The Apostle Peter wrote this, his Second Epistle or Letter to Christians dispersed throughout the Roman Empire and some places outside of the empire, such as India and even China (based on recent archaeological evidence).
This dispersion is written of in Acts 8:1. According to Luke, who wrote the Acts of the Apostles, Stephen the deacon had been stoned to death by a Jewish mob of scoffers for teaching that Christ is the Messiah using many Old Testament proofs. Read the story in Acts 6:1-7:60.
Saul, the Pharisee later known as the Apostle Paul (Acts 13:9), watched the stoning and even watched over the clothing of the men doing the stoning. This was before his conversion to Christianity at Damascus in Acts chapter nine. Before his conversion, Saul was a zealot for stopping the spread of Christianity. Saul was his Jewish birth name but, being a Roman citizen (Acts 22:25), Paul was his Roman name.
They stoned Stephen to death and Saul heartily agreed with the killing of Stephen. This began a great persecution of all Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 8:1). As a result, most of the Christians there went to other places in the known world to avoid the great persecution in Jerusalem.
A few remained with James the brother of Jesus who was the bishop of the Jerusalem church. They endured the persecution and stayed until The Romans laid siege to Jerusalem in 70 AD. Those Christians escaped during a lull in hostilities and went to Pella in Perea1 as Christ had warned them to before His Crucifixion (Mat 24:16; Luk 21:21). Therefore the Gospel was spread throughout the known world by the Christians who fled Jerusalem after the death of Stephen in circa 32 AD, and by those who fled to Pella in AD 70.
Being a Christian in the First Century AD was perilous. Christians were killed for their beliefs and there were several government persecutions against Christians during that century. Peter wrote his letter to bolster the faith of Christians, to exhort them to remember the origins of their faith, to comfort them, and to give them advice for the future.
Peter wrote:
It is important for you to understand what will happen in the last days. People will laugh at you. They will live following the evil they want to do. They will say, “Jesus promised to come again. Where is he? Our fathers have died, but the world continues the way it has been since it was made.” But these people don’t want to remember what happened long ago. The skies were there, and God made the earth from water and with water. All this happened by God’s word. Then the world was flooded and destroyed with water. 2 Peter 3:3-6 (ERV).
The same passage from the KJV:
Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men (2 Peter 3:3-7).
Peter’s prophecy is surely coming true in our day. People do scoff at us and laugh at us because of our belief in Christ. Scoffers certainly do not believe that Jesus is coming again. If they believe that Christ lived at all, they claim He was a “great human teacher,” a “philosopher,” a “good man,” etc., but they do not believe that He is the Messiah, the Son of God, or that He arose from the dead. This is a good place to once again quote what C. S. Lewis said about Jesus:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.” —Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity, from The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd., p. 36-37
We are told by the scoffers, many of whom, by the way, are highly educated and respected as “experts” in their fields of study, that the universe spontaneously happened four and a half billion years ago. One of their major theories is that nothing exploded into something and began the universe with a big bang. They tell us that all the matter in the universe was compressed into a super dense, extremely hot singularity that exploded to begin the universe. They do not tell us where the matter came from to form this singularity; but we are to accept it as fact.
These scoffers laugh at us because we believe that God created the heavens and the earth, that is, the universe (Gen 1:1) and the earth was covered by water on the first day of creation (Gen 1:2) Then God gathered the water into one place allowing the land to rise out of the water (Gen 1:9). In this way the ocean was separated from the dry land. People that believe this and speak out about it are laughed at by the intelligentsia, who call them ignorant, backward, uneducated, morons, mind-numbed, etc., and are generally ridiculed for their belief in the Word of God.
The supposed intellectual community tells us that all life we see on earth somehow self-formed through a process known as abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is natural biological beginnings from non-biological substances, or, more simply, the spontaneous development of living things from non-living matter.
The result of that theoretical spontaneous development was a single living cell, or perhaps a number of single cells that developed spontaneously around the same time. Then that cell somehow began to reproduce itself. Through processes that took millions of years, that single living cell became all the diversity of life we see on earth today. This is a theoretical process known as evolution, specifically macroevolution.
Macroevolution is the theoretical process through mutation and natural selection that changes one species into another. That process, according to evolutionists, took about four billion (that is four thousand million) years to result in the diversity of life we have on earth today.
Christians know that this is contrary to the truth that the Bible teaches. We know that God created plant life (Gen 1:11-12), sea life and fowl (Gen 1:21), animal and insect life (Gen 1:24), and human life (Gen 1:27) during the six days of creation. We also know from the Scriptures that God gave each living thing the ability to reproduce (Gen 1:22). However, they could only reproduce their own kind; God did not allow for evolution nor does Scripture allow for speciation outside of the kind. (Gen 1:24-25).
Creation science, which is a true and legitimate science that is staffed with many brilliant men and women with advanced science degrees from recognized universities and colleges. Those creation scientists have determined through scientific investigation and analysis, that the biblical kind, ‘min’ in Hebrew is restricted to family in biological taxonomy for some organisms, and genus for others. However, that investigation is ongoing.
Creation biologists have coined the word “baramin” to describe the Biblical ‘kind.’ It is a combination of the Hebrew word ‘min,’ which is ‘kind’ in the Bible and ‘bara,’ which means created in English. Hence baramin are created kinds. The word is recognized in many dictionaries.
When we Christians stand against evolution and for God’s creation, we are ridiculed, scoffed, laughed at, and otherwise scorned. In academia, people can lose their position or job if they do not tow the evolution line. Students that opposed the prevailing evolutionary views of academia can be ejected from their classrooms and restricted from returning. Applicants for positions will not even be given an interview if they do not support evolution. In fact some scoffers in the evolutionary school of thought even advocate the removal of “doubters” from society; some have even advocated the execution of evolution opponents, e.g. Nazi Germany. Scoffers do not like our beliefs.
Many of the academics, intelligentsia, and other scoffers explain that the topography of the earth, including mountains, canyons, valleys, plains, etc., took multiplied millions of years to “evolve.” In fact the prevailing theory among those in the old earth school is that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old. They say it took that long for the topography to develop slowly over the ages.
However, we Christians know that the current topography of the earth was created by the worldwide flood of Noah. The breaking up of the earth’s crust to allow the water to jet out into the atmosphere pushed up the mountains and hollowed out the ocean basins. The quickly receding waters after the flood ended created the canyons, valleys and other features of the topography. This all occurred in 150 days. When we stand on these principles, we are scorned, denigrated, laughed at, and ostracized.
The fact that Peter, a man that lived in the First Century AD (or CE for skeptics) was able to prophesy that these things would occur two millennia before they did occur is proof that the Bible is true (see Is the Bible Reliable). For Christians this is a letter that comforts us and gives us the strength to get through this quagmire of falsehoods that the world disseminates and holds over our heads as “proof” the there is no God. Make no mistake, the scoffers in the world wish to prove that God does not exist so they will not have to worry about sin and God’s judgement.
I will assure any scoffers that God does exist, and He is against sin, and that there is coming a time when He will judge the world for its sins. But in the meantime, before that judgment comes, God has given us a way to avoid being punished for our sins. That way is Jesus Christ, who paid the penalty for our sins. If we believe on Him then we will inherit eternal life. If we do not believe on him, and that is the default position of the entire world, then after our death we will spend eternity in hell, the place designed for Satan and his angels. Put your faith in Jesus Christ this very moment.
Do you know Jesus Christ as your Savior? He is going to return to the world soon. Are you ready? When He does if you do not know Him as your Savior, you will join all those who do not know Him in “Outer Darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Mat 22:13-14).
Updated July 22, 2021
