letter to you, dear brothers, and in both of them I have tried to remind you—if you will let me—about facts you already know: facts you learned from the holy prophets and from us apostles who brought you the words of our Lord and Savior.

    
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 First, I want to remind you that in the last days there will come scoffers who will do every wrong they can think of and laugh at the truth.
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 This will be their line of argument: “So Jesus promised to come back, did he? Then where is he? He’ll never come! Why, as far back as anyone can remember, everything has remained exactly as it was since the first day of creation.”

    
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 They deliberately forget this fact: that God did destroy the world with a mighty flood long after he had made the heavens by the word of his command and had used the waters to form the earth and surround it.
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 And God has commanded that the earth and the heavens be stored away for a great bonfire at the judgment day, when all ungodly men will perish.

    
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 But don’t forget this, dear friends, that a day or a thousand years from now is like tomorrow to the Lord.
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 He isn’t really being slow about his promised return, even though it sometimes seems that way. But he is waiting, for the good reason that he is not willing that any should perish, and he is giving more time for sinners to repent.
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 The day of the Lord is surely coming, as unexpectedly as a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise, and the heavenly bodies will disappear in fire, and the earth and everything on it will be burned up.

    
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 And so since everything around us is going to melt away, what holy, godly lives we should be living!
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 You should look forward to that day and hurry it along—the day when God will set the heavens on fire, and the heavenly bodies will melt and disappear in flames.
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 But we are looking forward to God’s promise of new heavens and a new earth afterwards, where there will be only goodness.
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 Dear friends, while you are waiting for these things to happen and for him to come, try hard to live without sinning; and be at peace with everyone so that he will be pleased with you when he returns.

    
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 And remember why he is waiting. He is giving us time to get his message of salvation out to others. Our wise and beloved brother Paul has talked about these same things in many of his letters. Some of his comments are not easy to understand, and there are people who are deliberately stupid, and always demand some unusual interpretation—they have twisted his letters around to mean something quite different from what he meant, just as they do the other parts of the Scripture—and the result is disaster for them.

    
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 I am warning you ahead of time, dear brothers, so that you can watch out and not be carried away by the mistakes of these wicked men, lest you yourselves become mixed up too.
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 But grow in spiritual strength and become better acquainted with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be all glory and splendid honor, both now and forevermore. Good-bye.

Peter

1 John

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1 John
1

Christ was alive when the world began, yet I myself have seen him with my own eyes and listened to him speak. I have touched him with my own hands. He is God’s message of life.
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 This one who is life from God has been shown to us, and we guarantee that we have seen him; I am speaking of Christ, who is eternal Life. He was with the Father and then was shown to us.
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 Again I say, we are telling you about what we ourselves have actually seen and heard, so that you may share the fellowship and the joys we have with the Father and with Jesus Christ his son.
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 And if you do as I say in this letter, then you, too, will be full of joy, and so will we.

    
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 This is the message God has given us to pass on to you: that God is Light and in him is no darkness at all.
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 So if we say we are his friends but go on living in spiritual darkness and sin, we are lying.
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 But if we are living in the light of God’s presence, just as Christ does, then we have wonderful fellowship and joy with each other, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from every sin.

    
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 If we say that we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and refusing to accept the truth.
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 But if we confess our sins to him,
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he can be depended on to forgive us and to cleanse us from every wrong. And it is perfectly proper for God to do this for us because Christ died to wash away our sins.
*
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 If we claim we have not sinned, we are lying and calling God a liar,
for he says we have sinned.