“THE LETTERS OF 2 PETER AND JUDE warn us about any tendency to treat sin lightly, to suppose that an immoral lifestyle can be pursued without penalty.” Thus Douglas Moo, in this excellent commentary, sums up the relevance of these two short letters for twenty-first century Christians.
An important message—and one we need to hear today. On the one hand, it is sad that we must be warned that doing bad things means bad things will happen to us. Time was, it seems, when parents considered it their sacred duty to instill this lesson in their children. No more. On the other hand, since cultural and familial structures no longer emphasize this important truth, at least as clearly as they once did, we are fortunate to have these two biblical letters to remind us.
It might be relevant, however, to take a look at the reason why the “sin-leads-to-judgment” message is so muted in our culture today. Our overloaded court system is filled with people attempting to avoid (and often succeeding) the consequences of their “sins.” Our whole public educational system is predicated on the invalid assumption that all values are temporary, conditioned solely by historical and cultural factors, an assumption that makes sin more a matter of bad judgment than of wrongdoing. Even churches pull their punches when it comes to sin. How long has it been since you heard a good sermon on the topic?
How have we come to this pretty pass? I think there is probably a good explanation. It can be traced, in part at least, to our current generation’s rejection of authority. This rejection is not a knee-jerk attempt at self-promotion or an immature adolescent testing of parental authority writ large; it is rather a response to a century-long, worldwide misuse of authority by those in charge. The “stars” of our century—Hitler, Stalin, Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, etc.—broke a centuries-old connection between truth and authority and made authority the only thing that mattered. “Might makes right” was their watchword, and they were ruthless in its execution.
It didn’t take genius to see that something was wrong, that our political leaders and nations were drunk on power but short on truth. Yet instead of restoring the biblical balance between and authority, the 1960s generation decided to maintain the separation, with one important difference. Instead of emphasizing authority at the expense of truth, they cut truth free from authority. Instead of one authoritative truth, we each have our own truth-value systems that are “true for me” but not necessarily true for you. This “I’m okay, you’re okay” attitude makes it almost impossible to talk about universal values, because the minute you talk about values that apply to everyone, you are talking again about authority.
The ironic result, of course, is that in such an authority vacuum, the very worst sorts of leaders rush to fill it. The best among us attempt to live out the anti-authority ideal, adopting some sort of pragmatism or tolerant personalism, while the worst of us work the levers of power in the same old totalitarian ways. They may do this behind the scenes, “despising authority” in public and “blaspheming in matters they do not understand” (2 Peter 2:10, 12). But their goal is to replace biblical truth and authority with their own.
The Bible teaches that truth and authority go together. Truth, by its universal, singular nature, has its own authority. It so happens that biblical authority is authority woven out of strands of grace-filled love, giving the resulting cloth a rich, soft texture that wears like iron against the false teachings of the world.
The message of 2 Peter and Jude is that there are true teachings and false teachings. We must resist with all our might the false teachers, without adopting the selfish, antibiblical methodologies they use. We cannot resort to a false dogmatism that contradicts the gospel message of love. We must restore the twin towers of truth and authority, the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
—Terry C. Muck