For if these are in you and abound, they will make you not inactive nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ;

and with covetousness they will make a gain of you with feigned words, whose judgment a long time lingers not, and their destruction slumbers not.

but especially those who walk after the flesh, in corrupt desires, and despise goverment. Presumptuous, self-complacent, they fear not to revile glories,

but these, like irrational animals, brutes made to be taken and destroyed, reviling things which they do not understand, will also be destroyed in their depravity,

having left the right way they have gone astray, following in the way of Balaam the son of Beor who loved the wages of wickedness,

For speaking extravagant words of vanity, they entice with carnal desires of lewdness those scarcely escaped from them, those living in error,

promising them liberty, when they themselves are servants of corruption; for by whatever a man is overcome, to this is he made a servant.

For if having escaped the defilements of the world by a knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled and overcome by them, the last state of those persons is worse than the first.

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

For of this they are willingly ignorant, that the heavens were of old, and the earth was made of water and by water by the word of God,

as also in all his epistles speaking of these things, in which are some things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest as they also do the other Scriptures to their destruction.