2 Peter 2:2Plain English VersionThose liars will teach people to do bad things, and a lot of people will listen to them and do those bad and dirty things. And if people that are not Christians see that, they will rubbish God and his true way. See the chapter |
They said to Jesus, “Teacher, we know that you always want to do the right thing, and you always say true words. You talk to everyone the same way, people that are important and people that are not important. You always teach God’s words the right way. Well, we have a question about the Roman government bosses over our country. Is it right or wrong for us Jews to pay tax money to them?”
There will be a lot of people that will tell lies and try to trick you. Some people will say that they are the Christ, the special man from God. Other people will say that they are telling people God’s words, and they might do all sorts of clever things. Those people will be thinking, ‘Maybe we can trick the people that God picked out for himself.’ But really, they can’t do that.
Some of those people believed that message about Jesus. But some of them didn’t believe it, and they didn’t want to keep on hearing it, so they stood up in front of everybody and said bad things about the Christian people. (Another name for the Christians was the Jesus Way mob.) So Paul left the Jewish meeting house, and he took the Christians with him. They didn’t go to the Jewish meeting house any more, but they had their meetings in a meeting house called Tiranus Hall. Paul was there every day, and he talked with people there about Jesus.
But I can tell you this, I do show respect to the God that our Jewish people respect, the God that our grand-fathers respected a long time ago. It is true that I’m with the mob called the Jesus Way mob. The Jewish leaders say that we are wrong, but that is not true. And I believe everything in God’s book. I keep our law, and I believe everything that God got his men to write in his book.
and to control themselves, and to only sleep with their own husbands, and not to do what married people do together with anybody else. And they can teach them to work hard at home, and to do good things, and to think about what their husbands want and agree with them. So people will see the things that the young women do, and they will not be able to say anything bad about God’s message.
You live in the same place with people that don’t follow Jesus. So you have to make up your mind to always do things that are good. Sometimes people might tell lies and blame you and say you have done wrong. But if you always keep on doing whatever is right, they will see that you do good things. Later, after God comes to judge everybody, they will remember the good things you did, and they will respect him.
They left the right way and went the wrong way. They stopped doing good things, and now they do bad things. Remember the story about Balaam, the son of Beyor. He loved money so much that he did bad things to get it. Then God made a donkey talk to him with a man’s voice. It told him he was going wrong, and it stopped him from being even more stupid. Those people are just like Balaam. They are stupid, and they go the wrong way, just like Balaam did.
That mob teach with words that sound good, but they are useless. They say we are free now, so we can do anything we like. They say that it is all right to do bad things. That is what they teach, but it is wrong. You know, there are some people that used to go wrong, but then they turned around and started to go right. But now those liars are tricking them and getting them to go wrong again. Those liars tell them that they can do any bad things they like, to get their bodies to feel good. Those liars promise to free people, but they themselves are not free. They can’t stop themselves from doing bad and dirty things. It’s like this. If somebody can’t stop themselves from doing something, that thing is their boss and they have to work for it. So it’s like those bad things are their boss. They are not free.
I talk like this because there are some bad people that secretly came into your group. That mob don’t want to do the things that God wants. Instead, they do all the bad things that they want to do. They reckon it is all right to do those bad things. They say, “God is good to us, so he lets us do these bad things.” Whenever they say that, they are really trying to change God’s true message. And they are turning away from Jesus, our only true boss. But God says in his book that he will punish those bad people.
Also, don’t forget the story about the towns called Sodom and Gomorrah, and the other towns around there. The people that lived there did bad things, like those bad angels. They always wanted to sleep with somebody, like husbands sleep with their wives, so they did that with people they were not married to, and they did it in all sorts of ways that were dirty and wrong. God is punishing those people now. He put them into the fire that doesn’t stop burning. That shows us how much he will punish people that do bad things like that.