2Peter 1:8-9 - Growth and Stagnation

2Peter 1:8-9

8 For if these things are yours and abound, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Things previously listed in the last 2 verses. If these are yours and abound or are increasing... We were exhorted to add these things to our faith. It all started with the belief in Christ that we have been given by God. With this gift of faith we were made partakers in the divine nature and given the means by which to grow in grace.

Applying the gift of faith we are exhorted to add virtue, knowledge, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection and love. We live in a dynamic environment and our relationship with God is a living one. Though maturity may come in one area or another sooner rather than later, or vice versa, these things come to us through our seeking of Christ - through our God-given desire to abide in Him, and for Him to be formed in us. Our striving is more "getting out of the way" than it is helping God. We put to death the deeds of the body as God is at work in us, experientially perfecting us in Christ.

This is all a part of His gift to us. We could have been perfected at a stroke. God chose not to do that. He gives us the experience of participating in the process of our sanctification. We do not sanctify, just as we did not justify and will not glorify ourselves. That is in God’s purpose and power alone, in Jesus Christ. We do not sanctify. We walk in the process of our sanctification. We do not sanctify, but we seek, we knock and we ask. We recognize that inability and weakness in us that needs the grace and power of God to be at work in us. That is the gift we have been given - to know what we are apart from God and to know Who God is and what He is able to do.

So the things added to faith through the process of our seeking, and of God sanctifying, make us effective and fruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Whereas the word "knowledge" listed before was the Greek gnosis, the word here is the Greek epignosis. The first means "factual knowledge" and the latter means "wisdom", which is knowledge correctly applied to life, relationships and circumstance - steadfastly, over a long period of time. It is in actual fact another way of describing character. The knowledge of Christ applied in life (wisdom) is the formation of the character of Christ in us.

The knowledge of Christ is in the doing of His Word. He is the Word. When we obey, then we are letting Him abide in us and act through us. Since He is a living Being, it is in His living in and through us that we know Him. We obey His Word, do His will and let His Spirit reign in our hearts. This is the epignosis spoken of here. It is not simply the amassing of information about Christ. It is not memorizing the Bible. It is not knowing theology. It is not doctrine for doctrine’s sake. It is the obedience of a faith enlightened by His Word, exercised in prayer and outworked in the power of His Spirit.

Millions sit in churches today who feel themselves secure because they know the doctrine - though they live as though the God of the doctrine was either remote or dead. Millions more do not even know the doctrine because they sit under apostate and even heretical preaching and teaching. They are kept as lambs on milk, even years and years after their conversion. The answer is not to throw out, or minimize, the doctrine and the deep truths of the faith, as some elements of the Charismatics have done. Nor is it to deny the experiential nature of religion as some traditionalists do. The answer is to know Christ from His Word so that Christ, the Word, may be known in us through the obedience of faith. This is what the Apostle is talking about here.

Living faith is an active application of the Word of life in the life of the believer. It is not a series of experiences for the experience’s sake. Neither is it knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Both are errors. And the whole process is not about us, but about God. God Himself can make it applicable to us, but we had better make it all about Him. Not to do one leads to the abominable and excessive errors of modern feelings-based religion that has ruined many a Christian’s fruitfulness. Not to do the other leads eventually to a hard, dry, mean, superior, proud and utterly useless dogmatism.

9 For whoever lacks these things is blind and shortsighted and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins.


Continuing on the topic of "these things" - these being the addition of virtue, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection and love to the faith we have been given.

The last verse spoke to what the presence and growth of these things indicated. This verse speaks to opposite - what the lack of any evidence of them indicates. Unfruitfulness in the character is evidence of (spiritual) blindness and/or dim-sightedness. In other words, the person is either not saved at all, or is a mere smoking flax. In either case, the responsibility rests upon the person, and not upon God.

Blindness as a Biblical symbol refers to lack of understanding - absolute ignorance of God where His light is not, in fact, seen at all. Blindness is not a halfway thing. Either you’re blind or you see - period.

Short-sightedness is not blindness. It is vision impairment, but there must first be vision in order for it to be impaired. This is why we must not judge the person of a brother when we are discerning his condition. He may be unsaved or he may be simply stalled. He may be blind or just vision-impaired. God alone knows those that are His. We can get some pretty good indications, but for the purposes of ministry only. The blind need the gospel and the vision-impaired need brotherly love, exhortation, admonishment and reproof from the Word.

Yet short-sightedness in this context can be a willful fault, and it can show a picture of the one who deliberately will not look afar off. It evokes the sense of the person who professes to be saved and has a form of religion, but who sets his sight only upon the "near" things of this world and not upon the "far" things of heaven. Was he really cleansed from his old sins? Was there ever truly saving faith present?

As stated, we cannot know for certain. But the terms here ought not to do either of these two things in us...

1) They ought not to evoke in us the thought that the Bible teaches that there are two types of Christian - the carnal and the spiritual. There are not. There are Christians and non-Christians and that is all. And each person, as we shall see in the next verse, is responsible for knowing which he or she is.

2) They ought not to generate in us a sense of complacency about the state of our brethren. We have a duty to warn them. When we see a brother failing it is a loving thing to do to exhort or rebuke or reprove or admonish Him - in a spirit of gentleness, when we can. {Galatians 6:1}

The question of such a person having been forgiven for his "old" sins is neither a proof that true salvation can be lost, nor that a person can be a "sleeper" Christian - one barely in through the door but who then lives as he pleases, without losing his salvation. There is too much scriptural evidence elsewhere supporting the eternal security of the believer. And there is no shortage of teaching that for a professor of Christ to continue in willful and unrepented sin is actually evidence of a false profession.

So whatever is meant by this phrase as it applies here it cannot be the loss of salvation. The "having forgotten" (in the literal Greek) carries the concept of letting go of something. False professors of Christ may, for a time, hold onto the truth, having, in fact, received it with joy. But because they have no root in themselves they wither and die when the sun comes up. They considered themselves to have been forgiven of sin, but they were never true believers to begin with because they had not truly repented. It was an "experience" that may have been intense, but which was not based in fact. In the parable of the sower, only the seed that eventually bore fruit was sown in the properly prepared and receptive soil. Only a heart that is prepared by God - convicted of sin and that turns from it, repents and amends its ways is evidence of the supernatural work of God.