Study Desk

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?

Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord.

and "A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall." They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.

Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge.

when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.

But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated,

They are surprised that you no longer join them in the same excesses of dissipation, and so they blaspheme.

But they will have to give an accounting to him who stands ready to judge the living and the dead.

For if these things are yours and are increasing among you, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And in their greed they will exploit you with deceptive words. Their condemnation, pronounced against them long ago, has not been idle, and their destruction is not asleep.

For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment;

—especially those who indulge their flesh in depraved lust, and who despise authority. Bold and willful, they are not afraid to slander the glorious ones,

These people, however, are like irrational animals, mere creatures of instinct, born to be caught and killed. They slander what they do not understand, and when those creatures are destroyed, they also will be destroyed,

suffering the penalty for doing wrong. They count it a pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their dissipation while they feast with you.

They have left the straight road and have gone astray, following the road of Balaam son of Bosor, who loved the wages of doing wrong,

For they speak bombastic nonsense, and with licentious desires of the flesh they entice people who have just escaped from those who live in error.

For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first.

and saying, "Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!"

They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water,

speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.