2 Peter 1:12-19
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[Introduction]
Last week we went over 2 Peter 1:1-11. Today we’ll be continuing on through 1:12-21. The passage we’ll be going through today is in light of the previous verses, what we discussed last time. So let’s do a quick review on that. Last time we talked about the importance growing in our faith. How we should grow to be mature Christians and what to supplement our faith with, which is a generous provision of moral excellence, knowledge, self-control, patient endurance, godliness, brotherly affection, and love for everyone. God has equipped us with everything we need to live a godly life by coming to know Him. We must grow closer to Christ and as we do we take on his characteristics through the power of the Holy Spirit changing us from the inside out. Peter says “do these things and you will never fall away.” And if you follow God to the end, “God will give you a grand entrance into the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
[Prayer]
[Body]
Now let’s read through today’s passage 2 Peter 1:12-21
12 Therefore, I will always remind you about these things—even though you already know them and are standing firm in the truth you have been taught. 13 And it is only right that I should keep on reminding you as long as I live. 14 For our Lord Jesus Christ has shown me that I must soon leave this earthly life, 15 so I will work hard to make sure you always remember these things after I am gone.
16 For we were not making up clever stories when we told you about the powerful coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We saw his majestic splendor with our own eyes 17 when he received honor and glory from God the Father. The voice from the majestic glory of God said to him, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.” 18 We ourselves heard that voice from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain.
19 Because of that experience, we have even greater confidence in the message proclaimed by the prophets. You must pay close attention to what they wrote, for their words are like a lamp shining in a dark place—until the Day dawns, and Christ the Morning Star shines in your hearts. 20 Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, 21 or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.
Let’s focus on verses 12-15.
These verses are very focused on the readers knowing the Word of God. The word knowledge appears 16 times throughout 2 Peter. This is one of the crucial points Peter is trying to make in this letter. There’s a really good chance that all of us have gone through a season where we lack motivation to stay in the Word. If you’ve been a Christian for a long time, it’s easy to think I know the gist of the book, the gospel, who wins in the end, the well known books and lessons. What’s the point of reading it over and over again if I know the main point. First of all we will never stop learning from the Word of God, yes the Gospel and receiving salvation is straightforward, but to walk with God and grow in the faith, we must continue to read and study His Word.
Remember this is Peter’s second letter to this group of people. He didn’t write them once and say, well if they screw up that’s on them because I gave them all they need to know. He writes again, even if it’s a similar message because he wants to make sure they remember who God is and why and how they should follow Him. When he opens with a message of encouragement about knowing God, how to grow in the faith, and pursuing a virtuous life, he writes here “I will always remind you about these things—even though you already know them and are standing firm in the truth you have been taught.” Peter is determined to constantly remind them of God’s teachings as long as he is alive. And these are people that he acknowledges are already standing firm in the Faith. “I know it already”, is not an excuse to stop studying the word. It’s actually very arrogant and foolish, because the reality is we don’t know it all. And I’ve been that arrogant fool before. The longer we avoid the Word, what we did know gets blurry, and eventually our actions will follow and we’ll stumble. The trials in life don’t stop, and so it needs to be combatted with God’s Word to keep us strong in the faith. Peter does not want these believers to fall away, and he knows the only thing to keep them going is to keep bringing them the Good News.
Repetition is important. In Sports if you want to compete you will practice your form over and over again. You practice different scenarios and situations over and over again. And if you’re on a team, you probably practice close to every day, for multiple hours. When you’re in school, you study the same thing over and over again. To stay sharp in whatever is we want to accomplish, knowledge or skill, we always go through repetition. The Word of God holds an infinite amount more value than anything else. We should go through the entire Bible, and then again, and again. I don’t want to make following God sound like a performance because it’s not, we are saved once and for all by trusting in Christ. Studying the Word is for our own good, to help keep us on the narrow path and not falling away.
We won’t talk about it today, but in Chapter 2 Peter writes about the dangers of false teachers. Knowing the Word of God is also necessary to be able to distinguish between those who are false teachers and those who preach the true Gospel. Many people will twist the Word in a way where it sounds pretty accurate but is a very different message.
Let’s re-read and focus on verses 16-18 now:
16 For we were not making up clever stories when we told you about the powerful coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We saw his majestic splendor with our own eyes 17 when he received honor and glory from God the Father. The voice from the majestic glory of God said to him, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.” 18 We ourselves heard that voice from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain.
Here Peter writes about why they can believe him and the other apostles in what they preach. Why they can believe that Jesus is the Son of God. Clever stories here in verse 16 in other translations may read “Fables” or “Myths”. The Greek word here means myths and in the new testament was typically referring to pagan mythology. If you know anything about Greek mythology you know how wild those stories are between Poseidon, Zeus, and all the others. Any story that involves super natural events will always raise some eyebrows. And Jesus, being the Son of God, did perform many supernatural things. What can give us assurance in the writings of the Bible is that there are multiple eyewitnesses to these events and prophecies that were fulfilled. God does not require blind faith us. If you have one person claiming something supernatural, but nothing verifiable, that would require blind faith.
- There are people who claim they’ve seen bigfoot, I don’t know about you but I’m not buyin’ it.
- Joseph Smith claimed to receive a book of golden plates from the angel Moroni, but of course he couldn’t actually take the golden plates to show anyone, the angel didn’t want him to. Nothing verifiable, and yet many people believe that story. Now we have the book of mormon.
- Muhammad claimed the angel Gabriel came to him in a cave and gave him the first revelations of the Quran and informed him that he is God's prophet. That’s how Islam was started.
There’s a lot of different book these days that people claim to be the word of God. These religions were started on some claimed personal experience and they have nothing verifiable. With the Bible we have subjective and objective reasoning. Personal experiences, prophecies and actual location and dates documented. A part from all the evidence of the Bible being a reliable historical document, it blows my mind that people think this was just a group of guys that made it all up. Not just the Bible but many other historical documents about church history we know many if not all the apostles were martyred. Why would a group of guys make up something that brings them no financial gain, they’re not even the hero of the story, and leads them to painful deaths.
The disciples witnessed supernatural events. Specifically here in these verses 16-18 Peter mentions the event on the Mount of Transfiguration. This is written in more detail in the gospels, let’s look at Matthew17:1-8 -
1 Six days later Jesus took Peter and the two brothers, James and John, and led them up a high mountain to be alone. 2 As the men watched, Jesus’ appearance was transformed so that his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as light. 3 Suddenly, Moses and Elijah appeared and began talking with Jesus.
4 Peter exclaimed, “Lord, it’s wonderful for us to be here! If you want, I’ll make three shelters as memorials—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
5 But even as he spoke, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy. Listen to him.” 6 The disciples were terrified and fell face down on the ground.
7 Then Jesus came over and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” 8 And when they looked up, Moses and Elijah were gone, and they saw only Jesus.
Now Peter, James, and John obviously witnessed many other supernatural events of Jesus, why is Peter mentioning this one. Peter in his first letter and this one, constantly brings up the second coming of Christ. And this event that he’s talking about now was a preview of Christ returning. Also, there were multiple eyewitnesses. In verses 16 and 17 Peter says we saw and we heard. The trustworthiness of an event taking place increases when there are multiple eyewitnesses. There’s no such thing as a group hallucination. Also they didn’t just see, they also heard.
And now as we get into 19-21, Peter focuses on the objective side.
We’ll re-read that.
19 Because of that experience, we have even greater confidence in the message proclaimed by the prophets. You must pay close attention to what they wrote, for their words are like a lamp shining in a dark place—until the Day dawns, and Christ the Morning Star shines in your hearts. 20 Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, 21 or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.
Peter points to the prophecies that were fulfilled. The prophets in the Old Testament would speak of events that would take place hundreds of years in advance, and they would happen exactly as the prophet had spoken.
In Isaiah 45 you can read about how after the Temple had been destroyed in Jerusalem and the Israelites had been exiled, Isaiah prophesied that
King Cyrus would save the Israelites from captivity and rebuild the Temple. What’s amazing is this prophecy was made around 150 years before King Cyrus had even been born. And sure enough, that event came to pass.
There are many prophecies documented in the Bible that were all fulfilled. Even when you think about Jesus being crucified, there wasn’t just one generic prophecy about Jesus’ death, there were specific details.
Here are some prophecies fulfilled in Jesus’s death:
death by crucifixion
- being crucified with thiefs
- given vinegar to quench his thirst
- And Jesus’s legs not being broken
Legs not being broken is interesting. First of all, where did this prophecy come from. God gave a command that the passover lamb should not have its legs broken. And this applies to Jesus since he is the Lamb of God sacrificed for us. Now you might be wondering why would someone’s legs need to be broken when they’re already nailed to a cross. This actually would happen often during a crucifixion to speed up the process of death. To breathe adequately, those being crucified would have to pull or push themselves up. Breaking their legs prevented the pushing, leaving them to only use their arms to pull them up. Their strength wouldn’t last long and eventually the victim would likely die to suffocation. In the book of John you can read that the Jews didn’t want the bodies on the crosses during the Sabbath day, so to ensure they died faster they did request for their legs to be broken. The roman soldiers broke the legs of the two thiefs, but when they got to Jesus, he was already dead and so they did not break his legs.
These prophecies contained very specific details. And these could be given with 100% accuracy because as Peter mentions, they were not from man’s understanding. They spoke from God.
And all the scriptures are God breathed. They were written by many different people, with all different levels of education and different styles, but the meaning and destination of that message was driven by God. All the writings come together in one cohesive message, because there is one author, and that is God.
We can read and trust the scriptures with confidence. The picture Peter gives is a lamp shining in a dark place. We need the Word of God. We live in a dark world and yes the Holy Spirit works within us as our guide, but we must know the Word.
105 Your word is a lamp to guide my feet
and a light for my path.
12 Jesus spoke to the people once more and said, “I am the light of the world. If you follow me, you won’t have to walk in darkness, because you will have the light that leads to life.”
How many here have ever stubbed their toe as they got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? We can feel like we have a good idea on how to navigate without a light sometimes, but when you get hit by something unexpected it can hurt real bad. This same thing applies to our spiritual life, the world is full of darkness and no matter how confident you are, trials are going to come, life is going to hit hard, the line between right and wrong in certain situations are going to get blurry, and if you don’t have the Word of God on your mind and heart you’re going to be in a much worse situation. We all have times where we stumble, but as long as we remember Christ is our refuge we’ll always have hope. We need to dive into the Word of God not just when times are hard, but in the good times as well. This will prepare us for the hard times and keep us from falling away.