2 Peter 2:19 - Exposition

While they promise them liberty; literally, promising. The words cohere closely with the preceding clause. Liberty was the subject of their great swelling words of vanity; they talked loudly, made a great boast, about liberty. Perhaps they were wresting to their own destruction the teaching of St. Paul concerning Christian liberty. St. Paul had spoken of the liberty of the glory of the children of God ( Romans 8:21 ); he had again and again asserted the liberty of Christians in things indifferent (see 2 Corinthians 3:17 ; 1 Corinthians 8:9 ; 1 Corinthians 10:23 , etc.). But he had insisted on the paramount duty of giving no offence ( 1 Corinthians 8:13 , etc.), and had earnestly cautioned his converts to "use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh." There were false teachers who maintained that the true Gnostic was free from moral restraints, in fact, that liberty meant libertinism, liberty to sin. They themselves are the servants of corruption. The construction is still participial, "being" ( ὑπάρχοντες ) being from the beginning servants of corruption. Those who talked about liberty were themselves all the time the bondservants, the slaves, of corruption. The word rendered "corruption" ( φθορά ) includes the sense of "destruction," as in 2 Peter 2:12 and 2 Peter 1:4 (comp. Romans 8:21 ). For of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage. "Of whom," or "by whatever;" by Satan, the personal tempter, or by sin, the innate tendency; the Greek word will bear either meaning. Some good manuscripts add "also," which strengthens the assertion; "is he also brought in bondage." St. Peter's teaching corresponds exactly with that of St. Paul in Romans 6:16 . There is a very close parallel to this clause in the 'Clementine Recognitions' ( Romans 5:12 ; quoted by Dr. Salmon, in his 'Historical Introduction to the Books of the New Testament'): "unusquisque illius fit servus cui se ipse subjecerit."