1 But there were also false prophets among the people, just as among you there will be false teachers, who will bring in on the side heresies that ruin, denying even the Master who bought them, and drawing on themselves swift destruction.
2 Many will follow their ruinous ways, and because of them the way of truth will be maligned.
3 In their greed they will exploit you with fabricated stories. Their sentence, pronounced long ago, is not idle, and their ruin is not asleep.
4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into Tartarus and handed them over to chains of gloom, to be held for judgment;
5 and did not spare the ancient world, but he kept Noah, the eighth person, a herald of righteousness, when he brought a flood on a world of ungodly people;
6 and he reduced the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes and condemned them to overthrow, making them an example to those who would afterward live ungodly lives;
7 and he rescued righteous Lot, who was distressed by the unbridled conduct of lawless men—
8 for as that righteous man lived among them, day after day his righteous soul was racked by the lawless deeds he saw and heard—
9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment,
10 especially those who follow the flesh in polluting desire and look down on authority. Bold and arrogant, they do not tremble to blaspheme glories,
11 whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord.
12 But these people, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct born to be captured and destroyed, blaspheming in matters they know nothing about, will be destroyed in their own corruption,
13 and they will receive the reward of unrighteousness. They count it a pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are stains and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions while they feast with you.
14 Their eyes are full of adultery and never stop sinning; they entice unsteady souls; they have hearts trained in greed. Accursed children!
15 They have left the straight road and wandered off, following the road of Balaam son of Bosor, who loved the wages of wrongdoing
16 but was rebuked for his own lawbreaking: a dumb donkey spoke with a human voice and held back the prophet's madness.
17 These people are waterless springs and clouds driven by a gale; for them the gloom of darkness has been kept in store forever.
18 For by uttering high-sounding words of folly, they use the cravings of the flesh and sensuality to lure those who had truly escaped from people who live in error.
19 They promise them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for a man is enslaved to whatever overcomes him.
20 For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through knowing the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again tangled up in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first.
21 It would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn their backs on the holy commandment delivered to them.
22 What the true proverb says has happened to them: "A dog goes back to its own vomit," and "A sow that has been washed goes back to rolling in the mud."