For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And in their greed they will exploit you with false words; from long ago their condemnation has not been idle, and their destruction has not been asleep.

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, to be reserved for judgment;

and especially those who indulge the flesh in its corrupt desire and despise authority. Bold and willful, they are not afraid to revile the glorious ones,

But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and killed, reviling in matters of which they are ignorant, will be destroyed in the same destruction with them,

suffering wrong for their wrongdoing. They count it a pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, as they carouse with you.

They have eyes full of adultery, that never cease from sin; they entice unstable souls. They have hearts trained in greed. Accursed children!

Forsaking the right way, they have gone astray, having followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness;

For speaking out arrogant words of vanity, they entice by fleshly desires, by sensuality, those who barely escape from the ones who live in error.

They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for whatever overcomes a man, to that he is enslaved.

For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.

and saying, "Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation."

They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and by means of water,

He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.