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Have you ever read a passage in the Bible that weighed heavily on you? A verse that caught you up short?  A verse that gave you great concern? A verse that made you question your own salvation?

I assume we all (who take the Bible seriously) have experienced that. I believe the Holy Spirit interacts with us as we read the Bible (which the writer of Hebrews says is “living and active”). Sometimes we are encouraged, and sometimes the light of scripture shines into the recesses of our hearts and exposes things that bother us. (And so they should!)

Indeed, I believe that this is one of the great benefits of reading Scripture on a regular basis. God talks to us through the word He inspired to be written down. He interacts with us in ways that get to the core of our being … if we let Him … to teach us, to convict us, to correct us, and to instruct us in righteousness. (2 Timothy 3:16)

I recently read the following verses in my daily Bible reading:

If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them.

2 Peter 2:20-21

Peter goes on to quote two “proverbs”: 1) “A dog returns to its vomit” (quoting Proverbs 26:11); and 2) “A sow that is washed returns to … wallowing in the mud.”

All of this seems to be a clear illustration of people who, having been cleansed from sin, return to their sin. If you have ever returned to the sin you have walked away from, you know the angst that reading this verse can bring.

Peter says it is better that we never know Jesus than to have known him and walked away! People like this are worse off than if they had not known the “way of righteousness” than to have known it and turned their backs on the “sacred command” (or holy commandment).

I am convicted when I read these things. I sometimes despair of the sin I tend to repeat. I often feel like a slave to that sin, and I become anxious for my own salvation.

I think we should feel the full weight of verses like this. God is clearly interested in the fruit of our lives, but a bad tree cannot produce good fruit. If we are tapping into the wrong tree, nothing we do can produce good fruit. The problem isn’t in the fruit; the problem is the source.

A couple of keys to this passage are found in the phrases “way of righteousness” and “sacred command”. If you are like me, you may think immediately of righteousness and commands as things we must do and must not do. That is our natural inclination.

If we look at the context of the verses quoted above, Peter is talking about the “depraved conduct” of false prophets. (2 Pet. 2:2) He is talking about those who “follow the corrupt desire of the flesh and despise authority (v. 10), people who revel in their pleasures, who “never stop sinning”, have “eyes full of adultery”, and are “experts in greed”. (v. 14) These people “appeal to the lustful desires of the flesh” to entice others away (v. 18) and are slaves to their own depravity. (v. 19)

All of this seems to affirm the idea that Peter is talking about people who are caught in sin and have given up trying to overcome it. Worse, they are people who revel in their sin and entice other people to do the same.

Indeed, I think there is some truth to that view, but (perhaps) not exactly as we might think.

Peter describes these actions as the fruits of people who have turned their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them and have left the way of righteousness. These things are not, themselves, deviations from the way of righteousness or the sacred command; they are the outgrowths (fruit, or lack thereof) of deviating from the way of righteousness and the sacred command.

Indeed, Jesus said that we will know false prophets by their fruit. The fruit, however, is not problem. The problem lies in the tree that produces the fruit.

Our actions (or failures to act) are not the problems; they are the symptoms. Thus, we need to understand the way of righteousness and the sacred command, which are trees that produce a different kind of fruit – the fruit of the Spirit.

To avoid going on too long in one article, however, I am cutting this short, and I will take up the way of righteousness and the sacred command in future articles.  I hope you will take a short brief and dive in deeper with me, as these things get to the very core of what Jesus taught and are literally the keys to the kingdom of God.