1But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves.
2And many will follow their debaucheries, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.
3And in their greed they will exploit you with fabricated words; their judgment, long prepared, is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.
4For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into Tartarus with chains of gloom, handing them over to be kept for judgment—
5and if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly;
6and if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction, reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would afterward live ungodly lives;
7and rescued righteous Lot, worn down by the conduct of the lawless in their debauchery—
8(for by what he saw and heard, that righteous man, living among them day after day, tormented his righteous soul over their lawless deeds)—
9then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment,
10and especially those who go after the flesh in defiling desire and despise authority. Bold and self-willed, they do not tremble to blaspheme glorious ones,
11whereas angels, though greater in strength and power, do not bring a blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord.
12But these people, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheme in matters they do not understand, and in their destruction they too will be destroyed,
13suffering wrong as the wages of their wrongdoing. They count reveling in the daytime a pleasure; they are stains and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions while they feast together with you,
14having eyes full of an adulteress and insatiable for sin, luring unstable souls, having a heart trained in greed—accursed children!
15Abandoning the straight way, they have gone astray, following the way of Balaam son of Beor, who loved the wages of wrongdoing,
16but was rebuked for his own transgression: a speechless beast of burden, speaking with a human voice, restrained the prophet’s madness.
17These people are waterless springs and mists driven by a squall, for whom the gloom of darkness has been reserved.
18For uttering bombastic, empty words, they lure with fleshly desires and debaucheries those who are barely escaping from people who live in error,
19promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whatever a person is overcome, to that he is enslaved.
20For if, after escaping the defilements of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.
21For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than, having known it, to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.
22What the true proverb says has happened to them: “A dog returns to its own vomit,” and, “A washed sow returns to wallowing in the mire.”
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