1Dear 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 our 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.
Dig Deeper
She had been divorced since her son was two years old. He was now ten and it had been just this newly-single mother and her son living alone for eight years. She had not given a second thought to the prospect of raising her son alone. She was sure that she well knew what was best for her son and how to best raise him. Her philosophy was simple. He was going to know nothing but love, which also meant that she did not want to discipline the young man at all. That seemed to work well enough for the first year or two, but things quickly began to turn sour. She found that her parenting techniques weren’t working and now she had a rude, disrespectful, and increasingly violent young man on her hands. His father, was sure that his wife had no clue how to parent, and he was equally sure that he he did know how to do it well. So, he convinced the boy’s mother to let the boy come and live with him. The father’s approach was almost the exact opposite. The boy didn’t need a bunch of love and affirmation, he needed discipline and to be toughened up. So he set about providing a stern environment that would whip this ten year old boy into shape. The problem is that that extreme didn’t work either. Truth be told, neither of the parents were right. The truth of what was needed didn’t lie in the extremes but somewhere in the middle of the two.
As people have approached this passage in Peter, there are two primary interpretations of this passage and the continuation of it that we will examine tomorrow. One group says that Peter is writing a prophecy of the time when Christ will return and destroy the present earth with fire, taking His people into heaven with him to reign with him in a spiritual state of existence forever. The other interpretation says that that interpretation is completely wrong. Rather, they say, Peter was referring symbolically to the destruction of Jerusalem (which came to pass in 70 AD) that Jesus predicted in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21. They argue that rather than being the end of the world, it is simply a symbolic description of the judgment of Jesus that came on Jerusalem in 70 AD and the final end of the Old Covenant. So which one is correct. In the full sense of things, I don’t believe either view is correct completely. The truth lies somewhere in between.
Peter has clearly laid out the character, motivations, and effects of the false teachers, but it wouldn’t be the most effective thing to do that for the entirety of the letter. So, he now turns to teaching some truth to balance the false teachings. He hasn’t clearly delineated the false teachings but he wouldn’t have had to because his initial readers were already familiar with them and subsequent readers don’t really need the details, even if we might like them. What we do need is precisely what Peter has given us, the truth.
Peter points out to his dear friends (literally the "beloved ones," showing that they are children of the beloved one) that this is his second letter to stimulate them to wholesome thinking. Somewhat obscured in the TNIV is that Peter is actually telling them that he is writing to stimulate or kick into gear their "pure minds." He is, in other words, giving them a compliment that basically means he wrote his letters to remind them of how great they are in Christ and to live up to that status. Peter refers to this as his second letter to these recipients, but that does not necessarily mean that the first letter to which he refers is what we know as 1 Peter. For instance Paul apparently wrote at least four letters to the Corinthians but only two were preserved as part of the Bible. One circumstantial piece of evidence that 1 Peter is not the letter to which Peter refers is that he appears to know the recipients of 2 Peter quite well, while that is not the case in 1 Peter. Ultimately, the best that can be said is that we don’t know whether he is referring to the letter that we have in our Bibles or another letter.
To what does he want to stimulate their pure minds? To the great motivating hope of the Christian faith. The time when God would once-and-for-all restore His perfect creation and fill His world with His presence (Matt. 19:28; cf. 1 Cor. 15; Rev. 21). He particularly calls their minds to the fact that this is not some brand new teaching. The prophets in the past spoke often of that day (for one example see Mal. 3:1-5; Isa. 65:17-25; 66), as have the apostles of the New Covenant. What is the command given by our Lord that Peter speaks of? He does not use the plural of the word, so doesn’t appear to be referring to any list of rules. Most likely, Peter refers to the totality of conforming to the life of Christ and being transformed into the image of Christ (Col. 3:10) which is at the very heart of the Christian gospel (cf. Matt. 5:48; Heb. 12:14).
After urging his readers to remember the truth in the first two verses, Peter warns them again of the false teachers, particularly in verses 3 and 4 of those who will scoff at the second coming of Christ. The early church used terminology indicating that the last days was the time beginning at Pentecost, so Peter makes it clear that just because Jesus has come to earth as a man doesn’t mean that scoffing against God’s plan of redemption for the world will end; it will just take a different form. Mockers like these men don’t generally lay out thorough and logical arguments against the truth of God’ reality, as much as they do belittle it and try to make those who believe in it feel stupid or superstitious. Peter probably views these men as particularly dangerous because mockers who come from without pose a certain set of problems, but mockers from within, who claim to hold to the same teachings and faith that the Christian community does, pose a far more dangerous set of problems. Just as a clock that is five minutes off will fool many more people than one that is three hours off, false teachers from within the Christian community that hold to parts of the faith while denying and mocking others, can be especially dangerous and deceiving.
These men were mocking the coming and justice of the Lord by claiming that the world was at it always was and always will be. They were apparently denying the belief that the present age would, at some point, come to a close and be transformed by God into the glorious age to come. This is where the two teachings mentioned earlier miss the point. It’s not that Jesus is coming back some day to destroy the physical universe, replacing it with a spiritual existence. Nor is it true that Peter is referring here to simply the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 AD. Jesus will return and judge the earth but not by annihilation by fire. He did certainly come in judgment on Israel in 70 AD but that served as vindication of Jesus as the Messiah and a guarantee that he would return one day as the king of His whole creation. The mistake comes in one side going to the extreme of thinking that Jesus’ coming will only be spiritual while the other side goes to the other extreme, claiming it to be only physical. Both are wrong because His return will involve the very act of brining the heavens (the spiritual realm) and the earth together again.
The false teachers were going to the extreme of claiming that God would not return in a physical way. To sum up their beliefs, it seems that they believed that Jesus would rule in a spiritual sense from heaven, would never return physically to earth, and that those in Christ were spiritual beings and did not need to constrain themselves physically and morally. They deliberately forget, says Peter, that long ago God did intervene in the physical universe. Hearkening back to Genesis 1, Peter says that God formed the earth out of water. He also deluged and destroyed the earth by flood in the days of Noah. This makes clear that Peter is using the word translated as "destroyed" here in the sense of judgment, because God clearly did not annihilate the earth in the time of Noah’s flood. He laid it bare in judgment, destroying the evil elements that had been judged by Him to be unacceptable.
Just as God intervened physically in the universe then, so He will again as He has promised. By the same word that created the universe and brought the great flood, so will the present age, both spiritual and physical be brought under judgment. The earth will be filled with fire, which is common biblical language for the presence of God (Deut. 4:24; Ps. 97:7; Heb. 12:29). In 1 Peter 1:4-5, it says that Christians have an "inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time." The consuming fire of God will be a refining moment for the people of God but a day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men (Mal. 3:1-5). This is a moment that will lay the entire universe bare in judgment before a holy God, as we will see in the next section.
Devotional Thought
Do you go about your day-to-day decisions with the coming presence and judgment of God in mind? How does remembering that one day the earth will be filled with the consuming presence of God effect the way we go about our lives?
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