But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient towards you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved and the earth and the works that are done in it will be exposed.
Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace.
And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according the the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.
You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. 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.
A Dozen Reasons Why 2 Peter 3 Is Not about Planet Destruction
by Charles S. Meek
In some translations of 2 Peter 3, we see implied that the planet itself (heavenly bodies/elements) will be “burned up.” There are many reasons why this is not literally about the physical cosmos, but rather is about the coming events of AD 70 when God judged Old Covenant Israel. At that time, over a million Jews were slaughtered at the hands of the Romans, the temple was destroyed, and along with it the last vestiges of the Old Covenant order.
1. The Bible elsewhere anticipates a never-ending earth (Ecclesiastes 1:4; Psalm 78:69; 104:5; 148:3-6; Ephesians 3:21), and the God would never again strike down every living creature (Genesis 8:21).
2. The context of Peter’s letters and speeches is the utter imminence of the culmination of the last days: The end of “all things” was “at hand” per 1 Peter 4:7. It was “time for judgment to begin” per 1 Peter 4:17. Peter was living in the last days per Acts 2:14-20 and 1 Peter 1:20.
3. This passage is about the culminating Day of the Lord. The “Day of the Lord” in the Bible is ALWAYS about God’s judgments on specific groups of people—not about the destruction of the planet: Isaiah 34 (against Edom); Jeremiah 46:10 (against named nations); Lamentations 2:22 (against Jerusalem); Ezekiel 13:5 (against Israel’s false prophets); Ezekiel 30:2-4 (against Egypt); Amos 5:18-20 (against Israel); Obadiah 15 (against Egypt); Malachi 4:5 (against Jerusalem)—not about the end of the planet. While the others were fulfilled in Old Testament times, Malachi 3:2-5; 4:1-5 ties “burning/ablaze” to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, which is confirmed by Matthew 3:7, 11, 12; 11:13-16; 13:49-50; 22:7; etc. The certain focus of the New Testament Great Judgment is against the first century Jews (Matthew 16:27-28; 21:40-45; 23:29-39; 24:1-3, 34; 26:64, etc.)—not thousands of years later.
4. The language about COSMIC DISTURBANCES of the created order is standard Hebraic apocalyptic language, used in non-literal terms about THEOLOGICAL OR COVENANTAL events, and especially about actual judgments by God on guilty groups of people. Take the time look up 2 Samuel 22:8-16; Isaiah 13:10-13; 19:1-22; 24:23; 29:3-6; 34:4; Jeremiah 4:23-31; Ezekiel 32:7-8; Joel 2:1-10; 3:15-16; Amos 5:20; 8:8-9; Micah 1:2-16, Nahum 1:2-6; and Zephaniah 1:2-18.
5. It is interesting that the Thessalonian Christians thought that the Day of the Lord had already come (2 Thessalonians 2:1-2)! So, they had a different understanding about the Second Coming and Day of the Lord than modern Christians. They believed in a Parousia that could be MISSED—this, even after having Paul’s first letter to them concerning the “rapture.”
6. The language about the New Heaven and New Earth is found also in Isaiah 65-66 and Revelation 21. In these passages we see that God judges his enemies, but regular human history continues, in which there is still sin and death (Isaiah 65:20; Revelation 22:15) and the need for evangelism because some people had not yet heard of God (Isaiah 66:19-24). It is also found in Matthew 5:17-18 where Jesus ties the New Heaven and New Earth to the age of grace and dissolution of the Old Testament law, which was clearly about the events of AD 70. Thus, the New Heaven and New Earth is not literally about the destruction of the planet, but rather about the new covenant.
7. The Greek word for “heavenly bodies/elements” (which were to be “burned up”) is STOICHEION. Everywhere else in the New Testament that this word is used it is about the “elements” of the OLD COVENANT, not physical things (Galatians 4:3, 9; Colossians 2:8, 20-22; Hebrews 5:12-13).
8. The Greek word for “burned up” is KATAKAIO, which is rendered in various translations as “exposed,” “found to deserve judgment,” or “laid bare.” This is appropriate language for what happened in AD 70 to the old covenant order.
9. We are given in the text the comparison of Noah’s day, when only the ungodly were destroyed, and Noah and his family were saved from this destruction (cf. 2 Peter 2:5; Revelation 11:18). This is similar to what happened in AD 70, where God took vengeance on Old Covenant Israel for their sins and refusal to accept Jesus.
10. The “day as a thousand years” language is not literal, otherwise it would be nonsense. Thus, it cannot mean that a short time means a long time. A “thousand” in the Bible is often used as a symbolic term of completeness. Peter is saying that covenantal completeness was coming soon.
11. Peter told his readers in verses 11-13 that THEY were to be looking for the coming Day of the Lord. If we are to receive a message as to the timing of the events in the statement about a thousand years being as a day, we submit that it means the opposite of what futurists think. Peter meant that the expected events were a short time into the future, especially given the other imminence passages in his epistles.
12. The imminence of Peter’s warning is evident from his warning to the “scoffers.” It seems that certain scoffers (2 Peter 3:3) were deriding Christians, claiming that Jesus had not come as He had promised in their generation (Matthew 24:34). Peter retorted, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promises.” (2 Peter 3:9) Peter was telling the scoffers that they should not make the mistake of believing Jesus had overlooked his promise to return while some of them were alive (Matthew 16:27-28; 26:64). He was warning the scoffers in no uncertain terms that “the Day of the Lord” would come and that it would come upon those very scoffers “as a thief in the night” (Matthew 24:34-43, 1 Thessalonians 5:2-4; Revelation 16:15; 22:6-20). The perceived delay or “slackness” was simply God’s patience toward all who would come to repentance and be saved in the last days of the Old Covenant Age (2 Peter 3:3, 9-10).
Finally, some questions: Does the thought of a burning planet somehow give you hope? What about the people who would be destroyed that had not yet had time to come to know Jesus? Does this sound like a God who promised not to destroy the earth (Genesis 9:11)?
For more about the biblical last days, see my Facebook site Evangelical Preterism and my website
www.prophecyquestions.com.