And in greediness they will exploit you with false words, whose condemnation [from] long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.

and especially those who go after the flesh in defiling lust and who despise authority. Bold [and] arrogant, they do not tremble in awe [as they] blaspheme majestic beings,

But these persons, like irrational animals born [only with] natural [instincts] for capture and killing, blaspheming {about things} they do not understand, in their destruction will also be destroyed,

being harmed [as the] wages of unrighteousness. Considering reveling in the daytime a pleasure, [they are] stains and blemishes, carousing in their deceitful pleasures [when they] feast together with you,

[By] leaving the straight path, they have gone astray, [because they] followed the way of Balaam the [son of] Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness,

{For by speaking high-sounding but empty words}, they entice with desires of the flesh [and] with licentiousness those who are scarcely escaping from those who live in error,

promising them freedom [although they] themselves are slaves of depravity. For to whatever someone succumbs, by this he is also enslaved.

For if, [after they] have escaped from the defilements of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and they are again entangled in these [things] [and] succumb to [them], 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] have continued just as they have been from the beginning of creation."

For [when] they maintain this, it escapes [their] notice that the heavens existed long ago and the earth held together out of water and through 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 [he does] also in all his letters, speaking in them about these [things], in which there are some [things] hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, as [they] also [do] the rest of the scriptures.