Dan Olinger

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Since the Day of the Lord is coming, how should we, God’s people, then live? 

One natural inclination would be to take fleshly joy in our deliverance: well, I’m OK, so why should I care? 

The Christian life is not like that. We don’t live for ourselves, and most certainly not for the lusts of the flesh, one of which is comfort and ease. Our perspective, our sense of responsibility, is outward: Jesus said we love God, and we love others. 

How do we manifest those two loves (which, of course, are in perfect harmony) with the certainty of coming judgment and an end to the cosmos as we know it? 

Peter begins with a summary: “holy conversation [lifestyle] and godliness” (2P 3.11). That, of course, is always called for, in any era or circumstance. 

What does that look like in the Last Days, with cosmic judgment possible at any time? 

Well, anticipation, even eagerness, makes sense (2P 3.12). 

Why? 

Because the destruction of the current world—broken by sin, and groaning for deliverance (Ro 8.21-22)—prepares the way for a new cosmos, unbroken, perfectly fruitful, and ready to serve as a home for glorified servants of a great and good God (2P 3.13). 

Peter does not emphasize this point here, but of course he has in mind our need to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. He received that Commission directly from the mouth of the Lord himself (Mt 28.16-20), and he has now devoted his life to carrying out that Commission faithfully, even knowing that at the end he would be bound and carried where he does not want to go (Jn 21.18). Our faithfulness in telling this story is of course part of what Peter urges us toward. 

But he devotes his words here to a slightly different track. 

Live right, he says. Live so as to finish “in peace, without spot, and blameless” (2P 3.14). Don’t get sloppy or inattentive just because the judgment hasn’t happened yet; use the time to advance, to grow, to mature in your salvation, specifically your sanctification (2P 3.15). 

Here Peter calls on the agreement of another apostle, Paul, with these urgings. As we’ve noted, Peter is familiar with Paul’s writings—Paul may already have been martyred by this time—and perhaps collections of his epistles may already be showing up in the churches. They have their dense parts—and as I’ve noted in the series on 1 Peter, so do Peter’s—but they are well worth the effort necessary in reading, understanding, and applying them. 

And so Peter closes with the two principles most heavily emphasized by both himself and Paul: 

• Pay attention (2P 3.17). Don’t be deceived by false teachers (cf. Co 2). Compare their teachings with the truth (again, both the words of the apostles [cf. 2Th 2.15; 3.4] and the Scripture itself) and cling to the truth. 

• Pursue sanctification: “grow in grace” (2P 3.18). Live a life of constant growth, empowered by the means of grace and aiming for the character of Jesus Christ (1J 3.2), insofar as is possible for someone who is only human and not also God. 

Peter closes with a benediction. We should not read this, or any benediction, as a mindless formula, like the “Sincerely,” at the end of our letters. (Does anybody write letters anymore?) 

This is a statement of the reason for which we live, for which we were designed to live. Our lives, and indeed all the universe, exist for the explicit purpose of bringing “to him … glory both now and for ever” (2P 3.18). 

There’s no greater joy than finding your designed purpose and fulfilling it. And in the light of coming judgment and new creation, there’s nothing that makes more sense. 

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As Peter has been discussing God’s judgment of false teachers, he naturally turns to the greatest judgment of all, God’s coming with a final judgment over all the earth. He eventually calls it “the Day of the Lord” (2P 3.10). This term is used 25 times in the prophets, Acts, and the epistles, usually in a sense of coming judgment. In the prophets it may refer to a coming local judgment—say, the Assyrian or Babylonian invasion—but most often it’s speaking of God’s great intervention at the end of days. By the time Peter is writing this epistle, Paul has already discussed it (1Th 5.2ff), and Peter is certainly familiar with that passage (2P 3.15-16). Here it’s a natural follow-on to what he has just said about the false teachers. 

He begins the chapter by warning his readers against following the path of the false teachers; remember, he says, what the prophets (in the Scripture) and the apostles (today) have warned you about (2P 3.2). Here, of course, he’s repeating the two authoritative sources he’s already identified in 2 Peter 1.16-21. 

Here Peter calls the opponents “scoffers” (2P 3.3), calling to mind the OT references to “the ungodly” (Ps 1.4-6) and the frequent references in Proverbs to the “fool.” These are people with hard hearts, who are predisposed to reject God’s word in any form and to call into question anything he says. Here they scoff at any warning of coming judgment, motivated by “their own lusts,” as Peter has already noted in chapter 2. 

Their foolish confidence in mocking the predictions is based on the fact that time has passed since they were given (2P 3.4); of course the prophets and the OT patriarchs are long dead, and though only a minority of NT scholars believe that Peter is here speaking of “the fathers” from the Christian era, many of them have died by the time Peter is writing in the mid to late 60s AD. Stephen has died (Ac 7.59-60); the Apostle James has died (Ac 12.2); “James the Just,” the half-brother of Jesus, and author of the Epistle of James, has likely been thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple by this time as well. 

Mocking God’s warnings on the basis of the passage of time is a really dumb idea. As Peter notes, the record shows that God does keep his promises. Noah’s flood is testimony to that (2P 3.5-6). 

Some years ago I had the opportunity to travel through the Grand Canyon on a six-day rafting trip. As the days passed we were deeper and deeper into the layers of rock, standing as mute—but visible—testimony to God’s judgment, until we reached the Great Unconformity, the abrupt layer of pre-Flood rock. The layers above, which evolutionary geologists say were laid down over millions of years, show folds that must have occurred while those multiple layers were soft. And some of those layers extend from the American Southwest all the way to the British Isles. 

Global flood. God does keep his promises, whether of judgment or anything else. And so another promised judgment, this one by fire, is certain to come (2P 3.7). And the passage of time since that promise means nothing; God is not time-bound as we are, and he has literally all the time in the world (2P 3.8). 

So why does he delay? Well, technically, he’s not delaying; he’s waiting for the pre-determined time. But in the meantime, he is giving those of his people who are not yet his people time to come to him (2P 3.9). The “delay” is evidence of his patience, of his grace. 

But when it comes—when it comes—there will be no doubt what is happening. When no one expects it—like a thief in the night—everything that we know will be destroyed by fire (2P 3.10). The sky, the earth, everything humans have built on it, even the very chemical elements themselves—all of it will be destroyed. 

Promises made, promises kept. 

Those false teachers, with those rock-hard hearts, and all their victims, whom they are using just for their own selfish gratification? Yes, they’d better listen, because judgment is certainly coming, in a time of God’s own choosing. They should not interpret the delay as softness or indecision. 

Now, God’s people are safe from this judgment; we need not fear. But there are still ramifications of its certain coming; there are ways we ought to direct our thinking and behavior in the meantime. We’ll get to those in the next post. 

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Peter has briefly given us some help in recognizing false teachers when they show up. Now he spends considerably more column inches telling us what’s going to happen to them. Since God has consistently acted against false prophets in the past to condemn his enemies (2P 2.4-6) and to rescue his people (2P 2.7-8), he will certainly act now to rescue his people (2P 2.9) and to condemn his enemies (2P 2.9-22). 

(Side note: this structure is a chiasm. The Bible contains lots of them.) 

Past Examples 

God condemned the angels who joined Satan in his rebellion (2P 2.4); he condemned those who rejected the preaching of Noah (2P 2.5); and he condemned Sodom and Gomorrah for a whole raft of sins (2P 2.6; cf Ezk 16.49-50). But even in the Flood he rescued Noah and his family (2P 2.5), and even in his destruction of Sodom he saw, loved, and rescued Abraham’s nephew Lot (2P 2.7) because Lot was grieved by what he saw around him in that wicked city (2P 2.8). 

(Side note #2: Observant readers will recognize that these verses also appear in the Epistle of Jude. Older interpreters believed that Jude wrote first and then Peter pulled his words in and rearranged them slightly. They note that Peter says the false teachers “will come,” while Jude says they’re already here. More recent commentators reverse the order. I’m inclined to go with the old guys. But in the end it makes little difference for doctrine or application.) 

Present Certainty 

Well, then. If God has done these things in the past, then we should expect that he will do them again as we face sly attacks from false teachers. He will rescue us (2P 2.9a), and he will “reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished” (2P 2.9b). 

Specifically, he will judge them for their immorality (2P 2.10a) and for their rejection of authority, including God’s (2P 2.10b). Here he repeats two of the three characteristics of false teachers that he identified earlier in the chapter. 

Their arrogance and rebellion are displayed by their shameless acts “to speak evil of dignities” (2P 2.10c); whether Peter is referring here to human dignities, such as pastors or government officials, or to supernatural beings, Peter does not make clear. But the parallel passage in Jude (Jude 1.9) refers to the account in the apocryphal Assumption of Moses in which the archangel Michael would not rebuke Satan as they contended over the body of Moses. (Unfortunately that portion of the apocryphal manuscript has not survived. And no, I don’t have much light to shine on it.) 

Peter spends the bulk of this chapter on the immoralities of the false teachers. 

They “riot in the daytime” (2P 2.13)—that is, they don’t even have the decency (!) to wait until after dark before they start into their immoral behavior. They have “eyes full of adultery” (2P 2.14)—which is to say that every time they look at a woman, they objectivize and sexualize her. They love “the wages of unrighteousness” (2P 2.15)—and here Peter recalls the third characteristic of false teachers mentioned in the first section of the chapter: they’re in it just for themselves.  

As a result of the emptiness of their worldview, they are unremittingly disappointing. They are “wells without water” (2P 2.17), a common disappointment in the desert climates extensive in the biblical lands. They promise what they can’t deliver. They appeal to the worst instincts of their hearers (2P 2.18), promising them freedom but in fact leading them into the same slavery that engulfs themselves (2P 2.19). 

In the Hebrew Scriptures even Exodus reminds us that life is not about being free from all authority, but about being delivered from an evil master to be placed into service to a good one. If, then, we have escaped an evil master, Peter says, we must not go back. To do so would be worse than if we had never escaped at all (2P 2.21). 

There’s a clear application here. 

If you’re a Chapter 2 person, there is nothing good down the road on which you’re traveling. Repent and believe now, before things get even worse. 

And if you’re a Chapter 1 person, rest assured that God knows you, sees you, and will deliver you from the evil one. Or as Jude says, he “is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy” (Jude 24). 

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Peter spends most of his first chapter laying out the reasons that we can be confident in trusting God’s Word. The apostles have spoken it truthfully, some of them even having seen the Lord glorified while he was still on earth. And that experience has only made more certain the reliability of the Scriptures, whose authors wrote not simply their own opinions, but rather the very words the Holy Spirit drove them to write. 

And coming from that doctrinal mountain top—ambiguity absolutely intended—we find that the truth of the Word is subject to twisting, to distortion. There are those who will inevitably turn the truth of God into a lie—and Peter wants his readers to be alert so as to recognize and reject them. In the first three verses of this second chapter, he tells us how we can recognize them. 

Expectation 

Peter notes that even as the OT prophets were being driven along to write the truth, there were simultaneously false prophets, those who claimed to speak from God but did not—who opposed the true prophets and sought to discourage God’s people from listening to them. In the very same way, we can expect false prophets to arise today (2P 2.1)—and even “among” us, that is, within the very church. These teachers claim to be our fellow believers. 

Commentator Warren Wiersbe notes, “False teaching from within the church is far more dangerous than persecution from without (see Acts 20:28–32). Persecution has always cleansed and strengthened the church; false teaching weakens the church and ruins its testimony.” 

It’s certainly coming, and it can do a lot of damage. 

So how do we recognize these people? 

Recognition 

Peter points out three common marks of false teachers, things we can watch for as warning signs. 

First, they reject God’s authority, “denying the Lord that bought them” (2P 2.1b). The word Lord here is despotes, from which our word despot comes. In Greek it doesn’t necessarily involve cruel abuse of authority as it usually does in English, but it does speak of absolute authority, of dominion, of sovereignty. How foolish is it to reject the authority of one who is completely in charge? of one who owns you, having bought you? 

It’s often noted that sin makes a person stupid. Here’s an example. They “bring in damnable [destructive] heresies,” and logically but ironically, when they do, “they bring upon themselves swift destruction” (2P 2.1). Same root. Proper payment for parallel behavior. 

Next, they entrap others in “their pernicious [shameful] ways” (2P 2.2). This word in the NT often refers to immoral sexual practices. False teachers are like that—and they provoke onlookers to speak evil of [blaspheme] the truth that they claim to represent. 

We live in a time when a broad spectrum of religious leaders has been caught in immorality. Peter doesn’t say that all such people are false teachers—sometimes God’s people stumble into sin—but he does say that false teachers are often sexually immoral and thereby encourage others to follow in that path. 

Enough soft-pedaling. Enough excuses. Such people are disqualified from ministry. We shouldn’t listen to them. 

There’s a third characteristic of false teachers: they’re in it for what they can get out of it—and out of you. “And through covetousness shall they with feigned [plastos] words make merchandise of you” (2P 2.3). Again Weirsbe comments, “The false teachers use our vocabulary, but they do not use our dictionary.” 

Do you recall Peter’s statement that he had not followed “cunningly devised fables” (2P 1.16) when he preached to them? Well, these false teachers have. 

The airwaves are full of preachers who flaunt their lavish lifestyles and encourage their followers to send a “seed gift,” with the clear implication, or even the direct statement, that God will pour out greater (monetary!) blessings on them as a reward. 

Nonsense. 

In Africa I have often seen posters advertising mass meetings for “healing” and “blessing,” picturing preachers from America, or Europe, or indigenous Africans. Crowds throng to these meetings, and they have been doing so for decades. It astonishes me that so few of them seem to realize that they’re not any richer than they were last year, or five years ago. 

False teaching is a powerful thing. 

Next: what’s down the road for these false teachers. 

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