WWUTT 361 Blaspheming the Glorious Ones?

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False prophets, false teachers, do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones.

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Whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the

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Lord, when we understand the text. Many of the

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Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text, as an online ministry committed to teaching sound doctrine and exposing the faulty, visit our website at www .utt

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.com. Now here's our host, Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky. And we've got a new links page now on our website.

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Just added it over the weekend. It's something that was requested of me for a while, and I finally just threw something together and it'll be added to periodically as time goes on.

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But if you go to our website, www .utt .com, you'll notice along the tabs along the top of the page, there's one now entitled links.

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So you click on that and you'll find, well, links to other ministries that we recommend, seminaries, conferences,

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Bible translations, blogs, podcasts, even notable sermons. Some of the sermons that I'll recommend on the podcast sometimes and folks will ask me, hey, you mentioned something about such and such a sermon by so and so, you know, where do

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I find that? We're providing links to some of those now. I think there's only about a dozen listed, but eventually there'll probably be 30 or 40 on there.

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But go to our website, www .utt .com, and click on the links tab. Find some other

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Christian resources recommended by when we understand the text. We continue our study of 2

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Peter 2, and this week we'll be focusing on the section from about midway through verse 10 through verse 16.

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In the ESV Bible anyway, that's a paragraph. So it's going to be that paragraph or the third paragraph so far here in 2

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Peter that we'll be looking at this week. Then next week, it's that final paragraph.

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So between this week and next week, we should finish up 2 Peter 2. So beginning in verse 10 or that paragraph that starts there midway through verse 10, bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones.

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Whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the

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Lord. But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant, will also be destroyed in their destruction, suffering wrong as the wage for their wrongdoing.

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They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions while they feast with you.

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They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. They entice unsteady souls.

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They have hearts trained in greed, accursed children, forsaking the right way they have gone astray.

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They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved gain from wrongdoing, but was rebuked for his own transgression.

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A speechless donkey spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet's madness.

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So going back to that midway part in verse 10, bold and willful, they do not tremble.

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Who are they? Who is it that we are talking about? Well, false prophets. That was the way we started off the chapter.

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False prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.

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And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.

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Now that's an interesting word to use, and we see it come up a couple of times here in this particular section that we're reading today, verses 10 through 16.

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Oftentimes we think of blasphemy as taking the Lord's name in vain. So how is it blasphemy to pronounce a blasphemous judgment or to blaspheme about matters of which they are ignorant?

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How is it that we are to understand the word blasphemy in this particular context?

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Well, the word blasphemy and the way that it applies in scripture is simply to speak about matters with no fear of God.

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So it doesn't necessarily have to be taking the Lord's name in vain.

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It could be talking about anything in a spiritual matter or anything theological for that matter, and just not having the fear of God before your eyes.

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So anytime you are opening your mouth and talking about God, you are being theological. You know, you have those people who say,

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I'm a spiritual person, but I'm not really theological. Well, you're being theological just saying that.

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Talking about God is theology, but we have to have a theology that is grounded in biblically historical orthodoxy.

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And if it's not, then what you're saying about God is probably heretical. And anytime you use the name of God, if it is not done in a reverent way, that's blasphemy.

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Thus talking about anything that pertains to God and his wisdom, his direction, his guidance, his word, any of these things, if not spoken about with a knowledge of God, according to a sound understanding of biblical doctrine, then what you're saying about God is probably heretical.

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Even if you're hitting the right notes, if it's not spoken about in a reverent way, it is blasphemous to speak about God without the fear of God.

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And so that's what's being spoken about here concerning these false prophets. They are bold and they are willful in the things that they say.

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They are so sure of themselves, not sure of about God, not looking at anything through a biblical worldview, but rather just thinking of things as they want to think about them.

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This is what I think about God. This is what I think about the Bible, but not actually having a reverent fear of God.

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They do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones. So really, that's where our definition, our understanding of blasphemy would be spelled out in this case or in this context of 2

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Peter 2. Bold and willful. They do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones.

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There's our understanding of blasphemy there. They're bold and willful, meaning they're prideful.

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They have no reverent fear of God. They do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones.

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Now, what does that mean? Well, it basically means that they don't think that they're going to be affected by anything evil.

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The glorious ones in this case would be the angels that we've talked about before in verse four. For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment.

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All right, they're the glorious ones. They are evil powers that still affect and influence human thought and thinking temptations, so on and so forth.

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And a person who is bold and willful does not tremble, does not think that they will ever be under the influence of some sort of demonic or evil power.

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I think my own thoughts. I am my own person. I am in complete control of my faculties.

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Nobody or nothing is influencing my thinking. I am the one who has come to these decisions on my own, completely unaware of the fact that that because they have that level of pride, they have already been influenced by those dark forces, those evil powers.

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And so they blaspheme with no fear of God, with no fear of of even understanding that demons do have power.

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And so, therefore, they blaspheme these spiritual matters in an irreverent way, as if to say that nothing's ever going to affect me.

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I'm too strong for that. I'm too good for that. I remember talking with a young man a number of years ago, and he was talking to me about how he used to be a

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Christian, but he asked God to show himself to him and and God didn't show him anything.

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And so because God didn't show him anything, then then God doesn't really exist. And I remember one of the things he said to me was, why doesn't

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God show himself to me when he knows my address? That was the way that he said it. Well, he happened to be a

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John Mayer fan, a fan of the musician John Mayer. And there's a song that John Mayer has written in which he says that very thing.

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He says, is there a God? What is he waiting for when he knows my address or something like that?

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I can't remember exactly how the song goes, but I heard that song and I remembered what that young man said. And I encountered him again later.

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And I said, your thinking is being influenced by the secular art, music, songs,

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TV shows, commercials, movies, so on and so forth that you subject yourself to. And you don't even realize that your thinking has been manipulated by those things.

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And he tried to convince me, no, I've chosen to listen to those things or watch those things because they're interesting to me or whatever, but but simply could not come to the understanding of the fact that his mind had been affected by those things to the point that he was even repeating them when it came to explaining his beliefs or his philosophies or any of these other kinds of things.

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And so without an understanding that he was being influenced by the spiritual forces of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the way that Paul puts it in Ephesians chapter two, he was therefore blaspheming the glorious ones, thinking that he was strong enough in mind to not be influenced by those things and and not seeing and not hearing that the things that were coming out of his mouth was parroting the stuff that had been fed into his mind by the culture.

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And there are people that that think that way. They think that billboards that they pass by and music they listen to and the stuff they watch is not going to affect them at all.

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It all gets in there. We're all being affected by it. I'm being affected by it. You're being affected by it.

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This is one of the reasons why church attendance and the declaration of the gospel and the public reading of scripture.

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These are all such important habits for us. Reading your Bible daily, praying before the

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Lord, listening to listening to good music, things that are honoring to God as much as you have control over those things, putting your mind and your heart in under the influence of that rather than subjecting yourself to all the mindless, brainless, evil stuff that comes from the culture as as much as you can submit your thoughts to God.

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You need to do that because this is a regular cleansing of our mind, cleansing the toxic venom that gets in there from the culture that is just bombarding us with with a secular message that is being controlled by Satan.

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Satan does not want us to think about the things of God. He does not want us to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ.

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He is the very one who is being described in Ephesians chapter two when Paul talks about the prince of the power of the air that which has a particular significance to us in this culture.

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Now, when you think about airwaves, right, a signal being beamed out over the airwaves through your cell phone, over your computer screen, in your television and on and on it goes as much as we can submit our thoughts to the

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Lord so that we can have our our thoughts cleansed, our hearts revived, refreshed, renewed by the declaration of the gospel of Jesus Christ, having our hope restored and knowing that our hope is not in anything in this world, but is in Christ and the kingdom to come.

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So let us not ever think that we can't be affected by evil forces.

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We can be even we who are in Christ, if we're not careful, will be affected by the message of Satan through this world, which again is why we need to join together as the church, why we need to encourage one another, why we need to commit ourselves to regularly hearing the declaration of the gospel from our pulpits, in our family devotionals, sermons that we listen to even while we're at home.

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As much as we can get the gospel in our minds, let us submit ourselves to those things so we can cleanse out that toxicity that comes in from the culture.

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Do not ever think that you cannot be tempted. You can be. And if you ever get so prideful as to think that, you know,

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I've got myself figured out, I'm now well protected from any of this stuff that's coming at me from the outside.

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That is when your guard is the most let down. That's when you let your guard down the most.

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When you think that you've got this figured out, I'm invincible, I'm now untouchable, or at least

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I'm strong enough to prevent myself from this, that, or the other. We're about to get into, in 2

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Samuel, in our Old Testament study on Thursday, we're about to get into David's temptation while he was on the walls of his palace and he looks down and he sees a woman bathing and he's tempted by what he sees and he brings that woman into his own bedchamber and then has her husband killed,

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Uriah, to cover up this evil that it is that he's done in having an affair with another man's wife.

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David, if David was susceptible to that sort of temptation, you're susceptible to that as well.

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We have to keep our minds fixed on the things of God as much as we can, keeping as much of the culture out as we can within a reasonable level.

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I mean, you can't go live in your bunker. Okay, you can't just hunker down in your basement and shut the whole culture out.

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I'm going to order everything off of Amazon and I don't even ever have to go to the grocery store again and I'm keeping myself cut off from the world.

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That's not how we're supposed to go about this because we need to share the gospel with the world. There are people in the world who are lost, who are going to hell, who have never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ and we need to share the gospel with them.

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So that requires interaction with the world. You cannot completely cut yourself off from the world.

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But as much as we can, we need to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ as Paul instructed the

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Corinthians to do. So we must do as well. And again, this all ties in with making sure that we understand that we're not invincible.

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We are not invulnerable to the devil's schemes, but we need to submit ourselves to the strength of Christ.

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It is by his power that we will be protected from the things of this world.

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Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones. Whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the

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Lord. Now, those of you who are familiar with the book of Jude, you'll notice this sounds a little familiar. This sounds like something

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Jude has said. In fact, one of the criticisms against the book of Second Peter questioning its authenticity as to whether or not it was actually written by Peter is that there are things, particularly in the second chapter, that sound almost identical to things that we read in the book of Jude.

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And so critics will say, no, well, Second Peter chapter two sounds like Jude probably had the same writer.

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It wasn't actually Peter. It was somebody else. But that's an unfounded claim. Well, it's a ridiculous claim.

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I'll just put it that way, because the way that Peter words things isn't even the same way that Jude words them.

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It might be the same thought, but they're not worded exactly the same. It's not uncommon for the apostles to have similar thoughts and preach similar things, but just use different wording in the way those things are communicated to their respective audiences.

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And we've already looked at that in several different ways. Peter says this. Paul says this similar thing over here.

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James says the same thing over here. And so here we have a statement that looks very similar to something that Jude has said as well.

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In Jude chapter one, you know, I'm still going to say Jude one eight, even though it's one chapter.

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Anyway, there aren't chapters in Jude because it's twenty something verses. It's all just one chapter.

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I still just out of habit. I'm going to say one eight, even though there's not a Jude two eight.

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But you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, Jude one eight says this. Yet in like manner, these people also relying on their dreams defile the flesh, reject authority and blaspheme the glorious ones.

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Sounds sounds familiar, right? But when the archangel Michael contending with the devil was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said the

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Lord rebuke you. So even here in this apocryphal story about Michael and the devil contending over the the body of Moses, Michael doesn't overthrow the devil, but rather he says the

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Lord rebuke you. He doesn't say I rebuke you. He says the Lord rebuke you. So Michael, the archangel, still submitting himself to the full will and sovereignty of God rather than acting by his own power and his own force against the devil in such a way that God did not command of him.

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Now, often, particularly among word of faith people, you will hear it said that you need to rebuke the devil devil today.

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I rebuke you. There was a particular teacher, Southern Baptist teacher, as a matter of fact, who who was doing a periscope

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Bible study, and she was wearing on that particular day a shirt that said not today, Satan. And she was very proud of it.

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And she stands up in front of her smartphone or computer. I don't know what she was doing periscope through. But anyway, stands up and goes,

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Hey, look at the T -shirt I'm wearing today. Not today, Satan. You know that that does not ward off Satan.

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I mean, that right there is blaspheming the glorious ones to think that that's enough to ward off the devil.

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It's not going to do anything. It's not going to have any effect on him whatsoever. As a matter of fact, the devil is probably laughing and going, thanks for wearing my name today, right?

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Showing everybody my name on your shirt. That doesn't do anything to ward off evil spirits.

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And so, you know, Michael, the archangel, doesn't even rebuke the devil by his own authority.

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He says the Lord rebuke you. And so if angels themselves do not even pronounce judgments apart from the will of the

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Lord. So who are we to be able to say that we have some sort of a power within ourselves to rebuke

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Satan or the devil or any of these other kinds of things? We don't have such a power. And it's blaspheming the glorious ones to assume that we do.

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Rather, we need to understand something that we've read previously in the book of James. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.

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James 4, 7. Submit yourselves, therefore, to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

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Not rebuke Satan. Resist him. And how do we resist him? Verse 8.

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Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners.

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Purify your hearts, you double -minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.

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Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you. And it's that lack of humility that we're reading about here in 2

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Peter 2, 10 and 11. Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones.

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Whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the

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Lord. Let us be humble before the Lord. Submitting ourselves to him. Drawing near to God and he will draw near to us.

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Resisting the devil and he will flee from us. Not confronting the devil. Not rebuking the devil.

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Drawing near to God. Resisting Satan. And the devil will flee from us.

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Let us pray and we'll conclude our lesson for today. We thank you, our dear

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Lord, for the salvation that has been given to us through Jesus Christ. We were dead in our sins and our trespasses.

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We were following the course of this world. The prince of the power of the air. The evil spirit that is at work in the sons of disobedience.

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We were once part of them before God intervened and rescued us from darkness and transferred us into his marvelous light.

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Your glorious kingdom of which we are now fellow heirs with Christ because of your grace and mercy.

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So Lord, we ask for your forgiveness. When our minds become susceptible to the things of this world, when we start following the pattern of this world, instead of not being conformed to the world, but instead being transformed in mind and submitting our thoughts to Christ.

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So keep us on guard in Christ Jesus, submitting our thoughts to him.

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And it is by the strength of Christ that we will be able to resist the devil's schemes.

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Help us not to ever think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, but with sober judgment, submitting ourselves before the

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Lord. And it is you who will exalt us in Christ. It is his name that is exalted above every other name.

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So that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

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And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God, the Father. Amen. Pastor Gabe keeps a regular blog sharing personal thoughts, alerting readers to false teachers, and offering commentary on the church and social issues.

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You can find a link to the blog through our website, www .utt .com.

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Thank you for listening and join us again tomorrow as we continue our study in God's Word, when we understand the text.