waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, by reason of which [the] heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and [the] elements, burning with heat, shall melt?
Peter looks ahead to a universe on fire, and tells believers not only to wait for that day but to hurry towards it. Two questions follow: what is "the day of God," and how can anyone hasten a day God has fixed?
Scripture speaks of the day of the Lord, and here Peter names a different day. Commentators treat the two as separate periods, one after the other.
The day of the Lord is the period marked above all by the exaltation of Christ, as Lord and Administrator of the will of God, when righteousness will reign. It lasts for 1000 years. The day of God is the eternal state that follows it, in which God will dwell with men in a new heaven and a new earth, and there righteousness will dwell without a single enemy to challenge its peace.
That later day is not simply longer or brighter than what precedes it. It answers something in God Himself.
Glorious as this day of Christ will certainly be, a day of even greater charm and beauty is still to be revealed, and its glory is beyond anything words can express. The world to come will be a full testimony to the righteousness of God's character and ways, but the eternal state — the "day of God" — is needed to satisfy His heart. A heart of eternal love could not find its complete rest in anything but eternal conditions.
The ESV says the "heavenly bodies" will melt; older translations read "elements." One writer takes that word in a very physical sense — the raw stuff the planet is made of.
By "elements" the Apostle means, I think, the materials that make up the crust of the globe. As the world was once flooded with water, it will be melted down by fire, to form a new earth, a new atmospheric heaven, and so on.
So what survives the fire? Another writer answers that melting down is not wiping out.
Fire brings this dissolution; it is not annihilation. Scripture says nothing about any future act of literally creating matter, and it says nothing to support what some foolishly argue for: annihilation, the total wiping out of being. Scripture knows nothing of such a baseless theory. Not an atom of matter, not a blade of grass, and certainly no living creature in the wide universe is doomed to extinction. Our planet will go into the crucible, altered, changed, and made new, to last for ever. Since there is no sin, there can be no corruption.
Here the writers disagree. One rejects the idea that human activity can move God's timetable.
People often take the words "hastening the coming of the day of God" to mean that we might act and serve, sending the gospel to the nations and doing other things, and so hurry the coming of the Lord. The text does not warrant that thought, and it is not true. No creature can hurry God, and none can delay Him in carrying out His eternal purposes.
Another writer holds both sides together, with an image of people reaching out to a sunrise.
We are like people holding out our hands to the dawn of a new day. Nothing we can do will make the clock go faster, but we hurry towards it in our hearts and affections. People are eagerly reaching forward to the new day that is coming. Men talk about a new day that new schemes will bring in, but we Christians hurry to the coming of the day of God.
Yet the longing carries a restraint, because God's delay is His patience with people:
We do not want this day delayed for our own sakes, but we love God's patience towards men, and that reconciles our hearts to the delay, though we ourselves long for the Lord to come.
The test of whether someone truly believes this verse is not what he says but where he sinks his roots.
The Christian who spends all his energy making the best of this world may say he knows these things, but he does not truly believe them. Lot sank his roots deep into the soil of Sodom, but that was because he did not know its doom was already decided. What would he have done if he had known? The light of true prophecy really does have a separating and sanctifying effect.
- Two days. The day of the Lord is Christ's thousand-year reign. The day of God is the eternal state that follows, where God dwells with men.
- Fire. One writer takes the elements as the material of the planet itself. Water once flooded the world; fire will melt it down.
- Not extinction. The burning dissolves; it does not annihilate. The planet goes into the crucible and comes out new and lasting.
- Hastening. Commentators differ. One denies that any creature can speed God's purpose. Another says we hurry towards it in heart and affection, while loving God's patience with people.
- Result. Knowing this world's doom loosens your grip on it. Lot's roots in Sodom show what happens when that knowledge is missing.
But, according to his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwells righteousness.
Peter has just described the present heavens and earth passing away in fire. He now turns from what burns to what God has promised: a new creation, unlike the coming reign of Christ on earth, where righteousness is finally at home.
Twice in this chapter Peter points back to what God has promised. One writer asks where that leaves our confidence:
Faith does more. It has a long outlook, and it carries us beyond judgment into "new heavens and a new earth." … We do not look for this because of our imaginations or our feelings. We look for it because of His unfailing word — "His promise." For the second time the Apostle reminds us that it is "His promise." Because it is His, it will certainly be fulfilled (verses 9 and 13).
That promise was not new with Peter. One writer traces it back to the prophet Isaiah, and notes how little the earlier prophets said about it:
Beyond it, according to His promise, there remains for us the cheer of new heavens and the new earth, in which righteousness dwells. This clearly points back to Isaiah's word: "For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind." It is only a glance. Apart from this, the prophets of the Old Testament never seem to go beyond the kingdom we have learned to call "millennial."
So is this a different world, or this same one made new? One writer answers with a picture taken from the believer's own life:
The new earth, let us remember, is new in the same sense that the man in Christ is a new man — not a new individual. It is the same person who was the sinner and is now the saint, but there is a new condition altogether.
Another writer applies the same thought to the fire, and says which heavens are meant:
The great burning up did not mean that the earth and the heavens are wiped out of existence. God wipes nothing out of existence. … The burning of the earth and the heaven means their complete cleansing. The heaven spoken of cannot be the whole of the heavens, because there is a heaven that these cleansing fires cannot touch. It is the heaven that surrounds the earth, the sphere that once belonged to the great usurper, the prince of the power of the air.
The verse does not say righteousness rules there. It says righteousness dwells there. One writer shows how that one word marks this scene off from Christ's coming reign:
It will be a scene "in which righteousness dwells." Every kind of corruption and violence, lust and lawlessness marks the present world. Lasting righteousness will mark the new creation. It will not be the reign of righteousness as in millennial days, which implies that evil is present and has to be held down. In the new scene, evil has been dealt with, and righteousness will dwell.
The picture is of righteousness stepping down from the bench because there are no more cases to try:
Righteousness is going to have its lasting home, with nothing to disturb it. It will not have to sit on a throne, watching like a judge in case something rises up that it must condemn. That is its position in the millennial age. When you reach the new heavens and the new earth, righteousness will be able to come down from the throne, its work done, and live among men. Nothing will ever rise again to challenge it.
One writer sets this scene beside the earlier stages of God's dealings with the world:
We have four worlds, so to speak, in this respect. First, the garden of Eden. Then a world no longer innocent, a world that has left God and been driven out, where sin and Satan reign. Then a world in which Christ reigns, and reigns in righteousness. Last, the new heavens and the new earth, in which righteousness dwells. The innocent world is now gone. It was tested by simple obedience, with no evil in it. The final world is based on righteousness, and righteousness in its nature never changes, so that world can never change in its moral stability.
Only at that point is sin fully cleared out of the world — though the work that clears it was finished long before:
As believers, your sins are undoubtedly forgiven, but this is another thing. … He has shed His blood for the purpose, and that blood is beyond doubt a perfectly efficacious sacrifice, by which all things are surely to be reconciled to God; but they are not reconciled till He comes again. … When the Lord takes the world-kingdom, it will be richly applied and for a long while, but not in absolute and everlasting fulness, till "the new heavens, and the new earth, in which righteousness dwells."
God's promise also changes how a believer faces the end:
All true believers have eternal life in Christ. So they are already free from judgment, and they have a living hope: they are expecting their Lord to return and receive them to Himself. The breaking up of heaven and earth fills us with no dread. We who have believed can say with assurance, "But according to His promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells."
- Promised — the hope rests on God's word through Isaiah, not on our feelings or our imagination. Peter calls it "His promise" twice in one chapter.
- Purified — the fire cleanses the world; it does not wipe it out. The earth is new the way a believer is a new man: the same one, in a wholly new condition.
- Peopled by righteousness — in the coming kingdom righteousness reigns and holds evil down. Here it comes down from the throne and lives at home, with nothing left to challenge it.
- Permanent — Eden was lost and the kingdom is a reign. This last world rests on righteousness, and righteousness never changes, so this world never changes either.
- Practical — others dread the coming fire. Those who trust the promise look past it, and wait for the home of righteousness on the far side.