3 They will exploit you in their greed with deceptive words. Their condemnation, pronounced long ago, is not idle, and their destruction does not sleep.
4 For if God didn’t spare the angels who sinned but threw them down into Tartarus and delivered them to be kept in chains of darkness until judgment;
5 and if He didn’t spare the ancient world, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others, when He brought a flood on the world of the ungodly;
6 and if He reduced the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes and condemned them to ruin, making them an example to those who were going to be ungodly;
7 and if He rescued righteous Lot, distressed by the unrestrained behavior of the immoral
8 (for as he lived among them, that righteous man tormented himself day by day with the lawless deeds he saw and heard ) —
9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment,