The Character of False Teachers

Peter does not present false teachers merely as men who teach mistruths about the Bible or God. To be sure, they are ‘false teachers,’ but he emphasizes their character qualities as much as, maybe even more than, their audible words.

In 2 Peter 2, Peter describes false teachers. He uses a very important word, ‘secretly’ (2:1). Why? Because these are not just blatant false teachers. He isn’t talking primarily about Joel Osteen and Kreflo Dollar. We who study the Bible seriously can very easily see their heresy. There is nothing ‘secretive’ about those men. The bigger question is, ‘who in our community is a false teacher?’ The point is not to be paranoid or to be heresy-hunters (“burn the witches!”). We aren’t playing a game of mafia. But Peter does want us to have a healthy concern and awareness for what might be ‘sneaking in’ to our community.

“The bigger question is, ‘who in our community is a false teacher?'”

The first half of 2:10 reveals a ‘two-tier’ system of sinners. God knows how to punish the unrighteous, but he has reserved a special punishment for false teachers. This group is especially notable for two characteristics: their sensuality and their disrespect for authority. 2:10b-16 will expound on these characteristics.

First, Peter deals with disrespect for authority (2:10b-13a). False teachers really have no idea what they are up against. So, they blaspheme the ‘glorious ones.’ By comparing this passage to Jude 9-10, we get the clear sense of supernatural beings as the ‘glorious ones.’ These false teachers are willing to get into spiritual battles, to talk against the spiritual realm, without any sense of what they are getting into. Spiritual warfare is a real thing, and it is something that we must approach cautiously.

There also seems to be a general approach of disrespect that these false teachers have toward authority. They discount authority in general. They have degrading words to say about those in authority, whether that be the pastor of a church or the president of the United States. This goes beyond pointing out abuses of authority. Rather, they despise, or count as insignificant, the positions of authority. This is something that Christians are often guilty of. We ought to be very careful in how to talk about those in authority, and our criticisms should come from a spirit of humility – I would almost say, a spirit of reverence.

From here, Peter turns to the sensuality of these false teachers, and he puts this on full display, in 2:13b-16. They are sensual, and here, though not stated directly, is the idea of sexual excess. They can’t control their sexual appetites. This can spill over into actual physical fornication or adultery or pedophilia, as so many scandals in the church have shown, but it just as often can stay right below the surface in pornography or other such ‘private’ sexual sins.

Peter is giving them a low blow. The whole second half of this chapter has a lot of animal language in it: we have “irrational animals” (v. 12), a “speechless donkey” (v. 16), “the dog” that returns to its vomit” (v. 22), and the “sow” that returns to the mire (v. 22). None of these descriptions are very flattering. First he compares them to irrational animals, and animals don’t have ‘higher level’ thinking skills. They don’t think about the future, just what feels good in the here-and-now. That is what the false teacher is like: saying things and living out passions that feel good in the here-and-now, but entirely unconcerned about future judgment. Then Peter describes these teachers like Balaam, who was rebuked by a speechless donkey. In other words, even irrational animals have the sense to see that what these men are doing is irrational!

“Even irrational animals have the sense to see that what these men are doing is irrational!”

The verdict comes in 2:17-22. It starts with a pronouncement about their character: they are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm. A waterless spring is a place where you go, hoping to get some refreshment, and it is just as dry as a bone. If you are a wanderer in the desert, you likely knew where every spring was, and you counted on it to have water. The problem was that sometimes these places were separated by thirty, fifty, or even one hundred miles. In a hot desert, if one of these springs is dry, it could literally be a death sentence.

These false teachers are out there. They are marked on the map as springs of water, and so you go to them. You are just barely surviving since you drank all the water that you brought from the last spring, and when you arrive, the spring is dry. And for some, this is literally a spiritual death sentence. They will never get any closer to God, and their experience with the false teacher and his hypocrisy will ruin any faith they had.

“For some, this is literally a spiritual death sense. They will never get any closer to God, and their experience with the false teacher and his hypocrisy will ruin any faith they had.”

They are also described as mists driven by a storm, and “…according to Aristotle…this rare term [mists] denotes the haze which is left after the condensation of cloud into rain. It is, as it were, ‘unproductive cloud’ heralding dry weather, and both that fact and the ease with which such mists are dispersed by sharp gusts of wind…underline the insubstantiality and flimsiness of the teaching.” (J. N. D. Kelley)

With the pronouncement of character comes the judgment: “For them the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved.” If you have ever been to one of the bayous or swamps of the deep south, you might have a picture of this. In those places, everything is still; there is just a mist that hangs in the air. The noises that come from out there, in the darkness – the kind of noises that make little children run and hide under their pillows to get away from the darkness – that is the sort of thick gloom, the chilliness, that Peter says these men are destined to wander in.

Peter describes these people as shouting about their spiritual wisdom – “loud boasts of folly,” he calls it. People are craving real leadership. We live in a culture and society of broken homes, broken institutions, broken relationships, broken lives, and anyone who looks like they have it together – anyone who seems to have a solution to this brokenness – people look up to them. Society is ripe to listen to and follow these loud boasts.

Peter says that these teachers have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of Jesus, but they get re-entangled and overcome. Things are worse after than before. In other words, better to be a pagan who dies and goes to judgment than a false teacher who dies and goes to judgment.

“…better to be a pagan who dies and goes to judgment than a false teacher who dies and goes to judgment.”

This is stated very bluntly in 2:22, describing these teachers like dogs and pigs. We have a similar idea in English: “you can get the people out of the slums, but how do you get the slums out of the people?” That is the core of the problem here, and the problem with all non-Christian religions. False religions can elevate a man and get him to live a moral life. They can get him out of an evil environment, but they can’t regenerate his inward moral nature. The evil remains on the inside. How do you change the desires of a dog or a pig? How do you change the inner being to no longer desire evil? The answer is: you can’t. Only God can perform that change.

Here is what Peter sees going on. There are people who actually had a radical transformation of life as a result of hearing about Jesus Christ. They went from being total pagans to being baptized Christians, they gave up their lusts, they turned from immorality and drunkenness and debauchery and every other evil that you can imagine, and they started living quiet, orderly, peaceable lives as benefits to society. This really happened. Then these people gradually changed. They became evil and false teachers and scoffers. Peter is aware that they did have this remarkable change in their lives, and he is willing to describe it just that way. Nor will he deny that this change happened because of Jesus Christ. When a person has such a dramatic change, God is working in that person’s life, make no mistake. But we must not conflate God ‘working’ in someone’s life to God ‘electing’ that person.

The point is that these people did experience a temporary change – they got out of their mire – but people always return to their natural habitat, and these false teachers returned as well to their natural habitat.

That is the wonder, the marvel – that I say not, the horror – of the human spirit: it always returns to its environment. That is why, without regeneration, you can take an individual and surround him with believers, give him a Bible and place him at the head of a church, or a large ministry – but if he is not regenerated, he is still going to find some way to express that evil nature. He will always find some way to return to sin.