2 Peter

Grace and peace are multiplied “through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord” (1:2), and God’s power has given all things for life and godliness “through the knowledge of him that hath called us” (1:3). The word is epignōsis, and in every use here it is knowledge of a person, God or Christ. To faith the believer is to add virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness and charity (1:5–7), so as not to be “barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:8). That diligence does not earn the calling, which is God’s; it makes the calling and election “sure” (1:10). The letter ends where it began: “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” (3:18).

Peter rests the faith on two witnesses. The first is his own: “we have not followed cunningly devised fables … but were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (1:16). The second is the prophetic word, “a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn” (1:19). Its certainty lies in its source: “the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (1:21). The commandment of the apostles stands beside the words of the prophets (3:2), and Paul’s epistles are counted with “the other scriptures,” which the unlearned wrest “unto their own destruction” (3:16). The false teachers come with “feigned words” (2:3); the church holds a word God gave.

As “there were false prophets also among the people,” Peter writes, “there shall be false teachers among you” (2:1). Their heresies are “damnable,” heresies of apōleia, destruction, and the same word is their “swift destruction” (2:1) and the “perdition of ungodly men” (3:7). Peter answers them from three judgments of old: the angels that sinned, the flood and Sodom. In two of them God also delivered, Noah and “just Lot,” for “the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations” (2:9). Christians have read the turning back of 2:20–22 in two ways: of men who had known “the way of righteousness” and turned from it (Ezekiel 18:24), or of men only outwardly washed, like the sow of the proverb (2:22), who “went out from us, but they were not of us” (1 John 2:19).

The scoffers ask, “Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation” (3:4). Peter answers that all things have not continued. By the word of God the world “that then was, being overflowed with water, perished” (3:6), and by the same word the present heavens and earth are “reserved unto fire” (3:7). The delay is longsuffering, “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (3:9). Some read “any” of all men, as God “will have all men to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4); others of the “us-ward,” the Lord’s own, for whom his longsuffering is “salvation” (3:15). On either reading the waiting is mercy, and the day still comes “as a thief in the night” (3:10).