False teachers are sometimes false converts

In Peter’s second letter, he spends a whole chapter on the subject of the dangers of false teachers in the church. And he is mostly referring to false teachers who may claim to know Jesus but they in fact had false conversions. It is true that there are men and women in the church who are truly born again and then drift away from sound doctrine. They are enticed by the enemy and their own fleshly desires and begin to believe and even to teach unsound doctrine. Some of them grow huge churches and at the same time that they are preaching Christ crucified, they are also serving up deadly works-righteousness in their weekly sermons or even promoting sensuality of some form or another. They may be misguided believers but we must certainly judge their wrong teaching and hold it up to the Word of God as the good Bereans did. As Luke records in Acts 17, the believers in Berea examined the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul and Silas was teaching them was the truth!

But let’s be clear. Peter is not talking about those guys in his second letter, not the misguided believers. He is talking about false teachers who were never truly born again. They put on the uniform and learn the language but their hearts remain blackened by sin. Jude says, “These are grumblers, malcontents, following their own sinful desires; they are loud-mouth boasters, showing favoritism to gain advantage.” Peter says these men actually seemed to escape the defilements of the world for a season, because they heard of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. They heard the truth and for a while conformed their lives, in their own strength of will, to what accords with sound doctrine. They cleaned themselves up! It seems. But wait. Can anyone do that? Have you ever heard someone say they can’t come to Christ right now, not until I get myself cleaned up? And you say to them, what? Don’t kid yourself, man! Jesus catches his fish and Jesus alone can clean them. How do we know these false teachers were also false converts? “They are again entangled in them (the defilements of the world) and overcome (by them), the last state has become worse for them than the first.” The disease they were born with, sin, was never actually cured through faith in Jesus, and their defilements, or the pollution of their lives is even worse now than when they were not pretending to be saved. 

Then Peter says something shocking. These false teachers who are false converts would have been better off never knowing the way of righteousness. Or he could have said, “knowing about the way of righteousness.” This is a hard word. One explanation may be this: to hear the truth and ignore it inoculates you against the truth. It is harder for you to even hear it after that. Also, to hear the truth and pretend to embrace it makes you a liar and a deceiver. And in so many cases as we see here, someone who rejects the truth starts a campaign to entice others away from it as well. Paul wrote about that to the church in Galatia: “Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in—who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery—to them we did not yield in submission even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.” 

And that must be our answer to false teachers as well. We do not yield even for a moment. We stand firmly and loudly proclaim the truth of the gospel.