R.C. Sproul

to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, to brotherly kindness love.

For if these things are yours and you abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Remember at the beginning, we saw that in all probability,

The great enemy that was threatening the church here to which Peter was addressing himself was the intrusion of the Gnostic heresy, where the Gnostics were called Gnostics because they claimed to have a superior type of knowledge above and beyond that possessed by the apostles, a knowledge that was gained through some direct mystical perception

and not by diligent thinking.

And Peter, again and again throughout this epistle, brings us back to the subject of the acquisition of true knowledge, the trunosis, which is that knowledge that is revealed by God and is found here in His Word.

And so here when he gives these lists of virtues,

He says, if you have these virtues in your life, you will not be barren or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Again, the knowledge of God, the true knowledge of the things of God,

is not a knowledge that is satisfied with mere abstract propositions, but it is a knowledge by which we are equipped for virtue.

And that's why we're called to be diligent to seek the knowledge of God, not to get a degree in theology,

not to receive the accolades of men, not to be known for our intelligence, but that we may learn from God and gain the mind of Christ.

And so he says, if you had these virtues, you won't be barren, you won't be unfruitful in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

For he who lacks these things, Peter goes on to say,

is short-sighted even to blindness.

He is myopic.

He is myopic like Mr. Magoo to that degree so that he can't see his hand in front of his face.

He is short-sighted, Peter says, even to

to blindness."

You know, that image of blindness is used again and again in the Word of God to describe the natural tendency of people who live in darkness and who will not have God in their thinking and who, proclaiming themselves to be wise, become fools because