Escaped

DEVOTION 2 PETER ESCAPED 2 Peter 1:3-4 3 His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. NIV If His divine power has given us everything we need for life, why then do we strive so much to get more of the stuff of this world? Or is it His divine power which gives us the ability to pursue and accumulate so much of this stuff? Isn’t this the stuff which is the corruption in the world caused by a longing for them? It is only through the knowledge of God that we have escaped perishing. That is the original language word translated corruption. We have escaped ruin, decay, perishing because we learned about God and His great power to save us from this destruction which is caused by living without the knowledge of Him. Since we learned about God and spend our lives trying to learn more and more about Him and His ways we are able to participate in His divine nature. That phrase of wanting to be more like Jesus has great bearing here. It is obvious there can be no fence riding; either we live for God or for the world. God gives us eternal life, the world gives us destruction. Why would we want to have the world, or for that matter both? How can we say we love God and desire to live for Him and still want so much of the world offers? Either we have escaped or we haven’t. It is far better to be a part of His divine nature, living as a member of the body of Christ, being a citizen in the Kingdom of God, a foreigner, a stranger, alien to this world and its corruption, its destruction, its perishing which is certainly the end it will experience with all of its inhabitants which refused to acknowledge God. That is the greatness and the preciousness of this promise. Once we were prisoners of this world, chained to it, enslaved to it and its ways, under the horrible control of the evil one himself, but because of God, and His glory and goodness He has set us free and once we have been freed from that bondage why would we ever want to return to it. We have escaped.