I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Peter 1-3.

    God has given us all we need to live the holy life to which He has called us. Further, He has promised us the ability to partake of the divine nature, the ability to be free from the corruption caused by sinful desires. There is a process which follows if we want to accept that promise and receive what was promised. The process, in order, is: faith, goodness (or moral excellence), knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, mutual affection, love for everyone. It is worth noting that goodness, or moral excellence, is not the same thing as godliness. I am not going to go into what that difference is at the moment. In many ways that would be a blog post all of its own.

    A simplistic reading of this process might lead one to think it was a step by step process, with one moving on from one step to the next. However, I believe it is more a kind of positive feedback loop: as you add goodness to your faith, you get more faith, as you add knowledge to goodness, you get more goodness (and thus even more faith), this continues on with each step. Each step up the ladder calls on us to increase the level of the step which proceeded it. I am going to give two examples of how this works. As we do good the faith which motivated us to do good becomes stronger because we see the truth of that faith in the results of our good actions. As we become more knowledgeable, we see that some places where we thought we were doing good, we can do better, which hopefully results in us doing more good. Which in turn results in our faith growing stronger. This process continues through every step of this process.

    Peter goes on to write about false teachers. He warns us that they will use deception and guile to introduce heretical teachings. Their hallmarks are arrogance and greed. They scoff at what they do not understand. I could go on and write more about what Peter says about them, but you can read the passage for yourself. I want to rather look at some manifestations of the sorts of false teachers which Peter describes. There are those who introduce heretical teachings, often in order to allow themselves to satisfy their greed and/or their immoral sexual desires (failing to realize that neither of those will ever be satisfied). We see these in those who preach prosperity gospel, that following Christ is a formula for gaining wealth (it is interesting how often part of that formula is sending them money). We, also, see this in those who want to weaken or destroy the Church’s teachings against sexually immoral conduct. We see another aspect of this among those who teach that they have a special knowledge or ability necessary for battling against evil spiritual powers. All of these teachers have one thing in common, they promise us greater freedom, but all that they deliver is further enslavement to sin.