Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Peter · About this commentary
The Last State Worse Than the First
2 Peter 2:20-22
20 For if, after they have escaped the defilement of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in it and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. · WEB
The chapter's most sobering paragraph is about people who had genuinely escaped, and two proverbs explain why the escape did not hold.
If, after they have escaped the defilement of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled and overcome, the last state is worse than the first. The word for knowledge is epignōsis G1922 again, the letter's own good word, here describing people it did not finally keep.
The reasoning is stated in verse 21 without qualification: better not to have known the way of righteousness than, having known it, to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. Knowledge raises the stakes rather than merely raising the standing. The Lord says the same of a swept house whose last condition is worse than its first Matthew 12:45.
Verse 22 closes with two proverbs. The first is Scripture's own — the dog returning to its vomit Proverbs 26:11; the second, the washed sow going back to the mire, is not found elsewhere in Scripture, and the letter presents both simply as the true proverb. Their combined point is exact and unsentimental. Neither animal was changed by what happened to it. A dog that vomits and a sow that is washed are the same creature afterward, and the return is not a relapse but a nature reasserting itself.
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