For if these things are yours and abound, they make you to be not idle nor unfruitful unto the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For the man in whom they are lacking is blind and cannot see distant objects, in that he has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his old sins.

For they were no fictitious stories that we followed when we informed you of the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and of his coming, but we had been eye-witnesses of his majesty.

For not, by will of man, was prophecy brought in, at any time, but, as, by Holy Spirit, they were borne along, spake, men, from God.

But there were false prophets among the people, as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly put forward wrong teachings for your destruction, even turning away from the Lord who gave himself for them; whose destruction will come quickly, and they themselves will be the cause of it.

Many people will follow their immoral ways, and they will cause the true way to be maligned.

And in covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose sentence now from of old lingereth not, and their destruction slumbereth not.

For if God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell, and committed them to pits of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment;

and saved the upright Lot who was so distressed by the immoral conduct of unprincipled men??8 for as long as that upright man lived among them, day after day his upright soul was tormented by what he saw and heard of their lawless actions??9 then the Lord knows how to rescue God-fearing people from trial and to punish wrongdoers while they are being kept for the Day of Judgment,

but chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of defilement, and despise dominion. Daring, self-willed, they tremble not to rail at dignities:

while [those] angels, who are greater in strength and power than they, refuse to speak against such authorities, in condemnation, before the Lord.

But these, as creatures without reason, born mere animals to be taken and destroyed, railing in matters whereof they are ignorant, shall in their destroying surely be destroyed,

suffering wrong as the hire of wrong-doing; men that count it pleasure to revel in the day-time, spots and blemishes, revelling in their deceivings while they feast 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.

forsaking the right way, they went astray, having followed the way of Balaam the'son of Beor, who loved the hire of wrong-doing;

Such men are dried-up springs, clouds driven by the storm, and they are doomed to densest darkness.

For, uttering great swelling words of vanity, they entice in the lusts of the flesh, by lasciviousness, those who are just escaping from them that live in error;

promising them liberty, while they themselves are bondservants of corruption; for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he also brought into bondage.

For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein and overcome, the last state is become worse with them than the first.

For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them.

They are an example of that true saying, The dog has gone back to the food it had put out, and the pig which had been washed to its rolling in the dirty earth.

and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for, from the day that the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.

For this they willfully forget, that there were heavens from of old, and an earth compacted out of water and amidst water, by the word of God;

[while] waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed [by] being burned up and the celestial bodies will melt [as they] are consumed by heat!

as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; wherein are some things hard to be understood, which the ignorant and unstedfast wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.

For this reason, my loved ones, having knowledge of these things before they take place, take care that you are not turned away by the error of the uncontrolled, so falling from your true faith.