For if you have these qualities in their fulness, they will make you neither idle nor unproductive when it comes to the understanding of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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.

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

In their greed they will exploit you with pretended arguments. From of old their condemnation has not been idle, and their destruction has not slumbered.

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but plunged them into Tartarus, and committed them to dark dungeons to await their doom,

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,

especially those who yield to their physical nature and indulge in passions that defile them, and despise authority. Rash, headstrong men! They stand in no awe of majesty, but deride beings

These men, like unreasoning animals, mere creatures of instinct created to be caught and killed, abuse what they do not understand and will be destroyed like animals,

suffering wrong as the reward for their wrongdoing. They find pleasure in the indulgence of the moment; they are a stain and a disgrace, and they revel in their deceit while they join in your religious meals.

They have eyes for nobody but adulterous women??yes insatiable in sin. They lure unsteadfast souls. Their hearts are trained in greed. They are accursed!

They have left the straight path and gone astray. They have followed the path of Balaam, the son of Beor, who set his heart on dishonest gain,

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

They utter arrogant nonsense and use physical cravings to lure into immorality men who are just escaping from among those who live in error;

promising them freedom when they are themselves slaves of destruction; for a man is the slave of whatever overcomes him.

For if after men have escaped the corrupting influences of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they again become entangled in them and are overcome by them, their final condition is worse than their former one.

For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of uprightness than after knowing it to have turned their backs upon the sacred command with which they had been intrusted.

For they wilfully ignore the fact that long ago there existed heavens and an earth which had been formed at God's command out of water and by water,

speaking of it as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which ignorant, unsteadfast people twist to their own ruin, just as they do the rest of the Scriptures.