Today’s Passage: 2 Peter 1
An old man is writing, and he knows he does not have long. That is the first thing to understand about this chapter, because it explains everything else in it. Peter says plainly in verse fourteen that he knows the tent of his body will soon be laid aside, and that the Lord Jesus Himself has made this clear to him, and so what you are reading has the weight of last words. There is no wandering in it. He begins where a dying man begins, with what is certain: that God has already given, by His own divine power, everything His people need for life and godliness, and that He has attached to that gift promises Peter can only call precious and magnificent. Because of that gift, and not in order to earn it, Peter tells them to make every effort, and he strings out eight qualities that grow one out of another, from faith to love, and tells them that a life increasing in these things will never be barren and never stumble. Then he turns to why he keeps saying it, and the answer is that he will soon be gone and wants them able to recall these things when he is no longer there to say them. And then, at the end, he sets down the two foundations he is leaving them to stand on. One is what he saw with his own eyes on a mountain, when the voice came out of the Majestic Glory. The other is the written prophetic word, which he says is confirmed beyond doubt, and which came to us not by the will of any man but from God, through men carried along by the Holy Spirit.
As you read, hold this: God’s own divine power has already given you everything you need for life and godliness, so give yourself to growing in the knowledge of Christ and stake your whole weight on the prophetic word, which came not from the will of man but from men who spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Context The world of 2 Peter 1
This is the second letter, written to the same scattered believers Peter had written to before, and the mood has changed. The first letter was written to Christians suffering from the outside, pressed by neighbors and magistrates and a world that found them strange. This one is written because of a danger from the inside. Chapter two, which follows immediately, describes teachers rising up within the churches who will exploit the people with fabricated stories, who promise freedom while they are themselves slaves of corruption. Peter can see it coming, and his answer, before he ever names the error, is to fill his readers with the truth. That is worth noticing at the very start. He does not open by attacking the wolves. He opens by feeding the sheep, on the character of God, on the promises of God, on the growth God works in a life, and on the certainty of the written word. A church that has those four things in its bones is very hard to deceive. The letter is generally placed in the mid to late sixties, near the end of Nero’s reign, when a man in Rome who confessed Christ knew what could be coming. Peter says he is writing while he still lives in the tent, and he clearly expects that to end soon.
The language he chooses would have landed hard in a Greek-speaking world. The word rendered “excellence” in verse three, aretē, was the great word of Greek moral philosophy and of public inscriptions, the word for the virtue or valor for which a city honored a benefactor with a bronze plaque. Peter takes it and hangs it on God: we were called by His own glory and excellence. The list in verses five to seven has the look of the virtue lists that moral teachers of the day handed to their students, and Peter uses that familiar shape and then fills it with things no Stoic list ever contained, brotherly kindness and love, and roots the whole chain in faith. And the phrase in verse four, partakers of the divine nature, was the very promise the mystery religions were making all over the Mediterranean, initiation into the life of a god. Peter is not borrowing their idea. He is telling ordinary believers, in words they already knew, that what the pagan cults could only advertise, the living God actually gives, and gives on entirely different terms. One more thing should be said calmly and then set down. Some readers, from the early centuries to now, have questioned whether Peter wrote this letter, though the letter presents itself as his in the plainest terms and the church received it as Scripture. It is not a crisis, and we will read it as what it says it is.
2 Peter 1:1–4 (BSB)
¹ Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours: ² Grace and peace be multiplied to you through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. ³ 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. ⁴ 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.
He calls himself a servant first and an apostle second, and the order is not an accident in a man who once had to be told to put up his sword. Then look at what he says about his readers, and take it slowly, because it is the most generous opening in the New Testament. They have received a faith as precious as ours. Peter is one of the Twelve. He walked the roads of Galilee with Jesus, he saw the empty tomb, he preached at Pentecost. These readers are ordinary believers scattered across Asia Minor who never saw the Lord in the flesh. And Peter says their faith stands in exactly the same rank as his. There are no second-class Christians in this letter. Notice also where that faith came from: it came through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ, which is at once a plain statement that Jesus Christ is God, and a plain statement that our standing rests on His righteousness and not a scrap of ours. Then the greeting, and even the greeting teaches. Grace and peace be multiplied to you, not merely given but multiplied, and multiplied along one channel: through the epignōsis, pronounced eh-PIG-noh-sis. Strong's G1922, full, personal knowledge of a person. The word here is not the ordinary Greek word for knowing. It is epignōsis, a strengthened form, and it carries the sense of knowledge that has arrived, knowledge that has become full and personal and settled, the difference between knowing about a man and knowing the man himself. Peter uses it at the start, in the middle, and again at the close of the letter, and every time it is the knowledge of a Person, of God, of Jesus our Lord. That should guard us from two errors at once. It is not bare information, so no one can be a mature Christian merely by accumulating facts about doctrine and never bowing. But neither is it a wordless feeling that floats free of what God has actually said, for Peter will end this chapter insisting on the written word. It is the real acquaintance of a soul with the God who has made Himself known, deepened by everything He has revealed. And see how much is hung on it here. Grace and peace are multiplied through it. Everything needed for life and godliness comes through it. Fruitfulness in verse eight is measured by it. If you want more of God’s peace, Peter’s counsel is not to search harder inside yourself but to come to know the Lord Jesus better, for He is the channel through which the whole supply runs. of God and of Jesus our Lord. That word will come back three times in this short chapter, and by the end you will see that it is the spine of the whole thing.
And now verse three, which ought to be underlined in every believer’s Bible. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness. Not will give, if we perform well enough. Has given. It is done, it is in hand, it is past tense and settled, and it came by His divine power and not by our resolve. Whatever Peter is about to ask of his readers in verse five, he asks it of people who have already been fully supplied. That is the order of the Christian life, and getting it backwards has crushed more sincere people than almost any other mistake. God gives, and then God calls us to work out what He has given. He does not dangle the supply in front of us as a wage. And notice by what means He called us: by His own glory and excellence. He did not call us on account of our glory, for we had none. He called us out of the sheer weight and beauty of who He is. Praise Him for that. Then verse four adds the promises, precious and magnificent, and tells us what they are for: that through them you may become koinōnos, pronounced koy-noh-NOSS. Strong's G2844, partaker, sharer, partner. Koinōnos means a sharer, a partner, one who has a genuine stake in something held in common. It was an everyday word: fishermen who worked one boat together were koinōnoi, and Luke uses it of James and John in partnership with Simon Peter, which may be why it came so readily to this old fisherman’s hand. So what does Peter mean, that we become sharers in the divine nature? Say first, and say it clearly, what it does not mean. It does not mean that a believer becomes a god, or a piece of God, or is absorbed into Him like a drop into the sea. God is the Creator and we are creatures, and that line is never crossed, not in this life and not in glory. The mystery cults of Peter’s world promised exactly the thing he is not promising. Now say what it does mean, and let it be as large as Peter makes it. By His Spirit, through His promises, God grants His people a real share in His own moral character and His own life: His holiness, His love, His truthfulness, worked genuinely into a human being who did not have them before. Peter puts the two halves in one breath, escape from corruption and share in the divine nature, and they belong together. God does not merely pardon you and leave you as He found you. He makes you like His Son. of the divine nature, now that you have escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
2 Peter 1:5–9 (BSB)
⁵ For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith virtue; and to virtue, knowledge; ⁶ and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; ⁷ and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. ⁸ For if you possess these qualities and continue to grow in them, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁹ But whoever lacks these traits is nearsighted to the point of blindness, having forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.
Everything turns on the first four words. For this very reason. Peter has just said that God’s divine power has already given everything needed, and that the promises are already ours, and the eight qualities that follow grow out of that soil and nowhere else. This is not a ladder you climb in order to be accepted. It is what a life looks like when it has already been accepted and is being supplied. Keep that fixed, because a list like this one can be read in a way that would drive a tender conscience to despair, and Peter did not write it for that. He wrote it for people who had escaped, who had been cleansed, and who now had a whole new nature to give expression to. So spoudē, pronounced spoo-DAY. Strong's G4710, earnestness, diligence, urgent zeal. The noun is spoudē, and it is a strong word: haste, earnestness, zeal, the diligence of a person who is genuinely in earnest and not merely willing. In the Greek of the day it could describe a runner’s exertion or an official’s urgent business. Peter piles it up here, using this word and the verb built on it three times in this chapter, at verse five, at verse ten, and again at verse fifteen where he is making arrangements for after his death. So set two things side by side and refuse to let go of either. Salvation is entirely God’s gift, given by His divine power before we lifted a finger. And the Christian life is not passive. Grace does not make us spectators; it makes us workers who have something to work with. Peter says to bring alongside what God has supplied every ounce of earnestness we have. Anyone who has tried to grow in self-control or in love knows that it does not happen by drifting. Nothing worth having in a soul ever grew by accident. The gospel does not hand you a hammock. It hands you a supply, and then it asks you to be in earnest with it, and it promises that the God who gave the supply is at work in the effort itself. , he says, and then he takes each quality in turn, and they are worth taking one at a time rather than swallowing whole.
Faith comes first, because nothing else is Christian without it, and everything after it grows out of it. To faith, virtue, which is that word aretē again, moral excellence, the sheer quality of a life that does what is right when no one is checking. To virtue, knowledge, so that goodness does not go blundering about without discernment but learns what God has actually said. To knowledge, self-control, which is the mastery of a person over his own appetites rather than the other way round, and which keeps knowledge from becoming a head full of truth attached to an ungoverned life. To self-control, perseverance, the word for standing up under a weight and not going down, because self-control on a good day is easy and the test is the long haul. To perseverance, godliness, which is not merely endurance gritting its teeth but a life turned Godward, reverent, worshipping, aware of Him. To godliness, brotherly kindness, because a piety that makes a person cold toward the brethren has gone wrong somewhere. And to brotherly kindness, love, the self-giving love of God Himself, which reaches past the family to the neighbor and the enemy, and which crowns the whole chain because it is the nearest thing to His own nature. Then verse eight, and hear the promise in it: if you possess these qualities and continue to grow in them, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of the Lord Jesus. Peter’s concern is not that you should tick items off a list but that your knowing of Christ should bear fruit. And verse nine is the sad other side. The one who lacks these is nearsighted to the point of blindness, squinting at what is directly in front of him and unable to see anything at a distance, and Peter puts his finger on the cause with real insight: having forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins. A Christian who stops growing is very often a Christian who has forgotten what he was forgiven. Remember the washing, and the walking tends to follow.
2 Peter 1:10–14 (BSB)
¹⁰ Therefore, brothers, strive to make your calling and election sure. For if you practice these things you will never stumble, ¹¹ and you will receive a lavish reception into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. ¹² Therefore I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are established in the truth you now have. ¹³ I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of my body, ¹⁴ because I know that this tent will soon be laid aside, as our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me.
Verse ten has been made to carry a load it was never built for, so read it slowly and watch the direction of the sentence. Strive to make your calling and election sure. Peter does not say that your striving creates the calling, and he does not say that your striving keeps God’s hand from letting go. He has already told us in verse three where the whole supply came from and who gave it. The calling and the election are God’s acts, done in eternity and worked out in time, and nothing a creature does adds a thing to them. What can grow, and what Peter is after, is your own certainty about them. The eight qualities do not manufacture your election; they confirm it, the way fruit on a branch does not create the root but does settle the question of whether the branch is alive. Assurance is the thing in view, and assurance is yours, not God’s. He was never uncertain about you. And so a believer who wants to stop wobbling is not sent to peer anxiously into the secret counsels of God. He is sent to get on with faith, and virtue, and knowledge, and self-control, and to find that as these grow the doubts lose their footing. Peter said the same thing plainly in his first letter, and it is the other rail of the track:
"who through faith are shielded by God’s power for the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time." 1 Peter 1:5 (BSB)
Shielded by God’s power. That is the garrison around a Christian, and it is His power and not ours. So hold both, because Peter did. You are kept by the might of God, and you are called to be in earnest, and the earnestness is not the wall that keeps you. It is the evidence that you are inside it. And then the promise of verse eleven, which is one of the warmest lines in the letter: you will receive a lavish reception into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The word behind “lavish reception” is the word used for the rich, generous provision a city made for an honored guest, or the welcome given a victor coming home. Peter is telling scattered, pressured, ordinary believers that the door of the eternal kingdom will not be opened to them grudgingly, with the owner squinting to check their credentials. It will be flung wide. What a Savior, that He should meet homecoming sinners like that.
Then he tells us why he keeps repeating himself, and there is something very moving in it. He knows they already know these things. He says so, twice over: they know them, and they are established in the truth they now have. He is not correcting ignorance. He simply understands what every honest pastor and every honest parent understands, that people do not chiefly need new truths, they need the old ones kept in front of them. So he says he will always remind them, as long as he lives in the tent of his body. He calls his body a tent, and it is exactly the right word for a man who had spent his life on the road, a temporary shelter that gets folded up when the traveling is done. And then the quiet sentence: I know that this tent will soon be laid aside, as our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. Cast your mind back to a charcoal fire on a beach, and a risen Lord who restored a man who had denied Him three times, and who then told him plainly how he would end, and said, “Follow Me.” Peter has carried that word for thirty years. He is not writing in a panic. He is writing like a man who has made his peace with the appointment and wants to use every remaining day for the people God gave him.
2 Peter 1:15–18 (BSB)
¹⁵ And I will make every effort to ensure that after my departure, you will be able to recall these things at all times. ¹⁶ For we did not follow cleverly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. ¹⁷ For He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to Him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” ¹⁸ And we ourselves heard this voice from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain.
He is making arrangements. That is what verse fifteen is, an old man’s provision for the church after he is gone, so that the truth does not depend on his being alive to say it. The word he uses for his death is exodos, a departure, a going out, and it is the same word Moses and Elijah were using on the mountain when they spoke with Jesus about the departure He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Peter is not going to be extinguished. He is going out, as a man goes out of one country into another. And then he turns to the ground of everything he has taught, and his voice rises. There were people saying, or about to say, that this whole message of Christ’s power and coming was an invented tale. Peter answers with the flattest denial he can make: we did not follow cleverly devised fables. The word is mythos, and the Greek world was full of them, splendid stories about gods who were never anywhere at any particular hour of any particular day. Christianity is not that. We were eyewitnesses, Peter says, and he uses a heavy word for it, the word for one admitted to see for himself.
And then, of everything he might have chosen, look at what he reaches for. He does not tell them about the miracles, or the empty tomb, or the meal on the shore. He goes back to a mountain. He was there, with James and John, when the appearance of Jesus changed before their eyes and the borrowed glory of that face was suddenly not borrowed at all, and the cloud came down, and out of the Majestic Glory a voice said the words Peter can still hear. This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Sit for a moment with what this is. Here is an old man in the last year of his life, under an empire that is starting to kill Christians, writing to congregations he will never see again, and the thing that steadies him is a voice he heard on a mountain when he was younger. He had been a fool on that mountain, babbling about building three shelters when he did not know what to say. He was forgiven that, as he was forgiven worse. And the Father’s verdict on the Son has never altered since. Matthew, who took his account from men who were there, records the same voice, with one line more:
"While Peter was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him!”" Matthew 17:5 (BSB)
Listen to Him. That is the command the Father Himself attached to His Son, and it turns out to be exactly where Peter is going next.
2 Peter 1:19–21 (BSB)
¹⁹ We also have the word of the prophets as confirmed beyond doubt. And you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. ²⁰ Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture comes from one’s own interpretation. ²¹ 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.
Now come to the summit of the chapter, and slow down, because these three verses are among the clearest things the New Testament says about the book in your hands. Peter has just told us he stood on the holy mountain and heard the voice of God the Father. What could possibly be added to that? And his answer is astonishing. We also have the word of the prophets as confirmed beyond doubt. He sets the written prophetic word beside his own eyewitness experience and points his readers not to the experience but to the word. He does not say, seek a mountain of your own. He says, you will do well to pay attention to it. The most privileged eyewitness in the church directs you away from the search for an experience and toward the Scriptures, because the Scriptures are what you can hold, and hand on, and read again tomorrow when the feeling has gone. That is a rebuke to every generation that has grown bored with the Bible and gone hunting for something more direct, and it comes from a man who had the more direct thing and told us where to look instead.
And notice the picture he chooses. The word is a lamp shining in a dark place, and the place is dark, and there is no pretending otherwise. Peter is not promising floodlights. He is promising enough light to take the next step by, all the way through the night, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. That last phrase looks past everything to the return of Christ Himself, the bright Morning Star, when faith will give way to sight and the lamp will no longer be needed because the sun will be up. Until that hour, this is how a Christian walks. The Psalmist knew the same thing long before, and said it in almost the same picture:
"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." Psalm 119:105 (BSB)
Then Peter tells us why the lamp can be trusted, and here he goes right back behind the human authors to God Himself. No prophecy of Scripture comes from one’s own interpretation. The sentence is about origin, not merely about how we read it: prophecy did not arise out of a prophet’s own private working-out of things, his own insight into the times, his own reading of the political weather. Verse twenty-one nails it down from the negative side and then from the positive. No such prophecy was ever brought forth by the will of man. That is the door closed. Men do not decide to produce Scripture the way a man decides to write a book. And then the positive, and it is the sentence to memorize: men spoke from God as they were pherō, pronounced FEH-roh. Strong's G5342, to carry, to bear, to be borne along. Pherō simply means to carry or to bear, and in the passive, as here, to be borne along by a force outside yourself. It is the word Luke uses in Acts for a ship at the mercy of the wind, driven along by a gale the sailors could not fight, and Peter, who knew boats, could hardly have chosen a better picture. See how carefully it holds two things together. The men were really men. They were awake, they were themselves, they used their own vocabulary and their own memories and their own tears, exactly as sailors on a driven ship are still working the deck. Isaiah does not sound like Amos, and Peter does not sound like Paul, and God did not flatten one of them into a machine. And yet the ship went where the wind sent it and not where the crew chose. The men spoke from God, and the destination of every word was His. That is why Peter can call this word confirmed beyond doubt and tell frightened churches to stake their lives on it. What you hold in your hands when you open the Scriptures is not a collection of religious men’s best thoughts about God. It is God’s own word, carried to you through real human voices by the breath of His Spirit. Handle it accordingly, and thank Him for it. by the Holy Spirit.
Take the measure of what Peter has just done for the churches he is leaving behind. He is about to die. The false teachers of chapter two are already at the door. His readers cannot go and see Jesus, and they cannot climb the holy mountain, and soon they will not be able to send a question to Peter either. So he puts into their hands the one thing that outlasts him: a word that did not come from the will of man, that is confirmed beyond doubt, that shines like a lamp until the morning. Everything else in this chapter rests on it. The knowledge through which grace and peace are multiplied is knowledge of the God who has spoken here. The precious and magnificent promises are promises recorded here. The eight qualities are drawn out of a life shaped here. Take away the certainty of Scripture and the whole chapter collapses into one man’s opinion. Leave it standing, and an ordinary believer in an ordinary house with an open Bible has more solid ground under his feet than all the clever teachers in the world.
Study notes Going deeper
Look back over the whole chapter and see how tightly it is tied together. God’s divine power has already given everything needed for life and godliness, and it comes through knowing Him. Because of that, and not in order to earn it, we are to be in earnest, growing in the qualities that confirm to our own hearts that we were truly called and chosen. Peter, near death, keeps saying it because people need reminding more than they need novelty. And when he tells us where all of it is anchored, he does not finally anchor it in his own experience on the mountain, glorious as that was. He anchors it in the written word of God, which no man’s will produced. Paul, writing his own last letter to Timothy at about the same season and probably in the same city, put the identical truth from the other side. Peter tells us how Scripture came to us; Paul tells us what it is and what it is for.
"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work." 2 Timothy 3:16–17 (BSB)
God-breathed, and therefore fully equipping. Put the two apostles’ sentences side by side and you have the whole doctrine: Scripture came out from God by His Spirit, and Scripture goes to work on us for everything a servant of God needs. That is why Peter can leave his churches with a lamp and go to his death in peace. And it is why the chapter can promise so much to such ordinary people. You do not need a vision, and you do not need a mountain. You need the word God has given, and the Christ it reveals, and the Spirit who carried it to you, and by His divine power you already have everything necessary for life and godliness. So open the lamp and let it shine on the next step. Learn the Word, grow in the knowledge of Christ, and give thanks.