For this is hidden from them through their own wilfulness, that heavens were of old, and an earth, having its subsistence out of water and in water, by the word of God,
Peter answers the mockers of the last days who deny both the flood behind us and Christ's return ahead of us. His reply is not a new argument but an old record: God spoke the world into being, and later He drowned it.
The word behind "deliberately overlook" points to the will, not to the mind. Older versions read "willingly ignorant." Peter is not describing people who were never told.
2 Peter 3:5 shows the force of the Greek word thelō: "this they are willingly ignorant of," or "this is hidden from them through their own wilfulness."
God can forgive ignorance. This ignorance is different: the scoffer has chosen his own blindness.
A person might be ignorant and be forgiven, but the grave sin of the present moment is this, that the scoffer is "willingly ignorant."
Why do people want the flood never to have happened? One writer names the motive.
Peter says: you like to believe that there was no flood, and I will tell you why. If you admit the flood, you admit the judgment of God upon wickedness. And if you admit that God judged wickedness once, then it is more than probable He will judge a second time. So men will not have it: their will is in question again.
The same will shows itself in how these mockers handle the Bible.
Hating the truth of the promise, and not being able to deny its existence, they are driven to give up the word to get rid of the promise. They acknowledge it is there, but refuse to believe what God says.
Peter meets a claim about nature with a fact from Scripture.
Here we have inspired Scripture to set every doubt at rest for those that fear God. Scripture states the tremendous fact in a few words: the flood destroyed all guilty humanity. The account is free of local legend and human embellishment. The moral fact stands in all its solemnity.
That leaves two ways to explain where the world came from.
They speak of "the beginning of the creation", so they admit there was a beginning. But their wills are set against God, and they try to explain creation by natural causes. The believer knows that the heavens "existed long ago" by the word of God, and that the earth emerged from the waters to become the home of man.
What does it mean that the earth was formed "out of water and through water"? Kelly holds that both the earth's first shaping and the flood are in view.
Some apply this passage only to the earth's first make-up, others to the flood. Plainly the apostle looks at each in turn. The All-wise God had built the earth that way in case of need. When the human race turned away from Him, that drastic remedy was called for, and He used it to destroy the old world. Could unbelief be more suicidal than to assume such a thing is impossible?
Another writer goes back to the waters that were there before dry land.
When God began to form the world, what already existed was one vast mass of waters, called "the deep": "darkness was over the face of the deep," and "the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters." The earth did stand by God's power out of the water. Whatever store of waters lay below broke out over the earth, and more came down on it from above.
Verses 5 to 7 form a single chain, and the connecting link is the same word of God each time.
First, by His word God created the heavens and the earth. Second, by His word God stepped in with a judgment that brought the flood on the world of the ungodly, so that the world of that time perished. Third, by His word God keeps the present heavens and earth for fire, against the day when the ungodly men of this present generation are judged.
One writer takes the scoffing itself as proof that Peter's prediction has come true.
To a mind obsessed with evolution the flood of the past, as recorded in Genesis, and the personal coming of Christ in the future are equally unbelievable. They stay wilfully ignorant of the one, and they mock and deny the other. For over nineteen centuries scoffers have scoffed. Only during the last half century have they scoffed on these grounds. But the scoffers are to scoff on these grounds in the last days.
- Word — creating. God spoke, and the heavens and earth came into being. The earth rose out of water and stood through water at His command.
- Word — recorded. Peter answers a claim about nature with Scripture, not with theories. The flood is a fact on record, and it stands in all its solemnity.
- Word — refused. The mockers are not short of information. Their ignorance is chosen: to admit one judgment is to admit another may follow.
- Word — reserving. The same word made the world and later flooded it. That word now keeps the present heavens and earth for fire and the day of judgment.
- Word — vindicated. Peter foretold scoffing on exactly these grounds in the last days. Hearing it should steady faith, not shake it.
through which [waters] the then world, deluged with water, perished.
The verse points back to a single event in history: the flood that swept away the world of Noah's day. Peter uses it against people who say nature never changes, and the writers ask what perished, how far the water reached, and why the flood is denied.
Peter draws a line between two worlds, and the wording marks the earlier one as finished. One writer traces where the present order began:
The Apostle Peter, speaking of the world before the flood, calls it "the world that then existed" (2 Peter 3:6). That world has passed away forever. But he goes straight on to speak of "the heavens and earth that now exist." Here he means the world that started after the flood.
"Perished" is a strong word, but it does not mean the planet stopped existing. Scripture uses the same word elsewhere for things ruined rather than erased, translated "perish" in older versions:
"The skins will be destroyed" (Luke 5:37), that is, the new wine bursts the old skins, and they are made useless for the purpose they were made for. Again, "the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished" (2 Peter 3:6). The world was certainly not wiped out of existence.
The flood water was water God Himself had stored above and below:
Here we see that God destroyed the early population of the earth by the vast store of water He provided above and below. It overwhelmed man and beast, apart from those He preserved in the ark with Noah at His command. Genesis 7:11 points to this huge overflow: "all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows (or floodgates) of the heavens were opened."
How far did those waters reach? Peter's phrase itself settles the question for some writers:
The flood was universal — absolutely universal. That seems to me to be clearly meant and intended, because it destroyed the world that then existed. God puts an end to the whole system of the world. His judgment of the earth and everything on it was as complete as His coming judgment by fire will be. Everything in the whole order and system of the world that had life perished.
Some people say everything has carried on unchanged since the world began. The flood answers them:
They reason from what they see, and draw conclusions about what will be. Faith turns away from what is seen and stands on the word of God. It knows such arguments are completely false. Things have not continued as they were from the beginning of creation. God has stepped in with striking judgments. The flood is the outstanding witness that God has broken into the ordinary course of nature.
The memory of the flood is not kept in the Bible alone:
There is hardly a country on earth without traditions, more or less true, of that solemn dealing with the whole inhabited earth. God kept Noah and his family safe in an ark, along with the animals that would otherwise have died in the waters. So people are without excuse. What else but the fact itself could produce a tradition found among all the races of mankind, north, south, east and west?
Peter says the ignorance is deliberate. One writer explains what makes the flood so unwelcome:
Ah! says Peter, you like to believe there was no flood, and I will tell you why. If you admit the flood, you admit the judgment of God on wickedness. And if you admit the judgment of God on wickedness once, then He will most likely judge a second time. So men will not have it. Their will is in question again. They are deliberately ignorant of the solemn fact that the world has once been judged. The world came up out of the waters by the word of God, and at His bidding those same waters swallowed it up, and everything on it, apart from those in the ark He provided.
Verse 6 is one step in a three-part argument, and the same word runs through all of it:
First, by His word God created the heavens and the earth. Second, by His word God stepped in with a judgment that brought the flood on the world of the ungodly, so that the world that then existed perished. Third, by His word He keeps the present heavens and earth for fire, until the day He judges the ungodly men of this generation.
- Word made it. God spoke the heavens and the earth into being. That same word rules everything that has happened to them since.
- Word ended it. At His command the water He had stored above and below broke loose, and it ended the whole order of life before the flood.
- Ruined, not erased. "Perished" means that world stopped serving the purpose God made it for. The planet itself did not stop existing.
- Word answers the scoffer. The claim that nothing ever changes falls to one fact of history. Nations everywhere remember the flood, and so does Scripture.
- Word warns us still. Men reject the flood because one judgment means another can follow. That is Peter's point: the same word keeps the present heavens and earth for fire.
But the present heavens and the earth by his word are laid up in store, kept for fire unto a day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
Peter answers mockers who say the world has always run on unchanged, so Christ cannot be coming back. His reply rests on one thing: the word of God. That word made the heavens and earth, flooded them once, and now keeps them for fire.
Two facts about God carry the point.
(V. 7). If God brought the world into being by His word, He can surely end it by His word. If God has intervened in judgment, He can do so again.
The same writer sets out three acts of God, all carried by the same word:
First, that by His word God created the heavens and the earth. Second, by His word God stepped in to judge. He brought the flood on the ungodly world, and that world perished. Third, by His word God keeps the present heavens and earth for fire, until the day when He judges the ungodly men of this present generation.
To claim that nothing has ever interrupted nature, you must push one fact out of sight — the flood. Commentators say this blindness is real, and self-made.
They ask, "Where is the promise of His coming?" They claim that all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation. It is the argument of "uniformity," pushed all the way. They ignore God's judgment by the flood... This is hidden from them, says the apostle. It is truly hidden, so they can be sincere in holding it. Yet it is the cunning of their own wills that hides it — and those wills so often deceive the sharpest minds.
The verse says this world is "stored up" and "kept" for fire. One writer applies that to everything men build.
God has but one way of purifying this sin-stained earth, and it is by fire... So that, on the mightiest monuments of man's skill and ingenuity, faith sees the words "Reserved to fire" written in letters that cannot be erased.
The reason is not that the world is old but that it is stained. One writer ties the fate of the creation to the fate of the man who ruined it.
This world is already under judgment, and it will soon vanish, for the present heavens and earth are "stored up for fire"... Why? The answer is this: the first creation will share the doom of the first man.
Another writer looks at the world as it stands today.
The world, as we look at it, in spite of all reforms and all outward improvements, is not such that anyone can easily believe a holy God will go on with it forever.
Peter calls it "the day of judgment"; three verses later he calls the same event "the day of the Lord." Commentators read these as one period.
These two expressions must clearly mean the same thing — they both refer to the same period... "The day of judgment," then, is the period when God destroys the heavens and the earth by fire.
How long is that day? One writer says Peter takes it in its widest sense.
Peter, and he alone, takes the day of the Lord to cover the whole of the thousand-year reign, and even what comes just before it and just after it... All these vast events fall within the day of the Lord — not within the thousand years, but within that day.
Why is the coming judgment heavier than the flood? One writer points to all that has happened since Noah's day.
The law, Christ's coming, and the gospel preached to every creature have made man's responsibility far greater. So his sin in rejecting the truth is far greater too... Such measureless guilt — rejecting the only, perfectly righteous One and His propitiation — will have to face God's extreme punishment by fire.
Smaller judgments already stand as previews. Of the fire that fell on Sodom, one writer observes:
This judgment was a sample of what is yet to come on a much greater scale in "the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly."
- Word that made — the heavens and earth exist because God spoke; the whole verse rests on that single fact.
- Word that flooded — the same word once broke nature's routine. Scoffers must hide that fact to claim the world runs on unchanged.
- Word that keeps — the present world is not drifting. God stores it, holds it, and labels it "reserved to fire." Every human achievement carries that label.
- Word that names a day — Peter's "day of judgment" is his "day of the Lord." It is not an hour but a long period, reaching across the thousand-year reign and beyond.
- Word that raises the stakes — water answered an age of ignorance. Fire answers a world that has heard the gospel and refused the Righteous One.
But let not this one thing be hidden from you, beloved, that one day with [the] Lord [is] as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
The mockers of the last days say the world keeps running as it always has, so the promised return will never come. Peter's reply asks his readers not to overlook one thing: God does not measure time the way we do.
The mockers' taunt rests on two blind spots. This verse removes the second one.
The scoffers are ignorant of two things. First, God did once take public account of the ways of the world. It was filled with violence, and a flood of waters destroyed it all, apart from one family. Second, a thousand years are as one day in the reckoning of God. The first shows that God is not indifferent to the state of the world. The second shows that we must not judge His ways by the ways of men. Men live in hours, days and years. They must work in a rush in case they are too late to do what they want. He is the eternal God, whose being is outside the bounds of time. So He can patiently wait for everything to develop until the moment is ripe for the display of His glory.
The answer runs on into verse 9. Each part meets the charge of delay from a different side.
First, let the believer remember this. In our eyes the delay may seem long. With the Lord it is only a brief moment, for "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day". Secondly, let us never forget that the promise of His coming is "His promise", and that His word cannot fail. Thirdly, there is a reason for the delay. The Lord is not slack in fulfilling His promise. He is longsuffering, "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance". In His grace God gives space for repentance before the judgment falls. In his unbelief man uses the delay to deny that judgment will ever come.
Some have used these words to turn the days of creation into thousand-year ages. But the sentence runs in both directions.
But as to the principle, the passage in Peter is no proof at all. It is not a statement of time but the opposite — the simple assurance of how little God counts time as man counts it. You could argue from it, just as fairly, that the millennial "thousand years" was only a day, as that the creation "days" each stood for a thousand years. For it is not only "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years," but also "a thousand years as one day."
This verse prepares the reader for the day of the Lord, announced two verses later. That day does its work at once and yet stretches out.
He shows what is no small help for understanding the coming day of the Lord: with Him one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. Though that day brings immense change at once, it also extends through a long period. And it is His grace in saving now, not slackness, that defers it. But it will come unexpectedly, like a thief. In that day the heavens will pass away with a rushing noise. The elements will dissolve with fierce heat, and the earth and the works in it will be burned up (8-10). It is still the day, but its evening as it were, when this catastrophe comes.
The verse invites us to swap our arithmetic for His.
If days and years are taken out of their ordinary reckoning by time, and put in connection with the Lord and His coming, faith's reckonings become like His. We then readily believe that "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." This new way of counting lets us say, about this seemingly long interval that measures His absence, "The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you." The difference between these standards — either divine or human — makes the difference we are considering.
Counted that way, the cross is not ancient history, and this is still the world that crucified Him.
In God's sight it is less than two days since the world crucified your beloved Saviour. Do you want to find all your ambition, all your hopes, all your pleasures in such a world?
- Reckoning — The verse hands us God's scale of time. Faith adopts it and stops judging His ways by human clocks.
- Not slack — The delay is longsuffering. It gives space for repentance before judgment falls.
- His promise — The promise is the Lord's own, so its timing is His business and its fulfilment is certain.
- Not a formula — The sentence runs both ways, so it fixes no calendar. It measures how God views time, not the length of an age.
- Two days — On this reckoning the cross is less than two days behind us, and the day of the Lord is close ahead. That is near enough to reshape what you live for.