2 Peter 3

Today’s Passage: 2 Peter 3

Peter is near the end of his life and near the end of his letter, and he turns to the one thing that decides how a Christian lives: this world is not permanent, and its Maker is coming back to it. He writes, he says, to stir up wholesome thinking by way of reminder, calling his readers back to what the holy prophets foretold and what the Lord commanded through the apostles. Then he names the trouble ahead. In the last days scoffers will come, walking after their own desires, and their argument will sound perfectly reasonable: nothing ever changes, everything continues as it always has, so where is this promised coming of His? Peter answers them in three moves. First, they have deliberately forgotten that the world once did change, catastrophically, at the word of God, in the flood. Second, the delay they mistake for absence is patience, and patience is mercy, because God does not want anyone to perish. Third, the Day will come, and it will come without warning, like a thief, and the present order will be undone by fire. Then, right at the center, Peter asks the question the whole chapter has been building toward. Since everything is going to be dissolved in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? Not where should you hide, and not how should you calculate the date, but what kind of person should you be. And the hope he holds out is not escape but a new heaven and a new earth where righteousness dwells. He closes by pointing to Paul’s letters, warning about those who twist the Scriptures to their own ruin, telling his readers to stand guard, and giving the letter its final command, which is not to brace but to grow.

As you read, hold this: The delay you mistake for God’s absence is God’s patience, the Day will come suddenly and this world will not last, and so the question the end puts to us is not when but what kind of people we ought to be.

2 Peter 3:1–4 (BSB)

¹ Beloved, this is now my second letter to you. Both of them are reminders to stir you to wholesome thinking ² by recalling what was foretold by the holy prophets and commanded by our Lord and Savior through your apostles. ³ Most importantly, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. ⁴ “Where is the promise of His coming?” they will ask. “Ever since our fathers fell asleep, everything continues as it has from the beginning of creation.”

He calls them “beloved,” and he will call them that three more times before the chapter is over. Whatever hard things are coming, they are coming from a man who loves these people. And notice what he says he is doing. He is not bringing them anything new. He is reminding them, stirring up wholesome thinking by making them recall what they already have. That is a humbling description of the ministry of the word, and a wonderfully freeing one. The Christian’s great need is very rarely fresh information. It is that the truth already in our possession should be stirred up until it is awake and working. So Peter points them backward, to the holy prophets on one side and to the command of the Lord Himself, delivered through the apostles, on the other. Those two together are the whole of what we now hold in our hands, and Peter treats them as one settled deposit. Then comes the warning, and the striking thing is that he does not treat it as bad news to be broken gently. He says that this is the thing you must understand most importantly: scoffers (ἐμπαίκτης) empaiktēs, pronounced em-PIKE-tace. Strong's G1703, a mocker, one who makes sport of what is sacred. The noun Peter uses is empaiktēs, and it is built off a verb that means to make sport of someone, to play with a person as a cat plays with a thing it has caught. It is the very word the Gospels use for what was done to Jesus in the last hours of His life, when the soldiers put a robe on Him and bowed and mocked Him, and when the crowd at the cross wagged their heads and made sport of His trust in God. That is a sobering place to find this word. The scoffer is not primarily a man with an argument; he is a man who has decided that something sacred is funny. Mockery is a cheap weapon and a powerful one, because it does not have to prove anything. It only has to make the thing look small. And Peter’s warning is that this weapon will be turned specifically against the promise of Christ’s return, and that it will work on people who have never troubled to examine the evidence at all. The remedy he gives is not a clever comeback. It is memory. Recall what the prophets said. Recall what the Lord commanded through the apostles. A soul that has been reminded is very hard to laugh out of its hope, because it knows Who made the promise, and it has already been told that the laughter was coming. are coming. Their arrival is not a sign that the promise has failed. Their arrival is one of the things the promise told you to expect. And listen to their case, because it is still being made in every generation. The world runs on. Seedtime and harvest come round again. The believers who spoke most confidently about His return are in their graves now, and the sun came up the next morning just the same. Where is the promise of His coming? It sounds like sober realism. Peter tells us what it actually is: men following their own desires and reasoning backward to a world that will leave them undisturbed.

2 Peter 3:5–8 (BSB)

⁵ But they deliberately overlook the fact that long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water, ⁶ through which the world of that time perished in the flood. ⁷ And by that same word, the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. ⁸ Beloved, do not let this one thing escape your notice: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

“They deliberately overlook” is a gentle English rendering of a strong idea. It is not that the fact escaped them. They arranged for it to escape them. There is such a thing as willful ignorance, a forgetting that a man works at, and Peter says the whole scoffing argument rests on it. For consider what has to be left out of the account in order to say that everything continues as it always has. You must leave out the beginning, when there was nothing at all and God spoke and the heavens existed. You must leave out the water, out of which and by which the earth was formed. And you must leave out the day the waters came back and the world of that time perished. Three times in these verses everything hangs on the same phrase: by God’s word. The word that made the world is the word that drowned it, and it is that same word, Peter says, that has the present heavens and earth “reserved for fire.” The scoffers thought the stability of the world was proof that no one was minding it. Peter says the stability of the world is a mercy held in place by a word, and the word can be spoken again.

Then verse seven, which we must not hurry past and must not soften. The present order is being kept for “the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.” Scripture says this plainly and it says it often, and no honest reader of the Bible can make it disappear. There is a day appointed. There is a real judgment at the end of it, and it falls on real people, and it does not end. Peter has already used the darkest language in the letter about it, and he uses it here without decoration and without a hint of satisfaction. That is how it should be handled. Anyone who can speak of the judgment of God with relish has not understood it, and anyone who cannot speak of it at all has not believed the Book. It is precisely because this is true that the next verses are such staggering good news, for the same God who has set the day has been holding it open.

And now, “Beloved, do not let this one thing escape your notice.” He uses the same idea he used of the scoffers, but turned around and given to his friends as a gift: they let something escape them on purpose, so do not you let this escape you. “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” Peter is echoing an old psalm of Moses that his readers would have known.

"For in Your sight a thousand years are but a day that passes, or a watch of the night." Psalm 90:4 (BSB)

Now be careful here, because this verse has been made to carry a great deal of weight it was never built for. It is not a code, and it is not a conversion rate. It does not license anyone to take the numbers of prophecy and multiply them by a thousand to work out a calendar, and every attempt to do so has ended in embarrassment. Peter is not handing us a key to the timetable. He is telling us something about God, that He does not stand inside time the way we do, watching a clock and running short. The One who made the ages is not hurried by them and is not lost in them. A thousand years of waiting is not a strain on His patience and a single day is not too small for His purposes. And the practical comfort of it is enormous, because our sense that God is late is built entirely on the size of our own lifespan. We measure His faithfulness against seventy years and find it slow. He is measuring it against eternity, and He has not lost a moment.

2 Peter 3:9–13 (BSB)

⁹ The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise as some understand slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance. ¹⁰ But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and its works will be laid bare. ¹¹ Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to conduct yourselves in holiness and godliness ¹² as you anticipate and hasten the coming of the day of God, when the heavens will be destroyed by fire and the elements will melt in the heat. ¹³ But in keeping with God’s promise, we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

Here is the heart of Peter’s answer, and it is one of the tenderest sentences in the New Testament. The scoffers had a word for what they thought they were seeing, and the word was slow. Peter takes their word and refuses it. The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise as some understand slowness. He is patient (μακροθυμέω) makrothymeō, pronounced mah-kro-thoo-MEH-oh. Strong's G3114, to be long-tempered, slow to anger, patient with people. The verb is makrothymeō, and it is one of the loveliest compounds in the Greek Bible. It joins the word for long to the word for passion or temper, so that quite literally it means to be long-tempered, slow to boil, a great distance from the first provocation to the breaking point. Its opposite is the short-tempered man who snaps. The Greek translation of the Old Testament reaches for this family of words again and again to render the great self-description God gave to Moses on the mountain, that the LORD is slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion. So when Peter says God is patient rather than slow, he is putting his readers back in front of the face God showed Israel. And notice that this same word turns up in Paul’s list of what love is, where it stands first: love is patient. That is the word. God’s long-suffering is not divine procrastination and it is not weakness or indecision. It is love holding back a judgment it has every right to bring, and holding it back for the sake of people who have not yet come home. Every believer alive is a piece of evidence that it works. You were somewhere in that delay once, and God was being long-tempered with you. . And with that one substitution the whole picture turns over. What looked like a broken promise is an open door. What looked like absence is restraint. Every year that has gone by since the Lord said He was coming is a year in which someone somewhere has been brought to repentance who would otherwise have been lost, and the delay that the mocker points to as evidence against God is in fact the very mercy that is holding him upright while he mocks. Sit with that for a moment. If God had answered the impatience of the church in any century, none of us who came after would be here. The waiting is not indifference. The waiting is grace, and it is running out.

Now the second half of verse nine, “not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance,” has been read in more than one way by Christians who love the Scriptures and mean to obey them, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Some read the “you” of the verse as Peter’s own beloved readers and understand God’s patience to be aimed at gathering in every last one of His own, so that the Day cannot come until the full number of them is home. Others read the words as broadly as they sound, that God takes no pleasure in the death of anyone at all and genuinely holds out repentance to every soul who hears. Godly and careful believers have stood on both sides of this for centuries, and this study is not going to settle it, and you should be slow to let anyone tell you the matter is simple. What we can say without any hesitation at all is what the verse is actually doing where it stands. It is not a lecture on the hidden workings of God’s decree. It is an answer to a jeer. The scoffers said God was slow; Peter says God is merciful, and the proof of the mercy is that the door is still open and you are still standing in front of it. Hear how God Himself puts it through one of the prophets.

"Say to them: ‘As surely as I live, declares the Lord GOD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked should turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel?’" Ezekiel 33:11 (BSB)

But the door will close. “The Day of the Lord will come like a thief,” which is the Lord’s own image, taken up by the apostles and repeated everywhere in the New Testament, and it means one thing above all: no warning. A thief does not send word ahead. The whole point of the picture is that the household is doing exactly what it always does on an ordinary evening, and then it is too late. Paul used the same figure to another church.

"For you are fully aware that the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night." 1 Thessalonians 5:2 (BSB)

And what arrives is nothing small. The heavens disappearing with a roar, the elements destroyed by fire, the earth and its works laid bare. That last phrase is worth pausing over, because it is not only about matter being consumed. The works of the earth are laid bare, uncovered, exposed. Everything men have built and hidden and been proud of will lie open in the light. Now, here it must be said plainly and once, without heat. Believers who hold the same Bible in the same reverence have read the details of this dissolution and this renewal in more than one way, some understanding a total undoing of the present creation and a fresh act of making, others a purging fire that burns away the corruption and leaves a renewed creation standing, and Christians have likewise ordered the events surrounding the Lord’s return along more than one scheme. This study will not settle that, and it will not pretend to. What is not in doubt, and what Peter is preaching, is this: Jesus Christ will return personally, bodily, and in glory; there will be a judgment; the present order will not last; and God has promised a new heaven and a new earth. Hold those four with an iron grip, and hold the diagrams loosely, and do not let anyone divide the family of God over a chart.

Because look where Peter actually goes with all this. He has just described the end of the world, and the very next thing out of his mouth is not a prediction but a question about character. “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be?” That is the hinge of the chapter and, in a sense, of the whole letter. He does not ask where you should go, or what you should stockpile, or how you should read the newspaper. He asks what sort of person the end of all things ought to make you. And he answers his own question in two words that have nothing dramatic about them: holiness and godliness. A life set apart to God, and a life lived in reverence toward Him. Ordinary faithfulness, in an ordinary week, by people who know what is coming. There is a great deal of feverish interest in prophecy that never once produces this, and Peter would not have recognized it as interest in prophecy at all. Then he says something almost startling: we are to anticipate and even to hasten (σπεύδω) speudō, pronounced SPYOO-doh. Strong's G4692, to hasten, to hurry toward, to be eager for. The verb is speudō, and in ordinary Greek it is a word of hurrying feet. It is what the shepherds did when they left the fields and came with haste to Bethlehem, and what Zacchaeus did when he came down out of the tree quickly, and what a servant does when his master’s business will not wait. It can mean to hurry oneself toward a thing, and it can also carry the sense of urging a thing on, being eager for it, pressing it forward. Both senses are alive here, and translators have gone different ways with it. Some render it that we hasten the day; others, that we eagerly desire it. Either way the sentence is astonishing, because it puts the day of God and the conduct of ordinary Christians into some real relation with each other. The old Jewish teachers used to say that repentance among God’s people brings the promised day nearer, and Peter, who was raised on that world, does not flinch from the thought. God is not hurried by us, as verse eight has just made clear. And yet He has bound His purposes to the prayers and the holiness and the witness of His people, so that a life lived in godliness is not merely waiting for that morning. It is leaning toward it, pressing toward it, hurrying to meet it, the way the shepherds ran. the coming of the day of God.

And then verse thirteen, which is where the chapter comes to rest, and it deserves to be read slowly. “But in keeping with God’s promise, we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.” Notice first what the Christian hope is not. It is not that we escape the world and leave it behind as a bad business. Peter has just spoken of fire and dissolution, and if he had stopped there, the natural conclusion would be that matter is a mistake and the goal is to get out. He does not stop there. The end of the story is not less world but more: a new heaven and a new earth, a real place with a real ground under it, the good creation of Genesis brought through the fire and made new. God does not abandon what He made. Notice second what the promise rests on. Not on our optimism, and not on any reading of the times, but “in keeping with God’s promise,” which sends us straight back to the prophet who said it first.

"For behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind." Isaiah 65:17 (BSB)

And notice third, and best of all, what the defining feature of that world is. Peter does not describe its streets or its light or its music. He gives it one mark, and it is a moral one: righteousness dwells there. The word is the ordinary word for making your home in a place, settling down, living there permanently, and it is chosen with care. In this present world righteousness is a stranger. It visits, it is glimpsed, it is fought for at cost, and it is always in some measure a guest that has to be defended and made room for. In that world it will be a resident. Think what that means. No lie will ever again be told in that country. No child will be hurt in it, no woman afraid in it, no promise broken, no court corrupted, nothing taken that was not given. It will not be a place where wrong is punished quickly; it will be a place where wrong has no address. And every longing you have ever had for things to be right, every ache at the news, every quiet grief over your own crooked heart, is a homesickness for that country. This is what the Christian is looking forward to. Not merely rescue from a burning house, but a world at last fit for the God who made it, and a people at last fit to live in it.

2 Peter 3:14–18 (BSB)

¹⁴ Therefore, beloved, as you anticipate these things, make every effort to be found at peace—spotless and blameless in His sight. ¹⁵ Consider also that our Lord’s patience brings salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom God gave him. ¹⁶ He writes this way in all his letters, speaking in them about such matters. Some parts of his letters are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction. ¹⁷ Therefore, beloved, since you already know these things, be on your guard so that you will not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure standing. ¹⁸ 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.

“Beloved” again, and then the practical upshot of everything he has said: make every effort to be found at peace, spotless and blameless in His sight. Hear the word found. It assumes someone is coming who will do the finding, and that the finding will be sudden, and that what matters is not what you intended to be but what you are when He arrives. And there is a quiet edge in the two words Peter chooses. One chapter earlier he described the false teachers as “blots and blemishes” who feast among the believers, and now he takes the very same pair of words, turns them inside out, and holds them up as what he wants his readers to be: without blot, without blemish. The difference between the two lives is not a matter of religious talk, since both were sitting at the same tables. It is a matter of what the coming of Christ has actually done to a person’s conduct. Peace, too, is a strange thing to command in a chapter about the end of the world, and yet there it is. The one who knows the Judge and belongs to Him does not need to meet that Day in a panic.

Then Peter does something generous and revealing. He tells them that our Lord’s patience is salvation, and then he sends them to Paul. “Our beloved brother Paul,” he calls him, and there is a whole history behind that phrase, for Paul had once opposed Peter to his face in Antioch and written about it afterward for the whole church to read. No trace of a wound here. Peter says Paul wrote with “the wisdom God gave him,” names his letters as a known collection, and then makes the remark that ought to settle a great deal for us: ignorant and unstable people distort Paul’s harder passages “as they do the rest of the Scriptures.” Read that again. Peter has just set Paul’s letters inside the category of Scripture, and he has done it in passing, as a thing already understood among the churches. The apostle who walked with Jesus in Galilee treats the writings of the apostle to the Gentiles as the word of God. That is a gift to us who receive both.

And then the honest admission, which is one of the kindest sentences in the New Testament for anyone who has ever felt slow. “Some parts of his letters are hard to understand.” Peter says it. An apostle, writing under the inspiration of the Spirit, says plainly that parts of the Bible are difficult. If you have sat over a chapter of Romans with your head in your hands, you are in the best possible company. Scripture is not a shallow pond, and God did not intend it to be read once and mastered. But mark carefully what Peter identifies as the danger, because it is not difficulty. It is what certain people do with difficulty. Two words describe them: ignorant, meaning untaught, having never done the work of learning; and unstable, meaning unanchored, with nothing settled underneath them. Such people take the hard places and twist them, wrench them out of shape to fit what they already wanted, and the result is not a harmless mistake. It is “to their own destruction.” A hard passage handled humbly will feed you for fifty years. The same passage handled by a man who has decided in advance what he needs it to say can take him over a cliff. So do not be afraid of the parts you do not yet understand. Be afraid of handling them carelessly, and read them slowly, and read them alongside the plain parts, and read them with the church across the centuries rather than alone.

Which brings us to Peter’s last warning, and it must be read exactly as he wrote it. “Be on your guard so that you will not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure standing.” Some have taken that sentence to mean a believer may finally be lost, and it will not bear the weight. Look at what Peter says is doing the damage: not the ordinary weakness of a struggling saint, but being carried away by the error of lawless men, the very teachers he has spent a whole chapter exposing. And look at where he locates the danger, in a secure standing (στηριγμός) stērigmos, pronounced stay-rig-MOSS. Strong's G4740, firmness, a settled and secure standing. The noun is stērigmos, and it comes from a verb that means to prop a thing up, to fix it fast, to set it firmly in place. That verb is the one the Lord used with Peter himself, on the night before the denial, when He said that once he had turned back he was to strengthen his brothers, and it is the verb Paul reaches for when he prays that God would establish His people. Here it appears in its noun form, and it is found nowhere else in the New Testament, which makes Peter’s choice deliberate. What he warns against losing is not salvation but stability, the settled footing of a soul that knows what it believes and cannot be tipped over by a persuasive liar. Picture a house braced against a wind, or a man standing steady on the deck of a ship. That bracing is a real thing, it can be weakened, and a believer swept along by the error of lawless men will lose the use of it, to his own great sorrow and to the harm of everyone watching him. And notice how it is kept. Not by gripping harder, but by growing. The tree that stands in a gale is the one whose roots went down another foot last season. that these people already possess and are told to keep. The Lord’s own words about His sheep have never been withdrawn.

"I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one can snatch them out of My hand." John 10:28 (BSB)

That is the settled thing, and Peter would be the last man to contradict it, having written in his first letter that believers are shielded by God’s power. What he is doing here is what the Scriptures always do: he is putting a guard on the road, and the guard is one of the means God uses to bring His people safely home. And notice that Peter does not leave the warning hanging. His very next word is the remedy, and it is not a bolt on the door. It is growth. “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” The way to keep your footing is not to stand rigid and clutch at it. It is to keep going deeper into Christ. And this is the same letter that opened by telling us that “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness,” so the resources for that growth were handed over at the beginning and have never been short.

There is one command left in the letter, and it is that one: grow. After the eyewitness account and the prophetic word, after the parade of false teachers, after the fire and the flood and the scoffers and the new creation, the last thing this dying apostle asks of the church is that it should not stay where it is. Grow in grace, so that you know better every year how undeserved your standing is. Grow in knowledge, and mark that it is knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, not knowledge in the abstract and certainly not knowledge of the timetable. And then Peter, who had once fished on the lake with this Man and once denied Him by a fire, lifts his pen and gives Him the glory that belongs to God alone: “To Him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.” Not to the day of judgment. To the day of eternity, a day with no evening in it. That is where the letter stops, and it is a good place to be left standing.