If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning.
2 Peter 2:20 (NIV)
Who the Warning Is Aimed At
A waitress at a diner keeps a photograph taped inside the cabinet where the coffee filters are. It is from her first week, more than twenty years ago, and in it she stands by the register with her hair wrong and both hands full of menus. Nobody else in the building knows it is there. She looks at it on slow afternoons the way you would check a date on a receipt.
The men Peter is describing had a picture like that and threw it out. They got clear of the life they had been living. They knew the way. And now they work on people who are just getting clear themselves, promising them freedom while they are slaves of whatever has mastered them. Springs without water, he calls them. Mists driven by a storm. And about those men comes the sentence that frightens everybody who reads it: worse off at the end than they were at the beginning.
Worse off is hard to measure and Peter does not measure it. He describes a man who was shown the exit and has made a living telling people it goes nowhere. At the beginning that man was lost and could still be reached by anyone saying there was a way out. He cannot be reached that way now. He says it himself now, and he does not mean a word of it.
Not one of those men is afraid. They are confident. They mouth empty, boastful words and they promise freedom, and if one of them ever stood at a sink at the end of a shift wondering whether he had gone too far to come back, it is not recorded. Fear like that belongs to someone still close enough to the way out to be sick about it.
That does not make the sentence gentle. He means it. Knowing the way and then turning your back on the command that was handed to you is worse than never having been told, and he says so without softening anything. I have read the sentence both ways, since the they in it can also reach back to the people who were just getting clear and went under. Peter has been describing the promisers right up to that line, and the weight of it falls on them.
She has a photograph of who she was at the beginning, and she is not in that paragraph. The cabinet door shuts over it all shift, and it is there when she opens it.
A Prayer to Remember
It is the middle of the night and I have already decided what I am and how far back the damage goes. Stop me before I finish. Put one thing you have said where I can see it, and I will take it on your word tonight instead of mine.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
