Delivered from Temptation

The pull is strongest when you are tired. Late, alone in the house, one tab or one message away from the thing you promised yourself you had finished with.

Consider where this sentence was written. Peter's second letter reads like a last one; he says early on that he knows he must shortly put off this tabernacle, and the tradition places him in Rome under Nero, an old fisherman a long way from his lake, watching teachers move through the churches selling a version of grace with no floor under it. Chapter two is about those men and it is furious. Feigned words. Wells without water. Promising liberty to others while they themselves are the servants of corruption.

Into that he sets one long sentence about Noah and Lot, two men who lived surrounded by what they could not fix, and your verse is its conclusion. The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished. In the Greek that is a single thought, and Peter does not let anybody take only the first half of it. Lot was pulled out by the hand while the city was not. Deliverance is a thing God is genuinely expert in, and it usually looks less like magic than like a door standing open a few seconds before you had decided to stop looking for one.

The warning is the other half, and Peter is the last man alive who would soften it. That God knows how to rescue is not a promise the temptation will grow harmless, and the teachers he is describing built their entire appeal on that confusion. A man can be perfectly sure of God's ability to deliver him and walk into the room anyway. God is also expert at reserving. Peter had sat at a table with a man who sold Christ for money, and he never once wrote as though it could not happen again.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 143 is Two Are Better (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna