DEAR FRIENDS, THIS is now my second letter to you. I have written both of them as reminders to stimulate you to wholesome thinking. 2I want you to recall the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets and the command given by our Lord and Savior through your apostles.
3First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. 4They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since the fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” 5But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. 6By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. 7By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
Original Meaning
PEOPLE GENERALLY FAMILIAR with the Bible normally think “false teachers” when 2 Peter is mentioned. And, as a simple characterization, that is not far off the mark. But we must remember that the letter was not written to false teachers; it was written to Christians. The false teachers are the foil against which Peter develops his positive teaching and exhortation. Yet after chapter 2, it is easy to lose sight of this larger purpose. For after warning his readers about “false teachers among you” (2:1), the author devotes the rest of that chapter to these false teachers, describing their many theological and especially moral errors and uttering God’s verdict of condemnation over them. Throughout chapter 2, Peter speaks in the third person plural: “they….”
All that changes in chapter 3, where Peter addresses his readers directly again as his “dear friends” (vv. 1, 8, 14, 17) and turns from denunciation to exhortation. To be sure, he does not lose sight of the false teachers, for he talks about their misunderstanding of eschatology and again condemns them in verses 4–7. But the bulk of the chapter contains teaching and exhortation for believers, which bear a close resemblance, in both form and content, to the end of chapter 1. Note the verbal parallels (the Greek is almost identical in both cases):
1:13—“to refresh your memory” | 3:1—“as reminders to stimulate you” |
1:20—“Above all, you must understand” | 3:3—“first of all, you must understand” |
By using the same constructions here in chapter 3, Peter signals to the attentive reader that he is coming back to the earlier context and emphasis. More important are the similarities in content. As he did in chapter 1, Peter emphasizes the importance of memory (see 3:1–2, 5, 8). Furthermore, his topic is again eschatology. In 1:16–21, Peter combatted skepticism about the “power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” but only hints at the presence of false teachers propagating such a view. Here in chapter 3 he is more explicit, citing “scoffers” who have come along and are sarcastically asking, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised?” (v. 4). And in the earlier chapter, Peter sought to establish the reliability of his sources of information about the Parousia: his own experience of the Transfiguration and prophecy. In chapter 3, he grounds the credibility of the Parousia more generally in a certain theological view of history and providence.
Dividing the argument of chapter 3 into paragraphs is not easy. Verses 14–18 form the concluding paragraph of the letter, matching in some ways the opening in 1:3–11. The address “Dear friends” in 3:1 and 8 suggests that these verses each open paragraphs. Verses 11–13, finally, with their shift to exhortation, can also be grouped into their own thought unit.
Within the present unit (vv. 1–7), Peter’s argument proceeds in three stages:
verses 1–2: Peter urges his readers to remember the truth
verses 3–4: Peter warns of scoffers
verses 5–7: Peter rebukes the scoffers for forgetting the truth
Note how the idea of “remembering” frames the paragraph. By recalling the words of Christ and the apostles, believers will cultivate “wholesome thinking” (3:1); and because they have forgotten God’s providence in history, the false teachers have stumbled into error.
Peter Urges His Readers to Remember the Truth (vv. 1–2)
THE NIV’S “DEAR friends” takes away something of the strength and Christian flavor of the original: agapetoi, “beloved ones.” This word connotes the loving fellowship among believers secured by the sacrifice of God’s own “beloved one,” the Lord Jesus (“whom I love” in 1:17 translates this same word). After the harsh indictment of the false teachers in chapter 2, Peter wants to reassure his readers that he has confidence in their own Christian status and dedication. Why write this letter of warning then? Because Peter knows that no Christian can ever be so secure in his or her faith as to pass beyond the need of exhortation to holy thinking and living.
Christians, of course, should always be learning new things about the faith and discovering new avenues of serving the Lord in the way they live. But Christians also need reminders of basic truth, and they never outgrow the need for such reminders. While still resident somewhere in the data banks of our mind, the basics of faith can cease to have an active influence over us. “Remembering” these truths involves more than the mental act of “recalling” what had once been learned. It is the dynamic process of applying the truths to the new situations and problems that the believer confronts.1
Through his reminder, Peter wants to “stimulate you to wholesome thinking.” “Thinking” translates a noun (dianoia) frequently used by some of the Greek philosophers. Plato, for instance, uses the exact Greek phrase, eilikrine dianoia (“wholesome thinking”), that Peter has here. Peter may again, then, be appropriating a phrase current in the world of Greek philosophy and religion for application to Christian truth.2 For Peter, “thinking” is more than a purely mental process. It includes the ability to discern spiritual truth and apply it. Pagans, Paul says, are “darkened in their understanding [dianoia]” (Eph. 4:18), and Christians must cultivate an “understanding” that is “pure” (uncontaminated by worldly sentiment or false conceptions of Christianity).
The reminder Peter now gives his readers is not the first one. He has already written to them an earlier letter that covered many of the same points. What is this earlier letter? Most commentators think naturally that it is 1 Peter,3 and they may be right. But we should remember that Peter undoubtedly wrote more letters than the two that we have in the canon of the New Testament. Paul, for example, refers to at least three letters he wrote that we do not have in the New Testament: his “previous letter” to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 5:9), a “severe letter” to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 7:8), and a letter to the Laodiceans (Col. 4:16). It would be surprising if Peter had not done the same. We should not immediately assume, therefore, that just because we have only these two letters of Peter in the New Testament, the one must refer to the other.
In fact, Peter’s description of the purpose he has in these two letters—stimulating his readers to “wholesome thinking”—does not describe the contents of 1 Peter particularly well. Moreover, while Peter seems to know the readers of 2 Peter pretty well, we do not get the same impression from 1 Peter. It is for these reasons that commentators like Green think that Peter is referring here to a letter unknown to us rather than to 1 Peter.4 Still, neither of these points is decisive: Peter’s description is vague enough that it could apply to 1 Peter, and neither letter says much about the degree of Peter’s acquaintance with them. So we should probably leave the identification of this earlier letter undecided.
Peter’s focus on the idea of “reminder” in verse 1 naturally raises the question: reminder of what? This question Peter answers in verse 2, where he mentions two specific sources for the teaching that he wants his readers to recall and put into action. First is “the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets” (cf. 1:16–21, where Peter cited “the word of the prophets” as reliable testimony to the Parousia). As in the earlier passage, this reference is almost certainly to Old Testament prophets rather than, for instance, to New Testament prophets. “Spoken in the past” can refer to the teaching of the apostles (see the roughly parallel Jude 17). But it can also refer to the Old Testament (see, e.g., Acts 1:16; Rom. 9:29; Heb. 4:7), and the general notion is usually associated with the Old Testament (see Heb. 1:1). The important thing is that while the act of speaking is in the past, the message once spoken and then written down in Scripture continues to have force and relevance. For, as Peter has already made clear (2 Peter 1:21), God himself speaks in the words of these prophecies.
The second source Peter wants his readers to recall is “the command given by our Lord and Savior through your apostles.” The words “given” and “through” in the NIV represent an interpretive paraphrase. A literal translation of the Greek is, “the command of your apostles, of the Lord and Savior.” The main problem is to figure out the relationship between the two “of” phrases. The KJV follows a variant reading in the Greek text, reading “of us” rather than “of you” (e.g., “your”) and then taking the second “of” phrase to modify the first: “the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Savior.” But that variant reading cannot be accepted.5 A second way to construe the phrases is to take the second phrase as somewhat of an afterthought: “the command of your apostles—that is, of Christ.”6 Or the two may be parallel; Mayor cites as an example the phrase “Shakespeare’s speech of Mark Antony.”7 But the interpretation suggested by the NIV and by almost all other modern English versions is probably best. Peter wants to attribute the command to both the Lord Jesus and to the apostles, but in different senses. The Lord is the originator of the command, the apostles its transmitters.
What is this command? Because of the context (vv. 3–4), many commentators think that the “command” refers to the promised return of Christ in glory. But the word “command” (Greek entole) is certainly not a natural one to use to refer to a prediction of this kind. In all of its other approximately sixty New Testament occurrences, the word always refers to some kind of demand or requirement. And Peter has used this word just a few verses earlier with this sense (see 2:21). Almost certainly, then, Peter is describing the moral requirements that are placed on believers.
Peter uses the singular form of the word because he is thinking not so much as a series of “dos and don’ts” but of the basic demand that believers conform to the image of Christ, becoming holy even as the God who called them is holy (see 1 Peter 1:15–16). This central demand of the gospel was first laid down by Jesus himself (see Matt. 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”). And this same basic demand was passed on and fleshed out by the apostles to Christians all over the world. It was precisely this need for Christians to strive for conformity to the will of God taught by Christ and handed down by the apostles that the false teachers were willfully ignoring. In other words, Peter’s concern is that his readers will not fall prey to this false teaching by neglecting the life of holiness.
Finally on verse 2, some commentators insist that the language of this verse renders it impossible for the apostle Peter to have written it. They note two elements. (1) The reference to “command” suggests the idea of Christianity as a “new law,” an idea that surfaced only in the late first and early second centuries. But, as we have argued above, Peter is not using this term to define Christianity, only to stress one important side of the faith—a concern reflected often in the apostolic period. (2) The phrase “your apostles” suggests that the author could not himself have been one of those apostles. Whoever he is, he must be looking back at an earlier apostolic generation. But this does not follow. Peter simply wants to refer to those particular apostles who first brought the gospel to the Christians he is writing to.8 They are their apostles in the sense that they are the ones with whom his readers have had contact and whose presentation of the moral demands of the gospel Peter wants to recall to their attention.
Peter Warns of Scoffers (vv. 3–4)
HAVING REMINDED HIS readers of the requirements of Christ and the apostles who first preached the gospel to them, Peter goes on in verses 3–4 to suggest why such a reminder is so urgently needed: The false teachers are mocking the idea of Christ’s return in glory. Peter finally brings together two of the most important issues in the letter: the false teachers’ skepticism about the return of Christ in glory (see 1:16–21) and their disdain for holiness (chap. 2).
Peter wants his readers to understand “first of all” that the appearance of people like this is not a surprise. As he did in 2:1–4, he again uses the future tense to describe these irreverent mockers: “Scoffers will come.” As we argued there, the use of the future tense does not mean that someone, writing in Peter’s name, now quotes a prophecy of the apostle Peter.9 Peter himself uses the future tense, as in the earlier passage, because he is indirectly quoting the prediction of Jesus himself. He almost surely has in mind texts such as Matthew 24:5: “Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many.” Jesus warned there and elsewhere that the end times would be characterized by apostasy and false teaching.
Paul also picked up on these warnings and passed them on. See, for instance, his words to the elders of the Ephesian church: “I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them” (Acts 20:29–30). And similar to 2 Peter 3:3–4 is 1 Timothy 4:1: “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.” We sometimes read these passages as if they referred to a period at the very end of history that has not yet come. But both 1 Timothy 4 and 2 Peter 3 reveal that the apostles thought that these predictions about the “last days” were already being fulfilled in the false teaching that had arisen in their churches. And 1 John 2:18 couldn’t say it more plainly: “Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.”
As we pointed out in the notes on 2:1–4, the New Testament writers commonly viewed the period that began with Pentecost as the “last days.” They therefore viewed the predictions about those days as already being fulfilled in their time. Thus Peter here finds the scoffers of his day to be one manifestation of those deceitful apostates whom Jesus claimed would arise to plague the Christian community. His readers, who are perhaps being tempted and are certainly being disturbed by these scoffers, need to realize that the appearance of these people is no surprise. The church of Christ can always expect to find in its midst such scoffers.
The “scoffer” or “mocker” is certainly not a new phenomenon in the history of God’s people. The psalmist pronounced a blessing on the person of God who does not “sit in the seat of mockers” (Ps. 1:1). And three times Proverbs presents the mocker as someone whose ways are to be avoided by the righteous (Prov. 1:22; 9:7–8; 13:1). Mocking is one all-too-typical response to the truth of God’s revelation. Mockers do not so much reason against the truth of God as they disdain and belittle it. Rather than standing under God’s Word, mockers, as Peter points out, follow “their own evil desires.” “Evil desires” translates a single Greek word (epithymia) that Peter uses to encapsulate the ungodly orientation of such people (see 1:4; 2:10, 18). These scoffers, Peter says, insist on “going”10 their own way rather than following the will of God.
Mockery is a general response to the truth of God. But the mockers or scoffers that Peter is particularly concerned about were not, apparently, mocking the faith generally. Indeed, they claimed to be following the faith (see, e.g., 2:18–22). Rather they were scoffing at one particular teaching of the faith: the belief that Christ will return in glory at the end of history. “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised?” they kept asking. By putting “coming” in quotation marks and adding the word “this,” the NIV rightly suggests that the word has a special reference here. The Greek word is parousia, used throughout the New Testament as a technical term referring to the “coming” of Christ in the last day (see the notes on 1:16).
Peter makes clear that this question is not an innocent request for information about the time or the nature of Christ’s return. The form of the question itself suggests otherwise, for it imitates a form found in the Old Testament to express unbelief and mockery (cf., e.g., Mal. 2:17: “You have wearied the LORD with your words. ‘How have we wearied him?’ you ask. By saying, ‘All who do evil are good in the eyes of the LORD, and he is pleased with them’ or ‘Where is the God of justice?’ ”; see also Jer. 17:15). In asking where this coming was, the false teachers were implying that it was past due and that it was therefore not going to happen at all.
They based this rejection of the coming of Christ on a general belief in the unchanging nature of the world: “Ever since our fathers died,11 everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” Scholars who claim that an unknown Christian wrote 2 Peter after Peter’s death have one of their strongest bits of evidence in this verse. As Bauckham notes, the false teachers appear to be arguing, “The Parousia was promised before the death of the fathers. Well, the fathers have died and still nothing happens.”12 The assumption here is that “fathers” refers to the first generation of Christians—a generation that, of course, included Peter and the other apostles, who must therefore be dead by now.
This reading of the text is certainly a possible one, but it is not the only one. “Fathers” in the New Testament only rarely refers to an immediate ancestor (“my father was a policeman”). It usually has a spiritual sense, referring to the “ancestors” of the Jewish nation, and especially to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (as in the hymn “Faith of our Fathers”).13 This meaning of the word also makes good sense in this verse. For the false teachers have been at pains to deny, and Peter to affirm, that the promise of eschatological judgment is rooted in the Old Testament itself. We can very well imagine them arguing that ever since God began his work of creating a people for his name—ever since the time of “the fathers”14 of the biblical people of God—things have gone on much the same.15
Either interpretation of the word “father” explains the language of the verse and fits the context. A firm decision, then, should be based not on a specific word but on the general consideration of the authorship of the letter. And we have seen good reason to accept the letter’s own claim to have been written by the apostle Peter. The false teachers, then, were apparently scoffing at the idea of Christ’s return at the end of history because they could not imagine the kind of change in the world and in the human situation that the church’s teaching about the Parousia assumed.
Can we determine any more precisely what the false teachers were arguing? Can we understand more exactly what kind of view of history they were taking? We saw in the “Bridging Contexts” section on 2:17–22 that certain Epicurean thinkers in Peter’s day expressed skepticism about any divine intervention in the world. They denied, in effect, the whole idea of providence. Perhaps the false teachers held this sort of view of history. But if so, it is difficult to understand how they could make any claim to be Christian, for they would have to deny the incarnation and resurrection of Christ as well as his Parousia. And we might have expected Peter to write something about this. Perhaps, then, they held to a milder form of historical continuity, denying the possibility of any event that would materially change the nature of the world. The Parousia would not, then, fit into their scheme of things because it involved a transformation of both the world and of human beings. If this was their view, it also explains why Peter has chosen the examples of God’s intervention in history that he has in verses 5–7.
Peter Rebukes the Scoffers for Forgetting the Truth (vv. 5–7)
THE GENERAL MEANING of verses 5–7 is clear enough. Peter shows his readers why the false teachers are wrong in thinking that “everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” On the contrary, Peter notes, God has intervened spectacularly in the course of human history: Having created the world through water and the word (v. 5), God, by that same water and word also destroyed that world in the flood of Noah’s day (v. 6). And God will do the same again (v. 7), only this time he will use fire. Clearly, then, the false teachers’ assumption about an unbroken continuity in history, without significant divine intervention, is erroneous.
But if the basic argument of the paragraph is easy enough to figure out, many of the detailed points that Peter makes along the way are not. Verse 5 is especially difficult, offering problems both of translation and interpretation. The first translation problem is relatively minor. Should we render the opening words of the verse “They deliberately forget” (NIV; see NRSV; TEV) or “when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that” (NASB; see also REB)?16 The difference in meaning is slight; but the latter makes better sense of the order of the Greek words.17 The scoffers, Peter suggests, are not ignorant or naive, but willfully disobedient, maintaining a view of the continuity of human history that blatantly flies in the face of the Old Testament. The Scriptures show that the world is not eternal; it came into existence at a certain point in time.
But the details of Peter’s statement of this truth are somewhat obscure. Note the difference here between the translations of the NIV and the REB:
NIV: “by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water.”
REB: “there were heavens and earth long ago, created by God’s word out of water and with water.”
The NIV has two parallel clauses, the first having “the heavens” as its subject and the second “the earth.” The REB, on the other hand, makes “heavens and earth” the subject of the entire sentence. Choosing between these two renderings is difficult; each has its strengths and its weaknesses. This is sometimes the situation we face in translating and interpreting Scripture: to choose the option that has the fewest problems. In this case, I think the second rendering has the fewest problems.
Two points combine to make it likely that Peter is treating “heavens and earth” as a pair rather than separating them in different clauses. (1) Peter is obviously alluding to the story of creation as it is found in Genesis 1. As we all know, that story begins with the words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (2) Peter goes on to describe in verse 7 how the “present heavens and earth” will also be destroyed. The continuity of his argument suggests that, as “heavens and earth” go together as a unit there, so they do also in verse 5.18 What Peter is reminding these false teachers about, then, is the creation of the entire universe. Both the world we can experience through our senses (“the earth”) and the unseen spiritual realm (“heavens,” or better, “heaven”19) were brought into being “by God’s word.” As Genesis 1 repeatedly makes clear, all of creation is the effect of God’s powerful word. He spoke, and it came to pass. “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made” (Ps. 33:6); “the universe was formed at God’s command” (Heb. 11:3).
Perhaps even more difficult are Peter’s references to water as the element “out of which” (ek) and “through which” (dia) the heavens and the earth were formed. Charles Bigg thinks that the first phrase reflects an ancient belief that water was the material element out of which all other things were composed.20 But it is more likely that Peter is again thinking of the story of creation in Genesis 1, where water plays a significant role. In verse 2, before God begins to organize the chaos that he has brought into being, we read about the Spirit “hovering over the waters.” These waters, which are apparently viewed as covering the entire globe, are then separated as God makes the “sky” (Greek ouranos, “heaven”) (vv. 6–8). And God makes the dry land by gathering the water together (v. 9). On the basis of the Genesis account, then, Peter’s assertion that God created the heavens and the earth “out of water” does not seem far-fetched.
But what are we to do with the second phrase, “by water”? Some commentators think that Peter may be alluding to rain, which God uses to sustain the world that he has created (Gen. 2:6).21 This is possible, but difficult—Peter would have to be using the same verb to mean both “created” and “sustained.” Others suggest that the preposition Peter uses here (dia) may have a local sense: God created the universe “in the midst of” water.22 But this is not what the preposition means in the parallel phrase in 2 Peter 3:6. Thus we prefer to think that Peter simply expands here on his first phrase, “out of water.” As the verses we cited from Genesis 1 show, God used water as an instrument in his creation of the sky. And we must also allow for Peter’s rhetorical purpose here. One of the main reasons he introduces the idea of the world as being created “by water” is to prepare for the parallel he will make in verse 6, where God destroys the world “by water.”23
Lest we become lost in the “forest” as we examine the individual “trees” in Peter’s argument, we should note again that Peter’s general point in verse 5 is clear: God brought the universe into existence, and he did so by his own creative word and through the use of water. Therefore, the false teachers’ assumption of an unchanging universe is without warrant. The very universe they are talking about has not always been here.
But Peter’s second point is in some ways even more to the point. That same world that God created he also “destroyed” (v. 6), and he did it in the same way that he created the world: by “water and the word of God.” To be sure, the NIV translates here “by these waters” (see also TEV; REB). The problem is that the Greek text has only a plural relative pronoun (“which” [see NASB; NRSV] or “which things”), and we cannot be sure about its antecedent. Since Peter has used the word “water” twice in verse 5, the NIV rendering is certainly possible. Yet he has not spoken in verse 5 of “waters” but of the same water accomplishing two different things. Moreover, in the Greek text, the last thing mentioned in verse 5 is “the word of God.” Perhaps the most important argument in favor of rendering “by water and the word of God” is the prominent role that God’s word plays in this paragraph. In verse 5, God creates the world by his word; in verse 7, he judges it “by the same word.” It seems only natural that Peter would complete his parallelism by referring to God’s word also as the means by which he destroyed the world.24
The reference here is, of course, to the flood of Noah, which Peter has already used as an example of God’s judgment (2:5). In that verse, as we argued, God’s not sparing “the ancient world” referred to the destruction of ungodly people. Here again Peter refers to the destruction of the world. Since Peter has referred in verse 5 to the creation of the universe, some commentators think that he must be thinking in verse 6 of a destruction of the whole physical universe—an idea found in a few Jewish writers.25 But Peter’s shift from the language of “heavens and earth” (v. 5) to “world” (v. 6) may be significant. The latter often means the “world of human beings,” the inhabited and organized human dimension of the universe. I think it probably has this meaning here. Peter is affirming the destruction, through the waters of the Flood, of the ungodly human beings of Noah’s day.26 The example is a particularly apt one, because the false teachers are especially denying the judgment associated with the Parousia. This becomes clearer in verse 7.
The connecting link between verses 6 and 7, on the view we have defended above, is “the word of God”: Through God’s utterance the world of Noah’s day was destroyed, and through “the same word” it will be destroyed again. This time, however, God will use fire rather than water to bring about the destruction. Thus, in response to the false teachers, who view the world as going on in the same way forever, Peter makes clear that God has destined it for a sudden and definite end. “The present heavens and earth are reserved for fire”; the universe that now exists is under sentence of condemnation. It is being “kept” for the day when God will judge the world and sentence ungodly people to “destruction” (apoleia).
As we noted earlier (see the comments on 2:3), the words “destroy” and “destruction,” when applied in the New Testament to the judgment of human beings, must not be taken literally in the sense of annihilation. Indeed, some theologians have taken the language in this sense, but this does not fit the general New Testament teaching about “eternal” punishment. However uncomfortable we may be with the idea, it seems clearly taught in Scripture (e.g., Matt. 25:41, 46; Mark 9:43, 48; Rev. 14:9–11; see the discussion in the “Bridging Contexts” section on Jude 11–13). “Destruction” refers to the cessation of existence in this world and to the final and terrible separation from God involved in condemnation. Earlier Peter cited Old Testament examples of the condemnation of “ungodly people” (2 Peter 2:5–6). His application there was to the false teachers, and we are certainly right to suppose he has them in view here also. The false teachers, who sneer at any idea of judgment to come, will themselves experience its full fury.
This verse has sparked considerable theological controversy. Only here in the entire Bible (and possibly 3:10) do we find a clear reference to the destruction of the world with fire. Because of this, and because it is often suggested that Peter borrowed the idea of a final world conflagration from certain pagan philosophers of his day, some scholars resist the idea that Peter has this teaching here. Michael Green, for instance, noting Peter’s focus at the end of the verse on God’s condemnation of human beings, suggests that destruction with fire is simply an image of God’s judgment.27
We will discuss this whole issue more thoroughly in the next section, but we note here that Green’s idea is implausible. After referring to the “world” (of human beings) in verse 6, Peter returns in verse 7 to the “heavens and earth” language that he used in verse 5 to denote the entire created universe. We cannot limit his reference to human beings only. Note the comment of the second-century theologian Melito of Sardis, who apparently has this passage in mind: “There was a flood of water…. There will be a flood of fire, and the earth will be burned up together with its mountains.”28
Bridging Contexts
BRINGING THE BIBLICAL message into today’s world requires that we understand the context and background of that message—the social, historical, and religious environment of the world in which God inspired men to write his words. And we have sketched various elements of the environment as they affect the meaning and application of Peter’s words to us.
But rightly identifying the meaning of God’s Word for us today also demands that we understand exactly how the words that the human authors used to communicate their message function. For words can do many different things. Especially confusing are those words that do not mean what they seem to mean on the surface. Consider the question, “Are you crazy?” We usually think of questions as genuine requests for information. But, in most situations at least, this question is not so much seeking information as it is stating an objection to a course of action (e.g., it could well be the response of a wife whose husband has just said, “I think I’ll roller blade down this steep hill”). Or consider the statement, “I am hurt.” The person who says this is probably not simply stating a fact; he or she is calling for help.
Even more to the point in our interpretation and application of 2 Peter 3:1–7 is the problem of figurative language. Similes are easy to identify because they usually include a word such as “like” or “as” that makes clear the kind of comparison being made (e.g., “My love is like a red, red rose”). But trickier are metaphors, which are not always easy to identify. “The roof fell in on me” may be literal (a firefighter describing how he was injured) or metaphorical (an office worker telling what happened when the boss caught him playing “Tetris” during working hours). In normal conversation we can almost always tell which is which because we are familiar with the idiom, and we know the context in which the statement is made. But what happens when we encounter such language in the Bible? Because we live so far distant from the Bible times, we are not usually familiar with its idioms and metaphors. And context does not always tell the whole story.
Consider two debated examples of such wording in 3:1–7. In verse 4, Peter refers to false teachers who are claiming, “Ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things remain in the same way as from the beginning of creation” (my own lit. trans.). What are we to make of the word “sleep” in this statement? The context makes it clear that it is not intended literally: The false teachers are certainly not suggesting that a night’s sleep for their fathers changed their view of history. So the word is metaphorical in some sense. But what does it refer to? Virtually everyone recognizes that it refers to death. And so most modern English versions simply translate (as does the NIV) “ever since the fathers died.”
Such a translation does not really lose any meaning from the original—if “fall asleep” is a common euphemism for “die.” For the metaphor would then be what we call a “dead” one, and the use of the term to describe death says nothing about the writer’s view of the nature of death (cf. our much-used “pass away”). But if the metaphor is a “live” one for Peter, then the prosaic translation may lose some of his intended meaning. Peter may then be suggesting a certain, specifically Christian, perspective on death: For the Christian death is not a final doom but a temporary state from which one will be “awakened” in resurrection.29 This need not refer to what is called “soul sleep”—the idea that Christians between death and the coming of Christ are unconscious. The point would be, rather, that believers who die, while conscious of the presence of the Lord, have not yet been resurrected.
Those who think that we have here a “dead” metaphor cite evidence that Greeks used the word “sleep” to refer to death ever since the time of Homer and that it is also found in the Old Testament with the same sense.30 Clearly Christians did not invent the metaphor to connote their particular understanding of death. But we may still conclude that Christian writers appropriated this metaphor because it so perfectly suited their theology of death. In other words, it may not have been a “dead” metaphor for Christian writers, even if it was for others in that culture.
The use of the term “sleep” for death in the New Testament points in just this direction, for it is applied only to the death of righteous people.31 Particularly significant is John 11:11, where Jesus tells his disciples that Lazarus is “sleeping.” His point seems to be to characterize Lazarus’ death as a temporary condition, to be miraculously changed by the Lord himself within a short period of time. And so we would do better to keep the word “sleep” in our translations of 2 Peter 3:4—perhaps compromising with some such rendering as “sleep in death.”
But a second debated instance of metaphorical language in our text involves us in a larger and much more contentious matter: the language of eschatology. As Stephen H. Travis points out,
because eschatology deals with what “has never entered the heart of man,” it raises in acute form the problem of language. Some kind of picture-language seems inevitable when we are speaking about realities which lie both temporally and spatially beyond our present experience. What is the relationship between that language and those realities (assuming, of course, that they are real)? Were the biblical writers able to distinguish between “literal” and “pictorial” or “mythical” language, or did they use such language without reflecting on its precise relationship to reality? And—whatever may have been the case with them—how are we, with our “modern world-view,” to handle the Bible’s language about the parousia, about judgment, heaven and hell?32
We confront this problem in Peter’s assertion that “the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire.” What are we to make of this language? We may begin by noting three general directions that scholars have taken in handling such “cosmic” assertions.
(1) The first option is associated especially with the famous and controversial New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Motivated by a desire to make the New Testament relevant to the modern, scientific era, he argued for a program of “demythologizing” the New Testament—that is, taking the myth out of New Testament language. Bultmann viewed the New Testament authors as necessarily limited in their ideas by their “mythological” worldview. They believed in a “three-story” universe, in God’s direct intervention in the world through miracles, and in a literal, catastrophic “end of the world.” The discoveries of modern science have rendered such ideas obsolete. But this, to Bultmann, did not mean we have to discard the New Testament. Shorn of its mythological trappings, it speaks a message relevant to modern people. We can, for instance, still find meaning in the idea of the Parousia, with Christ coming to “judge the living and the dead” at the end of history, by getting to the core idea this myth represents: that every person must confront Christ in an encounter that will seal his or her destiny. Bultmann would probably think that Peter really thought that the world would be destroyed by fire, but its meaning for us is, perhaps, that the material universe is not the whole of reality.
Bultmann’s demythologizing has been unanimously rejected by evangelical scholars. In assuming that the biblical writers were limited by their own time, he ignores the reality of divine inspiration, intended to preserve the truthfulness of their words. Moreover, his view smacks of what C. S. Lewis has called “chronological snobbery”—the idea that only recent and modern ideas can be right. Science has vastly expanded our understanding of, and our ability to manipulate, the natural world—but it has done nothing to challenge the biblical conviction that God created that world, intervenes in it, and will some day bring it to an end. Demythologizing Peter’s language is not an option for anyone convinced of the truthfulness of Scripture.
(2) Another general approach to the language of eschatology is to take the cosmic language the Bible uses quite literally. If the Bible says that in the last days stars will fall from the sky to the earth (Rev. 6:13), then that is just what will happen. This “straightforward” reading of eschatological texts is deeply rooted in evangelical scholarship and popular imagination. When I first became a Christian (many more years ago than I would like to admit), almost the first biblical teaching I heard was from tapes of Hal Lindsay, giving his detailed and generally literalistic interpretation of end-time events as popularized in his best-selling book, The Late Great Planet Earth. A high point every year in the church I first attended as a believer was the prophecy conference, when guest speakers would go over the same ground. If one takes this approach to 2 Peter 3:4, then the conclusion follows without much analysis at all: Peter is predicting that the world will eventually be destroyed by fire. And those of us who live in the nuclear age can certainly understand how such a thing could come to pass.
I find that it is fashionable these days in some quarters to deride this approach to eschatology. Some people treat Christians who hold these views as if they were ignorant bumpkins. I don’t think such derision is justified. To be sure, I have my reservations about some aspects of the “entirely literal” approach. Its advocates may assume that certain biblical texts are clear when in fact they may not be. And a focus on prophecy can sometimes turn into an unhealthy preoccupation with the details of future history at the expense of living the Christian life here and now. But it seems to me that any believer committed to the full truthfulness of the Bible should welcome the seriousness with which such an approach treats the biblical text. The bumper sticker that proclaims, “The Bible says it; I believe it; and that’s good enough for me” captures a vital truth: Christians should accept whatever the Bible teaches.
(3) But it is precisely here that we come face-to-face with the real issue: What does the Bible teach? Many laypeople and not a few scholars think that eschatological texts in the Bible mean just what they appear to say on the surface. But as we have seen, language is not always this simple. And many scholars think that the eschatological language in the Bible is often metaphorical. This brings up the third general direction in the interpretation of the biblical language about the “last things.” Its advocates argue that predictions about the stars falling from the sky to the earth are not intended to describe a literal, astronomical disaster; they are simply figurative language for some kind of spectacular event.
The most important biblical evidence for this approach comes in prophetic passages that appear to use cosmic imagery to describe the historical judgment of God. In Isaiah 13, for instance, the prophet depicts God’s judgment on the nation of Babylon in cosmic terms:
The stars of heaven and their constellations
The rising sun will be darkened
and the moon will not give its light. (v. 10)
Therefore I will make the heavens tremble;
and the earth will shake from its place
at the wrath of the LORD Almighty,
in the day of his burning anger. (v. 13)
Those scholars who follow a more literal hermeneutic (option 2) would argue that the prophet has here moved from a description of the historical judgment on Babylon to the ultimate judgment of the entire world at the end of history. This may be right, but the prophet’s return in verses 17–22 to the situation of historical Babylon creates a problem for this way of looking at the verses. Virtually every instance of this kind of cosmic imagery is debated in just this fashion. But I think we have enough evidence to find at least some degree of metaphor in the eschatological language of the Bible.
Consequently, I do not think that we should approach any given eschatological passage with a clear presumption about the language one way or the other. We have to look at each text and decide whether the language is literal or metaphorical. As we do so, we will ask questions such as, “Is the language used here clearly metaphorical elsewhere in the Bible or in the ancient world?” “Can what is described literally happen?” “Are there parallel passages that show that the language is metaphorical?”
We must certainly entertain the possibility that Peter’s language about the heavens and earth being reserved for ultimate fiery destruction is metaphorical. As we noted in the “Original Meaning” section, Green suggests this possibility, that Peter may simply be describing God’s judgment on human beings in this verse. And, to be sure, God’s judgment is often pictured in the Bible in terms of “fire.” Note how the following passages highlight fire in various ways as a component of the day of the Lord:
The LORD will cause men to hear his majestic voice
and will make them see his arm coming down
with raging anger and consuming fire,
with cloudburst, thunderstorm and hail. (Isa. 30:30)
See, the LORD is coming with fire,
and his chariots are like a whirlwind;
he will bring down his anger with fury,
and his rebuke with flames of fire.
For with fire and with his sword
the LORD will execute judgment upon all men,
and many will be those slain by the LORD. (Isa. 66:15–16)
Who can withstand his indignation?
Who can endure his fierce anger?
His wrath is poured out like fire;
the rocks are shattered before him. (Nah. 1:6)
Neither their silver nor their gold
will be able to save them
on the day of the LORD’s wrath.
In the fire of his jealousy
the whole world will be consumed,
for he will make a sudden end
of all who live in the earth. (Zeph. 1:18)
“Therefore wait for me,” declares the LORD,
“for the day I will stand up to testify.
I have decided to assemble the nations,
to gather the kingdoms
and to pour out my wrath on them—
all my fierce anger.
The whole world will be consumed
by the fire of my jealous anger.” (Zeph. 3:8)
While some Christians doubt it, it seems clear that “fire” in these verses (as well as the many where it is applied to judgment in the New Testament) is not literal, but metaphorical (see the “Bridging Contexts” section on Jude 11–13). The biblical writers choose one of the most spectacular and painful of human disasters to convey some notion of the terrible nature of God’s judgment.
In other words, it is certainly possible that Peter uses “fire” in this verse simply as a metaphor for human judgment. But two points in the passage make this interpretation questionable. (1) Peter’s main point in verses 5–7 has to do with the continuity of the universe as a whole. He cites creation and the Flood—which, while directed against human sin, certainly affected the physical world. A reference to the judgment of humans only in verse 7 would be out of place. (2) Peter’s use of the phrase “heavens and earth” seems deliberately chosen to refer to the physical universe (see v. 5). We incline, then, with most commentators, to find in the verse a prediction of the ultimate destruction of the world by fire.
But before we leave the point, we should mention one objection to this conclusion. The idea of a final world conflagration was widespread in Peter’s day. One particular philosophical school, the Stoics, made this idea important in their thinking. And some scholars argue that Peter would not have taught an idea that was rooted in such a pagan philosophy. But I don’t think we can be so dogmatic. God may use even pagan ideas to lead the authors of Scripture into the truth he wants them to transmit.
Furthermore, that Peter derived his thinking from Stoicism is unlikely. The Stoics taught that the world be destroyed by fire and then recreated many times—a notion quite distant from what Peter teaches. A more likely influence is Jewish teaching in his day. A number of Jewish theologians had also begun to predict the destruction of the world with fire, and a careful reading of the Old Testament passages cited above shows that at least the germ of the idea is found in the Scriptures themselves. Peter may be the first explicitly to state this idea, but the Old Testament certainly hints at it.
Contemporary Significance
WHAT SIGNIFICANCE DOES this teaching about the end of the world have for Christians today? Peter has much to say about the importance of “memory” here, and readers should consult the “Bridging Contexts” section on 2 Peter 1:12–15 for discussion of this matter. Peter himself draws out some of the consequences of what he says here about eschatology later in the chapter; we will explore the issue at that point.
Law and gospel. But two other points Peter makes in this section are especially worthy of further application to our times. The first is his rather passing reference to the “command given by our Lord and Savior through your apostles” (v. 2). As we noted in the “Original Meaning” section, the word “command” cannot refer to the promise of the second coming of Christ. One of the most important contributions Martin Luther made to our understanding of God’s Word was his distinction between “law” and “gospel.” “Law,” said Luther, was “what we are to do and give to God”; “gospel” is “what has been given us by God.”33 In Luther’s terms, Peter is here speaking about “law,” not “gospel.” He wants his readers to recall that they, the apostles who first brought the good news of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, also relayed to them their Lord and Savior’s demand to give themselves in obedience to God.
The church in our day is in great confusion when it comes to this demand of our Lord. The confusion relates to two specific matters: (1) Where are we to find the “law” that we are to obey? (2) What is the place of this “law” in the Christian life?
(1) When one surveys the history of Christian theology and looks over the current scholarly landscape, one finds three basic answers to the first question: (a) the love command; (b) the Old Testament law as fulfilled in Christ; and (c) the teaching of Jesus and the apostles.
(a) The prominence of love in the New Testament is well known. Jesus singled out love for “the neighbor” (Lev. 19:15) as the heart of the law and made it the linchpin in his ethical teaching (Matt. 22:34–40; Mark 12:28–31; Luke 10:25–28; John 13:34–35; 15:12). And we find the same focus on the love command throughout the New Testament (Rom. 13:8–10; Gal. 5:13–15; James 2:8; 1 John 2:7; 3:11–20; 4:11, 19–21; 2 John 5). We can understand, then, why some theologians and ethicists have argued that the New Testament “replaces” law with love. The popular modern incarnation of this viewpoint is called “situational ethics.” As taught by writers like Fletcher, situational ethics disdains any moral absolutes. In any situation, all the Christian needs to do is the “loving thing.” And, according to Fletcher, what is “loving” will vary from situation to situation.
Now there is a sense in which Fletcher and others like him are absolutely right: Christ calls on his followers to love, and he suggests (as does Paul) that the believer who loves will invariably do what is right, thus fulfilling all the other commandments (see, e.g., Mark 12:28–31; Rom. 13:8–10). But what “situational ethics” advocates ignore is that the New Testament also gives definite guidance about how love is to be worked out. Indeed, New Testament writers warn against the sort of “situational” approach that Fletcher proposes. Thus, for instance, when the Corinthians begin going off the rails morally, Paul reminds them that “what counts is keeping the commandments of God” (1 Cor. 7:19). Love is certainly the most important of all the commands that we Christians are to obey; we could even say that it is basic to them all. But the New Testament does not countenance any replacing of law with love.
(b) Probably a majority of contemporary evangelical scholars would argue for the second option we listed above: that Christians are obliged to obey the law of Moses as fulfilled in Christ. According to the Puritans, the law of Moses has two distinct functions: As a “covenant of works,” it condemns the sinner who disobeys it; as an expression of God’s holy will, it directs the conduct of the people of God. For the Christians, the first of these functions is at an end, and this is what Paul means when he asserts that Christians are not “under the law” (Rom. 6:14–15). But the second of these functions remains fully in place, as Paul also suggests when he claims that the gospel “establishes the law” (3:31).
In other words, Christians are to continue to obey the law of Moses—although in its “fulfilled” form. Christ’s coming means those parts of the law that were to prepare for Christ are no longer obligatory: Believers do not need to observe the Old Testament sacrifices and rituals (the “ceremonial” law) or the rules for life in the land of Israel (the “civil” law). But Christ himself required continued obedience to the “moral” law (Matt. 5:18–19):
I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
On this view of the situation, then, the “command” that Peter is thinking about in 2 Peter 3:2 will be the Old Testament law as Christ and the apostles interpreted and applied it. If asked where this “moral” law is to be found, theologians who follow this line of thinking usually focus on the Ten Commandments.
(c) This traditional Puritan interpretation of law is extremely influential in contemporary evangelicalism. But I question whether it is correct. I certainly do not want to be known as somebody who speaks against the Ten Commandments! But in fairness to the New Testament, I think we must say that the commandments that Christians are now to obey are found in the New Testament rather than in the Old. We referred above to Paul’s statement that Christians are not “under the law”; what gives us the right to limit that statement to a certain function of the law or to some part of the law? Nothing in the context suggests any kind of restriction. Nor does Jesus’ endorsement of the law in Matthew 5:18–19 settle the matter: Taken at its surface meaning, it demands that believers obey the entire law of Moses—sacrifices, ceremonies, and all.
Clearly, then, something else is going on here. And that “something else” is expressed in verse 17: Christ came to “fulfill” the law. As this word “fulfill” is used in Matthew, it refers to a new covenant reality anticipated by the Old Testament. Applied in this context, this means that Christ’s own teaching is the “fulfillment” of the law. What he demands of his disciples is what the Old Testament law was all along pointing toward. But the point is that it is Jesus’ teaching, not the Old Testament law, that is the focal point for Christian obedience. This is confirmed at the end of the Sermon on the Mount and at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, when it is Jesus’ own words and teaching that are made the focus of new covenant ethics (Matt. 7:24–27; 28:19–20).
Obviously, then, I favor the third major interpretation of New Testament “law”: that believers are directly obliged to obey the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. This “law of Christ” (see Gal. 6:2) is the new covenant equivalent to the old covenant law of Moses. True, this whole matter is complex, and what I have said about it here only scratches the surface.34 And I think it is especially important to point out that the practical difference between these views is small. After all, nine of the Ten Commandments are clearly affirmed and repeated in the New Testament and thus made part of “the law of Christ” (the exception is the Sabbath command).
(2) In some ways, then, of more practical importance is the place that obedience to this law of Christ has in Christian discipleship. Here we find constant pressure toward two extremes: an excessive focus on rules and requirements versus a complete disregard of any rules—that is, legalism versus libertinism. The fundamentalist strain in evangelical Christianity has contributed to the first tendency. Fundamentalists have typically established rules about social conduct, dress, hairstyle, and so forth, loosely derived from biblical principles but very important in maintaining their identity.
In fairness to fundamentalists, we must note that they will strenuously deny any taint of legalism; their rules are not presented as a means of salvation but as a way of honoring God in daily life. But the effect is often to make conformity to rules of essential importance to Christian experience. In the seminary in which I teach, I have often encountered students raised in such a fundamentalist context. And among many of them, I have observed the opposite tendency: reacting against what they see as an excessive emphasis on rules in their early environment, they “throw the baby out with the bath water” and reject “law” altogether. Rightly celebrating the grace of God in Christ, they pooh-pooh any notion of rules; rightly recognizing the centrality of the Spirit for the Christian life, they resist any external norm.
If we are to attain a biblical balance on this matter of “the law of Christ,” we need to listen carefully to the teaching of all Scripture. The starting point must be God’s new covenant work of grace, in which he plants within the believer his own Spirit, who produces “fruit” in us that is pleasing to himself (cf. Gal. 5:16–26). Any teaching about the Christian life that does not make central this internal work of transformation misses the whole point of the new covenant. Ministry that is faithful to the New Testament will then seek to help Christians realize and work out the potential of this new life within. Jesus used an organic image to describe the process: A good tree produces good fruit (Matt. 7:16–20).
Unfortunately, however, people are not trees. A tree cannot uproot itself from good soil and plant itself in swampy, foul ground. A tree cannot refuse to ingest the fertilizer applied to it. But people, in effect, can. Even the believer, living under the power of grace and with the Spirit within, can resist the work of the Spirit. The Spirit does not instantly erase the programmed thoughts and behavior patterns acquired over ten, or twenty, or thirty years of immersion in the world. Thus it is easy for us to identify our own selfish desires with the promptings of the Spirit; to identify the “loving” action with the action that we really want to do; to think we have the “mind of Christ” when we really have the “mind of this world.”
In other words, without taking away anything from the centrality of the Spirit and the demand of love, the New Testament writers insist that there is an external code of conduct to which Christians must still conform. This code, the “law of Christ,” is neither detailed nor comprehensive. It focuses more on principles and attitudes than on specifics. It is not spelled out in one long document, but comes to us scattered within the pages of the New Testament. And it is not there to produce conduct pleasing to God, but to guide it. God is at work, through his Spirit, reprogramming our minds (see, e.g., Rom. 12:1)—Christian conduct is produced from within. But God has also through Christ and the apostles revealed to us his will for our behavior so that we can test the accuracy of that reprogramming and make sure that it is not our own agenda that is being installed. As a result, Christians never move beyond the need to “recall … the command given by our Lord and Savior through your apostles” (2 Peter 3:2).
God’s role in history. Peter touches in this passage on a second matter worth noting in our post-Christian environment. He accuses the false teachers of promulgating the notion that “everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation” (v. 4). This general attitude is similar to the ruling paradigm in our own world, which is the heritage especially of evolutionary theory. Many Christians struggle with the issue of evolution with respect to its assumptions about creation—and this debate is no doubt an important one. But perhaps even more destructive in the long run is the evolutionary assumption that history operates through blind chance and through uniform processes that are basically invariable from one age to the next. What evolution dismisses is any idea of a personal God who intervenes in the course of history. If the scoffers of Peter’s day were alive today, they would be talking about the “invariable laws of nature.”
It is this assumption that Peter contests in his references to God’s intervention in creation, the Flood, and the end of the world. Green quotes Plumptre: “The words [of Peter] are a protest against the old Epicurean view of a concourse of atoms, and its modern counterpart, the theory of a perpetual (i.e. unbroken) evolution.”35 Christians, even those who adopt theistic evolution as model of creation, cannot accept the larger evolutionary worldview. Yet we are prone to pick up, unconsciously, this way of viewing the world. We can easily succumb to the reigning paradigm of a “closed” universe and leave little, if any, room for God to act and to reveal himself.
To be sure, we must guard against the temptation to think we can precisely identify what God is doing in every event in history. Some Christians are far too prone to pontificate on everything that is reported on the evening news. An earthquake becomes a judgment of God against a certain sin in a certain part of the world, a favorable economic report a sign of God’s favor, and so on. But a Christian worldview affirms that God is constantly active in the events of our lives and in the history of the world. We may not be able to determine the significance of each one. But God has not stepped off the throne of the universe, nor has he stood aside to let events take their course. We need to recapture the biblical worldview, in which all of life is filled with the presence and activity of a personal, holy, and loving God, who is guiding history toward a definite end.