For if these virtues are yours in abounding measure, they render you not idle nor unfruitful, until you come into the full knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I shall therefore be always ready to remind you of all this, even though you know it, and are firmly founded in the truth which is with you.

then be sure that the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to keep the wicked (who are even now enduring punishment) for the "Day of Judgment";

suffering wrong as the wage of wrong which they have done. These are men who count it pleasure to carouse in open daylight; they are spots and blemishes reveling in their deceit, even while they are feasting with you.

They have eyes full of harlots, eyes that cannot stop sinning. They entice unsteady souls. Their heart is trained in greed. They are an accursed generation.

Such men are like waterless springs, or mists storm-driven; for them the blackness of darkness has been reserved.

For speaking great swelling words of vanity, they entangle, by their lasciviousness, in the lusts of the flesh, those who are just about to escape from the men that live in misconduct.

They promise them liberty, while they themselves are slaves of rottenness! (For indeed a man is the slave of anything which masters him.)

For if, after having escaped the pollutions of the world, through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, men are again entangled in them and overpowered, their last state is become worse than their first.

But the heavens and earth that now are, by the same word of God, have been reserved for fire, and are being kept for the Day of Judgment, and for the destruction of ungodly men.

Now since all things are in the process of dissolution, what kind of men ought you to be, in all holy living and piety;

But according to his promise, we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness makes her dwelling.

And so, beloved, since you are looking for these things, continually give diligence that you may be found in peace, unspotted and blameless in his sight.

It is the same in all his letters when he speaks of these things. There are indeed some things in his letters hard to understand, which the ignorant and the shifty wrest, as also they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.