Warning Examples

To emphasize that God will take action against willful wrongdoers, Peter provides from the Scriptures three warning examples. First, he writes:  "God did not hold back from punishing the angels that sinned."  These, Jude says, "did not keep their original position but forsook their own proper dwelling place" in heaven.  They came to earth before the Flood and took on fleshly bodies so as to engage in sexual relations with the daughters of men. As punishment  for their improper, unnatural conduct, they were thrown into "Tartarus," or as Jude's account says, they were "reserved with eternal bonds under dense darkness for the judgment  of the great day." -2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6; Genesis 6:1-3. 

Next, Peter refers to the people of Noah's day.  (Genesis 7:17-24)  He says that in Noah's time God "did not hold back from punishing an ancient world . .  .when he brought  a deluge upon a world of ungodly  people."  Finally, Peter writes that God set "a pattern for ungodly persons of things to come" by "reducing the cities Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes."  Jude gives the additional  information that those individuals "committed fornication excessively and [went] out after flesh for unnatural use."  (2 Peter 2:5, 6;Jude 7) Men not only had illicit sexual relations with women but lusted for the flesh of other men, possibly even for the flesh of brute beasts. -Genesis 19:4, 5; Leviticus 18:22-25. 

Yet, at the same time, Peter notes that Jehovah is a rewarder of those who faithfully serve him.  For example, he relates how God "kept Noah, a preacher of righteousness, safe with seven others" when He brought the Deluge.  He also tells of Jehovah's deliverance of "righteous Lot" in the time of Sodom, concluding: "Jehovah knows how to deliver people of godly devotion out of trial, but to reserve unrighteous people for the day of judgment to be cut off." -2 Peter 2:5, 7-9. 

Next time: Deeds Meriting Punishment

From the Watchtower magazine, 1997