2 Peter 1:16–21

Peter was writing to people who had cherished the hope of Messiah's kingdom from their fathers' days, and who had lived to see Him rejected and crucified. Were they tempted then to wonder about the prophecies of His glorious and actual kingdom, covering both earth and heaven? Were they only figures of speech — glowing, poetic descriptions of what was after all just a spiritual and invisible state in heaven?

In each Gospel that tells of it, the transfiguration comes right after a promise. Some standing there would not taste death before they saw the kingdom of the Son of Man. And Peter, when speaking of this scene, declares that it was a display of the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He says that the sight of His majesty confirmed the word of prophecy to them, so that they knew what they were talking about... It was a sample of the glory in which He would later come, given to confirm the faith of His disciples in view of His death, which He had just announced to them.

If we turn to Mark 9, we find the Lord saying in verse 1, "there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power." In Matthew 16:28 it is, "until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom." Third, in Luke 9:30-31, we find Moses and Elijah, "who appeared in glory". Peter speaks of these three marks — the power, the coming and the glory of the Lord — referring to the three different characters of the transfiguration in the Gospels.

Here our apostle testifies to it as one of the chosen three who actually saw the glory and heard the Father's voice about the Son. He uses a word found in the New Testament only in Peter. The word can carry a wide meaning, but it says more than "eyewitness". The Greeks used it for those admitted to the highest level of their secret religious rites.

He had spoken of things seen as well as things heard. The apostles Peter, John and James were together eyewitnesses of the majesty of Christ, the three of them forming a complete witness to His glory. They had known Christ in weakness and humiliation; they saw Him too in His power and majesty. The scene on the mount of transfiguration was a foretaste of His coming, for His coming will be in power and majesty. That power will change our bodies of humiliation into conformity to His body of glory. It is the power by which He is able even to subject all things to Himself (Philippians 3:21).

Look around the Christian world and ask people! Ah, they say, there is no prophecy. They say the book of Isaiah must be cut into three or four parts to get rid of the idea of prophecy. In the second part it names a man like King Cyrus, and nobody, they claim, can speak about a person in advance. It is impossible; there is no prophecy. Cleverly devised myths! they say.

When faith grasps the glory of Christ in the world to come, all the glitter and brightness of this world will fade into darkness. We will then value it at its true worth.

It was not the glory that belongs to Him in Himself. The point was not glory shining out of Him, but glory given to Him. "He received honor and glory from God the Father."

It was the Father's voice out of the excellent glory. "He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.'" The Father then showed His jealousy for the honour of His Son. He would not allow anyone to put the law-giver or the law-restorer on that level. They were servants, to be honoured in the place He gave them. But His beloved Son! — there were His delights. Christ went down in infinite love to suffer as man, and as man to be exalted. Yet in His Father's eyes the glory of the eternal Son was precious beyond all human thought.

Men heaped dishonour and shame on Christ. In contrast, He received honour and glory from God the Father. All others have come short of the glory. In contrast, here was One whom "the excellent glory" greeted as the beloved Son of the Father. The voice the Apostle heard came from heaven, and all heaven agrees with the Father's delight in Christ. The whole scene lets us into the secret of heaven's delight in Christ, and of how precious the Son is to the Father.

Soon His departure in Jerusalem would prove that the city He wept over saw no beauty in Him to desire. It hid its face from Him, the way people turn away from someone, and treated Him as struck down by God and afflicted. But here the voice out of the glory declares, This is my beloved Son in whom I found My delight. So it had been in eternity before creation. So it was when the world was made by Him, in all the dealings of providence, in the secret working of grace with people, and in the public government of Israel under the law.

Peter, speaking of this scene in 2 Peter 1:16, says it was a display of the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He says that the sight of His majesty confirmed the word of prophecy to them… It was a sample of the glory in which He will come later. It was given to confirm the faith of His disciples, who now faced the death He had just announced to them.

Peter tells us that this voice came from the excellent glory… Now Peter and the others had entered into the cloud. So we get the wonderful fact that saints have the privilege of standing in the glory the voice comes from, and there, in that glory, sharing the delight of the Father in His beloved Son. We are called not only to the fellowship of God's Son, Jesus Christ, but to have fellowship with the Father. God the Father admits us to share His satisfaction in His beloved Son.

To assure them of this, he reminds them of two things. He had seen it himself on the mountain where Jesus was transfigured. He had also heard the voice from the excellent glory: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." In one word, he had seen and heard, and this is what qualifies a competent witness.

Every part of the scene before their eyes was a magnificent testimony to the future kingdom of the Son of Man. They saw that kingdom on a small scale. Later the Lord will come and set it up in visible grandeur, at its appointed time, before the whole universe. But the emphasis clearly falls on "this voice we heard," carried out of heaven, when we were with Him on the holy mountain.

Men heaped dishonour and shame on Christ. In contrast, He received honour and glory from God the Father. And the voice the Apostle heard came from heaven; all heaven agrees with the Father's delight in Christ. The whole scene lets us into the secret of heaven's delight in Christ. It shows how precious the Son is to the Father. The honour and glory He receives comes "from God the Father", "from the excellent glory", and "from heaven".

The disciples were not in heaven. As one of them says, "we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven." They did not enter the cloud of the excellent glory with Moses and Elijah. Yet they saw it, and they have spoken of it. They have testified to us that they have been "eye-witnesses of His Majesty."

The Apostle may well speak of such a spot as "the holy mountain". Above the earth, and apart from the world, God lets us share with the Father in His delight in Christ. It is not what Christ is to sinners: we learn that in the sorrows of the plain below and the sufferings of the cross. Nor is it what Christ is to His tried saints: we learn that in the upper room. On the holy mountain we learn what Jesus is to the Father, to glory, and to heaven.

The voice comes, as Peter says, "from the excellent glory: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Notice that in the Gospels God added the words, "Hear him." Peter needed those words then. He was lowering his Master while lifting up Moses and Elijah. He learned his lesson, however, and here, quoting the Father's words, he leaves out "Hear him." By this time he had learned to listen to no voice but the voice of Jesus.

Our apostle leaves out the clause that the Gospel writers carefully record. It is not that he could forget it, or would forget it. He leaves it out to bring forward the Father's good pleasure in Him, His beloved Son.

"We have also a more sure word of prophecy" should be rendered, "We have the word of prophecy made more sure." The word of prophecy is, of course, in the Old Testament. But is it not sure enough already? Why make it more sure? It should be understood as attesting, or confirming, the word of prophecy. The transfiguration confirmed the prophecies in the Old Testament.

On the holy mount God let chosen witnesses see, as a living scene, the central point to which all prophecy tends — the coming and kingdom of our Lord Jesus. Moses represented the dead saints, raised. Elijah represented the saints taken to heaven without dying. And there was the Lord Jesus, the head and centre of all blessedness and glory. Besides, there were saints in natural unchanged bodies: Peter, James and John. The whole group was like a seal, confirming what the prophets had given the people of God to expect.

The word translated "dark" in the original means "squalid" or "filthy." This world, with all its clever inventions and elegant splendour, is only a squalid place in God's sight. Every Christian taught by Him sees it the same way. The only real light in the squalor comes from the lamp of prophecy. Men dream up an empty "millennium" they will produce out of the present filth. The lamp of prophecy brings us into the light of God's purpose and His coming work of both judgment and salvation. It lets us see the squalor of the world that is, and the glory of the world to come.

The power of prophecy is that it lays bare what is going on in the course of this world, and takes it into judgment. If I know that judgment is coming, and that the weeds are to be burned, I shall not have anything to do with the weeds.

Here prophecy is compared to the lamp shining in a squalid place, and the heavenly hope to daylight — above all to the person of Christ as the day-star. Notice it is not "till the day come," or "till the arrival of the day of the Lord." It is "till the day dawn and the day-star arise in your hearts." It is the heart getting hold of the heavenly hope. It is the heart now having Christ as its constant hope, and so in the spirit and light of the day before it shines on the earth by and by.

The lamp is excellent for casting enough light on this dark world, its evil and its doom. They did well to pay attention to it, "till day dawn and a morning star arise in your hearts." That is, until they enjoy the bright heavenly relationship which Christianity, fully understood, gives us now in Christ. And until they hold the heavenly hope of His coming to bring us into the Father's house.

There is a difficulty connected with this verse. One suggested rendering removes it: "We have also the prophetic Word confirmed, to which you do well in taking heed (as to a lamp that shines in an obscure place, until the day dawn and the morning star arises) in your hearts." It does not mean that the morning star is to arise in the heart of the believer. It means that we should take heed to prophecy in our hearts. And how the entire prophetic Word, that blessed lamp, is needed in these darkening days!

"Its own" is the simplest, strictest and most common use of the disputed word, and it is the only sense that fits the context. It is hard to see why the King James Version and the Revised Version chose "private," except that they did not know what to make of it.

No prophecy of Scripture is its own interpreter: you cannot interpret it by taking it on its own. That is the plain translation.

Rome has used the word "private" to hold up its terrible lie that no private individual should ever interpret Scripture. As a result Rome discourages the reading of God's Word in every way... Only the prophetic Word is in view here... In interpreting prophecy, prophetic Scripture must be compared with prophetic Scripture. Prophecy must be taken as a whole.

Taking single texts away from their context has often been disastrous for interpretation, as we all know. But it has nothing at all to do with the so-called "right of private judgment," which is better called the liberty of the soul to hear for itself what the Spirit makes known to everyone.

It is instead a warning against treating each prophetic saying as if it stood alone — a self-contained statement to be interpreted apart from the whole body of prophetic teaching. All prophecy is connected and related, and can only be understood in connection with the whole. It was never spoken by the will of man, but by the inspiration of the Spirit of God. He used different men in different ages, but His one mind runs through it all.

They were all parts of one whole, with one and the same object: the kingdom of God. Each event was a step towards that object, a link in the chain of God's government that led to it. No link can be explained unless you grasp the aim of the whole — the revealed aim of God's counsels in the glory of His Christ.

Local circumstances of the moment give the occasion for a prophecy, but it forms part of a great whole, and Christ the King is the centre of that whole. Taking it on its own is like cutting a branch off a magnificent tree that it belongs to.

He does not deny that many a prophecy had its scope only in one particular, passing event important enough to call for it... Take the dreams of Pharaoh in Genesis, and of his two officials before that. Take the prophecies of Agabus in the book of Acts about the famine and about the apostle Paul. Many such prophecies are recorded in the Old Testament. Yet none of them is a prophecy of Scripture in the sense meant here.

Those who look for prophecy to be fulfilled before the Lord comes for us miss the joy of waiting for Christ. They see a close likeness between a prophecy and some passing event, but they do not know what it is to watch for the bright and morning star.

The will of man could never produce prophecy. Only God knows the future, and He has spoken about the future.

Man's will resists all this. Even if it were ever so eager to help, who is able except God to take in a range so vast, deep, and high? So the only possible power is that of the Holy Spirit. In His great love for man's blessing, God chose to tell us beforehand of those coming glories of Christ, just as through holy men He also predicted His sufferings.

Notice how verse 21 speaks of inspiration. "Holy men of God" spoke and wrote "moved by" or "borne along by" the Holy Spirit. They put their pens to paper under His power, so He is the real Author of what they wrote.

Those who wrote the books of the Bible were holy men of God, acknowledged by Him as His instruments. Moses was such a man of God (Psalm 90:1), as was Elijah, who could say, "the LORD... before whom I stand" (1 Kings 17:1). They stood before God, conscious that He was constantly looking on them.

By the Holy Spirit He moved them to speak far above the measure of their understanding. They took no place of authority, but in the lowliness of faith searched their own writings, wanting to find God's interpretation of them (1 Peter 1:10-12).

He brings down the exalted one and lifts up the lowly one, putting them on one common level. He uses them as He finds them, making them the channels of His thoughts and not their own. Yet here is the remarkable fact: He never does violence to their individual character. Peter remains Peter and Moses remains Moses. Their abilities show in their writings. Their style is there. Everything there speaks of the man, yet nothing there fails to speak of God.

It is a distortion of the truth to say that the writers were inspired, but not the writings. If 2 Peter 1:21 supports the first, the claim for the second is even more explicit and directly to the point in 2 Timothy 3:16... Not only were the men inspired, but so, according to the apostle Paul, is the result.

In 2 Peter 1:21 we get the claim in definite terms... for surely if the spoken prophecies were inspired, their being written down would not be less authoritative.

If man had no part in originating prophecy, then certainly mere man is not the interpreter of it.

No single prophecy must be read alone, as if it stood apart from the rest. Read each one in connection with the whole plan of it in the Word. "For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man" — so it is not the expression of the many minds of men. "But men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" — there is One perfect mind throughout it.