12. But these people are like irrational animals, born to be captured and destroyed. They speak evil of the things that they do not understand, and in their corruption they will be destroyed.
13. They shall receive the wages of unrighteousness. They count it a pleasure to carouse in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes who revel in their own deception while they carouse together with you.
14. They have eyes full of adultery that cannot cease from sin. They entice unstable souls. Their hearts are trained in greed. They are cursed children!
15. They have forsaken the right way and have gone astray. They follow the way of Balaam the son of Beor, who loved the wages of wickedness,
16. but who was rebuked for his iniquity. The mute donkey speaking with a man’s voice constrained the madness of the prophet.
17. These men are wells without water and clouds that are carried by a storm, for whom the gloom of darkness has been reserved forever.
18. For when they speak arrogant words of vanity, they entice by the lusts of the flesh and by depravity those who barely escaped from those who live in error.
19. Although they promise them freedom, they themselves are slaves of corruption, for by that which a man is overcome, to this he is enslaved.
20. For if after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning.
21. For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it and then turn back from the holy commandment that was delivered to them.
22. But it has happened to them according to the true proverb, “The dog returns to his own vomit,” and “the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mud.”