A Note from Michael Gossett | June 19, 2026
A Deeper Commitment
2 Peter 2:11-22
On the morning of August 7, 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out onto a steel cable he had secretly strung between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Petit was up around 1,350 feet in the air with nothing beneath him. No safety net, no safety harness, and he walked across. He did not simply cross once and hurry back. He crossed eight different times. He knelt on the wire, he saluted the crowd below, and a thousand faces looking upward were in disbelief. For 45 minutes, he performed in the sky.
Those who balance themselves on a high wire are called funambulists. One of the strange truths about a skilled funambulist is that they are never actually still or technically balanced. In his book “Off Balance on Purpose,” Dan Thurmon, himself a wire walker, explains that the artist on the high wire is always in motion, always correcting, leaning slightly one way and then easing back the other, passing through the point of balance only to drift past it again. The adjustments are so small and so constant that the crowd never even sees them. Here is the secret that keeps him alive. He does not survive by staring down at his feet. He survives by lifting his eyes and fixing them on the platform waiting at the other end.
Maybe you know what that feels like. Maybe your own life has felt like a wire stretched out over a long fall, and you have been afraid to take the next step because you cannot find your footing. The world keeps throwing things at you that knock you off center. The Apostle Peter tells us that some of the things thrown at us will come from people who claim to speak for God.
In the second chapter of Second Peter, an alarm is sounded about false teachers who rise up within the church, then fall, and consequently drag others down with them. Notice what the warning is not about. Peter is not merely telling us to watch our step or to keep our balance. He is calling us to something more deliberate than caution. A tightrope walker is not finally rescued by fear. He is steadied by his commitment to the walk in front of him, his eyes locked on the far platform. For the believer, that platform has a name. We fix our eyes on Jesus, the author (source) and perfecter of our faith. The question for us to consider is how. Peter’s answer is that we are called to a deeper commitment, and in these verses, he gives us four commitments that will steady our walk with Christ.
“11 however, angels, who are greater in might and power, do not bring a slanderous charge against them before the Lord. 12 But these people, like irrational animals—creatures of instinct born to be caught and destroyed—slander what they do not understand, and in their destruction they too will be destroyed. 13 They will be paid back with harm for the harm they have done. They consider it a pleasure to carouse in broad daylight. They are spots and blemishes, delighting in their deceptions while they feast with you. 14 They have eyes full of adultery that never stop looking for sin. They seduce unstable people and have hearts trained in greed. Children under a curse! 15 They have gone astray by abandoning the straight path and have followed the path of Balaam, the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of wickedness 16 but received a rebuke for his lawlessness: A speechless donkey spoke with a human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness. 17 These people are springs without water, mists driven by a storm. The gloom of darkness has been reserved for them. 18 For by uttering boastful, empty words, they seduce, with fleshly desires and debauchery, people who have barely escaped from those who live in error. 19 They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption, since people are enslaved to whatever defeats them. 20 For if, having escaped the world’s impurity through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in these things and defeated, the last state is worse for them than the first. 21 For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy command delivered to them. 22 It has happened to them according to the true proverb: A dog returns to its own vomit, and, ‘A washed sow returns to wallowing in the mud.’”
The Warning
It helps to remember where these words sit. This is, as far as we can tell, the last thing Peter ever wrote. A man who knew his death was near chose to spend an entire chapter of his farewell warning the church about counterfeit teachers. That alone should make us lean in. Peter did not waste his final ink on trivial things.
You and I understand warning signs. We see them every day. A sign that reads thin ice, or no swimming, or bridge out, tells you plainly what not to do. But underneath every prohibition there is always an invitation. The sign that says do not cross is quietly telling you to find the safe road. That is exactly how Peter has built this chapter. He paints the negative in vivid color so that the positive will stand out against it. He describes the unsteady path so that you will commit yourself to the steady one. The danger is spelled out in ink. The faithfulness is written between the lines. Our task is to read the warning and then walk the other way, committing ourselves to the things that lead to a steady walk with Christ.
Commit to Dominion over Deception (vv. 11-14)
The first commitment runs straight against the grain of deception. Peter wants us to commit to dominion. To feel the weight of that word, go all the way back to the beginning. Genesis 1:28 says, “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.’”
From the very first pages of Scripture, God designed human beings to exercise dominion over the created world. This was never a license to abuse or to tyrannize. It was a calling rooted in the image of God. Because you bear his likeness, you were made to rule, not to be ruled by the lower instincts of the world around you.
Now hear how Peter echoes that same language. 2 Peter 2:12 says, “But these people, like irrational animals—creatures of instinct born to be caught and destroyed—slander what they do not understand, and in their destruction they too will be destroyed.” Peter calls them irrational animals. The Greek word behind irrational isaloga, which literally means creatures without logos, without reason and without word. There is a bit of irony surrounding this thought. The people of God are people of the Word, shaped by the Logos who became flesh, while the false teacher has abandoned reason and word alike and slid back down into mere instinct. He has surrendered the very thing humanity was made for. He has become the animal he was created to rule.
And verse 13 gives us the reality of what deception produces. 2 Peter 2:13 says, “Theywill be paid back with harm for the harm they have done. They consider it a pleasure to carouse in broad daylight. They are spots and blemishes, delighting in their deceptions while they feast with you.”Notice the boldness in that phrase, in broad daylight. There was a time when sin at least had the decency to wait for the cover of night. Peter describes a courage to sin that no longer bothers to hide. We should not be surprised to see exactly the same thing in our own day. The world now parades what it once concealed, and it takes pride in the very path that leads to ruin.
This is an old battle. Listen to what God said to Cain in Genesis 4:7: “If you do what is right, won’t you be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.” Same idea, same picture. Sin is crouching like an animal at the threshold of your life, and you are called to rule over it rather than be ruled by it.
The Puritan John Owen understood this danger better than most. He warned that sin is never passive. A sin you refuse to put to death will not simply lie quiet in the corner. It is always working, always pressing for more ground, and the soul that stops fighting has already begun to lose. To leave a sin alone is to feed it. This is why Peter will not let us treat the deceiver as harmless. The false teacher is not a curiosity to be studied at a comfortable distance. He is a threat to be resisted. Commit to dominion over deception. Do not be charmed by the world’s opinions or swept along by the instincts of the crowd. In the strength of Christ, rule over sin rather than letting sin rule you.
Commit to Principle over Profit (vv. 15-17)
The second commitment is principle over profit. False teachers, and those who trail along after them, care far more about what they can gain than about the truth they have been called to live by. We are living in a moment when principle itself has worn thin. Consider what people now say they believe. Survey after survey finds the overwhelming majority of Americans agreeing that the best way to find yourself is to look within yourself, that no one should ever criticize another person’s lifestyle choices, and that real fulfillment means pursuing whatever you desire most. Read those convictions together and you have a culture that has quietly traded fixed principle for personal preference. The self has become the standard, and the heart has been crowned as its own authority.
But Peter is after something far deeper than good manners or agreeable living. He is talking about the road God himself laid down, the road the earliest believers simply called the Way. Listen again. 2 Peter 2:15 says, “They have gone astray by abandoning the straight path and have followed the path of Balaam, the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of wickedness.”
That word path, which other translations render as the Way, pictures an actual road. In the first century you traveled by walking, and the wisdom of the road was simple. Stay on it. Do not drift to the right or to the left. The Greek word for that road is hodos, and it is the very word the first Christians used to name their whole life with Christ. They were people of the Way, a people defined by the road they walked. So to abandon the path is no small misstep. It is to walk away from the One who is himself the Way. The false teachers have stepped off the road entirely, and worse, they are coaxing others to follow them into the ditch.
Here is the danger of stepping off the road. It rarely happens all at once. A man does not usually leap from faithfulness into ruin. He drifts with compromises in one small thing, and then a smaller thing seems permissible, and over a long enough stretch of road those little turns add up to a different direction altogether. Even minor compromises, if given enough time, end in major devastation. This is why Peter tells us to watch for teachers who compromise at all. Hold your principle. Do not trade the way of Christ for the false promise of an earthly profit.
And what waits at the end of that off-road journey? Peter gives us three images, each one bleaker than the last. 2 Peter 2:17 says, “These people are springs without water, mists driven by a storm. The gloom of darkness has been reserved for them.”
First, a spring without water. Picture a traveler dying of thirst in the desert, spotting a spring, stumbling toward it, and finding it bone dry. False teaching does exactly this. It promises refreshment and delivers barrenness. Second, mists driven by a storm. A storm cloud ought to carry rain that soaks the fields and ends the drought, but this is only mist, all noise and motion and flash, with not a single drop of nourishment in it. Third, the gloom of darkness. They promise a new way, a brighter way, the way, and at the end of their tunnel there is no light at all, only the black despair of a lightless life. Commit to principle, which is the way of Christ, over the counterfeit profit that leads only to a dry, dark, and hopeless wasteland.
Commit to Freedom over Failure (vv. 18-19)
The third commitment is freedom over failure, because a life spent off the road ends in failure. If you will not commit to dominion, and if you will not commit to principle, failure is waiting at the end of the road. Perhaps not in this life, but certainly in the life to come.
2 Peter 2:18-19 says, “For by uttering boastful, empty words, they seduce, with fleshly desires and debauchery, people who have barely escaped from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption, since people are enslaved to whatever defeats them.” Look first at how the false teacher speaks. Peter calls his words boastful and empty. The Greek behind boastful is hyperonka, a word that means swollen or overblown, the speech of a man puffed up well past his actual size. It is impressive in volume and hollow at the core. And the word behind empty carries the sense of futility, of vanity, of something that looks substantial and finally amounts to nothing at all.
Then comes the cruelest irony in the whole passage. They promise freedom while they themselves are slaves. The Greek sharpens it even further. They offer eleutheria, freedom, while they live as douloi, slaves, slaves of corruption. And Peter states the principle underneath it plainly. A person is enslaved to whatever defeats him. Whatever masters you owns you, and there is no such thing as a teacher who can hand out a freedom he has never tasted himself.
Think about how strange it is to take advice from someone who has never once followed it. You would not ask a man how to care for an engine if he has never changed the oil in his life. You would not take lessons in raising cattle from someone who has never owned a single acre. It would be absurd. Yet this is exactly what happens when people sit under teachers who preach freedom while living in chains. In our own day there are preachers bending the clear word of God to keep their congregations comfortable, softening what Scripture plainly says about sexuality, baptizing the latest political platform, smoothing every hard truth so that no one in the room is ever offended. More and more voices now present what the New Testament never sanctions as though it were a settled mercy. But a teaching that compromises the truth can only ever be the spring without water and the thunder without rain. It takes people who are already in bondage and leaves them exactly where it found them, comforted in their chains.
Picture someone standing in front of you, wrists bound, and you are the one holding the key. How cruel would it be to look at that person and say, “well, we should simply accept you as you are.” That is not love. Love does not leave a captive in his chains. Love offers the key. We are not called to lead thirsty people to a dry well. We are called to lead them to the One who is living water, so that whoever drinks of his salvation will never thirst again. The freedom we offer others is real precisely because we have tasted it ourselves. So commit to freedom over failure, and then hold out, gladly and without flinching, the very key you have been given.
Commit to Remaining over Returning (vv. 20-22)
The final commitment is remaining over returning. Peter closes this section on false teachers with a series of sharp contrasts. Empty words set against holy words. Words that enslave set against words that liberate. And running underneath it all, a sobering picture of those who taste the truth and then walk away from it. 2 Peter 2:20 says, “For if, having escaped the world’s impurity through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in these things and defeated, the last state is worse for them than the first.”
That word knowledge is worth pausing over. Peter uses epignosis, which means far more than mere information. It is full knowledge, knowledge by acquaintance, the kind of knowing that comes from genuine contact with a person. It is the same word Peter has been weaving through this entire letter, all the way back to his opening prayer that grace and peace would be multiplied to us through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. And the word translated entangled, empleko, pictures being woven back into a net, tangled up once more in the very thing you had only just escaped.
Then Peter reaches for a proverb meant to make us wince. 2 Peter 2:22 says it has happened to them according to the true proverb: “A dog returns to its own vomit,” and, “A washed sow returns to wallowing in the mud.” We need to feel this the way Peter’s first readers felt it. In that world a dog was not a beloved family pet, and neither the dog nor the pig was anything a Jewish reader would hold dear. Think instead of a rat, a buzzard, an opossum, a creature drawn by instinct to garbage and roadkill. That is the image. The dog gags up what was poisoning it and then circles right back to swallow it again. The sow is scrubbed clean and walks straight back into the mire.
Here is the point Peter is pressing, and it is one the Puritans understood with painful clarity. Jonathan Edwards spent much of his ministry distinguishing true grace from its counterfeit, and he observed that a person can be deeply moved by religion, stirred, reformed, outwardly changed, and still never be born again. The washing of the sow is real washing. The water is real. But the nature underneath it is unchanged, and a clean pig with the heart of a pig will always find its way back to the mud. Thomas Watson made the same point in his own way. Hypocrisy can carry a person remarkably far, but it can never carry him home. Outward reformation is simply not the same thing as inward regeneration.
This is why Peter’s warning is not only for the false teacher who begins well and ends in ruin. It is just as much for the church member who claims the name of Christ and yet shows no change of life. And here we have to be careful to state the gospel rightly. You are not saved because of the way you behave. You behave a certain way because you have been saved. We cannot afford to get that backward. We are not a people committed to legalism or to self-righteousness, not to dead tradition or to restless innovation, not to what is popular or to whatever the world happens to applaud. We are a people committed to remain in Christ himself.
Jesus put it this way in John 15:4: “Remain in me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.” The word Jesus chooses for remain is meno, which means to abide, to stay, to take up lasting residence. It is not the language of visiting. It is the language of dwelling. The branch does not strain and sweat to manufacture fruit. It simply stays joined to the vine, and the fruit comes. We are not called to drop in on Christ from time to time. We are called to live in him. Commit to remain, and Jesus will not let you go. Abide in him, and he will abide in you.
Live on the Rock
Maybe, as you have read all of this, you have recognized yourself somewhere out on that wire. You have been inching across your life one careful step at a time, trying not to fall, certain that the next gust of wind will finally take you down. If that is you, hear the good news Peter has been building toward the whole time. Jesus does not merely train you to walk the tightrope a little better. He offers you a different place to stand altogether.
Psalm 40:2 says, “He brought me up from a desolate pit, out of the muddy clay, and set my feet on a rock, making my steps secure.” The answer to a life spent on the wire is not better balance. The answer is to surrender your life to Jesus, who lifts you off the rope entirely and sets your feet on solid ground. That is how your walk with him finally grows steady. And once your feet are planted on the Rock, you are free to commit to all the rest. Commit to dominion over your sin, in the strength of Christ. Commit to the principles he has clearly laid down. Commit to the freedom that he alone can give. And commit to remaining in step with him, all the way across to the far platform, where the author and perfecter of your faith is standing, watching, and waiting to welcome youhome.
One of the greatest ways we can love our city is by inviting people to hear the hope of the Gospel. That is exactly what we are praying God will do through our upcoming Celebrate Freedom event!
As our nation marks 250 years of history, we are grateful for the freedoms we enjoy as Americans. But even greater than political freedom is the eternal freedom that is found only through Jesus Christ. Scripture reminds us, “So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free” (John 8:36).
Celebrate Freedom will be a special opportunity for our church and community to come together for a night of family fun, drone show, and most importantly, a clear presentation of the Gospel. We are praying that people from every neighborhood, every background, and every stage of life will hear the good news that true freedom is found in Christ alone.
Would you help us make this a church-wide and city-wide outreach effort?
First, share every social media post. A simple share may place an invitation in front of someone who would never otherwise hear about this event.
Second, personally invite people. Invite your neighbors, coworkers, classmates, friends, and family members. Most people who attend church for the first time do so because someone personally invited them.
Third, come and participate. Your presence matters. Every smiling face, every conversation, every handshake, and every act of hospitality helps create an environment where people can experience the love of Christ.
Let’s pray boldly, invite intentionally, and believe God to work powerfully! I hope and pray that Celebrate Freedom will be more than an event, but instead be an opportunity to see lives changed, families strengthened, and people discover the freedom that only Jesus can give.
Let’s fill our campus and reach our city with the hope of the Gospel!
This Sunday, we will continue our series through Jonah with a message from Jonah 4 called “Grace that Confronts.” Most people think the book of Jonah ends with a great revival in Nineveh. It does not. It ends with God confronting the prophet’s heart.
It is possible to know the truth, obey outwardly, and still struggle with anger, comfort, pride, and a lack of compassion for people far from God. In Jonah 4, God lovingly exposes what is happening beneath the surface and invites Jonah to embrace His heart for the nations.
This may be our story. We all have areas where God is still shaping us, correcting us, and teaching us to love what He loves. Join us this Sunday as we discover how God’s grace does more than pursue us, rescue us, and transform us. God’s grace also confronts us so that we might become more like Christ. See you Sunday!
You are loved and prayed for!
Michael Gossett