What Does 2 Peter 2:7 Mean?

(7) **And delivered just Lot.**—Better, *righteous Lot*; it is the same adjective as occurs twice in the next verse. These repetitions of the same word, of which there are several examples in this Epistle (“destruction” thrice, 2Peter 2:1-3; various repetitions, 2Peter 3:10-12; “look for” thrice, 2Peter 3:12-14, &c), and which have been stigmatised as showing poverty of language, are perfectly natural in St. Peter, and not like the laboured efforts of a writer endeavouring to personate him. A person writing under strong emotion does not stop to pick his words; he uses the same word over and over again if it expresses what he means and no other word at once occurs to him. This is still more likely to be the case when a person is writing in a foreign language. The fact that such repetitions are frequent in the Second Epistle, but not in the First, is not only fully explained by the circumstances, but, as being so entirely in harmony with them, may be regarded as a mark of genuineness. “Delivered righteous Lot.” Here, as in the case of the Flood (2Peter 2:5), the destruction of the guilty suggests the preservation of the innocent. Is it fanciful to think that these lights in a dark picture are characteristic of one who had himself “denied the Master who bought him,” and yet had been preserved like Noah and rescued like Lot? This brighter side is wanting in Jude, so that in the strictly historical illustrations this Epistle is more full than the other (see Note on 2Peter 2:15); it is where apocryphal books seem to be alluded to that St. Jude has more detail. **The filthy conversation.**—Literally, *behaviour in wantonness* (comp. 2Peter 2:2; 2Peter 2:18)—*i.e., *licentious mode of life. The word for “conversation,” or “behaviour,” is a favourite one with St. Peter—six times in the First Epistle, twice in this (2Peter 3:11); elsewhere in the New Testament only five times. **Of the wicked.**—Literally, *of the lawless*—a word peculiar to this Epistle; we have it again in 2Peter 3:17. The word translated “abominable” in 1Peter 4:3 is closely allied to it. The judgment on Sodom and Gomorrha forms a fitting complement to that of the Flood as an instance of God’s vengeance, a judgment by fire being regarded as more awful than a judgment by flood, as is more distinctly shown in 2Peter 3:6-7, where the total destruction of the world by fire is contrasted with the transformation of it wrought by the Flood.