Survey of 2 Peter
Book Type: One of the New Testament’s General Epistles; the twenty-second book of the New Testament; the sixty-first book of the Bible.
Author: Simon Peter, one of the leaders among the twelve apostles. Peter was the main speaker at Pentecost (Acts 2), and fled Jerusalem after a miraculous escape from Herod around AD 42 (Acts 12). Little is known of his ministry after this time. Peter was at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) and in Antioch around the same time as Paul (Galatians 2:11–14). Tradition notes that Peter died as a martyr under Nero in Rome around AD 65.
Authorship of this letter was somewhat controversial in early church history. The weight of evidence strongly supports the letter of 2 Peter being written by the same author as 1 Peter (1 Peter 1:1; 2 Peter 3:1), but subtle differences in style between the two have led to doubts. The consensus view is that this is Peter’s letter.
Audience: General Epistles are also known as “catholic epistles,” meaning they are written to a general audience, rather than to a specific person or church. Second Peter is most likely written to the same audience as that of 1 Peter (2 Peter 3:1). This included Gentile and Jewish believers, even though Peter’s ministry was focused primarily on Jews.
Date: Tradition teaches that Peter ministered in Rome during the AD 60s. Since Peter likely died during Nero’s persecution around AD 65, the letter was written prior to this time.
Overview: Peter’s focus in this letter is on false teaching and the dangers which it presents. The letter can be divided into three sections, corresponding to its three chapters.
The first chapter encourages the reader with a reminder that they are already equipped, by Christ, to lead the life God intended of them. The emphasis here is on living out a vibrant Christian faith, adding the characteristics of Christ to one’s example to the world (2 Peter 1:1–15). Peter then adds to this encouragement with a reminder about evidence of fulfilled prophecy. Chief among these, for Peter, was his first-hand eyewitness of Jesus Christ’s transfiguration (2 Peter 1:16–21).
The second chapter warns against the influence of false teachers. These deceptive voices draw people away from Christ, and into sin, by speaking about issues which they do not understand. Peter delivers a dire warning for these teachers, who will be judged harshly by God (2 Peter 2:1–9). Those who fall for these schemes are enslaved to sin, something they prove by continually returning to their own moral filth (2 Peter 2:10–22).
The third chapter directly counters the claims of the false teachers. Peter again states that those who pervert the message of God will be subject to extreme judgment. Everything which is not preserved by Christ will be utterly destroyed (2 Peter 3:1–13). Peter concludes the letter with a final reminder that saved Christians can set aside sin and focus on preparing to live in peace with God. Notably, Peter also refers to the writings of the apostle Paul as “Scripture,” supporting the doctrine of divine inspiration (2 Peter 3:14–18).
Key Verses (ESV):
2 Peter 1:3–4: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.”
2 Peter 1:16: “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”
2 Peter 2:2: “And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.”
2 Peter 2:9: “then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment.”
2 Peter 2:19: “They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.”
2 Peter 3:9: “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”
2 Peter 3:18: “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.”
2 PETER
Introduction to the Second Letter of Peter
INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND LETTER OF PETER
THE NEGLECTED BOOK AND ITS CONTENTS
Second Peter is one of the neglected books of the New Testament. Very few people will claim to have read it, still less to have studied it in detail. E. F. Scott says “it is far inferior in every respect to First Peter”; and goes on “it is the least valuable of the New Testament writings.” It was only with the greatest difficulty that Second Peter gained entry into the New Testament, and for many years the Christian Church seemed to be unaware of its existence. But, before we approach its history, let us look at its contents.
THE LAWLESS MEN
Second Peter was written to combat the beliefs and activities of certain men who were a threat to the Church. It begins by insisting that the Christian is a man who has escaped from the corruption of the world (2Pet. 1:4) and must always remember that he has been purged of his old sins (2Pet. 1:9). There is laid upon him the duty of moral goodness, which culminates in the great Christian virtue of love (2Pet. 1:5-8).
Let us set out the characteristics of the men whom Second Peter rebukes. They twist Scripture to make it suit their own purpose (2Pet. 1:20; 2Pet. 3:16). They bring the Christian faith into disrepute (2Pet. 2:2). They are covetous of gain and exploiters of their fellow-men (2Pet. 2:3; 2Pet. 2:14-15). They are doomed and will share the fate of the sinning angels (2Pet. 2:4), the men before the Flood (2Pet. 2:5), the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah (2Pet. 2:6), and the false prophet Balaam (2Pet. 2:15). They are bestial creatures, ruled by their brute instincts (2Pet. 2:12), and dominated by their lusts (2Pet. 2:10; 2Pet. 2:18). Their eyes are full of adultery (2Pet. 2:14). They are presumptuous, self-willed and arrogant (2Pet. 2:10,18). They spend even the daylight hours in unrestrained and luxurious revelry (2Pet. 2:13). They speak of liberty but what they call liberty is unbridled licence and they themselves are the slaves of their own lusts (2Pet. 2:19). Not only are they deluded, they also delude others and lead them astray (2Pet. 2:14; 2Pet. 2:18). They are worse than those who never knew the right, because they knew what goodness is and have relapsed into evil, like a dog returning to its vomit and a sow returning to the mud after it has been washed (2Pet. 2:20-22).
It is clear that Peter is describing antinomians, men who used God’s grace as a justification for sinning. In all probability they were Gnostics, who said that only spirit was good and that matter was essentially evil and that, therefore, it did not matter what we did with the body and that we could glut its appetites and it made no difference. They lived the most immoral lives and encouraged others to do so; and they justified their actions by perverting grace and interpreting Scripture to suit themselves.
THE DENIAL OF THE SECOND COMING
Further, these evil men denied the Second Coming (2Pet. 3:3-4). They argued that this was a stable world in which things remained unalterably the same, and that God was so dilatory that it was possible to assume that the Second Coming was never going to happen at all. The answer of Second Peter is that this is not a stable world; that it has, in fact, been destroyed by water in the Flood and that it will be destroyed by fire in the final conflagration (2Pet. 3:5-7). What they regard as dilatoriness is in fact God withholding his hand in patience to give men still another chance to repent (2Pet. 3:8-9). But the day of destruction is coming (2Pet. 3:10). A new heaven and a new earth are on the way; therefore. goodness is an absolute necessity if a man is to be saved in the day of judgment (2Pet. 3:11-14). With this Paul agrees, however difficult his letters may be to understand, and however false teachers deliberately misinterpret them (2Pet. 3:15-16). The duty of the Christian is to stand fast, firmly founded in the faith, and to grow in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ (2Pet. 3:17-18).
THE DOUBTS OF THE EARLY CHURCH
Such are the contents of the letter. For long it was regarded with doubt and with something very like misgiving. There is no trace of it until after A.D. 200. It is not included in the Muratorian Canon Of A.D. 170 which was the first official list of New Testament books. It did not exist in the Old Latin Version of the Scriptures; nor in the New Testament of the early Syrian Church.
The great scholars of Alexandria either did not know it or were doubtful about it. Clement of Alexandria, who wrote outlines of the books of Scripture, does not appear to have included Second Peter. Origen says that Peter left behind one epistle which is generally acknowledged; “perhaps also a second, for it is a disputed question.” Didymus commented on it, but concluded his work by saying: “It must not be forgotten that this letter is spurious; it may be read in public; but it is not part of the canon of Scripture.”
Eusebius, the great scholar of Caesarea, who made a careful investigation of the Christian literature of his day, comes to the conclusion: “Of Peter, one Epistle, which is called his former Epistle, is acknowledged by all; of this the ancient presbyters have made frequent use in their writings as indisputably genuine; but that which is circulated as his second Epistle we have received to be not canonical although, since it appeared to be useful to many, it has been diligently read with the other Scriptures.”
It was not until well into the fourth century that Second Peter came to rest in the canon of the New Testament.
THE OBJECTIONS
It is the well-nigh universal judgment of scholars, both ancient and modern, that Peter is not the author of Second Peter. Even John Calvin regarded it as impossible that Peter could have spoken of Paul as Second Peter speaks of him (2Pet. 3:15-16), although he was willing to believe that someone else wrote the letter at Peter’s request. What, then, are the arguments against Peter’s authorship?
(i) There is the extreme slowness, and even reluctance, of the early church to accept it. If it had been truly Peter’s, there can be little doubt that the Church would have welcomed and honoured it from the first. But the case was very different. For the first two centuries the letter is never quoted at all in any certain instance; it is regarded with doubt and suspicion for more than another century; and only late in the fourth century is it accepted.
(ii) The contents make it difficult to believe that it is Peter’s. There is no mention of the Passion, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus Christ; no mention of the Church as the true Israel; no mention of that faith which is undefeatable hope and trust combined; no mention of the Holy Spirit, of prayer, of baptism; and no passionate desire to call men to the supreme example of Jesus Christ. If one took away these great verities from First Peter there would be little or nothing left, and yet none of them occurs in Second Peter.
(iii) It is wholly different in character and style from First Peter. This was realized as early as Jerome who wrote: “Simon Peter wrote two Epistles which are called Catholic, of which the authenticity of the second is denied by many because of the difference of the style from the first.” The Greek style of this letter is very difficult. Clogg calls it ambitious, artificial and often obscure, and remarks that it is the only book in the New Testament which is improved by translation. Bishop Chase writes: “The Epistle does produce the impression of being a somewhat artificial piece of rhetoric. It shows throughout signs of self-conscious effort. The author appears to be ambitious of writing in a style which is beyond his literary power.” He concludes that it is hard to reconcile the literary character of this letter with the supposition that Peter wrote it. Moffatt says: “Second Peter is more periodic and ambitious than First Peter, but its linguistic and its stylistic efforts only reveal by their cumbrous obscurity a decided inferiority of conception, which marks it off from First Peter.”
It might be claimed, as Jerome claimed, that, while Peter used Silvanus for First Peter, he used a different amanuensis for Second Peter and that this explains the change in style. But J. B. Mayor compares the two letters. He quotes some of the great passages of First Peter and then says: “I think that none who read these words can help feeling that, not even in Paul, not even in John, is there to be found a more beautiful or a more living description of the secret of primitive Christianity, of the force that overcame the world, than in the perfect quaternion of faith and hope and love and joy, which pervades this short epistle (i.e. First Peter). No one could make the same assertion with regard to Second Peter: thoughtful and interesting as it is, it lacks that intense sympathy, that flame of love, which marks First Peter…. No change of circumstances can account for the change of tone of which we are conscious in passing from one epistle to the other.” It is the conclusion of that great and conservative scholar that no explanation, other than difference of authorship, can explain, not so much the difference in style as the difference in atmosphere between First and Second Peter. It is true that from the purely linguistic point of view there are 369 words which occur in First Peter which do not occur in Second Peter; and there are 230 words which occur in Second Peter and not in First Peter. But there is more than a difference in style. A writer can change his style and his vocabulary to suit his audience and his occasion. But the difference between the two letters in atmosphere and attitude is so wide that it is hardly possible that the same person should have written both.
(iv) Certain things within Second Peter point well-nigh irresistibly to a late date. So much time has passed that men have begun to abandon hope of the Second Coming altogether (2Pet. 3:4). The apostles are spoken of as figures of the past (2Pet. 3:2). The fathers, that is the founders of the Christian faith, are now figures of the almost dim and distant past; there have been generations between this letter and the first coming of the Christian faith (2Pet. 3:4).
There are references which require the passing of the years to explain them. The reference to Peter’s approaching death looks very like a reference to Jesus’ prophecy in Jn.21:18-19, and the Fourth Gospel was not written until about A.D. 100. The statement that Peter is going to leave something which will continue his teaching after he has gone looks very like a reference to Mark’s Gospel (Mk.1:12-14).
Above all there is the reference to the letters of Paul (2Pet. 3:15-16). From this it is quite certain that Paul’s letters are known and used throughout all the Church; they are public property, and furthermore they are regarded as Scripture and on a level with “the other Scriptures” (2Pet. 3:16). It was not until at least A.D. 90 that these letters were collected and published, and it would take many years for them to acquire the position of sacred Scripture. It is practically impossible that anyone should write like this until midway through the second century A.D.
All the evidence converges to prove that Second Peter is a late book. It is not until the third century that it is quoted. The great scholars of the early church did not regard it as Peter’s although they did not question its usefulness. The letter has references which require the passing of the years to explain them. The great interest of Second Peter lies in the very fact that it was the last book in the New Testament to be written and the last to gain entry into the New Testament.
IN PETER’S NAME
How, then, did it become attached to the name of Peter? The answer is that it was deliberately attached. This may seem to us a strange proceeding but in the ancient world this was common practice. Plato’s letters were written not by Plato but by a disciple in the master’s name. The Jews repeatedly used this method of writing. Between the Old and the New Testament, books were written under the names of Solomon, Isaiah, Moses, Baruch, Ezra, Enoch and many another. And in New Testament times there is a whole literature around the name of Peter–The Gospel of Peter, The Preaching of Peter, The Apocalypse of Peter.
One salient fact makes this method of writing even more intelligible. The heretics used it. They issued misleading and pernicious books under the names of the great apostles, claiming that they were the secret teaching of the great founders of the Church handed down by word of mouth to them. Faced with this, the Church retaliated in kind and issued books in which men set down for their own generation the things they were quite sure that the apostles would have said had they been facing this new situation. There is nothing either unusual or discreditable in a book being issued under the name of Peter although Peter did not write it. The writer in humility was putting the message which the Holy Spirit had given him into the mouth of Peter because he felt his own name was unworthy to appear upon the book.
We will not find Second Peter easy to read; but it is a book of first-rate importance because it was written to men who were undermining the Christian ethic and the Christian doctrine and who had to be stopped before the Christian faith was wrecked by their perversion of the truth.
The Man who Opened Doors (2Pet. 1:1)
The Glorious Servitude (2Pet. 1:1)
The All-Important Knowledge (2Pet. 1:2)
The Greatness of Jesus Christ for Men (2Pet. 1:3-7)
Equipment for the Way (2Pet. 1:3-7)
The Ladder of Virtues (l) (2Pet. 1:3-7)
The Ladder of Virtues (2) (2Pet. 1:3-7)
On the Way (2Pet. 1:8-11)
The Pastor’s Care (2Pet. 1:12-15)
The Message and the Right to Give It (2Pet. 1:16-18)
The Words of the Prophets (2Pet. 1:19-21)
False Prophets (2Pet. 2:1)
The Sins of the False Prophets and Their End (2Pet. 2:1)
The Work of Falsehood (2Pet. 2:2-3)
The Fate of the Wicked and the Rescue of the Righteous (2Pet. 2:4-11)
1. The Sin of the Angels
2. The Men of ihe Flood and the Rescue of Noah
3. The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Rescue of Lot
The Picture of the Evil Man (2Pet. 2:4-11)
Deluding Self and Deluding Others (2Pet. 2:12-14)
On the Wrong Road (2Pet. 2:15-16)
The Perils of Relapse (2Pet. 2:17-22)
The Principles qf Preaching (2Pet. 3:1-2)
The Denial of the Second Coming (2Pet. 3:3-4)
Destruction by Flood (2Pet. 3:5-6)
Destruction by Fire (2Pet. 3:7)
The Mercy of God’s Delay (2Pet. 3:8-9)
The Dreadful Day (2Pet. 3:10)
The Moral Dynamic (2Pet. 3:11-14)
Hastening the Day (2Pet. 3:11-14)
Perverters of Scripture (2Pet. 3:15-16)
A Firm Foundation and a Continual Growth (2Pet. 3:17-18)
2 PETER
THE MAN WHO OPENED DOORS
2Pet. 1:1
Symeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, writes this letter to those to whom there has been allotted a faith equal in honour and privilege with our own, through the impartial justice of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
The letter opens with a very subtle and beautiful allusion for those who have eyes to see it and knowledge enough of the New Testament to grasp it. Peter writes to “those to whom there has been allotted a faith equal in honour and privilege with our own” and he calls himself Symeon Peter. Who were these people? There can really be only one answer to that. They must once have been Gentiles in contradistinction to the Jews who were uniquely the chosen people of God. Those who had once been no people are now the chosen people of God (1Pet. 2:10); those who were once aliens and strangers to the commonwealth of Israel, and who were once far off, have been brought nigh (Eph.2:11-13).
Peter puts this very vividly, using a word which would at once strike an answering chord in the minds of those who heard it. Their faith is equal in honour and privilege. The Greek is isotimos (GSN2472); isos (GSN2470) means “equal” and time (GSN5092) means “honour.” This word was particularly used in connection with foreigners who were given equal citizenship in a city with the natives. Josephus, for instance, says that in Antioch the Jews were made isotimoi (GSN2472), equal in honour and privilege, with the Macedonians and the Greeks who lived there. So Peter addresses his letter to those who had once been despised Gentiles but who had been given equal rights of citizenship with the Jews and even with the apostles themselves in the kingdom of God.
Two things have to be noted about this great privilege which had been extended to the Gentiles. (a) It had been allotted to them. That is to say, they had not earned it; it had fallen to them through no merit of their own, as some prize falls to a man by lot. In other words, their new citizenship was all of grace. (b) It came to them through the impartial justice of their God and Saviour Jesus Christ. It came to them because with God there is no “most favoured nation clause”; his grace and favour go out impartially to every nation upon earth.
What has this to do with the name Symeon, by which Peter is here called? In the New Testament, he is most often called Peter; he is fairly often called Simon, which was, indeed, his original name before Jesus gave him the name of Cephas or Peter (Jn.1:41-42); but only once in the rest of the New Testament is he called Simeon. It is in the story of that Council of Jerusalem in Ac.15 which decided that the door of the Church should be opened wide to the Gentiles. There James says, “Symeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name” (Ac.15:14). In this letter which begins with greetings to the Gentiles who have been granted by the grace of God privileges of equal citizenship in the kingdom with the Jews and with the apostles Peter is called by the name of Symeon; and the only other time he is called by that name is when he is the principal instrument whereby that privilege is granted.
Symeon has in it the memory that Peter is the man who opened doors. He opened the doors to Cornelius, the Gentile centurion (Ac.10); his great authority was thrown on the side of the open door at the Council of Jerusalem (Ac.15).
THE GLORIOUS SERVITUDE
2Pet. 1:1 (continued)
Peter calls himself the servant of Jesus Christ. The word is doulos (GSN1401) which really means slave. Strange as it may seem, here is a title, apparently one of humiliation, which the greatest of men took as a title of greatest honour. Moses the great leader and lawgiver was the doulos (GSN1401) of God (Deut.34:5; Ps.105:26; Mal.4:4). Joshua the great commander was the doulos (GSN1401) of God (Josh.24:29). David the greatest of the kings was the doulos (GSN1401) of God (2Sam.3:18; Ps.78:70). In the New Testament Paul is the doulos (GSN1401) of Jesus Christ (Rom.1:1; Php.1:1; Tit.1:1), a title which James (Jas. 1:1), and Jude (Jd.1) both proudly claim. In the Old Testament the prophets are the douloi (GSN1401) of God (Am.3:7; Isa.20:3). And in the New Testament the Christian man frequently is Christ’s doulos (GSN1401) (Ac.2:18; 1Cor.7:22; Eph.6:6; Col.4:12; 2Tim.2:24). There is deep meaning here.
(i) To call the Christian the doulos (GSN1401) of God means that he is inalienably possessed by God. In the ancient world a master possessed his slaves in the same sense as he possessed his tools. A servant can change his master; but a slave cannot. The Christian inalienably belongs to God.
(ii) To call the Christian the doulos (GSN1401) of God means that he is unqualifiedly at the disposal of God. In the ancient world the master could do what he liked with his slave; he had even the power of life and death over him. The Christian has no rights of his own, for all his rights are surrendered to God.
(iii) To call the Christian the doulos (GSN1401) of God means that he owes an unquestioning obedience to God. A master’s command was a slave’s only law in ancient times. In any situation the Christian has but one question to ask: “Lord, what will you have me do?” The command of God is his only law.
(iv) To call the Christian the doulos (GSN1401) of God means that he must be constantly in the service of God. In the ancient world the slave had literally no time of his own, no holidays, no leisure. All his time belonged to his master. The Christian cannot, either deliberately or unconsciously, compartmentalize life into the time and activities which belong to God, and the time and activities in which he does what he likes. The Christian is necessarily the man every moment of whose time is spent in the service of God.
We note one further point. Peter speaks of the impartial justice of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ. The King James Version translates, “the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ,” as if this referred to two persons, God and Jesus; but, as Moffatt and the Revised Standard Version both show, in the Greek there is only one person involved and the phrase is correctly rendered our God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Its great interest is that it does what the New Testament very, very seldom does. It calls Jesus God. The only real parallel to this is the adoring cry of Thomas: “My Lord and my God.” (Jn.20:28). This is not a matter to argue about; it is not even a matter of theology; for Peter and Thomas to call Jesus God was not a matter of theology but an outrush of adoration. It was simply that they felt human terms could not contain this person they knew as Lord.
THE ALL-IMPORTANT KNOWLEDGE
2Pet. 1:2
May grace and peace be multiplied to you by the knowledge of God. and of Jesus. our Lord.
Peter puts this in an unusual way. Grace and peace are to come from knowledge, the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Is he turning Christian experience into something dependent on knowledge? Or is there some other meaning here? First, let us look at the word which he uses for knowledge (epignosis, GSN1922). It can be interpreted in two directions.
(a) It can mean increasing knowledge. Gnosis (GSN1108), the normal Greek word for knowledge, is here preceded by the preposition epi (GSN1909) which means towards, in the direction of. Epignosis (GSN1922) then could be interpreted as knowledge which is always moving further in the direction of that which it seeks to know. Grace and peace are multiplied to the Christian as he comes to know Jesus Christ better and better. As it has been put: “The more Christians realize the meaning of Jesus Christ, the more they realize the meaning of grace and the experience of peace.”
(b) Epignosis (GSN1922) has a second meaning. Often in Greek it means full knowledge. Plutarch, for instance, uses it of the scientific knowledge of music as opposed to the knowledge of the mere amateur. So it may be that the implication here is that knowledge of Jesus Christ is what we might call “the master-science of life.” The other sciences may bring new skill, new knowledge, new abilities, but the master-science, the knowledge of Jesus Christ, alone brings the grace men need and the peace for which their hearts crave.
There is still more. Peter has a way of using words which were commonly on the lips of the pagans of his day and charging them with a new meaning. Knowledge was a much used word in pagan religious thought in the days when this letter was written. To take but one example, the Greeks defined sophia (GSN4678), wisdom, as knowledge of things both human and divine. The Greek seekers after God sought that knowledge in two main ways.
(a) They sought it by philosophic speculation. They sought to reach God by the sheer power of human thought. There are obvious troubles there. For one thing, God is infinite; the mind of man is finite; and the finite can never grasp the infinite. Long ago Zophar had asked: “Can you (by searching) find out the deep things of God?” (Jb.11:7). If God is ever to be known, he must be known, not because man’s mind discovers him but because he chooses to reveal himself. For another thing, if religion is based on philosophic speculation, at its highest it can be the preserve of only the few, for it is not given to every man to be a philosopher. Whatever Peter meant by knowledge, he did not mean that.
(b) They sought it by mystical experience of the divine, until they could say, “l am thou, and thou art I.” This was the way of the Mystery Religions. They were all passion plays; the dramatically acted story of some God who suffered and died and rose again. The initiate was carefully prepared by instruction in the inner meaning of the story, by long fasting and continence, and by the deliberate building up of psychological tension. The play was then played out with a magnificent liturgy, sensuous music, carefully calculated lighting and the burning of incense. The aim was that, as the initiate watched, he should so enter into this experience that he became actually one with the suffering, dying, rising, and eternally triumphant God. Again there are troubles here. For one thing, not every one is capable of mystical experience. For another thing, any such experience is necessarily transient; it may leave an effect, but it cannot be a continual experience. Mystical experience is the privilege of the few.
(e) If this knowledge of Jesus Christ does not come by philosophic speculation or by mystical experience, what is it and how does it come? In the New Testament knowledge is characteristically personal knowledge. Paul does not say, “I know what I have believed”; he says, “I know whom I have believed” (2Tim.1:12). Christian knowledge of Christ is personal acquaintance with him; it is knowing him as a person and entering day by day into a more intimate relationship with him.
When Peter speaks of grace and peace coming through the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ, he is not intellectualizing religion; he is saying that Christianity means an ever-deepening personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
THE GREATNESS OF JESUS CHRIST FOR MEN
2Pet. 1:3-7
Since his divine power has bestowed upon us all things that are necessary for true life and true religion, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, and since through these gifts there have been bestowed upon us precious and very great promises, that through them we might escape the world’s corruption caused by lust and become sharers in the divine nature–since kill this is so, bend all your energy to the tusk of equipping your faith with courage, your courage with knowledge, your knowledge with self-control, your self-control with stedfastness, your stedfastness with piety, your piety with brotherly affection, your brotherly affection with Christian love.
In 2Pet. 1:3-4 there is a tremendous and comprehensive picture of Jesus Christ.
(i) He is the Christ of power. In him there is the divine power which cannot be ultimately defeated or frustrated. In this world one of the tragedies of life is that love is so often frustrated because it cannot give what it wants to give, cannot do what it wants to do and must so often stand helpless while the loved one meets disaster. But always Christ’s love is backed by his power and is, therefore, a victorious love.
(ii) He is the Christ of generosity. He bestows on us all things necessary for true life and true religion. The word Peter uses for religion is eusebeia (GSN2150), the characteristic meaning of which is practical religion. Peter is saying that Jesus Christ tells us what life is and then enables us to live it as it ought to be lived. He gives us a religion which is not withdrawal from life but triumphant involvement in it.
(iii) He is the Christ of the precious and great promises. That does not so much mean that he brings us the great and precious promises as that in him these promises come true. Paul put the same thing in a different way when he said that all the promises of God are Yes and Amen in Christ (2Cor.1:20). That is to say Christ says, “Yes. So let it be,” to these promises; he confirms and guarantees them. It has been put this way–once we know Jesus Christ, every time we meet a promise in Scripture which begins with the word “Whosoever,” we can immediately say to ourselves, “That means me.”
(iv) He is the Christ by whom we escape the world’s corruption. Peter had to meet the antinomians, the people who used the grace of God as an excuse for sin. They declared that grace was wide enough to cover every sin; therefore, sin does not matter any more, the grace of Christ will win forgiveness for it. For any man to speak like that is simply to show that he ii,ants to sin. But Jesus Christ is the person who can help us overcome the fascination of the world’s lust and cleanse us by his presence and his power. So long as we live in this world sin will never completely lose its fascination for us; but in the presence of Christ we have our defence against that fascination.
(v) He is the Christ who makes us sharers in the divine nature. Here again Peter is using an expression which the pagan thinkers well knew. They spoke much about sharing in the divine nature. But there was this difference–they believed that man had a share in the divine nature by virtue of being man. All men had to do was to live in accordance with the divine nature already in them. The trouble about that is that life flatly contradicts it. On every side we see bitterness, hatred, lust, crime; on every side we see moral failure, helplessness and frustration. Christianity says that men are capable of becoming sharers in the divine nature. It realistically faces man’s actuality but at the same time sets no limit to his potentiality. “I am come,” said Jesus, “that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn.10:10). As one of the great early fathers said, “He became what we are to make us what he is.” Man has it in him to share the nature of God–but only in Jesus Christ can that potentiality be realized.
EQUIPMENT FOR THE WAY
2Pet. 1:3-7 (continued)
Peter says that we must bend all our energies to equip ourselves with a series of great qualities. The word he uses for to equip is epichoregein (GSN2023) which he uses again in 2Pet. 1:11 when he speaks of us being richly gifted with the right of entry into the eternal kingdom.
This is one of the many Greek words which have a pictorial background. The verb epichoregein (GSN2023) comes from the noun choregos (GSN5524), which literally means “the leader of a chorus.” Perhaps the greatest gift that Greece, and especially Athens, gave to the world was the great works of men like Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, which are still among its most cherished possessions. All these plays needed large choruses and were, therefore, very expensive to produce. In the great days of Athens there were public-spirited citizens who voluntarily took on the duty, at their own expense, of collecting, maintaining, training and equipping such choruses. It was at the great religious festivals that these plays were produced. For instance, at the city Dionysia there were produced three tragedies, five comedies and five dithyrambs. Men had to be round to provide the choruses for them all, a duty which could cost as much as 3,000 drachmae. The men who undertook these duties out of their own pocket and out of love for their city were called choregoi, and choregein (GSN5524) was the verb used for undertaking such a duty. The word has a certain lavishness in it. It never means to equip in any cheese-paring and miserly way; it means lavishly to pour out everything that is necessary for a noble performance. Epichoregein (GSN2023) went out into a larger world and it grew to mean not only to equip a chorus but to be responsible for any kind of equipment. It can mean to equip an army with all necessary provisions; it can mean to equip the soul with all the necessary virtues for life. But always at the back of it there is this idea of a lavish generosity in the equipment.
So Peter urges his people to equip their lives with every virtue; and that equipment must not the simply a necessary minimum, but lavish and generous. The very word is an incitement to be content with nothing less than the loveliest and the most splendid life.
But there is something else at the back of this. In 2Pet. 1:5-6 Peter goes on that we must, as the Revised Standard Version has it, add virtue to virtue, until the whole culminates in Christian love. Behind this is a Stoic idea. The Stoics insisted that in life there must continuously be what they called prokope (GSN4297), moral progress. Prokope can be used for the advance of an army towards its objective. In the Christian life there must be steady moral advance. Moffatt quotes a saying that, “the Christian life must not be an initial spasm followed by a chronic inertia.” It is very apt to be just that; a moment of enthusiasm, when the wonder of Christianity is realized, and then a failure to work out the Christian life in continuous progress.
That brings us to still another basic idea here. Peter bids his people bend every energy to do this. That is to say, in the Christian life the supreme effort of man must cooperate with the grace of God. As Paul has it: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work his good pleasure” (Php.2:12-13). It is true that everything is of faith; but a faith which does not issue in life is not faith at all, as Paul would heartily have agreed. Faith is not only commitment to the promises of Christ; it is also commitment to his demands.
Bigg well points out that Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, says that there are three theories of the source of happiness. (i) It is something which can come by training, by learning and by the formation of right habits. (ii) It is a matter of divine allotment, the gift or God. (iii) It is all a matter of chance.
The truth is that, as the Christian sees it, happiness depends both on God’s gift and on our effort. We do not earn salvation but at the same time we have to bend every energy towards the Christian objective of a lovely life. Bengel, in commenting on this passage, asks us to compare the Parable of the Ten Virgins, five of whom were wise and five of whom were foolish. He writes: “The flame is that which is imparted to us by God and from God without our own labour; but the oil is that which a man must pour into life by his own study and his own faithful effort, so that the flame may be fed and increased.”
Faith does not exempt a man from works; the generosity of God does not absolve a man from effort. Life is at its noblest and its best when our effort cooperates with God’s grace to produce the necessary loveliness.
THE LADDER OF VIRTUES (1)
2Pet. 1:3-7 (continued)
Let us then look at the list of virtues which have to be added one to another. it is worth noting that in the ancient world such lists were common. It was a world in which books were not nearly so cheap and so readily available as they are today. Instruction, therefore, had for the most part to be carried in the pupil’s head; and easily memorized lists were one of the commonest ways of inculcating instruction. One ingenious way of teaching the child the names of the virtues was by means of a game played with counters which could be won or lost, each of which bore the name of one of the virtues. Lists of virtues were common in the early Christian writings. Paul gives us the fruit of the Spirit–love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal.5:22-23). In the Pastoral Epistles the man of God is bidden to follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness (1Tim.6:11). In The Shepherd of Hermas (Visions 3.8.1-7), faith, self-control, simplicity, innocence and reverence, understanding and love are daughters one of another. In the Epistle of Barnabas (2) fear and endurance are the helpers of faith; patience and self-control are our allies; and when these are present a man can develop and possess wisdom, prudence, understanding and knowledge. Let us look one by one at the stages in the list which this letter gives us.
(i) It begins with faith (pistis, GSN4102); everything goes back to that. For Peter faith is the conviction that what Jesus Christ says is true and that we can commit ourselves to his promises and launch ourselves on his demands. It is the unquestioning certainty that the way to happiness and peace and strength on earth and in heaven is to accept him at his word.
(ii) To faith must be added what the Revised Standard Version calls virtue and we have called courage. The word is arete (GSN0703); it is very rare in the New Testament but it is the supreme Greek word for virtue in every sense of the term. It means excellence. It has two special directions in which its meaning moves. (a) Arete (GSN0703) is what we might call operative, or efficient excellence. To take two examples of its usage from widely differing spheres–it can be used of land which is fertile; and it can be used of the mighty deeds of the gods. Arete (GSN0703) is that virtue which makes a man a good citizen and friend; it is that virtue which makes him an expert in the technique of living well. (b) Arete (GSN0703) often means courage. Plutarch says that God is a hope of arete (GSN0703), not an excuse for cowardice. In 2 Maccabees we read of how Eleazar died rather than be false to the laws of God and his fathers; and the story ends by saying that he left his death for an example of noble courage (arete, GSN0703) and a memorial of virtue, not only to young men, but also to all the nation (2Macc.6:31).
In this passage it is not necessary to choose between these two meanings; they are both there. Faith must issue, not in the retirement of the cloister and the cell, but in a life effective in the service of God and man; and it must issue in the courage always to show whose it is and whom it serves.
(iii) To courage must be added knowledge. The word is gnosis (GSN1108). In ethical Greek language there are two words which have a similar meaning with a very significant difference. Sophia (GSN4678) is wisdom, in the sense of “knowledge of things both human and divine, and of their causes.” It is knowledge of first causes and of deep and ultimate things. Gnosis (GSN1108) is practical knowledge; it is the ability to apply to particular situations the ultimate knowledge which sophia (GSN4678) gives. Gnosis (GSN1108) is that knowledge which enables a man to decide rightly and to act honourably and efficiently in the day to day circumstances of life. So, then, to faith must be added courage and effectiveness; to courage and effectiveness must be added the practical wisdom to deal with life.
THE LADDER OF VIRTUES (2)
2Pet. 1:3-7 (continued)
(iv) To this practical knowledge must be added self-control, or self-mastery. The word is egkrateia (GSN1466), and it means literally the ability, to take a grip of oneself. This is a virtue of which the great Greeks spoke and wrote and thought much. In regard to a man and his passions Aristotle distinguishes four states in life. There is sophrosune (GSN4997), in which passion has been entirely subjugated to reason; we might call it perfect temperance. There is akolasia, which is the precise opposite; it is the state in which reason is entirely subjugated to passion–we might call it unbridled lust. In between these two states there is akrasia (GSN0192), in which reason fights but passion prevails; we might call it incontinence. There is egkrateia (GSN1466), in which reason fights against passion and prevails; we call it self-control, or self-mastery.
Egkrateia (GSN1466) is one of the great Christian virtues; and the place it holds is an example of the realism of the Christian ethic. That ethic does not contemplate a situation in which a man is emasculated of all passion; it envisages a situation in which his passions remain, but are under perfect control and so become his servants, not his tyrants.
(v) To this self-control must be added steadfastness. The word is hupomone (GSN5281). Chrysostom called hupomone (GSN5281) “The Queen of the Virtues.” In the King James Version it is usually translated patience; but patience is too passive a word. Hupomone (GSN5281), has always a background or courage. Cicero defines patientia, its Latin equivalent, as: “The voluntary and daily suffering of hard and difficult things, for the sake of honour and usefulness.” Didymus of Alexandria writes on the temper of Job: “It is not that the righteous man must be without feeling, although he must patiently bear the things which afflict him; but it is true virtue when a man deeply feels the things he toils against, but nevertheless despises sorrows for the sake of God.” Hupomone (GSN5281) does not simply accept and endure; there is always a forward look in it. It is said of Jesus, by the writer to the Hebrews, that for the joy that was set before him, he endured the Cross, despising the shame (Heb.12:2). That is hupomone (GSN5281), Christian stedfastness. It is the courageous acceptance of everything that life can do to us and the transmuting of even the worst event into another step on the upward way.
(vi) To this steadfastness must be added piety. The word is eusebeia (GSN2150) and is quite untranslatable. Even piety is inadequate, carrying as it does a suggestion sometimes of something not altogether attractive. The great characteristic of eusebeia (GSN2150) is that it looks in two directions. The man who has eusebeia (GSN2150) always correctly worships God and gives him his due; but he always correctly serves his fellow-men and gives them their due. The man who is eusebes (GSN2152) (the corresponding adjective) is in a right relationship both with God and his fellow-men. Eusebeia (GSN2150) is piety but in its most practical aspect.
We may best see the meaning of this word by looking at the man whom the Greeks held to be its finest example. That man was Socrates whom Xenophon describes as follows: “He was so pious and devoutly religious that he would take no step apart from the will of heaven; so just and upright that he never did even a trifling injury to any living soul; so self-controlled, so temperate, that he never at any time chose the sweeter instead of the better; so sensible, so wise, and so prudent that in distinguishing the better from the worse he never erred” (Xenophon: Memorabilia 1.5.8–11).
In Latin the word is pietas; and Warde Fowler describes the Roman idea of the man who possesses that quality: “He is superior to the enticements of individual passion and of selfish ease; (pietas is) a sense of duty which never left a man, of duty first to the gods, then to father and to family, to son and to daughter, to his people and to his nation.”
Eusebeia (GSN2150) is the nearest Greek word for religion; and, when we begin to define it, we see the intensely practical character of the Christian religion. When a man becomes a Christian, he acknowledges a double duty, to God and to his fellow-men.
(vii) To this piety must be added brotherly affection. The word is philadelphia (GSN5360), which literally means love of the brethren. The point is this–there is a kind of religious devotion which separates a man from his fellow-men. The claims of his fellow-men become an intrusion on his prayers, his study of God’s word and his meditation. The ordinary demands of human relationships become a nuisance. Epictetus, the great Stoic philosopher, never married. Half-jestingly he said that he was doing far more for the world by being an unfettered philosopher than if he had produced “two or three dirty-nosed children.” “How can he who has to teach mankind run to get something in which to heat the water to give the baby his bath?” What Peter is saying is that there is something wrong with the religion which finds the claims of personal relationships a nuisance.
(viii) The ladder of Christian virtue must end in Christian love. Not even affection for the brethren is enough; the Christian must end with a love which is as wide as that love of God which causes his sun to rise on the just and on the unjust, and sends his rain on the evil and the good. The Christian must show to all men the love which God has shown to him.
ON THE WAY
2Pet. 1:8-11
For, if these things exist and increase within you, they will make you not ineffective and not unfruitful in your progress towards the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever does not possess these things is blind, short-sighted, and has lapsed into forgetfulness that the sins of his old way of life have been cleansed away, So, brothers, be the more eager to confirm your calling and your choice. For, if you do practise these virtues, you will never slip, for you will be richly gifted with the right of entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Peter strongly urges his people to keep climbing up this ladder of virtues which he has set before them. The more we know of any subject the more we are fit to know. It is always true that “to him that hath it shall be riven.” Progress is the way to more progress. Moffatt says of ourselves and Jesus Christ: “We learn him as we live with him and for him.” As the hymn has it:
May every heart confess thy name, And ever thee adore, And, seeking thee, itself inflame To seek thee more and more.
To keep climbing up the ladder of the virtues is to come ever nearer to knowing Jesus Christ; and the further we climb, the further we are able to climb.
On the other hand, if we refuse to make the effort of the upward climb, certain things happen. (a) We grow blind; we are left without the guiding light that the knowledge of Jesus Christ brings. As Peter sees it, to walk without Christ is to walk in the dark and not to be able to see the way. (b) We grow what Peter calls muopazon (GSN3467). This word can have either of two meanings. It can mean short-sighted. It is easy to become short-sighted in life, to see things only as they appear at the moment and to be unable to take the long view of things, to have our eyes so fixed upon earth that we never think of the things beyond. It can also mean blinking, shutting the eyes. Again, it is easy in life to shut our eyes to what we do not wish to see, and to walk, as it were, in blinkers. To walk without Christ is to be in danger of taking the short-sighted or the blinkered view of life.
Further, to fail to climb the ladder of virtue is to forget that the sins of the old way of life have been cleansed away. Peter is thinking of baptism. At that time baptism was adult baptism; it was a deliberate act of decision to leave the old way and to enter upon the new. The man who, after baptism, does not begin upon the upward climb has forgotten, or never realized, the meaning of the experience through which he has passed. For many of us the parallel to baptism in this sense is entry into the membership of the Christian Church. To make our commitment and then to remain exactly the same, is to fail to understand what church membership means, for our entry into it should be the beginning of a climb upon the upward way.
In view of all this, Peter urges his people to make every effort to confirm their calling by God. Here is a most significant demand. In one way all is of God; it is God’s call which gives us entry into the fellowship of his people; without his grace and his mercy we could do nothing and could expect nothing. But that does not absolve us from every possible effort.
Let us take an analogy, which, although not perfect, may help us to understand. Suppose a man who is wealthy and kind picks out a poor lad, who would never otherwise have had the chance, and offers him the privilege of a university education. The benefactor is giving the lad something which he could never have achieved for himself; but the lad cannot make use of that privilege unless he is prepared to work, and the harder he works the more he will enter into the privilege offered to him. The gracious free offer and the personal hard work have to combine before the privilege becomes fully effective.
It is so with us and God. God has called us in his free mercy and his unmerited grace; but at the same time we have to bend every effort to toil upwards and onwards on the way.
If we follow this upward way, Peter says, we shall in the end be richly gifted with the right of entry into his eternal kingdom; and we shall not slip upon the way. By this Peter does not mean that we will never sin. The picture in his mind is of a march and he means that we will never fall out upon the march and be left behind. If we set out upon this upward and onward way, the effort will be great but God’s help will also be great; and in spite of all the toil, he will enable us to keep going until we reach our journey’s end.
THE PASTOR’S CARE
2Pet. 1:12-15
It is for this reason that I intend constantly to remind you of these things, although you already know them, and although you are already firmly established in the truth which you possess. I think it is right, so long as I am in this tent, to rouse you by reminding you, for I know that the time to put off my tent is coming soon, as indeed our Lord Jesus Christ has told me. Yes, and I will make it my endeavour to see to it that after my departure you will constantly remember these things.
Here speaks the pastor’s care. In this passage Peter shows us two things about preaching and teaching. First, preaching is very often reminding a man of what he already knows. It is the bringing back to his memory that truth which he has forgotten, or at which he refuses to look, or whose meaning he has not fully appreciated. Second, Peter is going to go on to uncompromising rebuke and warning, but he begins with something very like a compliment. He says that his people already possess the truth and are firmly established in it. Always a preacher, a teacher or a parent will achieve more by encouragement than by scolding. We do more to reform people and to keep them safe by, as it were, putting them on their honour than by flaying them with invective. Peter was wise enough to know that the first essential to make men listen is to show that we believe in them.
Peter looks forward to his early death. He talks of his body as his tent, as Paul does (2Cor.5:4). This was a favourite picture with the early Christian writers. The Epistle to Diognetus says, “The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tent.” The picture comes from the journeyings of the patriarchs in the Old Testament. They had no abiding residence but lived in tents because they were on the way to the Promised Land. The Christian knows well that his life in this world is not a permanent residence but a journey towards the world beyond. We get the same idea in 2Pet. 1:15. There Peter speaks of his approaching death as his exodos, his departure. Exodos is, of course, the word which is used for the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt, and their setting out to the Promised Land. Peter sees death, not as the end but as the going out into the Promised Land of God.
Peter says that Jesus Christ has told him that for him the end will soon be coming. This may be a reference to the prophecy in Jn.21:18-19, when Jesus foretells that there will come a day when Peter also will be stretched out upon a cross. That time is about to come.
Peter says that he will take steps to see that what he has got to say to them will be held before their memory even when he is gone from this earth. That may well be a reference to the Gospel according to St. Mark. The consistent tradition is that it is the preaching material of Peter. lrenaeus says that, after the death of Peter and Paul, Mark, who had been his disciple and interpreter, handed on in writing the things which it had been Peter’s custom to preach. Papias, who lived towards the end of the second century and collected many traditions about the early days of the Church, hands down the same tradition about Mark’s gospel: “Mark, who was Peter’s interpreter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, all that he recollected of what Christ had said or done. For he was not a bearer of the Lord, or a follower of his; he followed Peter, as I have said, at a later date and Peter adapted his instruction to practical needs, without any attempt to give the Lord’s words systematically. So that Mark was not wrong in writing down some things in this way from memory, for his one concern was neither to omit nor to falsify anything that he had heard.” It may well be that the reference here means that Peter’s teaching was made still available to his people in Mark’s Gospel after his death.
In any event, the pastor’s aim was to bring to his people God’s truth while he was still alive and to take steps to keep it in their memories after he was dead. He wrote, not to preserve his own name, but the name of Jesus Christ.
THE MESSAGE AND THE RIGHT TO GIVE IT
2Pet. 1:16-18
For it was not cleverly invented fables that we followed when we made known to you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; it was because we were made eye-witnesses of his majesty. This happened to us on that occasion when he received honour and glory from God the Father, when this voice was borne to him by the majestic glory–“This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” It was this voice that we heard, borne from heaven, when we were with him in the sacred mountain.
Peter comes to the message which it was his great aim to bring to his people, concerning “the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” As we shall see quite clearly as we go on, the great aim of this letter is to recall men to certainty in regard to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The heretics whom Peter is attacking no longer believed in it; it was so long delayed that people had begun to think it would never happen at all.
Such, then, was Peter’s message. Having stated it, he goes on to speak of his right to state it; and does something which is, at least at first sight, surprising. His right to speak is that he was with, Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration and that there he saw the glory and the honour which were given to him and heard the voice of God speak to him. That is to say, Peter uses the transfiguration story, not as a foretaste of the Resurrection of Jesus, as it is commonly regarded, but as a foretaste of the triumphant glory of the Second Coming. The transfiguration story is told in Matt.17:1-8; Mk.9:2-8; Lk.9:28-36. Was Peter right in seeing in it a foretaste of the Second Coming rather than a prefiguring of the Resurrection?
There is one particularly significant thing about the transfiguration story. In all three gospels, it immediately follows the prophecy of Jesus which said that there were some standing there who would not pass from the world until they had seen the Son of Man coming in his kingdom (Matt.16:29; Mk.9:1; Lk.9:27). That would certainly seem to indicate that the transfiguration and the Second Coming were in some way linked together.
Whatever we may say, this much is certain, that Peter’s great aim in this letter is to recall his people to a living belief in tile Second Coming of Christ and he bases his right to do so on what he saw on the Mount of Transfiguration.
In 2Pet. 1:16 there is a very interesting word. Peter says, “We were made eye-witnesses of his majesty.” The word he uses for eye-witness is epoptes (GSN2030). In the Greek usage of Peter’s day this was a technical word. We have already spoken about the Mystery Religions. They were all of the nature of passion plays, in which the story of a god who lived, suffered, died, and rose again was played out. It was only after a long course of instruction and preparation that the worshipper was finally allowed to be present at the passion play, and to be offered the experience of becoming one with the dying and rising God. When he reached this stage, he was an initiate and the technical word to describe him was epoptes (GSN2030); he was a privileged eye-witness of the experiences of God. So Peter says that the Christian is an eye-witness of the sufferings of Christ. With the eye of faith he sees the Cross; in the experience of faith he dies with Christ to sin and rises to righteousness. His faith has made him one with Jesus Christ in his death and in his risen life and power.
THE WORDS OF THE PROPHETS
2Pet. 1:19-21
So this mikes the word of the prophets still more certain for us; and you will do well to pay attention to it, as it shines like a lamp in a dingy place, until the day dawns and the Morning Star rises within your hearts. For you must first and foremost realize that no prophecy in Scripture permits of private interpretation; for no prophecy was ever borne to us by the will of man, but men spoke from God, when they were carried away by the Holy Spirit.
This is a particularly difficult passage, because in both halves of it the Greek can mean quite different things. We look at these different possibilities and in each case we take the less probable first.
(i) The first sentence can well mean: “In prophecy we have an even surer guarantee, that is, of the Second Coming.” If Peter did say this, he means that the words of the prophets are an even surer guarantee of the reality of the Second Coming than his own experience on the Mount of Transfiguration.
However unlikely it may seem, it is by no means impossible that he did say just that. When he was writing there was a tremendous interest in the words of prophecy whose fulfillment in Christianity was seen to prove its truth. We get case after case of people converted in the days of the early church by reading the Old Testament books and seeing their prophecies fulfilled in Jesus. It would be quite in line with that to declare that the strongest argument for the Second Coming is that the prophets foretold it.
(ii) But we think that the second possibility is to be preferred: “What we saw on the Mount of Transfiguration makes it even more certain that what is foretold in the prophets about the Second Coming must be true.”
However we take it, the meaning is that the glory of Jesus on the mountain top and the visions of the prophets combine to make it certain that the Second Coming is a living reality which all men must expect and for which all men must prepare.
There is also a double possibility about the second part of this passage. “No prophecy of the Scripture,” as the Revised Standard Version has it, “is a matter of one’s own interpretation.”
(i) Many of the early scholars took this to mean: “When any of the prophets interpreted any situation in history or told how history was going to unfold itself, they were not expressing a private opinion of their own; they were passing on a revelation which God had given them.” This is a perfectly possible meaning. In the Old Testament the mark of a false prophet was that he was speaking of himself, as it were, privately, and not saying what God had told him to say. Jeremiah condemns the false prophets: “They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord” (Jer.23:16). Ezekiel says, “Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing” (Eze.13:3). Hippolytus describes the way in which the words of the true prophets came: “They did not speak of their own power, nor did they proclaim what they themselves wished, but first they were given right wisdom by the word, and were then instructed by visions.”
On this view the passage means that, when the prophets spoke, it was no private opinion they were giving; it was a revelation from God and, therefore, their words must be carefully heeded.
(ii) The second way to take this passage is as referring to our interpretation of the prophets. A situation was confronting Peter in which the heretics and the evil men were interpreting the prophets to suit themselves. On this view, which we support, Peter is saying: “No man can go to Scripture and interpret it as it suits himself.”
This is of first-rate practical importance. Peter is saying that no man has the right to interpret Scripture, to use his own word, privately. How then must it be interpreted? To answer that question we must ask another. How did the prophets receive their message? They received it from the Spirit. It was sometimes even said that the Spirit of God used the prophets as a writer uses a pen or as a musician uses a musical instrument. In any event the Spirit gave the prophet his message. The obvious conclusion is that it is only through the help of that same Spirit that the prophetic message can be understood. As Paul had already said, spiritual things are spiritually discerned (1Cor.2:14-15). As the Jews viewed the Holy Spirit, he has two functions–he brings God’s truth to men and he enables men to understand that truth when it is brought. So, then, Scripture is not to be interpreted by private cleverness or private prejudice; it is to be interpreted by the help of the Holy Spirit by whom it was first given.
Practically that means two things.
(a) Throughout all the ages the Spirit has been working in devoted scholars who under the guidance of God have opened the Scriptures to men. If, then, we wish to interpret Scripture, we must never arrogantly insist that our own interpretation must be correct; we must humbly go to the works of the scholars to learn what they have to teach us because of what the Spirit taught them.
(b) There is more than that. The one place in which the Spirit specially resides and is specially operative is the Church; and, therefore, Scripture must be interpreted in the light of the teaching, the belief and the tradition of the Church. God is our Father in the faith, but the Church is our mother in the faith. If a man finds that his interpretation of Scripture is at variance with the teaching of the Church, he must humbly examine himself and ask whether his guide has not been his own private wishes rather than the Holy Spirit.
It is Peter’s insistence that Scripture does not consist of any man’s private opinions but is the revelation of God to men through his Spirit; and that, therefore, its interpretation must not depend on any man’s private opinions but must ever be guided by that same Spirit who is still specially operative within the Church.
FALSE PROPHETS
2Pet. 2:1
There were times when false prophets arose among the people, even as amongst you too there will be false teachers, men who will insidiously introduce destructive heresies and deny the Lord who bought them; and by so doing they will bring swift destruction on themselves.
That there should arise false prophets within the Church was something only to be expected, for in every generation false prophets had been responsible for leading God’s people astray and for bringing disaster on the nation. It is worth while looking at the false prophets in the Old Testament story for their characteristics were recurring in the time of Peter and are still recurring today.
(i) The false prophets were more interested in gaining popularity than in telling the truth. Their policy was to tell people what they wanted to hear. The false prophets said, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace” (Jer.6:14). They saw visions of peace, when the Lord God was saying that there was no peace (Eze.13:16). In the days of Jehosaphat, Zedekiah, the false prophet, donned his horns of iron and said that Israel would push the Syrians out of the way as he pushed with these horns; Micaiah the true prophet foretold disaster if Jehosaphat went to war. Of course, Zedekiah was popular and his message was accepted; but Jehosaphat went forth to war with the Syrians and perished tragically (1Kgs.22). In the days of Jeremiah, Hananiah prophesied the swift end of the power of Babylon, while Jeremiah prophesied the servitude of the nation to her; and again the prophet who told people what they wished to hear was the popular one (Jer.28). Diogenes, the great cynic philosopher, spoke of the false teachers of his day whose method was to follow wherever the applause of the crowd led. One of the first characteristics of the false prophet is that he tells men what they want to hear and not the truth they need to hear.
(ii) The false prophets were interested in personal gain. As Micah said, “Its priests teach for hire, and its prophets divine for money” (Mic.3:11). They teach for filthy lucre’s sake (Tit.1:11), and they identify godliness and gain, making their religion a money-making thing (1Tim.6:5). We can see these exploiters at work in the early church. In The Didache, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, which is what might be called the first service-order book, it is laid down that a prophet who asks for money or for a table to be spread in front of him, is a false prophet. “Traffickers in Christ,” the Didache (compare GSN1322) calls such men (The Didache 11). The false prophet is a covetous creature who regards men as dupes to be exploited for his own ends.
(iii) The false prophets were dissolute in their personal life. Isaiah writes: “The priest and the prophet reel with strong drink; they are confused with wine” (Isa.28:7). Jeremiah says, “In the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing; they commit adultery and walk in lies; they strengthen the hands of evil-doers…. They lead my people astray by their lies and their recklessness” (Jer.23:14; Jer.23:32). The false prophet in himself is a seduction to evil rather than an attraction to good.
(iv) The false prophet was above all a man who led other men further away from God instead of closer to him. The prophet who invites the people: “Let us go after other gods,” must be mercilessly destroyed (Deut.13:1-5; Deut.18:20). The false prophet takes men in the wrong direction.
These were the characteristics of the false prophets in the ancient days and in Peter’s time; and they are their characteristics still.
THE SINS OF THE FALSE PROPHETS AND THEIR END
2Pet. 2:1 (continued)
In this verse Peter has certain things to say about these false prophets and their actions.
(i) They insidiously introduce destructive heresies. The Greek for heresy is hairesis (GSN0139). It comes from the verb haireisthai (compare GSN0140), which means to choose; and originally it was a perfectly honourable word. It simply meant a line of belief and action which a man had chosen for himself. In the New Testament we read of the hairesis (GSN0139) of the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Nazarenes (Ac.5:17; Ac.15:5; Ac.24:5). It was perfectly possible to speak of the hairesis (GSN0139) of Plato and to mean nothing more than those who were Platonist in their thought. It was perfectly possible to speak of a group of doctors who practised a certain method of treatment as a hairesis (GSN0139). But very soon in the Christian Church hairesis (GSN0139) changed its complexion. In Paul’s thought heresies and schisms go together as things to be condemned (1Cor.11:18-19); haireseis (GSN0139) (the plural form of the word) are part of the works of the flesh; a man that is a heretic is to be warned and even given a second chance, and then rejected (Tit.3:10).
Why the change? The point is that before the coming of Jesus, who is the way, the truth, and the life, there was no such thing as definite, God-given truth. A man was presented with a number of alternatives any one of which he was perfectly free to choose to believe. But with the coming of Jesus, God’s truth came to men and they had either to accept or to reject it. A heretic then became a man who believed what he wished to believe instead of accepting the truth of God which he ought to believe.
What was happening in the case of Peter’s people was that certain self-styled prophets were insidiously persuading men to believe the things they wished to be true rather than the things which God had revealed to be true. They did not set themselves up as opponents of Christianity. Far from it. They set themselves up as the finest fruits of Christian thinking; and so it was gradually and subtly that people were being lured away from God’s truth to other men’s private opinions, which is what heresy is.
(ii) These men denied the Lord who had bought them. This idea of Christ buying men for himself is one which runs through the whole New Testament. It comes from his own word that he had come to give his life a ransom for many (Mk.10:45). The idea was that men were slaves to sin and Jesus purchased them at the cost of his life for himself, and, therefore, for freedom. “You were bought with a price,” says Paul (1Cor.7:23). “Christ redeemed us (bought us out) from the curse of the law” (Gal.3:13). In the new song in the Revelation the hosts of heaven tell how Jesus Christ bought them with his blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation (Rev.5:9). This clearly means two things. It means that the Christian by right of purchase belongs absolutely to Christ; and it means that a life which cost so much cannot be squandered on sin or on cheap thins.
The heretics in Peter’s letter were denying the Lord who bought them. That could mean that they were saying that they did not know Christ; and it could mean thai they were denying his authority. But it is not as simple as that; one might say that it is not as honest as that. We have seen that these men claimed to be Christians; more, they claimed to be the wisest and the most advanced of Christians. Let us take a human analogy. Suppose ii man says that he loves his wife and yet is consistently unfaithful to her. By his acts of infidelity he denies, gives the lie to his words of love. Suppose a man protests eternal friendship to someone, and yet is consistently disloyal to him. His actions deny, give the lie to, his protestations of friendship. What these evil men, who were troubling Peter’s people, were doing, was to say that they loved and served Christ, while the things they taught and did were a complete denial of him.
(iii) The end of these evil men was destruction. They were insidiously introducing destructive heresies, but these heresies would in the end destroy themselves. There is no more certain way to ultimate condemnation than to teach another to sin.
THE WORK OF FALSEHOOD
2Pet. 2:2-3
And many will follow the way of their blatant immoralities and through them the true way will be brought into disrepute. In their evil ambition they will exploit you with cunningly forged arguments. Their sentence was settled long ago, and now it is not inactive, and their destruction is not asleep.
In this short passage we see four things about the false teachers and their teaching.
(i) We see the cause of false teaching. It is evil ambition. The word is pleonexia (GSN4124); pleon (GSN4119) means more and -exia comes from the verb echein (GSN2192), which means to have. Pleonexia (GSN4124) is the desire to possess more but it acquires a certain flavour. It is by no means always a sin to desire to possess more; there are many cases in which that is a perfectly honourable desire, as in the case of virtue, or knowledge, or skill. But pleonexia (GSN4124) comes to mean the desire to possess that which a man has no right to desire, still less to take. So it can mean covetous desire for money and for other people’s goods; lustful desire for someone’s person; unholy ambition for prestige and power. False teaching comes from the desire to put its own ideas in the place of the truth of Jesus Christ; the false teacher is guilty of nothing less than of usurping the place of Christ.
(ii) We see the method of false teaching. It is the use of cunningly forged arguments. Falsehood is easily resisted when it is presented as falsehood; it is when it is disguised as truth that it becomes menacing. There is only one touchstone. Any teacher’s teaching must be tested by the words and presence of Jesus Christ himself.
(iii) We see the affect of the false teaching. It was twofold. It encouraged men to take the way of blatant immorality. The word is aselgeia (GSN0766) which describes the attitude of the man who is lost to shame and cares for the judgment of neither man nor God. We must remember what was at the back of this false teaching. It was perverting the grace of God into a justification for sin. The false teachers were telling men that grace was inexhaustible and that, therefore, they were free to sin as they liked for grace would forgive.
This false teaching had a second effect. It brought Christianity into disrepute. In the early days, just as now, every Christian was a good or bad advertisement for Christianity and the Christian Church. It is Paul’s accusation to the Jews that through them the name of God has been brought into disrepute (Rom.2:24). In the Pastoral Epistles the younger women are urged to behave with such modesty and chastity that the Church will never be brought into disrepute (Tit.2:5). Any teaching which produces a person who repels men from Christianity instead of attracting them to it is false teaching, and the work of those who are enemies of Christ.
(iv) We see the ultimate end of false teaching and that is destruction. Sentence was passed on the false prophets long ago; the Old Testament pronounced their doom (Deut.13:1-5). It might look as if that sentence had become inoperative or was slumbering, but it was still valid, and the day would come when the false teachers would pay the terrible price of their falsehood. No man who leads another astray will ever escape his own judgment.
THE FATE OF THE WICKED AND THE RESCUE OF THE RIGHTEOUS
2Pet. 2:4-11
If God did not spare even angels who had sinned, but condemned them to the lowest hell and committed them to the pits of darkness, where they remain kept for judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved in safety Noah, the preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when he despatched the flood on a world of impious men; if he reduced the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, when he sentenced them to destruction and so gave an example of what would happen to those who would one day act with impiety, but rescued righteous Lot, who was distressed by the blatantly immoral conduct of lawless men, for, to such a man, righteous in his looking and in his hearing, it was torture for his righteous soul to live his daily life amidst such people and amidst such lawless deeds–if all this is so, you can be sure that the Lord knows how to rescue truly religious men from trial and how to preserve the unrighteous under punishment, until the day of judgment comes, especially those whose lives are dominated by the polluting lusts of the flesh and who despise the celestial powers. Audacious, self-willed men they are. they do not shrink from speaking evil of the angelic glories, whereas angels who are greater in strength and power do not bring an accusation of evil against them in the presence of the Lord.
Here is a passage which for us combines undoubted power and equally undoubted obscurity. The white heat of its rhetorical intensity glows through it to this day; but it moves in allusions which would be terrifyingly effective to those who heard it for the first time, but which have become unfamiliar to us today. It cites three notorious examples of sin and its destruction; and in two of the cases it shows how, when sin was obliterated, righteousness was rescued and preserved by the mercy and the grace of God. Let us look at these examples one by one.
1. THE SIN OF THE ANGELS
Before we retell the story which lies behind this in Jewish legend, there are two separate words at which we must look.
Peter says that God condemned the sinning angels to the lowest depths of hell. Literally the Greek says that God condemned the angels to Tartarus (tartaroun, GSN5020). Tartarus was not a Hebrew conception but Greek. In Greek mythology Tartarus was the lowest hell; it was as far beneath Hades as the heaven is high above the earth. In particular it was the place into which there had been cast the Titans who had rebelled against Zeus, the Father of gods and men.
The second word is that which speaks of the pits of darkness. Here there is a doubt. There are two Greek words, both rather uncommon, which are confused in this passage. One is siros or seiros which originally meant a great earthenware jar for the storing of grain. Then it came to mean the great underground pits in which grain was stored and which served as granaries. Siros has come into English via Provencal in the form of silo, which still describes the towers in which grain is stored. Still later the word went on to mean a pit in which a wolf or other wild animal was trapped. If we think that this is the word which Peter uses, and according to the best manuscripts it is, it will mean that the wicked angels were cast into great subterranean pits and kept there in darkness and in punishment. This well suits the idea of a Tartarus beneath the lowest depths of Hades.
But there is a very similar word seira (GSN4577), which means a chain. This is the word which the King James Version translates when it speaks of chains of darkness (2Pet. 2:4). The Greek manuscripts of Second Peter vary between seiroi (GSN4577), pits, and seirai (GSN4577), chains. But the better manuscripts have seiroi (GSN4577), and pits o darkness makes better sense than chains of darkness; so we may take seiros (GSN4577) as right, and assume that here the King James Version is in error.
The story of the fall of the angels is one which rooted itself deeply in Hebrew thought and which underwent much development as the years went on. The original story is in Gen.6:1-5. There the angels are called the sons of God, as they commonly are in the Old Testament. In Job, the sons of God come to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan comes amongst them (Jb.1:6; compare Jb.2:1; Jb.38:7). The Psalmist speaks of the sons of gods (Ps.89:6). These angels came to earth and seduced mortal women. The result of this lustful union was the race of giants; and through them wickedness came upon the earth. Clearly this is an old, old story belonging to the childhood of the race.
This story was much developed in the Book of Enoch, and it is from it that Peter is drawing his allusions, for in his day that was a book which everyone would know. In Enoch the angels are called The Watchers. Their leader in rebellion was Semjaza or Azazel. At his instigation they descended to Mount Hermon in the days of Jared, the father of Enoch. They took mortal wives and instructed them in magic and in arts which gave them power. They produced the race of the giants, and the giants produced the nephilim (HSN5303), the giants who inhabited the land of Canaan and of whom the people were afraid (Num.13:33).
These giants became cannibals and were guilty of every kind of lust and crime, and especially of insolent arrogance to God and man. The apocryphal literature has many references to them and their pride. Wisdom (Wis.14:6) tells how the proud giants perished. Ecclesiasticus (Sir.16:7) tells how the ancient giants fell away in the strength of their foolishness. They had no wisdom and they perished in their folly (Bar.3:26-28). Josephus says that they were arrogant and contemptuous of all that was good and trusted in their own strength (Antiquities 1.3.1). Job says that God charged his angels with folly (Jb.4:18).
This old story makes a strange and fleeting appearance in the letters of Paul. In 1Cor.11:10 Paul says that women must have their hair covered in the Church because of the angels. Behind that strange saying lies the old belief that it was the loveliness of the long hair of the women of the olden times which moved the angels to desire, and Paul wishes to see that the angels are not tempted again.
In the end even men complained of the sorrow and misery brought into the world by these giants through the sin of the angels. The result was that God sent out his archangels. Raphael bound Azazel hand and foot and shut him up in darkness; Gabriel slew the giants; and the Watchers, the sinning angels, were shut up in the abysses of darkness under the mountains for seventy generations and then confined for ever in everlasting fire. Here is the story which is in Peter’s mind; and which his readers well knew. The angels had sinned and God had sent his destruction, and they were shut up for ever in the pits of darkness and the depths of hell. That is what happens to rebellious sin.
The story does not stop there; and it reappears in another of its forms in this passage of Second Peter. In 2Pet. 2:10 Peter speaks of those who live lives dominated by the polluting lusts of the flesh and who despise the celestial powers. The word is kuriotes (GSN2963), which is the name of one of the ranks of angels. They speak evil of the angelic glories. The word is doxai (GSN1391), which also is a word for one of the ranks of angels. They slander the angels and bring them into disrepute.
Here is where the second turn of the story comes in. Obviously this story of the angels is very primitive and, as time went on, it became rather an awkward and embarrassing story because of its ascription of lust to angels. So in later Jewish and Christian thought two lines of thought developed. First, it was denied that the story involved angels at all. The sons of God were said to be good men who were the descendants of Seth, and the daughters of men were said to be evil women who were the daughters of Cain and corrupted the good men. There is no scriptural evidence for this distinction and this way of escape. Second, the whole story was allegorised. It was claimed, for instance by Philo, that it was never meant to be taken literally and described the fall of the human soul under the attack of the seductions of lustful pleasures. Augustine declared that no man could take this story literally and talk of the angels like that. Cyril of Alexandria said that it could not be taken literally, for did not Jesus say that in the after-life men would be like angels and there would be no marrying or giving in marriage (Matt.22:30)? Chrysostom said that, if the story was taken literally, it was nothing short of blasphemy. And Cyril went on to say that the story was nothing other than an incentive to sin, if it was taken as literally true.
It is clear that men began to see that this was indeed a dangerous story. Here we get our clue as to what Peter means when he speaks of men who despise the celestial powers and bring the angelic glories into disrepute by speaking slanderously of them. The men whom Peter was opposing were turning their religion into an excuse for blatant immorality. Cyril of Alexandria makes it clear that in his day the story could be used as an incentive to sin. Most probably what was happening was that the wicked men of Peter’s time were citing the example of the angels as a justification for their own sin. They were saying, “If angels came from heaven and took mortal women, why should not we?” They were making the conduct of the angels an excuse for their own sin.
We have to go still further with this passage. In 2Pet. 2:11 it finishes very obscurely. It says that angels who are greater in strength and in power do not bring a slanderous charge against them in the presence of God. Once again Peter is speaking allusively, in a way that would be clear enough to the people of his day but which is obscure to us. His reference may be to either of two stories.
(a) He may be referring to the story to which Jude refers in Jd.9; that the archangel Michael was entrusted with the burying of the body of Moses. Satan claimed the body on the grounds that all matter belonged to him and that once Moses had murdered an Egyptian. Michael did not bring a railing charge against Satan; all he said was: “The Lord rebuke you.” The point is that even an angel so great as Michael would not bring an evil charge against an angel so dark as Satan. He left the matter to God. If Michael refrained from slandering an evil angel, how can men bring slanderous charges against the angels of God?
(b) He may be referring to a further development of the Enoch story. Enoch tells that when the conduct of the giants on earth became intolerable, men made their complaint to the archangels Michael, Uriel, Gabriel and Raphael. The archangels took this complaint to God; but they did not rail against the evil angels who were responsible for it all; they simply took the story to God, for him to deal with (Enoch 9).
As far as we can see today, the situation behind Peter’s allusions is that the wicked men who were the slaves of lust claimed that the angels were their examples and their justification and so slandered them; Peter reminds them that not even archangels dared slander other angels and demands how men can dare to do so.
This is a strange and difficult passage; but the meaning is clear. Even angels, when they sinned, were punished. How much more shall men be punished? Angels could not rebel against God and escape the consequences. How shall men escape? And men need not seek to put the blame on others, not even on angels; nothing but their own rebelliousness is responsible for their sin.
2. THE MEN OF THE FLOOD AND THE RESCUE OF NOAH
The second illustration of the destruction of wickedness which Peter chooses may be said to lead on from the first. The sin introduced into the world by the sinning angels led to that intolerable sin which ended in the destruction by the deluge (Gen.6:5). In the midst of this destruction God did not forget those who had clung to him, Noah was saved together with seven others, his wife, his sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and their wives. In Jewish tradition Noah acquired a very special place. Not only was he regarded as the one man who had been saved; but also as the preacher who had done his best to turn men from the evil of their ways. Josephus says, “Many angels of God lay with women and begat sons, who were violent and who despised all good, on account of their reliance on their own strength…. But Noah displeased and distressed at their behaviour, tried to induce them to alter their dispositions and conduct for the better” (Antiquities 1.3.1).
Attention in this passage is concentrated not so much on the people who were destroyed as on the man who was saved. Noah is offered as the type of man who, amidst the destruction of the wicked, receives the salvation of God. His outstanding qualities were two.
(i) In the midst of a sinning generation he remained faithful to God. Later Paul was to urge his people to be not conformed to the world but transformed from it (Rom.12:2). It may well be said that often the most dangerous sin of all is conformity. To be the same as others is always easy; to be different is always difficult. But from the days of Noah until now he who would be the servant of God must be prepared to be different from the world.
(ii) The later legends pick out another characteristic of Noah. He was the preacher of righteousness. The word for preacher used here is kerux (GSN2783), which literally means a herald. Epictetus called the philosopher the kerux (GSN2783) of the gods. The preacher is the man who brings to men an announcement from God. Here is something of very considerable significance. The good man is concerned not only with the saving of his own soul but just as much with the saving of the souls of others. He does not, in order to preserve his own purity live apart from men. He is concerned to bring God’s message to them. A man ought never to keep to himself the grace which he has received. It is always his duty to bring light to those who sit in darkness, guidance to the wanderer and warning to those who are going astray.
3. THE DESTRUCTION OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH AND THE RESCUE OF LOT
The third example is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the rescue of Lot.
The terrible and dramatic story is told in Gen.18-19. It begins with Abraham’s plea that God should not destroy the righteous with the guilty and his request that, if even ten just men are found in these cities, they may be spared (Gen.18:16-33). Then follows one of the grimmest tales in the Old Testament.
The angelic visitors came to Lot and he persuaded them to stay with him; but his house was surrounded by the men of Sodom demanding that these strangers might be brought out for them to use for their unnatural lust (Gen.19:1-11). By that terrible deed–at once the abuse of hospitality, the insulting of angels and the raging of unnatural lust–the doom of the cities was sealed. As the destruction of heaven came upon them Lot and his family were saved, except his wife, who lingered and looked back and turned into a pillar of salt (Gen.19:12-26). “So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the valley, God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot dwelt” (Gen.19:29). Here again is the story of the destruction of sin and the rescue of righteousness. As in Noah, we see in Lot the characteristics of the righteous man.
(i) Lot lived in the midst of evil, and the very sight of it was a constant distress to him. Moffatt reminds us of the saying of Newman: “Our great security against sin lies in being shocked at it.” Here is something very significant. It often happens that, when evils first emerge, people are shocked at them; but, as time goes on, they cease to be shocked at them and accept them as a matter of course. There are many things at which we ought to be shocked. In our own generation there are the problems of prostitution and promiscuity, drunkenness and drugs, the extraordinary gambling fever which has the country in its grip, the breakdown of the marriage bond, violence, vandalism and crime, death upon the roads, still-existing slum conditions and many others. In many cases the tragedy is that these things have ceased to shock and are accepted in a matter-of-fact style as part of the normal order of things. For the good of the world and of our own souls, we must keep alive the sensitiveness which is shocked by sin.
(ii) Lot lived in the midst of evil, and yet he escaped its taint. Amidst the sin of Sodom he remained true to God. If a man will remember it, he has in the grace of God an antiseptic which will preserve him from the infection of sin. No man need be the slave of the environment in which he happens to find himself.
(iii) When the worst came to the worst, Lot was willing to make a clean break with his environment. He was prepared, however much he did not want to do so, to leave it for ever. It was because his wife was not prepared to make the clean break that she perished. There is a strange verse in the Old Testament story. It says that, when Lot lingered, the angelic messengers took hold of his hand (Gen.19:16). There are times when the influence of heaven tries to force us out of some evil situation. It may come to any man to have to make the choice between security and the new start; and there are times when a man can save his soul only by breaking clean away from his present situation and beginning all over again. It was in doing just this that Lot found his salvation; and it was in failing to do just this that his wife lost hers.
THE PICTURE OF THE EVIL MAN
2Pet. 2:4-11 (continued)
2Pet. 2:9-11 give us a picture of the evil man. Peter with a few swift, vivid strokes of the pen paints the outstanding characteristics of him who may properly be called the bad man.
(i) He is the desire-dominated man. His life is dominated by the lusts of the flesh. Such a man is guilty of two sins.
(a) Every man has two sides to his nature. He has a physical side; he has instincts, passions and impulses which he shares with the animal creation. These instincts are good–if they are kept in their proper place. They are even necessary for the preservation of individual life and the continuation of the race. The word temperament literally means a mixture. The picture behind it is that human nature consists of a large variety of ingredients all mixed together. It is clear that the efficacy of any mixture depends on each ingredient being there in its proper proportion. Wherever there is either excess or defect the mixture is not what it ought to be. Man has a physical nature and also a spiritual nature; and manhood depends on a correct mixture of the two. The desire-dominated man has allowed his animal nature to usurp a place it should not have; he has allowed the ingredients to get out of proportion and the recipe for manhood has gone wrong.
(b) There is a reason for this loss of proportion–selfishness. The root evil of the lust-dominated life is that it proceeds on the assumption that nothing matters but the gratification of its own desires and the expression of its own feelings. It has ceased to have any respect or care for others. Selfishness and desire go hand in hand.
The bad man is he who has allowed one side of his nature a far greater place than it ought to have and who has done so because he is essentially selfish.
(ii) He is the audacious man. The Greek is tolmetes (GSN5113), from the verb tolman (GSN5111), to dare. There are two kinds of daring. There is the daring which is a noble thing, the mark of true courage. There is the daring which is an evil thing, the shameless performance of things which are an affront to decency and right. As the character in Shakespeare had it: “I dare do all becomes a man. Who dares do more is none.” The bad man is he who has the audacity to defy the will of God as it is known to him.
(iii) He is the self-willed man. Self-willed is not really an adequate translation. The Greek is authades (GSN0829), derived from autos (GSN0846), self, and hadon, pleasing, and used of a man who had no idea of anything other than pleasing himself. In it there is always the element of obstinacy. If a man is authades (GSN0829), no logic, nor common sense, nor appeal, nor sense of decency will keep him from doing what he wants to do. As R. C. Trench says, “Thus obstinately maintaining his own opinion, or asserting his own rights, he is reckless of the rights, opinions and interests of others.” The man who is authades (GSN0829) is stubbornly and arrogantly and even brutally determined on his own way. The bad man is he who has no regard for either human appeal or divine guidance.
(iv) He is the man who is contemptuous of the angels. We have already seen how this goes back to allusions in Hebrew tradition which are obscure to us. But it has a wider meaning. The bad man insists on living in one world. To him the spiritual world does not exist and he never hears the voices from beyond. He is of the earth earthy. He has forgotten that there is a heaven and is blind and deaf when the sights and sounds of heaven break through to him.
DELUDING SELF AND DELUDING OTHERS
2Pet. 2:12-14
But these, like brute beasts, knowing no law but their instincts, born only for capture and corruption, speak evil of the things about which they know nothing; they will be destroyed with their own corruption, and, like a man who is cheated, they will even lose the reward at which their iniquity aimed. They regard daylight debauchery as pleasure. They are spots and blots, revelling in their dissipations, carousing in their cliques amongst you. They have eyes full of adultery, eyes which can never gaze their fill on sin. They entrap souls which are not firmly founded in the faith. They have a heart which is trained in unbridled ambition for the things they have no right to have. They are accursed.
Peter launches out into a long passage of magnificent invective. Through it glows the fiery heat of flaming moral indignation.
The evil men are like brute beasts, slaves of their animal instincts. But a beast is born only for capture and death, says Peter; it has no other destiny. Even so, there is something self-destroying in fleshly pleasure. To make such pleasure the be-all and the end-all of life is a suicidal policy and in the end even the pleasure is lost. The point Peter is making is this, and it is eternally valid–if a man dedicates himself to these fleshly pleasures, in the end he so ruins himself in bodily health and in spiritual and mental character, that he cannot enjoy even them. The glutton destroys his appetite in the end, the drunkard his health, the sensualist his body, the self-indulgent his character and peace of mind.
These men regard daylight debauchery, dissipated revelling, abandoned carousing as pleasure. They are blots on the Christian fellowship; they are like the blemishes on an animal, which make it unfit to be offered to God. Once again we must note that what Peter is saying is not only religious truth but also sound common sense. The pleasures of the body are demonstrably subject to the law of diminishing returns. In themselves they lose their thrill, so that as time goes on it takes more and more of them to satisfy. The luxury must become ever more luxurious; the wine must flow ever more freely; everything must be done to make the thrill sharper and more intense. Further, a man becomes less and less able to enjoy these pleasures. He has given himself to a life that has no future and to pleasure which ends in pain.
Peter goes on. In 2Pet. 2:14 he uses an extraordinary phrase which, strictly, will not translate into English at all. We have translated it: “They have eyes full of adultery.” The Greek literally is: “They have eyes which are full of an adulteress.” Most probably the meaning is they see a possible adulteress in every woman, wondering how she can be persuaded to gratify their lusts. “The hand and the eye,” said the Jewish teachers, “are the brokers of sin.” As Jesus said, such people look in order to lust (Matt.5:28). They have come to such a stage that they cannot look on anyone without lust’s calculation.
As Peter speaks of this, there is a terrible deliberateness about it. They have hearts trained in unbridled ambition for the things they have no right to have. We have taken a whole phrase to translate the one word pleonexia (GSN4124) which means the desire to have more of the things which a man has no right even to desire, let alone have. The picture is a terrible one. The word used for trained is used for an athlete exercising himself for the games. These people have actually trained their minds to concentrate on nothing but the forbidden desire. They have deliberately fought with conscience until they have destroyed it; they have deliberately struggled with their finer feelings until they have strangled them.
There remains in this passage one further charge. It would be bad if these people deluded only themselves; it is worse that they delude others. They entrap souls not firmly founded in the faith. The word used for to entrap is deleazein (GSN1185), which means to catch with a bait. A man becomes really bad when he sets out to make others as bad as himself. The hymn has it:
All the mischief we have wrought, All forbidden things we’ve sought, All the sin to others taught: Forgive, O Lord, for Jesus’ sake.
Every man must bear the responsibility for his own sins, but to add to that the responsibility for the sins of others is to carry an intolerable burden.
ON THE WRONG ROAD
2Pet. 2:15-16
They have left the straight road and have gone awandering, and have followed the road of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved the profit which unrighteousness brings and who was convicted of his lawlessness. A dumb ass spoke with a man’s voice and checked the prophet’s folly.
Peter likens the evil men of his time to the prophet Balaam. In the popular Jewish mind Balaam had come to stand as the type of all false prophets. His story is told in Num.22-24. Balak, King of Moab, was alarmed at the steady and apparently irresistible advance of the Israelites. In an attempt to check it he sent for Balaam to come and curse the Israelites for him, offering him great rewards. To the end of the day Balaam refused to curse the Israelites, but his covetous heart longed after the rich rewards which Balak was offering. At Balak’s renewed request Balaam played with fire enough to agree to meet him. On the way his ass stopped, because it saw the angel of the Lord standing in its path, and rebuked Balaam.
It is true that Balaam did not succumb to Balak’s bribes, but if ever a man wanted to accept a bribe, that man was he. In Num.25 there follows another story. It tells how the Israelites were seduced into the worship of Baal and into lustful alliances with Moabite women. Jewish belief was that Balaam was responsible for leading the children of Israel astray; and when the Israelites entered into possession of the land, “Balaam the son of Beor they slew with the sword” (Num.31:8). In view of all this Balaam became increasingly the type of the false prophet. He had two characteristics which were repeated in the evil men of Peter’s day.
(i) Balaam was covetous. As the Numbers story unfolds we can see his fingers itching to get at the gold of Balak. True, he did not take it; but the desire was there. The evil men of Peter’s day were covetous; out for what they could get and ready to exploit their membership of the Church for gain.
(ii) Balaam taught Israel to sin. He led the people out of the straight and into the crooked way. He persuaded them to forget their promises to God. The evil men of Peter’s day were seducing Christians from the Christian way and causing them to break the pledges of loyalty they had given to Jesus Christ.
The man who loves gain and who lures others to evil for ever stands condemned.
THE PERILS OF RELAPSE
2Pet. 2:17-22
These people are waterless springs, mists driven by a squall of wind; and the gloom of darkness is reserved for them. With talk at once arrogant and futile, they ensnare by appeals to shameless, sensual passions those who are only just escaping from the company of those who live in error. promising them freedom, while they themselves are the slaves of moral corruption; for a man is in a state of slavery to that which has reduced him to helplessness.
If they have escaped the pollution of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and if they allow themselves again to become involved in these things and to be reduced to moral helplessness by them, the last state is for them worse than the first. It would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it and then to turn back from the holy commandment which was handed down to them. In them the truth of the proverb is plain to see: “A dog returns to his own vomit” and “The sow which has been washed returns to rolling in the mud.”
Peter is still rolling out his tremendous denunciation of the evil men.
They flatter only to deceive. They are like wells with no water and like mists blown past by a squall of wind. Think of a traveller in the desert being told that ahead lies a spring where he can quench his thirst and then arriving at that spring to find it dried up and useless. Think of the husbandman praying for rain for his parched crops and then seeing the cloud that promised rain blown uselessly by. As Bigg has it: “A teacher without knowledge is like a well without water.” These men are like Milton’s shepherds whose “hungry sheep look up and are not fed.” They promise a gospel and in the end have nothing to offer the thirsty soul.
Their teaching is a combination of arrogance and futility. Christian liberty always carries danger. Paul tells his people that they have indeed been called to liberty but that they must not use it for an occasion to the flesh (Gal.5:13). Peter tells his people that indeed they are free but they must not use their freedom as a cloak of maliciousness (1Pet. 2:16). These false teachers offered freedom, but it was freedom to sin as much as a man liked. They appealed not to the best but to the worst in a man. Peter is quite clear that they did this because they were slaves to their own lusts. Seneca said, “To be enslaved to oneself is the heaviest of all servitudes.” Persius spoke to the lustful debauchees of his day of “the masters that grow up within that sickly breast of yours.” These teachers were offering liberty when they themselves were slaves, and the liberty they were offering was the liberty to become slaves of lust. Their message was arrogant because it was the contradiction of the message of Christ; it was futile because he who followed it would find himself a slave. Here again in the background is the fundamental heresy which makes grace a justification for sin instead of a power and a summons to nobility.
If they have once known the real way of Christ and have relapsed into this, their case is even worse. They are like the man in the parable whose last state was worse than his first (Matt.12:45; Lk.11:26). If a man has never known the right way, he cannot be condemned for not following it. But, if he has known it and then deliberately taken the other way, he sins against the light; and it were better for him that he had never known the truth, for his knowledge of the truth has become his condemnation. A man should never forget the responsibility which knowledge brings.
Peter ends with contempt. These evil men are like dogs who return to their vomit (Prov.26:11) or like a sow which has been scrubbed and then goes back to rolling in the mud. They have seen Christ but are so morally degraded by their own choice that they prefer to wallow in the depths of sin rather than to climb the heights of virtue. It is a dreadful warning that a man can make himself such that in the end the tentacles of sin are inextricably around him and virtue for him has lost its beauty.
THE PRINCIPLES OF PREACHING
2Pet. 3:1-2
Beloved, this is now the second letter that I have written to you, and my object in both of them is to rouse by reminder your pure mind to remember the words spoken by the prophets in former times, and the commandment of the Lord and Saviour which was brought to you by your apostles.
In this passage we see clearly displayed the principles of preaching which Peter observed.
(i) He believed in the value of repetition. He knows that it is necessary for a thing to be said over and over again if it is to penetrate the mind. When Paul was writing to the Philippians, he said that to repeat the same thing over and over again was not a weariness to him, and for them it was the only safe way (Php.3:1). It is by continued repetition that the rudiments of knowledge are settled in the mind of the child. There is something of significance here. It may well be that often we are too desirous of novelty, too eager to say new things, when what is needed is a repetition of the eternal truths which men so quickly forget and whose significance they so often refuse to see. There are certain foods of which a man does not get tired, necessary for his daily sustenance they are set before him every day. We speak about a man’s daily bread And there are certain great Christian truths which have to be repeated again and again and which must never be pushed into the background in the desire for novelty.
(ii) He believed in the need for reminder. Again and again the New Testament makes it clear that preaching and teaching are so often not the introducing of new truth but the reminding of a man of what he already knows. Moffatt quotes a saying of Dr. Johnson: “It is not sufficiently considered that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.” The Greeks spoke of “time which wipes all things out,” as if the human mind were a slate and time a sponge which passes across it with a certain erasing quality. We are so often in the position of men whose need is not so much to be taught as to be reminded of what we already know.
(iii) He believed in the value of a compliment. It is his intention to rouse their pure mind. The word he uses for pure is eilikrines (GSN1506), which may have either of two meanings. lt may mean that which is sifted until there is no admixture of chaff left; or it may mean that which is so flawless that it may be held up to the light of the sun. Plato uses this same phrase–eilikrines (GSN1506) dianoia (GSN1271)–in the sense of pure reason, reason which is unaffected by the seductive influence of the senses. By using this phrase Peter appeals to his people as having minds uncontaminated by heresy. It is as if he said to them: “You really are fine people–if you would only remember it.” The approach of the preacher should so often be that his hearers are not wretched creatures who deserve to be damned but splendid creatures who must be saved. They are not so much like rubbish fit to be burned as like jewels to be rescued from the mud into which they have fallen. Donald Hankey tells of “the beloved captain” whose men would follow him anywhere. He looked at them and they looked at him, and they were filled with the determination to be what he believed them to be. We always get further with people when we believe in them than when we despise them.
(iv) He believed in the unity of Scripture. As he saw it there was a pattern in Scripture; and the Bible was a book centred in Christ. The Old Testament foretells Christ; the gospels tell of Jesus the Christ; and the apostles bring the message of that Christ to men.
THE DENIAL OF THE SECOND COMING
2Pet. 3:3-4
To begin with, you are well aware that in the last days there will come mockers with their mocking, guiding their steps by the law of their own lusts and saying, “What has happened to the promise of his Coming? For, since the day when our fathers fell asleep, everything remains the same as it was from the foundation of the world.”
The characteristic of the heretics which worried Peter most of all was their denial of the Second Coming of Jesus. Literally, their question was: “Where is the promise of his Coming?” That was a form of Hebrew expression which implied that the thing asked about did not exist at all. “Where is the God of justice?” asked the evil men of Malachi’s day (Mal.2:17). “Where is your God?” the heathen demanded of the Psalmist (Ps.42:3; Ps.79:10). “Where is the word of the Lord?” his enemies asked Jeremiah (Jer.17:15). In every case the implication of the question is that the thing or the person asked about does not exist. The heretics of Peter’s day were denying that Jesus Christ would ever come again. It will be best here at the beginning to summarize their argument and Peter’s answer to it.
The argument of Peter’s opponents was twofold (2Pet. 3:4). “What has happened,” they demanded, “to the promise of the Second Coming?” Their first argument was that the promise had been so long delayed that it was safe to take it that it would never be fulfilled. Their second assertion was that their fathers had died and the world was going on precisely as it always did. Their argument was that this was characteristically a stable universe and convulsive upheavals like the Second Coming did not happen in such a universe.
Peter’s response is also twofold. He deals with the second argument first (2Pet. 3:5-7). His argument is that, in fact, this is not a stable universe, that once it was destroyed by water in the time of the Flood and that a second destruction, this time by fire, is on the way.
The second part of his reply is in 2Pet. 3:8-9. His opponents speak of a delay so long that they can safely assume that the Second Coming is not going to happen at all. Peter’s is a double answer. (a) We must see time as God sees it. With him a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. “God does not pay every Friday night.” (b) In any event God’s apparent slowness to act is not dilatoriness. It is, in fact, mercy. He holds his hand in order to give sinning men another chance to repent and find salvation.
Peter goes on to his conclusion (2Pet. 3:10). The Second Coming is on the way and it will come with a sudden terror and destruction which will dissolve the universe in melting heat.
Finally comes his practical demand in face of all this. If we are living in a universe on which Jesus Christ is going to descend and which is hastening towards the destruction of the wicked, surely it behaves us to live in holiness so that we may be spared when the terrible day does come. The Second Coming is used as a tremendous motive for moral amendment so that a man may prepare himself to meet his God.
Such, then, is the general scheme of this chapter and now we look at it section by section.
DESTRUCTION BY FLOOD
2Pet. 3:5-6
What they wilfully fail to see is that long ago the heavens were created and the earth was composed out of water and through water; and through these waters the ancient world perished, when it was overwhelmed in a deluge of water.
Peter’s first argument is that the world is not eternally stable. The point he is making is that the ancient world was destroyed by water, just as the present world is going to be destroyed by fire. The detail of this passage is, however, difficult.
He says that the earth was composed out of water and through water. According to the Genesis story in the beginning there was a kind of watery chaos. “The Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters…. God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters” (Gen.1:2,6). Out of this watery chaos the world was formed. Further, it is through water that the world is sustained, because life is sustained by the rain which comes down from the skies. What Peter means is that the world was created out of water and is sustained by water; and it was through this same element that the ancient world was destroyed.
Further to clarify this passage we have to note that the flood legend developed. As so often in Second Peter and Jude the picture behind this comes not directly from the Old Testament but from the Book of Enoch. In Enoch 83: 3-5 Enoch has a vision: “I saw in a vision how the heaven collapsed and fell to the earth, and, where it fell to the earth, I saw how the earth was swallowed up in a great abyss.” In the later stories the flood involved not only the obliteration of sinners but the total destruction of heaven and earth. So the warning which Peter is giving may be put like this: “You say that as things are, so they have ever been and so they ever will be. You build your hopes on the idea that this is an unchanging universe. You are wrong, for the ancient world was formed out of water and was sustained by water, and it perished in the flood.”
We may say that this is only an old legend more than half-buried in the antiquities of the past. But we cannot say that a passage like this has no significance for us. When we strip away the old Jewish legend and its later development, we are still left with this permanent truth that the man who will read history with open eyes can see within it the moral law at work and God’s dealings with men. Froude, the great historian, said that history is a voice sounding across the centuries that in the end it is always ill with the wicked and well with the good. When Oliver Cromwell was arranging his son Richard’s education, he said, “I would have him know a little history.” In fact, the lesson of history is that there is a moral order in the universe and that he who defies it does so at his peril.
DESTRUCTION BY FIRE
2Pet. 3:7
But by the same word the present heavens and earth are treasured up for fire, reserved for the day of judgment and the destruction of impious men.
It is Peter’s conviction that, as the ancient world was destroyed by water, the present world will be destroyed by fire. He says that that is stated “by the same word.” What he means is that the Old Testament tells of the flood in the past and warns of the destruction by fire in the future. There are many passages in the prophets which he would take quite literally and which must have been in his mind. Joel foresaw a time when God would show blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke (Jl.2:30). The Psalmist has a picture in which, when God comes, a devouring fire shall precede him (Ps.50:3). Isaiah speaks of a flame of devouring fire (Isa.29:6; Isa.30:30). The Lord will come with fire; by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh (Isa.66:15-16). Nahum has it that the hills melt and the earth is burned at his presence; his fury is poured out like fire (Nah.1:5-6). In the picture of Malachi the day of the Lord shall burn as an oven (Mal.4:1). If the old pictures are taken literally, Peter has plenty of material for his prophecy.
The Stoics also had a doctrine of the destruction of the world by fire; but it was a grim thing. They held that the universe completed a cycle; that it was consumed in flames; and that everything then started all over again, exactly as it was. They had the strange idea that at the end of the cycle the planets were in exactly the same position as when the world began. “This produces the conflagration and destruction of everything which exists,” says Chrysippus. He goes on: “Then again the universe is restored anew in a precisely similar arrangement as before…Socrates and Plato and each individual man will live again, with the same friends and fellow-citizens. They will go through the same experiences and the same activities. Every city and village and field will be restored, just as it was. And this restoration of the universe takes place, not once, but over and over again–indeed to all eternity without end…. For there will never be any new thing other than that which has been before, but everything is repeated down to the minutest detail.” History as an eternal tread-mill, the unceasing recurrence of the sins, the sorrows and the mistakes of men–that is one of the grimmest views of history that the mind of man has ever conceived.
It must always be remembered that, as the Jewish prophets saw it, and as Peter saw it, this world will be destroyed with the conflagration of God but the result will not be obliteration and the grim repetition of what has been before; the result will be a new heaven and a new earth. For the biblical view of the world there is something beyond destruction; there is the new creation of God. The worst that the prophet can conceive is not the death agony of the old world so much as the birth pangs of the new.
THE MERCY OF GOD’S DELAY
2Pet. 3:8-9
Beloved, you must not shut your eyes to this one fact that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. It is not that God is dilatory in fulfilling his promise, as some people reckon dilatoriness; but it is that for your sakes he patiently withholds his hand, because he does not wish any to perish, but wishes all to take the way to repentance.
There are in this passage three great truths on which to nourish the mind and rest the heart.
(i) Time is not the same to God as it is to man. As the Psalmist had it: “A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night” (Ps.90:4). When we think of the world’s hundreds of thousands of years of existence, it is easy to feel dwarfed into insignificance; when we think of the slowness of human progress, it is easy to become discouraged into pessimism. There is comfort in the thought of a God who has all eternity to work in. It is only against the background of eternity that things appear in their true proportions and assume their real value.
(ii) We can also see from this passage that time is always to be regarded as an opportunity. As Peter saw it, the years God gave the world were a further opportunity for men to repent and turn to him. Every day which comes to us is a gift of mercy. It is an opportunity to develop ourselves; to render some service to our fellow-men; to take one step nearer to God.
(iii) Finally, there is another echo of a truth which so often lies in the background of New Testament thought. God, says Peter, does not wish any to perish. God, says Paul, has shut them all up together in unbelief, that he might have mercy on all (Rom.11:32). Timothy in a tremendous phrase speaks of God who will have all men to be saved (1Tim.2:4). Ezekiel hears God ask: “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, and not rather that he should return from his way and live?” (Eze.18:23).
Ever and again there shines in Scripture the glint of the larger hope. We are not forbidden to believe that somehow and some time the God who loves the world will bring the whole world to himself.
THE DREADFUL DAY
2Pet. 3:10
But when it does come, the Day of the Lord will come as a thief and in it the heavens will pass away with a crackling roar; the stars will blaze and melt; and the earth and all its works will disappear.
It inevitably happens that a man has to speak and think in the terms which he knows. That is what Peter is doing here. He is speaking of the New Testament doctrine of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, but he is describing it in terms of the Old Testament doctrine of the Day of the Lord.
The Day of the Lord is a conception which runs all through the prophetic books of the Old Testament. The Jews saw time in terms of two ages–this present age, which is wholly bad and past remedy; and the age to come, which is the golden age of God. How was the one to turn into the other? The change could not come about by human effort or by a process of development, for the world was on the way to destruction. As the Jews saw it, there was only one way in which the change could happen; it must be by the direct intervention of God. The time of that intervention they called the Day of the Lord. It was to come without warning. It was to be a time when the universe was shaken to its foundations. It was to be a time when the judgment and obliteration of sinners would come to pass and, therefore, it would be a time of terror. “Behold the Day of the Lord comes, cruel with wrath and fierce anger, to make the earth a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it” (Isa.13:9). “The Day of the Lord is coming, it is near, a day of darkness and of gloom, a day of clouds and of thick darkness” (Jl.2:1-2). “A day of wrath is that day, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness” (Zeph.1:14-18). “The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes” (Jl.2:30-31). “The stars of the heaven and their constellations shall not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising and the moon will not shed its light…. Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place, at the wrath of the Lord of hosts in the day of his fierce anger” (Isa.13:10-13).
What Peter and many of the New Testament writers did was to identify the Old Testament pictures of the Day of the Lord with the New Testament conception of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Peter’s picture here of the Second Coming of Jesus is drawn in terms of the Old Testament picture of the Day of the Lord.
He uses one very vivid phrase. He says that the heavens will pass away with a crackling roar (roizedon, GSN4500). That word is used for the whirring of a bird’s wings in the air, for the sound a spear makes as it hurtles through the air, for the crackling of the flames of a forest fire.
We need not take these pictures with crude literalism. It is enough to note that Peter sees the Second Coming as a time of terror for those who are the enemies of Christ.
One thing has to be held in the memory. The whole conception of the Second Coming is full of difficulty. But this is sure–there comes a day when God breaks into every life, for there comes a day when we must die; and for that day we must be prepared. We may say what we will about the Coming of Christ as a future event; we may feel it is a doctrine we have to lay on one side; but we cannot escape from the certainty of the entry of God into our own experience.
THE MORAL DYNAMIC
2Pet. 3:11-14
Since these things are going to be dissolved like that, what kind of people ought you to be, living a life of constant holiness and true piety, you who are eagerly awaiting and doing your best to hasten on the Day of the Lord, by whose action the heavens will burn and be dissolved and the stars blaze and melt! For it is new heavens and a new earth, as he promised, for which we wait, in which righteousness has its home. So, then, beloved, since these are the things for which you eagerly wait, be eager to be found by him at peace, without spot and blemish.
The one thing in which Peter is supremely interested is the moral dynamic of the Second Coming. If these things are going to happen and the world is hastening to judgment, obviously a man must live a life of piety and of holiness. If there are to be a new heaven and a new earth and if that heaven and earth are to be the home of righteousness, obviously a man must seek with all his mind and heart and soul and strength to be fit to be a dweller in that new world. To Peter, as Moffatt puts it, “it was impossible to give up the hope of the advent without ethical deterioration.” Peter was right. If there is nothing in the nature of a Second Coming, nothing in the nature of a goal to which the whole creation moves, then life is going nowhere. That, in fact, was the heathen position. If there is no goal, either for the world or for the individual life, other than extinction, certain attitudes to life become well-nigh inevitable. These attitudes emerge in heathen epitaphs.
(i) If there is nothing to come, a man may well decide to make what he can of the pleasures of this world. So we come on an epitaph like this: “I was nothing: I am nothing. So thou who art still alive, eat, drink, and be merry.”
(ii) If there is nothing to live for, a man may well be utterly indifferent. Nothing matters much if the end of everything is extinction, in which a man will not even be aware that he is extinguished. So we come on such an epitaph as this: “Once I had no existence; now I have none. I am not aware of it. It does not Concern me.”
(iii) If there is nothing to live for but extinction and the world is going nowhere, there can enter into life a kind of lostness. Man ceases to be in any sense a pilgrim for there is nowhere to which he can make pilgrimage. He must simply drift in a kind of lostness, coming from nowhere and on the way to nowhere. So we come on an epigram like that of Callimachus. “Charidas, what is below?” “Deep darkness.” “But what of the paths upward?” “All a lie.” “And Pluto?” (The God of the underworld). “Mere talk.” “Then we’re lost.” Even the heathen found a certain almost intolerable quality in a life without a goal.
When we have stripped the doctrine of the Second Coming of all its temporary and local imagery, the tremendous truth it conserves is that life is going somewhere–and without that conviction there is nothing to live for.
HASTENING THE DAY
2Pet. 3:11-14 (continued)
There is in this passage still another great conception. Peter speaks of the Christian as not only eagerly awaiting the Coming of Christ but as actually hastening it on. The New Testament tells us certain ways in which this may be done.
(i) It may be done by prayer. Jesus taught us to pray: “Thy Kingdom come” (Matt.6:10). The earnest prayer of the Christian heart hastens the coming of the King. If in no other way, it does so in this–that he who prays opens his own heart for the entry of the King.
(ii) It may be done by preaching. Matthew tells us that Jesus said, “And this gospel of the Kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come” (Matt.24:14). All men must be given the chance to know and to love Jesus Christ before the end of creation is reached. The missionary activity of the Church is the hastening of the coming of the King.
(iii) It may be done by penitence and obedience. Of all things this would be nearest to Peter’s mind and heart. The Rabbis had two sayings: “It is the sins of the people which prevent the coming of the Messiah. If the Jews would genuinely repent for one day, the Messiah would come.” The other form of the saying means the same: “If Israel would perfectly keep the law for one day, the Messiah would come.” In true penitence and in real obedience a man opens his own heart to the coming of the King and brings nearer that coming throughout the world. We do well to remember that our coldness of heart and our disobedience delay the coming of the King.
PERVERTERS OF SCRIPTURE
2Pet. 3:15-16
Regard the Lord’s willingness to wait as an opportunity of salvation, as indeed our beloved brother Paul has written to us, in the wisdom which has been given to him, and as he says in all his letters, when he touches on these subjects, letters which contain some things which are difficult to understand, things which those who lack knowledge and a firm foundation in the faith twist, as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Peter here cites Paul as teaching the same things as he himself teaches. It may be that he is citing Paul as agreeing that a pious and a holy life is necessary in view of the approaching Second Coming of the Lord. More likely, he is citing Paul as agreeing that the fact that God withholds his hand is to be regarded not as indifference on God’s part but as an opportunity to repent and to accept Jesus Christ. Paul speaks of those who despise the riches of God’s goodness and forbearance and patience, forgetting that his kindness is designed to lead a man to repentance (Rom.2:4). More than once Paul stresses the forbearance and the patience of God (Rom.3:25; Rom.9:22). Both Peter and Paul were agreed that the fact that God withholds his hand is never to be used as an excuse for sinning but always as a means of repentance and an opportunity of amendment.
With its reference to Paul and its tinge of criticism of him, this is one of the most intriguing passages in the New Testament. It was this passage which made John Calvin certain that Peter did not himself write Second Peter because, he says, Peter would never have spoken about Paul like this. What do we learn from it?
(i) We learn that Paul’s letters by this time were known and used throughout the Church. They are spoken of in such a way as to make it clear that they have been collected and published, and that they are generally available and widely read. We are fairly certain that it was about the year A.D. 90 that Paul’s letters were collected and published in Ephesus. This means that Second Peter cannot have been written before that and, therefore, cannot be the work of Peter, who was martyred in the middle sixties of the century.
(ii) It tells us that Paul’s letters have come to be regarded as Scripture. The misguided men twist them as they do the other Scriptures. This again goes to prove that Second Peter must come from a time well on in the history of the early Church, for it would take many generations for the letters of Paul to rank alongside the Scriptures of the Old Testament.
(iii) It is a little difficult to determine just what the attitude to Paul is in this passage. He is writing “in the wisdom which has been given to him.” Bigg says neatly that this phrase can be equally a commendation or a caution! The truth is that Paul suffered the fate of all outstanding men. He had his critics. He suffered the fate of all who fearlessly face and fearlessly state the truth. Some regarded him as great but dangerous.
(iv) There are things in Paul’s letters which are hard to understand and which ignorant people twist to their own ruin. The word used for hard to understand is dusnoetos (GSN1425), which is used of the utterance of an oracle. The utterances of Greek oracles were always ambiguous. There is the classic example of the king about to go to war who consulted the oracle at Delphi and was given the answer: “If you go to war, you will destroy a great nation.” He took this as a prophecy that he would destroy his enemies; but it happened that he was so utterly defeated that by going to war he destroyed his own country. This was typical of the dangerous ambiguity of the ancient oracles. It is that very word which Peter uses of the writings of Paul. They have things in them which are as difficult to interpret as the ambiguous utterance of an oracle.
Not only, Peter says, are there things in Paul’s writings that are hard to understand; there are things which a man may twist to his own destruction. Three things come immediately to mind. Paul’s doctrine of grate was twisted into an excuse and even a reason for sin (Rom.6). Paul’s doctrine of Christian.freedom was twisted into an excuse for unchristian licence (Gal.5:13). Paul’s doctrine of faith was twisted into an argument that Christian action was unimportant, as we see in James (Jas. 2:14-26).
G. K. Chesterton once said that orthodoxy was like walking along a narrow ridge; one step to either side was a step to disaster. Jesus is God and man; God is love and holiness; Christianity is grace and morality; the Christian lives in this world and lives in the world of eternity. Overstress either side of these great two-sided truths, and at once destructive heresy emerges. One of the most tragic things in life is when a man twists Christian truth and Holy Scripture into an excuse and even a reason for doing what he wants to do instead of taking them as guides for doing what God wants him to do.
A FIRM FOUNDATION AND A CONTINUAL GROWTH
2Pet. 3:17-18
As far as you are concerned. beloved, you have been forewarned. You must, therefore, be on your guard not to be carried away by the error of lawless men and so to fall from your own foundation; rather, you must see to it that you grow in grace and in understanding of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
To him be glory both now and to the day of eternity.
In conclusion Peter tells us certain things about the Christian life.
(i) The Christian is a man who is forewarned. That is to say, he cannot plead ignorance. He knows the right way and its rewards; he knows the wrong way and its disasters. He has no right to expect an easy way, for he has been told that Christianity means a cross, and he has been warned that there will always be those who are ready to attack and to pervert the faith. To be forewarned is to be forearmed; but to be forewarned is also a grave responsibility, for he who knows the right and does the wrong is under a double condemnation.
(ii) The Christian is a man with a basis for life. He ought to be rooted and founded in the faith. There are certain things of which he is absolutely certain. James Agate once declared that his mind was not a bed to be made and remade but that on certain things it was finally made up. There is a certain inflexibility in the Christian life; there is a certain basis of belief which never changes. The Christian will never cease to believe that, “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Php.2:11); and he will never cease to be aware that there is laid on him the duty of making his life fit his belief.
(iii) The Christian is a man with a developing life. The inflexibility of the Christian life is not the rigidity of death. The Christian must daily experience the wonder of grace, and daily grow in the gifts which grace can bring; and he must daily enter more and more deeply into the wonder which is in Jesus Christ. It is only on a firm foundation that a great building can tower into the air; and it is only because it has a deep root that a great tree can reach out to the sky with its branches. The Christian life is at once a life with a firm foundation and with an ever outward and upward growth.
And so the letter finishes by giving glory to Christ, both now and to the end of time.
FURTHER READING
James
E. C. Blackman, The Epistle of St. James (Tch; E) J. B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James (MmC; G) C. L. Mitton, The Epistle of St. James J. Moffatt, The General Epistles: James, Peter and Jude (MC; E) J. H. Ropes, St. James (ICC; G)
1 Peter
F. W. Beare, The First Epistle of Peter (G) E. Best, 1 Peter (NCB; E) C. Bigg, St. Peter and St. Jude (ICC; G) C. E. B. Cranfield, 1 and 2 Peter and Jude (Tch; E) E. G. Selwyn, The First Epistle of St. Peter (MmC; G)
2 Peter
C. Bigg, St. Peter and St. Jude (ICC; G) C. E. B. Cranfield, 1 and 2 Peter and Jude (Tch; E) J. B. Mayor, The Second Epistle of St. Peter and the Epistle of St. Jude (MmC; G) J. Moffatt, The General Epistles: James, Peter and Jude (MC; E)
Abbreviations
ICC : International Critical Commentary MC : Moffatt Commentary MmC : Macmillan Commentary NCB : New Century Bible Tch : Torch Commentary
E : English Text G : Greek Text