Of Dogs & Pigs

A few years ago, I passed a nice spring Friday sanding and re-staining the wooden columns on my front porch. A neighborhood dog lay in the sun nearby while I worked, and I occasionally spoke to him and gave his head a rub. We spent a very pleasant day together. Imagine then how betrayed I felt when I walked into my backyard and found meat packaging strewn all over our backyard. My friend had found the pork steaks I was going to grill for supper that night. My stomach growled as I picked up the trash, and I ground my teeth at this turncoat. Of course, he only did what any dog would do.

Peter is thinking about the nature of dogs in today’s text, one of the soberest in all of the New Testament. The false teachers in this church have preyed especially on the unstable disciples in this church. These are disciples who appear to have escaped the world’s corruption by trusting Jesus. But afterward, they never grew in grace as Peter has been urging, and it left them unstable. They are susceptible to the false teachers’ empty promises of “freedom (2:19).” The next thing you know, these unstable church folk are no longer walking with the Lord at all. Sin has entangled and overcome them; they are slaves to corruption (2:19–20). The scariest part is they are now worse off than they were before they responded to the gospel (2:20–31). The truth is, when a man or woman starts out to follow Jesus and then abandons the Way, something happens to them. Their conscience is seared. Their heart is hardened. You won’t see them again.

Peter’s sharp warning raises questions about the possibility of losing one’s salvation. On the one hand, Peter has already told us that true salvation is God’s work: he graciously elects you in eternity, calls you at a moment in time, leading to a supernatural change in your nature (1:1–11). This message is consistent with the rest of the New Testament: If God has saved you, then you stay saved.

How then can you know God has saved you? Peter’s answer is simple: we can tell you are truly saved if you persevere. You just keep going with Jesus: loving him, listening to him, trusting and obeying him, all the way to the end. That’s not to say that you will never sin or fail, even for extended seasons. But if God has truly saved you, the Holy Spirit who lives within you will turn you back from sin and self. You will draw near to Jesus for forgiveness and restoration, and return to walking on the way of truth. You will do this many times over the course of your Christian life, but the point is that you keep going: Peter knew this well enough from his own walk. This is the old Christian doctrine of the “perseverance of the saints,” a better way of framing the Biblical truth Christians are trying to get at with the confusing phrase “once saved always saved.”

But the thing about perseverance is that it is only revealed over time. It is easy to mistake temporary, external change for the real thing. That’s where dogs come in. You can clean up a dog or a pig, and dress him up in a fine suit of clothes. But eventually, dogs will do dog things—whether stealing your supper or eating its own vomit. And no clean pig can pass a mud hole without wallowing in it. Time eventually reveals our real nature—that goes for dogs, pigs, and professing Christians. Peter saw it with Judas, and Simon Magus, and now with these unstable disciples in Asia Minor. I’ve seen it, too.

It’s alarming. But if it sobers us up, then it’s an alarm that can stabilize our faith.

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Article by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church