2 Peter 3

18 verses

Scoffers mock the promise of Christ's coming, asking where is the promised parousia and demanding to know where God is when the world continues unaltered from creation's beginning, revealing their willful ignorance of the cosmic interventions at creation and flood. The Lord is not slow in fulfilling his promise but is patient, waiting and not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance—the delay of the parousia is an expression of divine mercy and longsuffering. The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, accompanied by a great noise as the heavens pass away and the elements melt with fervent heat, when the earth and the works upon it are exposed to judgment. Yet the promise of new heavens and new earth where righteousness dwells—not merely renewed but recreated—provides the framework for Christian hope and ethical behavior in light of coming dissolution. Since all creation will be dissolved in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness? The letters of Paul, containing things hard to understand that the untaught and unstable distort to their own destruction, demonstrate the reliability of apostolic testimony while acknowledging genuine theological difficulty requiring spiritual maturity to understand.

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