2 Peter 2:13

and shall receive the reward of unrighteousness The words, which stand in the Greek as one of a series of participial clauses, are, perhaps, better joined with the last clause of the preceding verse, They shall perish … receiving the reward.…

as they that count it pleasure to riot in the day time The latter words have been variously rendered; (1) as in the English version, (2) counting delicate living for a day (i.e. but for a little while, laying stress on the transitoriness of all such indulgence) as pleasure: (1) seems, on the whole, preferable, all the more so as it supplies a point of contact at once with St Peter's own language as to the shamelessness of revel "at the third hour of the day" (Acts 2:15), and with St Paul's contrast between the works of the day and those of night (Romans 13:13-14; 1 Thessalonians 5:7). It has been urged against this that the Greek word for "riot" means rather the delicate and luxurious living (Luke 7:25) that might be practised both by day and night rather than actual riot, but it is obvious that luxury shews itself chiefly in banquets which belong to night, and to carry the same luxury into the morning meal might well be noted as indicating excess. In the Greek version by Symmachus a cognate noun is applied to the banqueters of Amos 6:7.

Spots they are and blemishes The former word is found in Ephesians 5:27; the latter is not found elsewhere in the New Testament.

sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you The MSS. both here and in the parallel passage of Jude (2 Peter 2:12) vary between ἀπάταις (deceits) and ἀγάπαις (feasts of love). The latter gives, on the whole, a preferable meaning, and, even if we adopt the former reading, we are compelled by the context to look on the love-feasts as the scene of the sin referred to. The Agapaewere a kind of social club feast, at first, perhaps, connected in time and place with the Lord's Supper, but afterwards first distinguished and then divided from it. They were a witness of the new brotherhood in which the conventional distinctions of society were suspended, and rich and poor met together. Their existence is recognised in early ecclesiastical writers, in the first century by Ignatius (ad Smyrn. c. 2), in the second by Tertullian (Apol. c. 39), and they survived for three or four hundred years, till the disorders connected with them led to their discontinuance. In 1 Corinthians 11:21 we have traces of such disorders at a very early period, and St Peter's language here shews that they had found their way into the Asiatic Churches as well as into that of Corinth. The "false teachers" and their followers took their place in the company of the faithful, and instead of being content with their simple food, consisting probably of bread, fish, and vegetables (the fish are always prominent in the representations of the Agapaein the Catacombs of Rome), brought with them, it would seem, the materials for a more luxurious meal (comp. 1 Corinthians 11:21), and, as the context shews, abused the opportunities thus given them for wanton glances and impure dalliance. Taking the first reading ("deceits"), the Apostle lays stress on the fact that in doing so they were in fact practising a fraud on the Christian society into which they thus intruded themselves.