Beginning

1 Simon Peter, a servant and emissary^[a] of Jesus the Anointed One, to those who have received the same precious faith we share through the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus the Anointed. ² I wish you a full measure of grace and peace as you grow in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

³ His divine power has given us everything we need to experience life and to reflect God’s true nature through the knowledge of the One who called us by His glory and virtue. ⁴ Through these things, we have received God’s great and valuable promises, so we might escape the corruption of worldly desires and share in the divine nature.

⁵ To achieve this, you will need to add virtue to your faith, and then knowledge to your virtue; ⁶ to knowledge, add discipline; to discipline, add endurance; to endurance, add godliness; ⁷ to godliness, add affection for others as sisters and brothers; and to affection, at last, add love. ⁸ For if you possess these traits and multiply them, then you will never be ineffective or unproductive in your relationship with our Lord Jesus the Anointed; ⁹ but if you don’t have these qualities, then you will be nearsighted and blind, forgetting that your past sins have been washed away. ¹⁰ Therefore, brothers and sisters, work that much harder to confirm that God has called you and claimed you. If you do this, then you will never fall along the way; ¹¹ and you can be sure that you will be richly welcomed into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus the Anointed, our Liberating King.

¹² That is why I will keep reminding you of these things, even though I know that you believe them and have made these truths a part of your lives; ¹³ as long as I draw breath, I know it is right for me to keep on stirring you up with these reminders. ¹⁴ I know that soon I must die and lay down this old body that’s been my home—our Lord Jesus the Anointed has told me so. ¹⁵ But before my exodus from this life, I want to be certain you will be able to call these things to mind anytime you need them even after I am gone.

¹⁶ For I want to remind you that when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus the Anointed, we were relying on what our eyes had seen of His glorious majesty, not on cleverly told fables. ¹⁷ You see, God the Father lavished honor and glory upon Jesus when the voice of the Majestic Glory echoed from heaven and said, “This is My beloved Son, and My favor rests on Him.”^{[b] 18} We witnessed this—we ourselves heard this voice from heaven—when we were with Jesus on that holy mountain. ¹⁹ We have a fuller confirmation of the message of the prophets. You would do well to pay close attention to this word; it is like a light that shines for you in the darkness of night until the day dawns when the morning star rises in your own hearts.

²⁰ But notice first that no prophecy found in Scripture is a matter of the prophet’s own interpretation. ²¹ Prophecy has never been a product of human initiative, but it comes when men and women are moved to speak on behalf of God by the Holy Spirit.

2 Just as false prophets rose up in the past among God’s people, false teachers will rise up in the future among you. They will slip in with their destructive opinions, denying the very Master who bought their freedom and dooming themselves to destruction swiftly, ² but not before they attract others by their unbridled and immoral behavior. Because of them and their ways, others will criticize and condemn the path of truth we walk as seedy and disreputable. ³ These false teachers will follow their greed and exploit you with their fabrications, but be assured that their judgment was pronounced long ago and their destruction does not sleep.

⁴ For God did not spare the heavenly beings who sinned, but He cast them into the dark pits^[c] of hell^[d] to be kept until the time of judgment; ⁵ and He did not spare the ancient world, but He sent a flood swirling over the ungodly (although He did save Noah, God’s herald for what is right, with seven other members of his family); ⁶ and God condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, reducing them to ash as a lesson of what He will do with the ungodly in the days to come ^7-8 (although again He did rescue Lot, a person who did what was right in God’s eyes and who was distressed by the immorality and the lawlessness of the society around him. Day after day, the sights and sounds of their lawlessness were like daggers into that good man’s soul). ⁹ If all this happened in the past, it shows clearly the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from their trials and how to hold the wicked in punishment until the day of judgment.

¹⁰ And above all, it shows He will punish those who let the desires of their bodies rule them and who have no respect for authority. People like this are so bold and willful that they aren’t even afraid of offending heavenly beings, ¹¹ although the heavenly messengers—in spite of the fact that they have greater strength and power—make no such accusations against these people before the Lord. ¹² These people who speak ill of what they do not understand are no different from animals—without sense, operating only on their instincts, born to be captured and killed—and they will be destroyed just like those animals, ¹³ receiving the penalty for their evil acts. They waste their days in parties and carousing. As they feast with you, these stains and blemishes on your community are feasting on their deceptions.^{[e] 14} Their eyes are always looking for their next adulterous conquests; their appetites for sin cannot be satisfied. They seduce the unwary soul, and greed is the only lesson they have learned by heart. God’s curse lies upon them. ¹⁵ They have veered off the right road and gotten lost, following in the steps of Balaam, the son of Beor, the false prophet. Balaam loved the reward he could get by doing evil, ¹⁶ but he was rebuked for crossing the line into sin; his own speechless donkey scolded him in a human voice, an amazing miracle that reined in the prophet’s insanity.^[f]

¹⁷ These people I’m talking about are nothing but dried-up springs, mists driven by fierce winds; the deepest darkness has been set aside for them. ¹⁸ They speak in loud voices empty and arrogant. They exploit the desires of the flesh, take advantage of sensual natures, to entangle people who have just escaped from those who live by deception. ¹⁹ They claim to offer them freedom, but they themselves are enslaved by corruption because whatever a person gives in to soon becomes his master. ²⁰ Those who have been pulled out of the cesspool of worldly desires through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus, the Anointed One, yet have found themselves mired in it again are worse off than they were before. ²¹ They would have been better off never knowing the way of righteousness than to have known it and then abandoned the sacred commandment they had previously received and dived back into the muck! ²² In their cases, the words from Proverbs hold true: “The dog goes back to his own vomit,”^[g] and as the Greeks say, “The sow is washed to wallow in the mud.”

3 This is now, my dear friends, my second letter to you. In both of them, I have tried to inspire you to a sincere and pure way of thinking by reminding you of what you already know. ² Remember the words spoken earlier by God’s holy prophets and the commandment that our Lord and Savior gave to you through your emissaries.^{[h] 3} Above all, be sure to remember that in the last days mockers will come, following their own desires and taunting you, ⁴ saying, “So what happened to the promised second coming of Jesus? For everything keeps going just the way it has since our ancestors fell asleep in death; since the beginning of creation, nothing’s changed.”

⁵ When they make fun of you, it’s as if the scoffers are deliberately forgetting that long ago when God spoke the word, the heavens came into existence and the earth formed from water and by water. ⁶ The waters later flooded and destroyed that world. ⁷ By that same word, the heavens and earth we see now are being reserved for destruction by fire, preserved until the time comes for the godless on the day of judgment.

⁸ Don’t imagine, dear friends, that God’s timetable is the same as ours; as the psalm says, for with the Lord, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like one day.^[i]

⁹ Now the Lord is not slow about enacting His promise—slow is how some people want to characterize it—no, He is not slow but patient and merciful to you, not wanting anyone to be destroyed, but wanting everyone to turn away from following his own path and to turn toward God’s.^[j]

¹⁰ The day of the Lord will come unexpectedly like a thief in the night; and on that day, the sky will vanish with a roar, the elements will melt with intense heat, and the earth and all the works done on it will be seen as they truly are.^{[k] 11} Knowing that one day all this will come to pass, think what sort of people you ought to be—how you should be living faithful and godly lives, ¹² waiting hopefully for and hastening the coming of God’s day when the heavens will vanish in flames and the elements melt away with intense heat. ¹³ What will happen next, and what we hope for, is what God promised: a new heaven and a new earth where justice reigns.

¹⁴ So, my friends, while we wait for the day of the Lord, work hard to live in peace, without flaw or blemish; ¹⁵ and look at the patience of the Lord as your salvation. Our dearly loved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, has written about this. ¹⁶ He says essentially the same in all of his letters, although uneducated and unstable readers misinterpret the difficult passages, just as they always misread Scripture, to their spiritual ruin.

¹⁷ So hear my final words, my friends. Now that I have warned you about what’s ahead, keep up your guard and don’t let unprincipled people pull you away from the sure ground of the truth with their lies and misunderstandings. ¹⁸ Instead, grow in grace and in the true knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus, the Anointed, to whom be glory, now and until the coming of the new age. Amen.