Thoughts on 2 Peter 2

Today’s reading: Psalms 5-7; 2 Peter 2

Reading 2 Peter 2 this morning really just makes me sad for the state of the church today, at least in the US.

Peter is warning his readers about the defiling impact of those who are greedy, lustful, and despise authority. He warns that they will entice and lead astray those who are just turning to the Lord. From the way he talks about them, it is clear he is expecting such people to be the exception in their communities, and to be people who are sneakily doing these things.

But in how many churches are these things just normative today? How many churches ignore, or at times even actively accept, the greed, lust, and immorality of our culture among themselves? In how many churches is there no expectation that anything would be different within the church than without? And how many churches make no attempt to claim or exercise any authority in the lives of the people in the church because our culture is so strongly against the “oppression” of external authority over against people’s freedom to self-actualize?

Thar’s obviously not to say there are no good churches that hold to proper biblical authority and call their people to live lives that look different from the world around them, but it’s really becoming less and less normative. When my wife and I were looking for a church in our community, the list of questions I had about the various churches was honestly disheartening. Some of them were functional, like whether the teaching ministry is more topical or exegetical, and some were doctrinal, like whether they lean more Calvinist or Armenian, but many of the most important boiled down to, “Do you believe and stand on the truth of the Bible, even in the areas that are ‘problematic’ according to society today?” Obviously some functional or doctrinal questions were more important than others, but the question that should be the largest given in a Christian church, whether the Bible or our culture has the final authority, simply cannot be assumed anymore.

Too many people today want to feel better about themselves by going to church, without their lives being in any way submitted to the Lord, and too any churches are all too happy to indulge this excuse for Christianity.

What was such an exception in Peter’s day, that he needed to warn and remind his readers to be on guard against such things has now become the accepted and expected norm in so many churches, and that should be devastating to those in the church who actually want to see the church submitted to our Lord.