1. Peter recognizes the first letter he wrote and this letter as the second.

2. II Cor. 13:1, Paul declares that he wrote three letters to the Corinthians, but most people say he only wrote two.

1. Peter would remind these people of previously learned doctrines.

2. God would use these letters to stir up the pure minds of remembrance for all saints who would read and study these letters.

1. Both could refer to the Old Testament and the New Testament.

2. It is very important to study both the Old And New Testament.

3. The Old Testament is our constant example and prophecy concerning the coming Christ.

4. The New Testament concerns the operation of the Lord’s Church and the fulfilling of the prophecies concerning Jesus Christ.

5. A proper understanding of these two testaments will lead us to a true understand of God, and the way God works in this universe.

1. In this case "mix" means to cause confusion.

2. There is a difference between "mix" and "stir".

1. There is more confusion than there is anything else.

2. When something is stirred, there is also a lot of parts that make up the whole, but the resulting substance is something that can be used.

1. The only way a natural mind can be pure is by the Spirit of God.

2. Romans 12:2 - Our minds must be "renewed" in order to understand spiritual things.

3. These people had studied spiritual things in the past, and that had changed their minds from being completely natural to being somewhat spiritual.

4. Phil. 2:5, "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:" II Tim. 1:7, "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."

1. Peter is not telling them something they have never heard before.

2. This is no new doctrine, but a revival of things once learned and practiced.

3. Sometimes preachers don’t like to preach things that their listeners have already heard.

4. But this is absolutely necessary.

5. This provides a link so the listeners can learn other doctrines.

6. It also renews and stabilizes them more firmly in present doctrines.

1. A person must look after material things so he will have enough to eat.

2. A person must also look after his family, training them in the way of the Lord.

3. He must also look after his own health, doing what is humanly possible to maintain God’s gift of health.

1. We will understand how to look after material things by reading how the people of God looked after the material things God gave them.

2. We will understand how to raise our children, using God’s people as an example.

3. We will understand that God will give us health if we will follow his laws.

1. There are some people who follow only the Old Testament, believing that is enough.

2. They will find the law in the Old Testament, and the prophecies concerning Christ who is come, fulfilling the requirements of the law for them, but they won’t find Christ coming in the Old Testament.

3. They won’t find Christ working in His church in the Old Testament, therefore they won’t understand how they are supposed to serve God during this age.

1. One of the very first things we understand from the New Testament is that Christ is come fulfilling the Old Testament scriptures.

2. The next thing we understand is that we are to serve Him during this age through the local church Christ established during His personal ministry.

3. If we didn’t use both the Old and New Testament scriptures, we would have an incomplete view of Israel, Christ, and His church.

1. There were certain qualifications for a prophet.

2. There were no books of the Old Testament written by a non prophet.

3. II Peter 1:19-21 - Holy men of old spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

1. Luke 6:13-16 gives a list of the apostles names.

2. Acts 1:21,22 - gives a list of the qualifications of an apostle.

3. Any religious organization that claims to have apostles in it is a false religion.

4. Any religious organization that claims to have special visions and words from the Lord is a false religion.

5. When the last apostle died, the Word of God was completely written.

1. Luke 6:12-16 gives the names of the first twelve apostles.

2. In Acts 1:15-26, Judas Iscariot was replaced with Matthias.

3. I Corinthians 15:7-9, Paul declares he is an apostle, "After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. 8 And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time. 9 For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God."

4. Acts 14:4 compared to Acts 14:14 gives strong indication that Barnabas was also an apostle.

5. Romans 16:7 can be interpreted two ways, "Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellowprisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me."

6. Jesus Christ is also called an apostle in Hebrews 3:1, "Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus;"

1. This shouldn’t discourage us, but many times it does.

2. God has saved us and shown us things that help us to live a very satisfying life.

3. We naturally want others to see what God has shown us.

4. When they don’t want to hear what we have to say, it hurts and we don’t understand why they don’t want to listen.

5. We must understand that it is only by God’s grace that we understand.

6. God must reveal to them what He has revealed to us.

1. We should not take this mocking as being against us.

2. They are really mocking God.

1. These scoffers are walking after their own lusts, not after Godliness.

2. They are fulfilling the natural desires of the flesh, and don’t want to believe Christ will come back and stop them from doing the things they plan to do.

3. They have so little respect for God and His plans they believe that simply saying He won’t return will prevent His return.

4. They will certainly be surprised to learn that they have actually been a part of the prophecies concerning His return!

1. It is very likely these people are part of those that Paul told Timothy about in II Tim. 4:3,4.

2. It is one thing to know the promises of God and another to apply those promises to our everyday life.

3. The promise they refer to is a specific promise - that of Christ return.

1. This is really quite stupid.

2. Any child knows that if Christ had already come, the promise would have already been fulfilled.

3. A promise is a covenant or guarantee by God that He will do something.

1. They have applied depraved human reasoning instead of God’s word.

2. They have wasted their lives trying to "undo" what God has done, instead of yielding themselves to Him.

3. These are the false teachers Peter was talking about in chapter 2.

1. Men look with eyes of sight at the present creation, and suppose that all things have always been this way.

2. Heb. 11:3 - It is by looking with eyes of faith that we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God.

1. They may fool themselves into thinking that death will not come to them.

2. They may fool themselves into thinking that there is no life after death: that when they die all life stops.

1. They don’t believe in the fall of man and the resultant death.

2. They accept death as a necessary part of life without understand why death is that necessary part.

3. Evidently, they never stop long enough to ask themselves why this is so.

4. A man once told me that he could look at the stars and moon in the sky, but he couldn’t think about it very long.

1. The scoffers will say that the people who declared the end of the world have died without seeing the fulfillment of their preaching, therefore their preaching must be wrong.

2. That is a very hollow argument since Adam also died without having seen the promise given to him in Genesis 15, concerning the coming savior, fulfilled.

1. As a matter of fact, all of the prophets that preached concerning the coming savior died without having seen their preaching fulfilled.

2. Hebrews 11:13 - These all died in faith, not having seen the promises fulfilled.

3. That doesn’t mean that the prophecy didn’t come true.

4. It simply means that it didn’t come true in their lifetime.

5. It is completely amazing how we believe God must do things according to our timetable, when he lives in eternity, which has no time at all!

1. Everybody believes the universe had a beginning.

2. Even the evolutionists believe in creation.

3. The evolutionists are caught in their own web with this point.

4. If evolutionists could only believe there was no creation, that this present world has always existed the way it exist, they would not have to deal with God.

1. Evolutionists want to believe there was a creation without God, so they can believe this present world is all there is, and they will not die in their sins and go to an eternal hell, prepared by an eternal God, whom they have rejected.

2. They just don’t believe God had anything to do with it.

3. They foolishly devise their own creation, leaving God and His power and His will out of the matter.

1. This fact creates a philosophy of the mind that forces them to know that God had a plan in mind when He created the world.

2. Everything in their world is viewed from that perspective and the end result is that God is Almighty, and they are accountable to Him.

1. Rom. 1:18-20 - God has revealed His eternal power and Godhead to every human who reaches the age of accountability.

2. John 1:9 - The true light "lighteth every man that cometh into the world".

3. Rom. 2:15 - When lost people see the truth of God’s Word, they will either excuse themselves (and continue in wickedness) or accuse themselves (and turn from their wickedness).

1. Man has a natural bias away from God, and toward sin.

2. It is only by the intervention of God that anybody will accept the fact of His creating this universe.

1. This law states that nothing is new being created.

2. There are new things being made all the time, but the number of elements has remained the same.

1. This law states that everything is running down.

2. Everything takes more energy to operate than the energy derived from it.

3. The lost energy dissipates in the form of heat.

1. Genesis 1 declares over and over again that God spoke the world into existence.

2. Heb. 11:2 - Believers understand by faith that the worlds were framed by the Word of God.

1. This is no doubt referring to the heavens as we stand on the earth and look upward.

2. This would include the sun, moon, stars, and planets.

3. "Of old" refers to the age of the heavens, being about 6,000 years old at the present time.

4. The heavens were about 4,000 years old when Peter lived.

5. 6,000 years may not sound very old when compared with the billions of years old evolution says the world is.

1. Genesis 1:6-8 - In the beginning, there was a "water barrier", called the firmament, in the atmosphere which (I believe) acted like a filter to keep the harmful rays of the sun from the earth.

2. Below this firmament, there was more water on the earth itself.

3. Unbelievers are willingly ignorant of this fact because if they accepted this fact, they would also have to accept the fact that God made it, and that God called the firmament "heaven".

1. If they believe God created the world, they would be God’s creation, or they would be living on God’s creation.

2. If they are God’s creation, they would be accountable to God, and they don’t want to be accountable to anybody.

3. Eccl. 3:11 - "…God has put the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end."

4. It is as impossible to look at a tree and be saved, as it is to look at the creation and discover how it was created.

5. Faith is the message of the Bible.

1. They have allowed Satan to blind their minds.

2. They didn’t want to believe the overwhelming evidence of the judgment of God in the past.

3. They don’t want to believe in the future judgment of God.

1. Genesis 6:15 - The ark was approximately 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet tall.

2. It was divided into three stories, giving a total floor space of 33,750 square feet on each floor, for a total of 101,250 square feet on all three stories. Each story could have an 11 foot ceiling if three floors and the roof were each 3 feet thick!

3. The ark held the equivalent of 522 stock railroad cars. Two trains with 73 cars each would be able to carry approximately 35,000 animals.

4. Some have estimated the number of animals on the ark in the hundreds of millions, but the most logical estimates are about 35,000.

1. It doesn’t make any sense to me for Noah to build such a huge ark to escape a local flood.

2. Some say that only the known world was flooded.

3. Some say it was raining so hard that Noah couldn’t tell a mountain from a hill.

1. The Paluxy River Bed near Glen Rose, TX has dinosaur and human footprints in the same place!

2. These footprints are together and they are running. Some say the dinosaur is running from the man. Some say the man is running from the dinosaur. It just might be that both are running from the flood!

1. For a fossil to be formed, there must be a living creature (plant or animal) that dies and is suddenly covered in sediment before the body decays.

2. The body of any living creature that dies will decompose (two or three days, a week at most) before natural events cover it up (it could take many years for drifting sand or whatever to cover it up).

3. There is a "fossil graveyard" at Agate Springs, Nebraska. There are thousands (800,000,000,000 - 800 thousand million) of bones in this stratum, which runs horizontally for a long distance in the limestone hill. Fossils of the rhinoceros, camel, giant boar, and numerous other exotic animals are found jumbled together in this stratum.

1. Their not believing the first two conditions didn’t make those things not happen.

2. God spoke the world into existence, and He also destroyed the world by water.

3. God will also destroy the heavens and the earth by fire, whether anybody believes it or not.

1. The flood involved only the earth being destroyed by water.

2. The final destruction will include both the heavens and the earth being destroyed by fire.

3. There will be no traveling to another planet to escape the destruction of this world, because all the heavens will be destroyed along with this earth.

1. I do not believe there is any other "heavens and earth" that Peter was referring to.

2. Some people believe there are more universes than ours, and this scripture is talking about the destruction of this universe, not another.

3. The term "heavens and earth" speaks about the destruction of the entire creation of God, not a local destruction of a part of His creation.

4. There was not a local flood, and there won’t be a local destruction by fire.

1. The same word that created the heavens and the earth, and brought about the flood in Noah’s day.

2. This same word will also bring about the destruction of the world by fire.

3. John 1:1-5,14 - This word is Jesus Christ.

1. God still has control over His creation.

2. God is keeping His creation intact for His own purposes and glory.

3. When He is ready, he will destroy it all by fire.

4. We must understand that God didn’t create the world in order to destroy it.

5. He created it for His glory and honor.

6. The world was plunged into sin because of the disobedience of Adam.

7. God will use that disobedience for His own glory.

8. Psalms 76:10 - "Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee, the remainder of wrath shall thou restrain."

9. Eccl. 8:11, "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil."

1. God gave them space to repent, but instead, they devised more wickedness.

2. God is now giving men space to repent, but instead of repenting, they are devising more and more meanness.

1. A few of these are: Wetstein, Seneca, Simplicius, and Eusebius.

2. These philosophers didn’t get their ideas from Scripture.

3. They may have gotten it from pure conjecture, or from what was handed down by tradition.

4. However they arrived at their conclusions, they are remarkable consistent with Scripture.

1. Rev. 1:14 - The eyes of Jesus Christ are like a flame of fire.

2. I Peter 4:17,18 - If judgment will begin at the house of God, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?

1. The word perdition means destruction, or loss.

2. Verse 7 explains that God will allow wicked men to continue in their wickedness until their wickedness is fulfilled.

3. Gen. 15:16 - Israel will spend four generations in Egypt because the iniquity of the Amorites isn’t full.

4. Romans 11:25 - Israel is in darkness until the times of the Gentiles is fulfilled.

5. These verses show us that God is controlling both sides of the spectrum. He is not only controlling the lost, He is controlling the saved.

6. When God’s entire plan, then the heavens and the earth will be destroyed, and not one minute beforehand.

1. Some of these elect must be born first.

2. They must grow up and hear the gospel and be saved, then fulfill all the service God desires them to fulfill.

1. It simply changes the things it destroys from one substance into another.

2. The first law of thermodynamics declares that there is nothing being created, or nothing being completely destroyed into nothingness.

3. I do not believe the new heavens and the new earth will be a new creation in the sense that God will speak a new creation into existence.

1. The fact that there is no more sea on the new earth testifies to the fact that fire has changed all the water into something else.

2. Rev. 21:1 states there is coming a time when there will be no more sea. This is the time of eternity, after this heaven and earth are destroyed and God has created a new heaven and a new earth.

3. Psalms 72:8 states that Christ will reign from sea to sea. This is the time of the millennium when Christ rules over this earth with a rod of iron for 1,000 years.

1. The end result of all this is that God will wind up with exactly what He wanted to begin with (before sin), plus there will be many millions of redeemed people who will freely worship Him, plus Satan (all evil for all eternity) will have been put away. There will be nothing left but endless bliss and happiness.

1. Genesis 19:24 - Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven.

2. Exodus 3:2 - And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

3. Exodus 9:23 - And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven: and the LORD sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground; and the LORD rained hail upon the land of Egypt.

4. Exodus 13:21 - And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night

5. Exodus 24:17 - And the sight of the glory of the LORD was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel.

6. Lev. 9:24 - And there came a fire out from before the LORD, and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and the fat: which when all the people saw, they shouted, and fell on their faces.

7. I Kings 18:38 - Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.

8. II Kings 1:10, 12 - And Elijah answered and said to the captain of fifty, If I be a man of God, then let fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy fifty. And there came down fire from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty. {12} And Elijah answered and said unto them, If I be a man of God, let fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy fifty. And the fire of God came down from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty.

9. These are only a few of the passages that show God reveals His power in the form of fire.

1. II Thess. 2:11,12, God will send strong delusion to unbelievers through these great signs and wonders that they might believe Satan’s lie.

2. Matt. 24:24, The signs and wonders will be so great that if it were possible even the very elect would be deceived.

3. This event will be to show that Satan has overcome God and is sitting in his throne.

4. Satan is the great counterfeiter.

1. God will destroy this world by fire in order to prove once for all that Satan never had the victory over Him.

2. The destruction by fire also lays creates the new heavens and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.

1. Psalms 90:4 - "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."

2. God lives in eternity, and is not concerned with time. Men are concerned with time because God created us to live in these fleshly bodies in time. Men only has so long to live, therefore is concerned with time. God has all eternity, therefore isn’t concerned with time.

1. He has no beginning or end.

2. Peter declares that God is not hindered by our timetables.

3. Men think that is something isn’t accomplished during their life times, it won’t be accomplished.

4. This just isn’t so.

1. He does things according to His timetable, whether this fits in with what men think or not.

2. Psalms 90:4, "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."

3. For men a thousand years is a long time, but to God, it is no time at all.

1. Some have used this passage to teach against a pre-tribulation rapture.

2. Others use it to teach a post-tribulation return of the Lord.

3. Peter does not have in mind to set a time table, rather to confirm that the destruction of the world by fire will come whether anybody believes it will or not.

4. The previous verses in this chapter will demonstrate this.

1. John 21:18,19, Jesus has told Peter that he will die before the rapture comes.

2. II Peter 1:12-15 - Peter declares that he knows he will die, and these verses show the great burden he has for the people who will remain until the coming of the Lord.

1. Methuselah died the year of the flood.

2. Methuselah was born 687 A.M. and his name means "Man of the dart, or Javelin", "It shall be sent (deluge)".

3. Believers knew than when Methuselah died, the coming judgment of God was very near.

4. Believers can also know that when Peter dies, the destruction of this world is very near.

5. Methuselah died the year of the flood, but the judgment of God didn’t come on the earth immediately after Peter’s death.

6. It is the longsuffering of God that has kept the judgment away for this length of time.

1. Evidently, Noah was in the ark seven days before the first drop of rain fell.

2. We shouldn’t get excited when things don’t happen when and how we think they are supposed to.

3. God is in control, and we ought to trust Him, regardless of how circumstances look to us.

1. There are some dispensationalists who believe this.

2. They say it was 2,000 years from the creation to the flood. (Actually it was 1656 years, but Noah did die when the world was 2006 years old.) This has been referred to as the time of conscience, or the time of the family.

3. They declare it was another 2,000 years to Christ. This time period is roughly equivalent to the times of the Jews.

4. They then conclude (accurately) it has been another 2,000 years since Christ. This time is attributed to the Gentiles, or the local churches.

5. They see from the scriptures that Christ shall reign on this earth for 1,000 years.

1. Rev. 20:4 - Christ shall reign for 1,000 years.

2. Rev. 20:5 - The dead (lost) shall remain in hell until the end of the millennium. After the millennium the lost shall be judged at the Great White Throne Judgment.

3. Rev. 20:6 - Those that take part in the first resurrection shall reign with Christ for 1,000 years.

4. Rev. 20:7 - After the 1,000 year reign of Christ, Satan shall be loosed from the bottomless pit where he will gather the inhabitants of the world together, all those that have rejected Christ, and will attempt to fight God. God will soundly defeat all his enemies, and Satan will be cast into the lake of fire, where the beast and false prophet are.