Read with Me
2 Peter 3:17-18 (HCSB)
Therefore, dear friends, since you know this in advance, be on your guard, so that you are not led away by the error of lawless people and fall from your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
Listen with Me
Peter reminds his readers that, since they know that ignorant and unstable people distort the Scriptures that are hard to understand (verse 16), they themselves must stay alert and on guard to protect themselves from being led astray by those people. Being led astray is actually far easier than most people realize, and many otherwise intelligent people are snared by reasonable sounding but false and unscriptural arguments every day.
The only way to protect oneself from being led astray in this way is to stay constantly in the word and rely on the Holy Spirit to help us to understand what we are reading. Too many Christians read a snippet here and a snippet there in their daily devotional time. In doing so, they lose the context of what they are reading, not only the immediate context, but the larger context of the paragraph, the chapter, the whole book, and the rest of Scripture.
Even those who choose to read through the Bible in a year tend to read each day’s section as if it is a stand-alone teaching, divorced from what has gone before and what comes after. Without reading in such a way as to be able to keep track of the overall context, it is easy to be led astray.
For example, keep in mind that when a Church in a city such as Ephesus, received a letter from Paul, the whole letter was read to the whole congregation in one sitting, much as we read a whole letter or email in one sitting today, and do not stop to parse each sentence or phrase. Thus, we receive the whole message and grasp its flow, and are able to see each part of the message in its appropriate context.
The stakes of being led astray are high. Peter had seen the faith of many destroyed by these ignorant people hawking their “secret interpretations” to the point that they had fallen away from the faith and were lost, falling from their stability, their “secure position”. And Peter wanted far better than that for his readers.
Peter’s final advice, and the surest safeguard against being led astray, is to continue to grow in both the grace and the knowledge of Jesus, the Lord and Savior of all who belong to God’s kingdom. And that is still the best way to remain firmly in the faith in confusing times like our own.
Pray with Me
Father, this is a very important reminder for our day as well, because those same ignorant and unstable people are still around today, and they are still distorting the Scriptures to move their own agendas forward. They consistently take Scriptures out of context to support whatever they are pushing, redefine words, or cast aspersions on the Holy Spirit who inspired the writers by claiming that those writers were ignorant, superstitious, agenda-driven, and not as aware of science as we are today. And just like in Peter’s day, many are drawn out of the way, away from the faith, and into the path of destruction by their reasonable sounding but entirely fallacious arguments. Lord, help me to walk each day in Your truth, in the whole counsel of Your Scriptures, in context, and with the help of Your Spirit, so that I can live each day in Your truth. Amen.