Beginning

Confirm your call!

1 Simon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus the Messiah, to those who have obtained a share of faith equal to ours in the righteousness of our God and savior Jesus the Messiah: ² may grace and peace be multiplied to you, in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

³ God has bestowed upon us, through his divine power, everything that we need for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and virtue. ⁴ The result is that he has given us, through these things, his precious and wonderful promises; and the purpose of all this is so that you may run away from the corruption of lust that is in the world, and may become partakers of the divine nature. ⁵ So, because of this, you should strain every nerve to supplement your faith with virtue, and your virtue with knowledge, ⁶ and your knowledge with self-control, and your self-control with patience, and your patience with piety, ⁷ and your piety with family affection, and your family affection with love. ⁸ If you have these things in plentiful supply, you see, you will not be wasting your time, or failing to bear fruit, in relation to your knowledge of our Lord Jesus the Messiah. ⁹ Someone who doesn’t have these things, in fact, is so short-sighted as to be actually blind, and has forgotten what it means to be cleansed from earlier sins. ¹⁰ So, my dear family, you must make the effort all the more to confirm that God has called you and chosen you. If you do this, you will never trip up. ¹¹ That is how you will have, richly laid out before you, an entrance into the kingdom of God’s coming age, the kingdom of our Lord and savior Jesus the Messiah.

Prophecy made sure

¹² So I intend to go on and on reminding you about all this—even though you know it, and have been firmly established in the truth which has come to you. ¹³ But it seems right to me, as long as I am living in this present tent, to stir you up with a reminder, ¹⁴ since I know that I shall shortly be putting off this tent, as our Lord Jesus the Messiah showed me. ¹⁵ So I shall also be making every effort to ensure that, once I am gone, you may be able to call these things to mind at any time.

¹⁶ You see, when we made known to you the power and appearing of our Lord Jesus the Messiah, we were not following cleverly devised myths. Rather, we were eyewitnesses of his grandeur. ¹⁷ For when he received honor and glory from God the father, a voice spoke to him from the Wonderful Glory, “This is my son, my beloved one, in whom I am well pleased.” ¹⁸ We heard this voice, spoken from heaven, when we were with him on the holy mountain. ¹⁹ And we have the prophetic word made more certain. You will do well to hold on to this, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star shines in your hearts. ²⁰ You must know this first of all, that no scriptural prophecy is a matter of one’s own interpretation. ²¹ No prophecy, you see, ever came by human will. Rather, people were moved by the holy spirit, and spoke from God.

False prophets

2 There were, however, false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among yourselves, who will sneak in with their destructive false teachings, even denying the master who paid the price for them. They will earn swift destruction for themselves, ² and many will follow after their disgusting practices. The way of truth will be blasphemed because of them, ³ and in their greed they will exploit you with fake prophecies. For a long time now, their condemnation has not been idle, and their destruction has not fallen asleep.

⁴ God didn’t spare the angels who sinned, you see, but he threw them into the pit, into dark caverns, handing them over to be guarded until the time of judgment. ⁵ Similarly, he didn’t spare the ancient world, but brought a flood on the world of the ungodly and rescued Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others. ⁶ Similarly, he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, reducing them to ashes and ruin, thus setting up an example of what would happen to the ungodly. ⁷ He snatched righteous Lot out of the disaster, a man who had been deeply troubled by their shameful and unprincipled behavior. ⁸ That righteous man, you see, living in their midst, could see and hear day after day lawless deeds which tortured his righteous soul. ⁹ The Lord knows how to rescue the godly from testing, and also how to keep the unrighteous ready for the day of judgment and punishment, ^10a especially those who follow after the pollution of fleshly lust and despise authority.

From bad to worse

^10b Such people are arrogant and self-willed! They are not afraid to blaspheme the glorious ones, ¹¹ whereas the angels, stronger and more powerful though they are, do not bring a charge of blasphemy against them before the Lord.

¹² These people are like unreasoning beasts, by nature born to be caught and destroyed. They curse at things of which they have no knowledge; they are destroyed by their own self-destructive tendencies. ¹³ They commit injustice, and receive injustice as their reward. They count it pleasure to hold wild revels in the daytime. If they join you for a meal, they pollute and stain the whole thing as they wallow in their disgusting pleasures. ¹⁴ Their eyes are full of adultery; they can’t get enough of sin; when they find unsteady souls, they lead them astray; their hearts have been trained in greed; they are children of the curse. ¹⁵ They have left the straight path and have wandered off in pursuit of Balaam son of Bosor, who loved the reward of unrighteousness, ¹⁶ and was rebuked for his disobedience when a normally speechless donkey spoke in a human voice to stop the prophet’s madness in its tracks.

¹⁷ These people are springs without water. They are patches of fog driven along by a storm. The depth of darkness has been reserved for them! ¹⁸ They utter bombastic words of folly as they entice, with licentious fleshly desires, those who have only just escaped from the company of people who behave improperly. ¹⁹ They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves to corruption. (A person who is defeated by something, you see, is enslaved to it.) ²⁰ For if they have fled the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and savior Jesus the Messiah, but again become entangled in them and are defeated, they have ended up in a worse state than they were before. ²¹ It would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than, having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment which had been given to them. ²² There is a true proverb which now applies to them: the dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow gets washed only to wallow once more in the mud.

The day of the Lord

3 My dear family, this is now the second time I am writing you a letter. Your motives are pure, and what I’m trying to do in reminding you is to stir them into action, ² so that you’ll remember the words spoken earlier by the holy prophets, and by the command of the Lord and savior which you received from your apostles. ³ But you must first know this. Deceivers will come in the last days, with deceitful ways, behaving according to their own desires. ⁴ This is what they will say: “Where is the promise of his royal arrival? Ever since the previous generation died, everything has continued just as it has from the beginning of creation.” ⁵ They willingly overlook this one thing, you see: the ancient heavens and earth were formed out of water and through water, by God’s word— ⁶ and it was destroyed by flooding the world of that time with water. ⁷ The heavens and earth that we now have are being preserved for fire by the same word, being kept for the day of judgment and the destruction of the wicked. ⁸ So, beloved, don’t forget this one thing, that a single day with the Lord is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like a single day. ⁹ The Lord is not delaying his promise, in the way that some think of delay, but he is very patient towards you. He does not want anyone to be destroyed. Rather, he wants everyone to arrive at repentance.

¹⁰ But the Lord’s day will come like a thief. On that day the heavens will pass away with a great rushing sound, the elements will be dissolved in fire, and the earth and all the works on it will be disclosed.

God’s patience

¹¹ Since everything is going to dissolve in this way, what sort of people should you be? You should live lives that are holy and godly, ¹² as you look for God’s day to appear, and indeed hurry it on its way—the day because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the elements will melt with heat. ¹³ But we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth, in which justice will be at home. That is what he has promised.

¹⁴ So, my dear family, as you wait for these things, be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, in peace. ¹⁵ And when our Lord waits patiently to act, see that for what it is—salvation! Our beloved brother Paul has written to you about all this, according to the wisdom that has been given him, ¹⁶ speaking about these things as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them which are difficult to understand. Untaught and unstable people twist his words to their own destruction, as they do with the other scriptures.

¹⁷ But as for you, my dear family, be on your guard, since you have been warned in advance. That way you won’t be led astray through the error of lawless people and fall away from your own solid grounding. ¹⁸ Instead, grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and savior Jesus the Messiah. To him be glory both now and in the day when God’s new age dawns. Amen.