Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book
You are about to sit down with a last letter. Peter says it plainly himself, without drama and without self-pity: he knows that the tent of his body will soon be laid aside, because the Lord Jesus Christ has made it clear to him, and so he intends to keep reminding these people of what matters most for as long as he has breath, and to leave them something they can recall after he is gone. Every line of these three chapters is written under that shadow, and it gives the letter a particular urgency. Notice, though, what has changed since his first letter. That one was written to people under pressure from outside, slandered by their neighbors, insulted for the name of Christ, and it taught them how to suffer well. This one has a different enemy, and a worse one. The danger now is inside the house. Teachers were rising up among the congregations, men who knew the vocabulary and could hold a room, who would secretly introduce destructive heresies and even deny the Master who bought them, who exploited people with fabricated stories, who traded in sensuality and greed, and who promised their hearers freedom while being themselves slaves of depravity. Behind them, or alongside them, came scoffers with a question that has never gone out of fashion: where is the promise of His coming? Everything goes on as it always has. Against all of that Peter sets three things, and they are the spine of the letter. Knowledge, the real and settled knowledge of Jesus Christ, through which God has already given us everything we need for life and godliness. Growth, a faith that adds to itself and does not sit still, because a Christian who stops growing becomes easy prey. And remembering, the humble work of going back over what you already know until it is fixed in you, which is exactly what an old man does when he can see the end of the road. Three short chapters, and they will not waste a word of it.
As you read, hold this: A dying apostle writes once more, and because the danger is now inside the house rather than outside it, his whole remedy is the true knowledge of Jesus Christ: everything needed for life and godliness has already been given, so grow in it, remember it, and do not be carried away.
The name and what it means
The word that governs this letter is a word for knowing. In Greek it is ἐπίγνωσις (epignōsis), pronounced eh-PIG-noh-sis (Strong’s G1922), and it is built by taking the ordinary word for knowledge, gnōsis, and putting a preposition on the front of it that strengthens and directs it. The result is not simply more facts. It is knowledge that has arrived, knowledge that has come to rest on its object, full and thorough and settled, the difference between knowing about a man and actually knowing him. Watch where Peter places it and you will see him building the frame of the whole letter with it. In his second sentence he prays that grace and peace be multiplied to them through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. In the next breath he says that God’s divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us. A few lines later he warns that a believer who does not grow will end up ineffective and unproductive in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. And then, after three chapters of hard warning about deceivers and scoffers and fire and judgment, the very last thing he writes before the doxology is a command: grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The letter opens with it, is held up by it, and closes on it.
That matters enormously for how you read what comes in between. When error walks into a congregation, the instinct of a frightened church is to pull back, to think less, to stop asking questions, to make the circle smaller and the teaching thinner and hope the trouble passes. Peter does the opposite. His answer to false teaching is not less thinking but more of the right kind, not a retreat from knowledge but a deeper hold on the true knowledge of a real Person who lived and died and rose and is coming again. And notice that this knowing is never merely mental in Peter’s hands. It produces virtue, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love. It is knowledge that changes how a person lives, or it is not the thing he is talking about at all. Hold that word as you go through these three chapters. The men Peter is warning against had knowledge of a sort, clever and fluent and for sale. What he wants for these ordinary believers is the other kind, the kind that comes from God, rests on Christ, and grows.
The world of the book
Peter is almost certainly writing from Rome, in the middle sixties of the first century, and he is writing as a man whose time has run out. The Lord Himself had told him long before, on a beach in Galilee, by what kind of death he would glorify God, and now he says simply that the Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to him that the tent will soon be laid aside. That was the ancient way of speaking about a body, a temporary shelter that a traveler pitches for the night and strikes in the morning, and Peter uses it without flinching. The empire under Nero had begun to treat Christians as a public menace, and church tradition from the earliest centuries says that Peter died in that city, executed, in those years. Letters of this kind were a known thing in that world: the last words of a father or a leader, gathering his household around him to say what must not be forgotten. He tells us who he is writing to as well, since he calls this his second letter to them, which points back to the scattered believers of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. On the matter of who wrote it, it is best to be plain and unworried. The letter presents itself as Peter’s, names him in the first line, appeals to his memory of standing on the holy mountain when the voice came from heaven, and speaks of a first letter he had sent. The church received it and read it as Scripture. Some, from the early centuries down to today, have questioned whether Peter wrote it, chiefly because its Greek style differs from the first letter and because it took longer to be quoted widely. We are content to receive it as what it says it is and as the church has received it, and we will not treat an old scholarly argument as a crisis of faith.
The trouble Peter is answering would have been immediately recognizable to anyone living in a Roman provincial town. The Greco-Roman world was full of traveling teachers, and a persuasive man with a good voice, a striking doctrine, and no scruples could make a comfortable living off an admiring circle. The young churches were especially exposed to it, because they practiced hospitality on principle, opened their homes to strangers who came with a Christian greeting, and had no seminaries, no printed Bibles, and often no elder with much experience. Into that opening came men who used the language of freedom to sell license, who made merchandise of people with invented stories, and whose real interest, as Peter says bluntly, was greed. The intellectual mood of the age helped them along. Many educated people found the whole idea of a world running toward a divine reckoning faintly ridiculous, holding instead that the universe simply continues as it always has, generation after generation, with no hand over it and no end in view. So the scoffers of chapter three were not saying anything original. They were saying what the cultured people around them already said, and dressing it in a sneer at a promise that had, by then, been waiting a few decades. Peter answers them not with speculation but with two facts of history: God has spoken, and God has acted before, and a world that once thought itself safe went under the water.
The shape of the book
- Everything you need, and the qualities to add to your faith (chapter 1). Peter opens with a staggering claim, that God’s divine power has already given us everything we need for life and godliness, along with promises described as precious and magnificent. Then comes the list: make every effort to add to your faith virtue, and knowledge, and self-control, and perseverance, and godliness, and brotherly kindness, and love, so that you will not be ineffective and unproductive but will make your calling and election sure. He explains why he keeps repeating himself, since he knows his departure is near and wants them able to recall these things when he is gone. And he closes the chapter by grounding everything in testimony rather than invention: we did not follow cleverly devised fables, we were eyewitnesses of His majesty, we heard the voice on the holy mountain, and we have the word of the prophets, which no one ever produced by his own will, for men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
- The false teachers, their character, and their judgment (chapter 2). Peter turns and looks the danger full in the face. There were false prophets among the people once, and there will be false teachers among you, introducing destructive heresies and denying the Master who bought them. He shows from history that God knows both how to judge and how to rescue, in the angels who sinned, in the flood that spared Noah, in the cities of the plain out of which Lot was drawn. He describes the men themselves without relish and without flinching: bold, arrogant, driven by greed and sensuality, springs without water, promising freedom while enslaved to their own appetites. And the chapter ends with the hardest warning in the letter, about those who knew the way of righteousness and turned away from it, a passage we will not hurry past and will not soften when we come to it.
- The scoffers, the patience of God, and the day of the Lord (chapter 3). Peter reminds them that this is his second letter and that both were written to stir them to wholesome thinking by making them remember. Then the scoffers, and their question, and his answer: they deliberately overlook that the same word of God which made the heavens once brought a flood, and that same word holds the present order until the day of judgment. With the Lord a day is like a thousand years. He is not slow in keeping His promise; He is patient. The day of the Lord will come like a thief, and everything we build our security on will be laid bare, and God’s people are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where righteousness dwells. Since all this is so, what kind of people ought you to be? He even pauses to call Paul’s letters Scripture, warns that unstable people twist them, and ends with the charge that gives this series its name.
The one thread to carry
If you carry one thing through these three chapters, carry this: grow, remember, and do not be carried away. Those three commands hold the whole letter together, and they belong to each other. A believer who is growing is very hard to deceive, because he has tasted the real thing and the counterfeit does not satisfy him. A believer who remembers is hard to unsettle, because he has been over the ground before and knows where the solid rock is. And Peter’s last warning before his last command is precisely about being carried away by the error of the lawless and falling from a secure standing, so the antidote he prescribes is not vigilance alone but growth. Standing still is not actually an option. Notice, too, where he starts, because he does not start with effort. He starts with a gift.
"His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. Through these He has given us His precious and magnificent promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, now that you have escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires." 2 Peter 1:3–4 (BSB)
Read that slowly, because everything Peter asks of us afterward stands on it. Everything we need. Not most of what we need, not the beginning of what we need with the rest left to our ingenuity. Everything for life and godliness has already been handed over, by divine power, through the knowledge of the One who called us. So when he says in the next verse to make every effort to add to your faith, he is not telling you to manufacture something out of nothing. He is telling you to work out what God has already worked in. And the promises are the engine of it: precious, magnificent, and powerful enough to pull a person out of the world’s corruption and into a share in the very life of God.
The second pillar is where that knowledge comes from, and Peter is emphatic. He did not make it up, and neither did any prophet before him. He stood on a mountain and heard the Father’s voice; and behind that stands a written word that is more certain still, a lamp shining in a dark place.
"Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture comes from one’s own interpretation. For no such prophecy was ever brought forth by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." 2 Peter 1:20–21 (BSB)
That is one of the clearest statements in all the Bible about where Scripture comes from, and it is the reason a small congregation with no scholars and no defenses can stand against a fluent deceiver. The book in your hands did not begin in a human mind. Men spoke, and their personalities and vocabularies are all over the page, and yet they were carried along, as a ship is carried by wind in the sail, so that what came out was God’s own word. Hold that, and you will not be at the mercy of whoever speaks most confidently this year.
And then the last thing. Chapter three will take you to the edge of the world’s ending, and it is worth saying here how we will handle it. That Jesus Christ will return personally, bodily, and in glory, and that a real judgment comes with Him, is certain, and Peter stakes everything on it. The timetable is not given to us. Sincere believers who love the Scriptures have read the details differently for two thousand years, and this study will not hand you a schedule the Bible does not hand us. What Peter actually does with the promise is not draw a chart. He draws a conclusion about how to live, and then he closes his last letter with a command and a doxology.
"But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen." 2 Peter 3:18 (BSB)
There is the final word of the fisherman from Galilee, written down with the executioner not far off. Not hold on, though he might have said that. Not hide, though the danger was real. Grow. Grow in grace, which means going deeper into what you never earned, and grow in the knowledge of Jesus Christ, which means knowing Him better this year than last. That is how a Christian survives a season of clever error, and it is how a Christian survives the long wait for a promise. So come to these three chapters ready to be warned and ready to be fed. Learn the Word, grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and give thanks.