Knights of Columbus Beaver Valley Chapter Electronic Books

The New Jerusalem Bible with Apocrypha
The Second Letter of Peter

Second Peter encourages its readers to wait for the Day of the Lord Jesus Christ with patience and alert perseverance. It warns against false teachers, and especially ones who value only knowledge at the expense of generosity and self-control. A large section, 2:1-3:3, coincides closely with the Letter of Jude and is probably dependent on it. The letter may well be the latest writing of the NT, and is widely accepted as dating from the 2nd century, well after Peter's death. It is given the authority of Peter by a literary convention.

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Chapter 1

Greetings

^1:1Simon Peter, servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have received a faith as precious as our own, given through the saving justice of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ. ²Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of our Lord.

The generosity of God

³By his divine power, he has lavished on us all the things we need for life and for true devotion, through the knowledge of him who has called us by his own glory and goodness. ⁴Through these, the greatest and priceless promises have been lavished on us, that through them you should share the divine nature and escape the corruption rife in the world through disordered passion. ⁵With this in view, do your utmost to support your faith with goodness, goodness with understanding, ⁶understanding with self-control, self-control with perseverance, perseverance with devotion, ⁷devotion with kindness to the brothers, and kindness to the brothers with love. ⁸The possession and growth of these qualities will prevent your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ from being ineffectual or unproductive. ⁹But without them, a person is blind or short-sighted, forgetting how the sins of the past were washed away. ¹⁰Instead of this, brothers, never allow your choice or calling to waver; then there will be no danger of your stumbling, ¹¹for in this way you will be given the generous gift of entry to the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

The apostolic witness

¹²That is why I will always go on recalling the same truths to you, even though you already know them and are firmly fixed in these truths. ¹³I am sure it is my duty, as long as I am in this tent, to keep stirring you up with reminders, ¹⁴since I know the time for me to lay aside this tent is coming soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me. ¹⁵And I shall take great care that after my own departure you will still have a means to recall these things to mind. ¹⁶When we told you about the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, we were not slavishly repeating cleverly invented myths; no, we had seen his majesty with our own eyes. ¹⁷He was honoured and glorified by God the Father, when a voice came to him from the transcendent Glory, This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour. ^{*[Mt 17:5par] 18}We ourselves heard this voice from heaven, when we were with him on the holy mountain.

The value of prophecy

¹⁹So we have confirmation of the words of the prophets; and you will be right to pay attention to it as to a lamp for lighting a way through the dark, until the dawn comes and the morning star rises in your minds. ²⁰At the same time, we must recognise that the interpretation of scriptural prophecy is never a matter for the individual. ²¹For no prophecy ever came from human initiative. When people spoke for God it was the Holy Spirit that moved them.

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Chapter 2

False teachers

^2:1As there were false prophets in the past history of our people, so you too will have your false teachers, who will insinuate their own disruptive views and, by disowning the Lord who bought them freedom, will bring upon themselves speedy destruction. ²Many will copy their debauched behaviour, and the Way of Truth will be brought into disrepute on their account. ³In their greed they will try to make a profit out of you with untrue tales. But the judgement made upon them long ago is not idle, and the destruction awaiting them is for ever on the watch.

Lessons of the past

⁴When angels sinned, God did not spare them: he sent them down into the underworld and consigned them to the dark abyss to be held there until the Judgement. ⁵He did not spare the world in ancient times: he saved only Noah, the preacher of uprightness, along with seven others, when he sent the Flood over a world of sinners. ⁶He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by reducing them to ashes as a warning to future sinners; ⁷but rescued Lot, an upright man who had been sickened by the debauched way in which these vile people behaved- ⁸for that upright man, living among them, was outraged in his upright soul by the crimes that he saw and heard every day. ⁹All this shows that the Lord is well able to rescue the good from their trials, and hold the wicked for their punishment until the Day of Judgement, ¹⁰especially those who follow the desires of their corrupt human nature and have no respect for the Lord's authority.

The punishment to come

Such self-willed people with no reverence are not afraid of offending against the glorious ones, ¹¹but the angels in their greater strength and power make no complaint or accusation against them in the Lord's presence. ¹²But these people speak evil of what they do not understand; they are like brute beasts, born only to be caught and killed, and like beasts they will be destroyed, being injured in return for the injuries they have inflicted. ¹³Debauchery even by day they make their pleasure; they are unsightly blots, and amuse themselves by their trickery even when they are sharing your table; ¹⁴with their eyes always looking for adultery, people with an insatiable capacity for sinning, they will seduce any but the most stable soul. Where greed is concerned they are at their peak of fitness. They are under a curse. ¹⁵They have left the right path and wandered off to follow the path of Balaam son of Bosor, who set his heart on a dishonest reward, but soon had his fault pointed out to him: ¹⁶a dumb beast of burden, speaking with a human voice, put a stop to the madness of the prophet. ¹⁷People like this are dried-up springs, fogs swirling in the wind, and the gloom of darkness is stored up for them. ¹⁸With their high-sounding but empty talk they tempt back people who have scarcely escaped from those who live in error, by playing on the disordered desires of their human nature and by debaucheries. ¹⁹They may promise freedom but are themselves slaves to corruption; because if anyone lets himself be dominated by anything, then he is a slave to it; ²⁰and anyone who has escaped the pollution of the world by coming to know our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and who then allows himself to be entangled and mastered by it a second time, ends up by being worse than he was before. ²¹It would have been better for them never to have learnt the way of uprightness, than to learn it and then desert the holy commandment that was entrusted to them. ²²What they have done is exactly as the proverb rightly says: The dog goes back to its vomit ^{*[Pr 26:11]} and: As soon as the sow has been washed, it wallows in the mud.

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Chapter 3

The Day of the Lord; the prophets and the apostles

^3:1My dear friends, this is the second letter I have written to you, trying to awaken in you by my reminders an unclouded understanding. ²Remember what was said in the past by the holy prophets and the command of the Lord and Saviour given by your apostles.

False teachers

³First of all, do not forget that in the final days there will come sarcastic scoffers whose life is ruled by their passions. ⁴'What has happened to the promise of his coming?' they will say, 'Since our Fathers died everything has gone on just as it has since the beginning of creation!' ⁵They deliberately ignore the fact that long ago there were the heavens and the earth, formed out of water and through water by the Word of God, ⁶and that it was through these same factors that the world of those days was destroyed by the floodwaters. ⁷It is the same Word which is reserving the present heavens and earth for fire, keeping them till the Day of Judgement and of the destruction of sinners. ⁸But there is one thing, my dear friends, that you must never forget: that with the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. ^{*[Ps 90:4] 9}The Lord is not being slow in carrying out his promises, as some people think he is; rather is he being patient with you, wanting nobody to be lost and everybody to be brought to repentance. ¹⁰The Day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and melt away, the earth and all that it contains will be burned up.

Fresh call to holiness. Doxology

¹¹Since everything is coming to an end like this, what holy and saintly lives you should be living ¹²while you wait for the Day of God to come, and try to hasten its coming: on that Day the sky will dissolve in flames and the elements melt in the heat. ¹³What we are waiting for, relying on his promises, is the new heavens and new earth, where uprightness will be at home. ¹⁴So then, my dear friends, while you are waiting, do your best to live blameless and unsullied lives so that he will find you at peace. ¹⁵Think of our Lord's patience as your opportunity to be saved; our brother Paul, who is so dear to us, told you this when he wrote to you with the wisdom that he was given. ¹⁶He makes this point too in his letters as a whole wherever he touches on these things. In all his letters there are of course some passages which are hard to understand, and these are the ones that uneducated and unbalanced people distort, in the same way as they distort the rest of scripture -to their own destruction. ¹⁷Since you have been forewarned about this, my dear friends, be careful that you do not come to the point of losing the firm ground that you are standing on, carried away by the errors of unprincipled people. ¹⁸Instead, continue to grow in the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory, in time and eternity. Amen.

The Beaver Valley Chapter of the Knights of Columbus graciously thanks Duquesne University and Father Sean Hogan, C.S.Sp. for sponsoring our Knights of Columbus Beaver Valley Chapter web page.