Does ‘the Master who bought them’ (2 Peter 2:1) not imply that if they were bought by our Lord, they are covered by his redemption?

This text is from a transcript of a talk by David Gooding, entitled ‘An Abundant Entrance into the Eternal Kingdom’ (1985).

But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. (2 Peter 2:1)

My answer to that in the first place would simply be this. Coming at it from the practical end, what it means when it says they 'deny the Master who bought them' is that they repudiate all claims upon their lives issued by the Lord Jesus and his apostles. The passage is talking in particular about their immoral behaviour. These are men who, if an apostle rebuked them for their immoral behaviour, would have said, 'But who are you to tell us how we ought to behave?' And if the apostles had quoted to them the words of the Lord Jesus, they would have denied that they were subject to those words.

There are, of course, people around like that today. Some of them do it in a very refined sense, but they will tell you that the commands of the apostles on matters of morals, and a good deal else, and even the ideas of our Lord Jesus, are no longer applicable. And, therefore, you may go quite contrary to them, and it is all right. The difficulty is that these people wanted, at the same time, to be recognized as Christian and did profess to be Christian. I take it, therefore, that when they deny the claims of the Lord Jesus they show that their profession of Christianity is empty; it is not genuine.

Now, our Lord talked about that kind of thing in some of his parables. In Luke 12, for instance, at great length he indicates to us the behaviour that he expects from those that profess to be his servants. And he asks us to consider who is that faithful and wise steward. When the Lord comes he will reward such a faithful servant of his.

And the Lord said, 'Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom his master will set over his household, to give them their portion of food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions' (Luke 12:42–44).

But then he goes on to say,

But if that servant says to himself, 'My master is delayed in coming', and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and put him . . . (Luke 12:45–46)

And, as I understand it, the Greek should then be translated, 'with the unbelievers', because such behaviour is evidence that, in spite of his profession to be a servant of Christ, the man is an unbeliever and his portion is appointed with the unbelievers. So our Lord said in the Sermon on the Mount: you judge a prophet by his fruits. If his fruits are evil, you decide that he is a false prophet. He is not the genuine article (Matthew 7:15–20).

How then does Peter say that our Lord bought such people? You will notice the term he uses. You can translate the term 'redeemed' if you like. It is referring, of course, to our Lord's sacrifice at Calvary. I think the best thing I can do is simply to refer to our Lord's parable in Matthew 13:44–45. It talks about a merchant who bought a whole field in order to get the treasure hidden in that field. In that sense, our Lord has bought the whole world and all that is in it. One day, Colossians says, he is going to restore all things in heaven and in earth (Colossians 1:20). He is going to take the whole lot under his control. It is his by right, not only by rights of creation, but by rights of redemption.

Therefore, he has a claim on these men. They profess to own that claim; in actual practice they deny it. And I conclude that a man who denies the claims of our Lord based on his redemption is no true believer and, therefore, will not be covered from the guilt of his sin by the sacrifice of Christ.