The points I made in my last post (here) are enough to establish the legitimacy of interpreting particular biblical language in a non-literal way.1 However, I need to prove it is legitimate to do so regarding the new heavens and earth of 2 Peter by making the following points:
- Peter had a distinctively Jewish understanding in his preaching and writing. He, therefore, intended his audience to interpret his messages in a distinctly Jewish manner.
- Peter specifically linked the judgment of the scoffers, the day of the Lord, and the new heavens and earth to old prophecies, not to any further predictions. Logically and contextually, these ancient prophecies must be in the Old Testament.
- In Peter’s understanding, this “something” is the final judgment upon Israel, the formal dissolution of the covenant God made with her after the Exodus. This dissolution culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
- The Old Testament contains several prophecies of the final destruction of Israel, and Isaiah 65 gives one of the new heavens and earth. Therefore, logic requires us to stay within the bounds of Peter’s Jewish understanding. Anything else would be injecting a new meaning into Peter’s words.
Let us work through these points more thoroughly. I will look at the first one in the remainder of this post and save the other three for future posts.
1. Peter had a Jewish understanding of the Scriptures that differs from the way we tend to read the Bible, as I mentioned above. We must learn to think the way the Jewish Christians thought, or we will misinterpret their teaching. (For a deeper dive, see the Supplement on how Peter would have read the Old Testament.)
Particular passages from the Old Testament show the Jewish understanding of judgment language. If we learn to think like the ancients, we will see that the prophets used it to foretell a nation’s last days and illustrate spiritual truths.
For example, Isaiah 13 is a prophecy of the destruction of Babylon by the Medes. The prophet represented the last days of Babylon by things that sound (to us) like God destroying the physical heavens and earth. But in this context, it can only refer to the nation of Babylon, not to the physical elements of the heavens and earth.
Read through all of Isaiah 13 to note the language. Particularly note the following verses:
Behold, the day of the Lord comes,
cruel, with wrath and fierce anger,
to make the land a desolation
and to destroy its sinners from it.
For the stars of the heavens and their constellations
will not give their light;
the sun will be dark at its rising,
and the moon will not shed its light.
I will punish the world for its evil,
and the wicked for their iniquity.…
Therefore I will make the heavens tremble,
and the earth will be shaken out of its place,
at the wrath of the Lord of hosts
in the day of his fierce anger. (Isa 13:9–13 ESV. Emphasis added)
Though future to Isaiah, the fulfillment of this prophecy has already happened: God has judged the nation of Babylon. Is it not apparent that the darkening of the stars, sun, and moon is symbolic and describes the destruction of the world of the Babylonians? Is it not accurate to say that this is the language of judgment?
When Isaiah prophesies that God would judge Egypt, he says things like: “Behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt; and the idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence, and the heart of the Egyptians will melt within them” (Isa 19:1 ESV. Emphasis added).
The prophet uses this judgment language in Isaiah 24:
The earth is utterly broken,
the earth is split apart,
the earth is violently shaken.
The earth staggers like a drunken man;
it sways like a hut;
its transgression lies heavy upon it,
and it falls, and will not rise again.
On that day the Lord will punish
the host of heaven, in heaven,
and the kings of the earth, on the earth.
They will be gathered together
as prisoners in a pit;
they will be shut up in a prison,
and after many days they will be punished.
Then the moon will be confounded
and the sun ashamed,
for the Lord of hosts reigns
on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem,
and his glory will be before his elders. (Isa 24:19–23 ESV. Emphasis added)
If we could transport ourselves to the times of the ancients, we might better understand how they thought. They had no satellite images of planet Earth. The heavens were a vast expanse of blue by day and a canopy of beautiful stars by night. Their existence comprised the things they could see before and above them: their heavens and earth (or land2). In their thinking, the boundaries of a nation were their heavens and earth. The heavens watched over their earth, so to speak. To have the heavens and earth destroyed meant that their nation would collapse. It did not mean everything would be dissolved by fire and remade.
Peter would have been familiar with this judgment language, and he would have understood it to mean that these nations were to fall.
When Peter preached, he used this non-literal, figurative Jewish understanding. (Again, see the Supplement.) He preached in a way that did not correspond to the words exactly as they are written, or, more accurately again, as they might seem to us. For instance, in Acts 2:34–35, Peter referred to Psalm 110:1 when he preached about the Ruler:
For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says,
“The Lord said to my Lord,
‘Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.’” (Acts 2:34–35 ESV)
It was not Peter’s intention to teach that Christ’s enemies would become a literal footstool. Instead, he was teaching the dominion of Christ over all his enemies.
In Acts 4:11, Peter said,
This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. (Acts 4:11 ESV)
Surely nobody believes Peter intended to teach that Jesus was a literal stone or cornerstone. Rather, he set forth Jesus as the reason for all things, being the spiritual cornerstone that joins all things prophesied of Him in the Old Testament, and all things taught of Him in the New Testament, and all future things promised to Him in his Lordly rule over all the nations. In short, he set forth the great reality of the Stone from Daniel 2 that crushes rulers and then fills the whole earth.
Peter wrote his letters (and preached) with this same Jewish understanding he grew up with. They are remarkably Jewish! (Refer to the Supplement to see just how Jewish they were!) If Peter wrote his letters using Jewish thinking, then he intended that the “new heavens and earth” be understood that way.
Footnotes
- The image in this post is The Creation by James Tissot (1826–1902). This file (here) is in the public domain (PD-US).
- The Hebrew word means either earth or land.
