2 PETER
THE DATE, from what has been said, would be about A.D. 68 or 69, about a year after the first, and shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem
2 Peter 1
1 Simon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ. I am writing to all of you who share the same precious faith we have, faith given to us by Jesus Christ, our God and Savior, who makes us right with God.
2 May grace and peace be yours in full measure through your knowledge of God {The Father} and of Jesus our LORD(Yahweh).
No Holy Spirit in the Godhead
3 His divine power has given us everything we need to live a truly religious life through our knowledge of the one who called us to share in his own glory and goodness.
4 In this way He has given us the very great and precious gifts he promised, so that by means of these gifts you may escape from the destructive lust that is in the world, and may come to share the divine nature.
5 For this very reason do your best to add goodness to your faith; to your goodness add knowledge;
6 to your knowledge add self-control; to your self-control add endurance; to your endurance add godliness;
7 to your godliness add brotherly love.
8 And God will open wide the gates of heaven for you to enter into the eternal Kingdom of our LORD(Yahweh) and Savior Jesus Christ.
9 But if you do not have them, you are so shortsighted that you cannot see and have forgotten that you have been purified from your past sins.
10 Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure, for if you do these things you will never stumble.
11 In this way you will be given the full right to enter the eternal Kingdom of our LORD and Savior Jesus Christ.
12 And so I will always remind you of these matters, even though you already know them and are firmly grounded in the truth you have received.
13 Yes, I think it is right, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by reminding you,
14 I know that I shall soon put off this tabernacle {mortal body}, as our Lord Jesus Christ plainly told me.
15 I will do my best, then, to provide a reminder to you in these matters at all times after my death.
Reminder-The Feast!
16 We have not depended on fables in making known to you the mighty coming of our LORD Jesus Christ. With our own eyes we saw his greatness.
17 For He received from God the Father honor and glory when such a voice came to Him from the Excellent Glory: "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."
18 We ourselves heard this Voice coming from heaven, when we were with him on the holy mountain.
holy mount--as the Transfiguration mount came to be regarded, on account of the manifestation of Christ's divine glory there.
we--emphatical: we, James and John, as well as Peter
19 So we are even more confident of the message proclaimed by the prophets. You will do well to pay attention to it, because it is like a lamp shining in a dark place until the Day dawns and the light of the morning star shines in your hearts.
20 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophets themselves {out of their own imaginations but came directly from God}
21 For no prophetic message ever came just from the human will, but people were under the control of the Holy Spirit as they spoke the message that came from God.
2 Peter 2
FALSE MINISTERS OF CHRIST:
1 False prophets appeared among the people, and in the same way false teachers will appear among you. They will bring in destructive, untrue doctrines, and will deny the LORD(Jesus-Yahweh) who redeemed them, and so they will bring upon themselves sudden destruction.
2 And many will follow after their destructive ways, because the right way {of God} will be blasphemed.
3 In their greed these false teachers will make a profit out of telling you fables. For a long time now their judgement has been waiting, and their destruction is on the way.
Selling the Gospel!
4 For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to a place of restraint (hell) and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment;
hell--Greek, "Tartarus": nowhere else in New Testament or the Septuagint:. It means a place of restraint, probably the bottomless pit of Revelation where the false prophet and Dejvil are thrown into, to keep them for a thousand years.
5 and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly;
6 Later, turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into heaps of ashes and swept them off the face of the earth, making them an example of what will happen to ungodly people.
LOT WAS UPSET AT THE SIN OF SODOM:
7 But at the same time, rescuing righteous Lot who was a good man who was sick of all the immorality and wickedness around him.
8 (For that good man lived among them, and day after day he suffered agony as he saw and heard their evil actions.)
9 And so the LORD knows how to rescue godly people from their trials and how to keep the wicked under punishment for the Day of Judgment,
10 especially those who follow their own evil, lustful desires and who despise authority. These people are proud and arrogant, daring even to scoff at the glorious ones without so much as trembling.
11 Even the angels, who are so much stronger and mightier than these false teachers, do not accuse them with insults in the presence of the LORD(Jesus and The Father).
12 But these people act by instinct, like wild animals born to be captured and killed; they attack with insults anything they do not understand. They will be destroyed like wild animals,
13 and they will be paid with suffering for the suffering they have caused. Pleasure for them is to do anything in broad daylight that will satisfy their bodily appetites; they are a shame and a disgrace as they join you in your meals, all the while enjoying their deceitful ways!
14 They want to look for nothing but the chance to commit adultery; their appetite for sin is never satisfied. They lead weak people into a trap. Their hearts are trained to be greedy. They are under a curse!
15 They have left the straight path and have lost their way; they have followed the path taken by Balaam son of Beor, who loved the money he would get for doing wrong
16 and was rebuked for his sin. His donkey spoke with a human voice and stopped the prophet's insane action.
17 These people {false ministers} are as useless as dried-up springs of water or as clouds blown away by the wind -- promising much and delivering nothing. They are doomed to blackest darkness.
promising much and delivering nothing—Like modern Christianity!
18 They brag about themselves with empty, foolish boasting. With lustful desire as their bait, they lure back into sin those who have just escaped from such wicked living.
What Peter means here is that after the people hear the true Gospel of Christ, which is rejecting sin (breaking of the Law) – these false ministers try to lure them back into sin by saying the Law is abolished!
19 They promise freedom, but they themselves are slaves to sin and corruption. For you are a slave to whatever controls you.
They promise freedom from the Law (Paulianity) but they themselves are under sin (by breaking God's LAW – The Torah). See verse 21 below.
20 If people have escaped from the corrupting forces of the world through their knowledge of our LORD(Yahweh) and Savior Jesus Christ, and then are again caught and conquered by them, such people are in worse condition at the end than they were at the beginning.
21 It would have been much better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than to know it and then turn away from the holy Commandments that was given them.
22 They make these proverbs come true: "A dog returns to its vomit," and "A washed pig returns to the mud."
2 Peter 3
SURENESS OF CHRIST'S COMING:
1 My dear friends, this is now the second letter I have written you. In both of them I have tried to stimulate your wholesome thinking and refresh your memory.
2 I want you to remember the words that were spoken long ago by the holy prophets, and the Commandments from the LORD(Jesus) and Savior which was given you by your apostles.
3 First of all, you must understand that in the last days there will be scoffers who will laugh at the truth and do every evil thing they desire.
4 The will ask: "Jesus promised to come back, did he? Then where is he? Why, as far back as anyone can remember, everything has remained exactly the same since the world was first created."
5 They purposely ignore the fact that long ago God gave a command, and the heavens and earth were created. The earth was formed out of water and by water,
6 and it was also by water, the water of the flood, that the old world was destroyed.
7 But the heavens and the earth that now exist are being preserved by the same command of God, in order to be destroyed by fire. They are being kept for the day when godless people will be judged and destroyed.
8 But you must not forget, dear friends, that a day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day.
one day . . . thousand years--( Psalms 90:4 ): Moses there says, Thy eternity, knowing no distinction between a thousand years and a day, is the refuge of us creatures of a day. Peter views God's eternity in relation to the last day: that day seems to us, short-lived beings, long in coming, but with the Lord the interval is irrespective of the idea of long or short. His eternity exceeds all measures of time: to His divine knowledge all future things are present: His power requires not long delays for the performance of His work: His long-suffering excludes all impatient expectation and eager haste, such as we men feel. He is equally blessed in one day and in a thousand years. He can do the work of a thousand years in one day: so in 2 Peter 3:9 it is said, "He is not slack," that is, "slow": He has always the power to fulfil His "promise." (Jamieson)
thousand years as one day--No delay which occurs is long to God: as to a man of countless riches, a thousand dollars are as a single penny. God's æonologe (eternal-ages measurer) differs wholly from man's horologe (hour-glass). His gnomon (dial-pointer) shows all the hours at once in the greatest activity and in perfect repose. To Him the hours pass away, neither more slowly, nor more quickly, than befits His economy. There is nothing to make Him need either to hasten or delay the end. The words, "with the Lord" ( Psalms 90:4 , "In Thy sight"), silence all man's objections on the ground of his incapability of understanding this [BENGEL].
9 The LORD(Jesus) is not slow to do what he has promised, as some think. Instead, he is patient with you, because he does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants all to turn away from their sins.
10 But the Day of the LORD(Jesus) will come like a thief. Then the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise, and everything in them will disappear in fire, and the earth and everything on it will be exposed to judgment.
11 Since everything around us is going to melt away, what holy, godly lives you should be living!
12 You should look forward to that day and hurry it along -- the coming day of God when the heavens will be set on fire and the elements will melt away in the flames.
13 Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
14 Therefore, friends, we are looking forward to these things, so be diligent to be found by Him in living a righteous life, without blemish and blameless;
15 And remember, the LORD is waiting so that people have time to be saved. This is just as our beloved brother Paul wrote to you with the wisdom God gave him --
16 This is what he says in all his letters when he writes on the subject. There are some difficult things in his letters which ignorant and unstable people explain falsely, as they do with other passages of the Scriptures. So they bring on their own destruction.
Paulianity: The modern so-called Christian Church fulfills this verse. These people misquote Paul concerning his writings on the Law. They have wrongfully concluded that Paul is telling the church that Christ did away with the Law. This is a lie, and Peter is warning the church about it right here. Paul himself makes it plain that he never once taught such a heresy in Acts. Paul followed the Law. It appears here that this religion of paul would become the dominant religion at the end of the world, just before Christ returns.
other scriptures--Paul's Epistles were, therefore, by this time, recognized in the Church, as "Scripture": a term never applied in any of the fifty places where it occurs, save to the Old and New Testament sacred writings. Men in each Church having miraculous discernment of spirits would have prevented any uninspired writing from being put on a par with the Old Testament word of God; the apostles' lives also were providentially prolonged, Paul's and Peter's at least to thirty-four years after Christ's resurrection, John's to thirty years later, so that fraud in the canon is out of question. The three first Gospels and Acts are included in "the other Scriptures," and perhaps all the New Testament books, save John and Revelation, written later. (Jamieson)
17 But you, my friends, already know this. Be on your guard, then, so that you will not be led away by the errors of lawless people and fall from your safe position.
18 But continue to grow in the grace and knowledge of our LORD and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory, now and forever! Amen.
