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.

In their covetousness, with cunning words, they will make merchandise of you; those whose doom has not been idle from of old, and whose destruction has not been slumbering.

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them down to Tartarus, and committed them to chains of darkness, and reserved them for judgment;

especially those who spend their lives following the flesh in the lust of defilement, and in despising all authority. Audacious and willful, they feel no awe in railing against dignities;

But these men, like irrational creatures, mere animals, born to be taken and destroyed, continually rail about matters of which they know nothing. In their corruption they will surely be destroyed,

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.

They have forsaken the right way; they have lost their way, and followed the road of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved the wages of wrong-doing.

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 they willingly ignore the fact that there were heaven, from of old, and an earth formed out of water and through water, by the word of God;

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.