Bible Study on II Peter 3:1-18 (short)

Every spirituality has it’s opinion about how it all began and how it will all end. Secular humanism (which is the spirituality that dominates our own culture) can’t quite make its mind up about how it will all end, and true to relativistic form, holds two completely contradictory ideas in place. On the one hand is the myth of inevitable progress towards a Utopia, a world where we have beaten disease, and perhaps even death (www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/the-immortalists-can-science-defeat-death/). In such a vision of the future, we live in perfect balance with nature, and everyone is free to be who they ‘really’ are without fear of judgment. But running alongside that is the a much more dysoptian fear rooted in environmental and ecenomic collapse, population overload, and perhaps through that some kind of planetary re-set. Our hopes and fears for the future tend ot be played out in science fiction (often set in the future), so having a look at that genre can be quite instructive about where our culture is at!

Against all this, the Bible has a much more Christ-centred vision of both origin and destiny. And it turns out the two a deeply interconnected. Tragically, even in the Church not everyone is prepared to accept the Bible’s teaching on how this age will end. It’s surprising how many Christians functionally believe our culture’s narrative(s), and how many Churches never preach or teach about Christ’s return - in spite of it being embedded in our Creeds and plainly taught in our Scriptures. It’s a compelling observation that most of what we know about the end of the age is from Jesus Himself - yet even that isn’t seemingly conclusive! When it is referred to, it is often in a context of apology, and qualification. I have heard the idea mocked in Churches. The idea that ‘no-one really believes in these things any more’ is regularly peddled, though I find the whole thing tends more often to be ignored. Which is both unBiblical and catastrophic for authentic Christian discipleship. A Christian who does not have a rigorously-informed vision of Christ’s return held at the front of their thinking, will simply be unable to live faithfully for Christ.

There is nothing new under the sun. The Apostles raged against the same short-sightedness, and against the chaos it introduced into the Church. Theology has consequences. And bad (i.e. unBiblical) theology has toxic consequences. Eternal ones. And so without apology, we celebrate and eagerly anticipate the Day of the Lord. We long for His return, and the exposure of all that has been done in the earth. Without any hint of embarrasment we await the destruction of all that is cruel, barabaric, unjust, and evil. We look forward to the New Creation where righteousness dwells. If others ignore it or mock it, or dismiss it with sophisticated contempt, no matter. For us it our bedrock, the foundation on which we build ‘holy and godly lives’. We gladly suffer and sacrifice everything now in the cause of the Gospel, knowing that ‘our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us’ (Rom.8:18). We meditate on that Day, and live each ‘today’ knowing we will give account, and orienting every decision to elicit from Christ His commendation: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ (Matt.25:21). And throughout this age and the age to come, the fact of Christ coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and to renew all things (Matt.19:28), will be the reason for our delight in, and our worship of our Living God. ‘Halleljuah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and just are His judgments…’ (Rev.19:1-2). Don’t we?

Questions:

Why do you think that the Bible’s teaching about the return of Jesus is so widely disregarded in the Church?

How can we encourage each other that this teaching is Good News (in Rom.2:16, Paul speaks of Judgment as part of the Gospel)? …that it should be celebrated and enjoyed, and that it should form the basis of our worship, when (let’s be honest) for many it is the cause of spiritual angst, and all-in-all, we’re not sure we think it’s ‘good news’ at all!

What do we lose when we either consciously or unconsciously displace the Bible’s vision of the return of Christ and the renewal of all things?

Read II Peter 3
Has Peter succeeded in stimulating you to ‘wholesome thinking … to recall the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets and the command given by our Lord and Saviour through your Apostles’ (3:1-2)? If this hasn’t been the effect of reading and studying II Peter over the last few weeks, can you identify why it hasn’t had its desired impact?

Does considering the end of the age, the day of judgement, and the destruction of the ungodly (see3:7) cause you to worship? … to puruse holy and godly lives (3:11)? …to eagerly anticiapte and look forward to that Day (3:12)? Are you reassured by a sense of God’s justice, or does it make you feel uneasy?

Have you ever heard the ‘Return of Christ’ mocked, or dismissed by other Christians or Chruch leaders? Can you remember the arguments used? How would you respond to them?

Peter seems to be suggesting that the only reason there is history, is so that people can hear the Gospel and be saved (3:9, 15). Do you agree with that? What then do you make of Christians who shy away from talking about Jesus, or who don’t think we need to? Do you think Peter would accept the idea that we can do ‘outreach’ without proclaiming Christ? Wouldn’t that put us at odds with God’s purpose for history?

How do you feel about living in a New Creation where righteousness dwells? What would you say to someone who struggled to see how they could enjoy the New Creation knowing that people had been eternally destroyed in the Day of Judgment (3:7)?

Does the idea of Christ renewing all things in this way inspire you in your faith, and in your pursuit of holiness? How would you counsel someone for whom it didn’t have this effect?

What does it mean to ‘grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’? How can we support one another as we do this?

Bible Study on II Peter 2:1-22 (short)

Peter has put his case postively in Chapter 1. He calls us to healthy, intentional, full-orbed, developing Christian living, rooted both in looking back to what we have been redeemed from, and forward to what we have been redeemed to, when Christ return at the end of the age (see I Pet.1:3-5). He pleads with us to grow strong and stable so that we do not stumble in our pilgrimage. He builds everything on God’s revelation of Himself in Christ, which we connect with, and encounter through the Spirit-inspired Scriptures. God has given us everything we need to live a godly life (1:3)! But it is not enough to be ‘positive’. Peter knows that he must also now spell out the dangers the Church faces from those in her midst who will undermine genuine and authentic Christianity (see II Pet.2).

Incredible though it may seem to us, there have been, and always will be, those in the Church who will disregard all this. Betraying their own spiritual immaturity, indeed their own lack of spiritual life at all, these ‘false teachers’ dismiss Scripture in favour of their own ‘fabricated stories’, and their own desire for what they want the Christian life to be about. They long to have all they think this world has to offer them here and now, and then to enjoy New Creation life as well. Christ becomes nothing more than a servant who can protect us from the consequences of our decisions. They both forget they have been cleansed from past sins, and are blind to the question of the welcome they will receive into the eternal kingdom… or not.

And as there will always be such ‘false teachers’, there will tragically always be those who follow them. Disregarding Peter’s pleas, the remain culpably ignorant of the Bible’s teaching and chronically underdeveloped in their disicpleship. As such they are equipped neither to recognise nor resist those who will lead them away from Christ. They are enticed back into slavery, and Peter - rather disturbingly - tells us that it would have been better if they had never heard the Gospel, than to have heard it and allowed themselves to be drawn away from it again.

Such stark warnings don’t sit well with our ‘tolerant’ age. But tolerance is not always a virtue. Think about it this way: imagine a tolerant immune system. The loss of an immune system leaves a body vulnerable to a thousand different ways to die. Likewise, a lack of discernment, or worse a willingness to tolerate that which we know is hostile to the body of Christ, leaves the Church vulnerable to being wounded, and her people in danger of eternal destruction.

Questions:

Where do you draw the line between recognising a legitimate difference of opinion between Christians, and recognising false teachers / false teaching?

Why are we so susceptible to believing false teachers, and thier ‘fabricated stories’? How do you assess teaching that you hear by those claiming to teach the Bible?

What Old Testament incident is Peter referring to in 2:4? What is the relevance of it to his argument throughout Chapter 2?

How do you feel about the vision of God’s unrelenting judgment that Peter paints for us in 2:4-9? What do you think we have lost by marginalising the Bible’s teaching on God’s judgment?

Do you think God still judges people ‘within history’ in the ways He did in these Old Testament narratives?

What harm do ‘false teachers’ do to the Church (2:13)? How could we protect the Church from such people?

Do you think false teachers know they are false teachers? Does it matter?

Based on II Peter 2 (and other passages you might be aware of) how would you recognise a false teacher? How would you respond to being exposed to one? Have you ever experienced false teaching? Are you aware of any false teaching prevalent in the Church today?

Read II Peter 2:20-22. Is Peter teaching us that Christians can lose their salvation if they listen to and believe false teachers?

Bible Study on II Peter 1:12-21 (short)

Above all (v.20)… it’s a strong phrase. Whatever else you understand, you must understand this. Peter then lays out an extraordinarily high view of the process of inspiration. We may be a bit uneasy about it. It probably feels to us like Peter is undermining the human integrity of the ‘prophecy of Scripture’. But in spite of our misgivings, it does resonate very clearly with the experience of the prophets themselves, who seem much more comfortable with the explicit and self-conscious sense that God is active through them, by His Spirit. Just a couple of examples:

Jeremiah (1:9), Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “I have put my words in your mouth.

Balaam, (Num.22:28), ‘I have come to you now, but can I say just anything? I must speak only what God puts in my mouth’.

Ezekiel (3:1-4), And he said to me, “Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the people of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. Then he said to me, “Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.” So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth. He then said to me: “Son of man, go now to the people of Israel and speak my words to them…’.

It’s an expereince shared by the Apostles, classically stated by Paul in I Cor.2:11-13, ‘…no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words’.

Strangely we have a habit of rejecting their own testimony, and attributing to the Apostles and Prophets a different experience of being inspired, one of which htey were likely largely unaware. But over and over again they speak of their conscious awareness that the words that would become Scripture were not their own, but were coming to the prophets from outside themselves. Throughout the Bible, this is as relentless as it is unchanged. And it leads to quite a different sense of the place and purpose of Scripture in our lives as individuals and as a Church.

As we are increasingly aware, the question of what we think the Bible is, and how it functions in the life of the Church is of crucial importance. Key questions have the potential to unite or divide the Church. Is the writing of the Apostles and Prophets, for example, culturally conditioned?

Well, it was originally spoken / written into a specific cultural context, but is it limited in some way by that culture, or perhaps the the Author living in that culture? Or an even more serious question: Does it require us to be familiar with that cultural context before we can understand what the Prophets / Apostles were saying?

When we take seriously the Prophets’ / Apostles’ own account of their experience of being inspired, it becomes more difficult to see how our understanding the Bible well depends on our ability to understand the original culture well. That’s not to say the relationship with culture - either the Prophet’s or our own - is always straightforward. The ‘prophetic message’ was as alien to its original culture as it is to ours… and every bit as challenging! But it does suggest that the Bible might be much more straightforward to understand and apply than we generally assume. Which is good news for the majority of Christians in the world today (and throughout history) who don’t have access to the priveleged cultural studies that underpin many of the commentaries, and theological reasonings that increasingly characterise the Western Church. As our appreciation of the very direct way in which God’s Spirit inspired those writing the Bible (and indeed, the Bible they wrote) grows, we will find our confidence in the Spirit’s working equally directly to enable us to understand it grows and develops in equal measure (I Cor.2:14-16).

Questions:

vv.12-15

Why does Peter seem to think that Christians are prone to forgetfulness? Do you think he is right in his analysis? How can we help ourselves (and each other) to develop better retention of the things that matter?

What are the ‘these things’ Peter thinks we need reminding of?

Why is such spiritual amnesia so dangerous? How could you recognise a Church that hadn’t heeded Peter’s advise?

What is Peter’s strategy to help us overcome it? How should that shape our expectation of pastoral ministry at MIE?

vv.16-18

How does the very straightforward and unsophisticated manner of the Apostles’ teaching about Jesus encourage us in our Bible Study?

The Apostles were ‘eyewitnesses’ of Christ, and it is striking that the Scriptures are our only substantive link with Jesus. Do you see the Apostles as faithfully teaching us about the reality of Jesus, or do you think they are sometimes at odds with Jesus and His message? How does this affect how you read the Apostles’ writings?

Compare Peter’s quote here (in v.17) with the events he is recalling in Matt.17:1-8. What is missing? Why does Peter leave out something Jesus says? What does he put in its place in II Pet.1:18-21? What are the implications of this for our engaging with the Bible?

vv.19-21

Historically the Church has held to 4 characteristics of Scripture: Authority; Clarity; Necessity; Sufficiency. What do you think each of these mean? Do you agree with them? What is there in this passage that would help us understand the Church’s beliefs about Scripture?

Do you think the Bible is ‘completely reliable’ (1:19)?

What is Peter seeking to convey by speaking of the ‘prophetic message’ as ‘a light shining in a dark place’? …and by the ‘morning star’ rising in our hearts (freebie: see Rev.22:16)? When and how does this morning star rise? What does it mean to say ‘it’ will rise?

Are the introductory notes at the start of this study a good analysis and application of vv.20-21? Where do you agree / disagree with what I’ve written?

Bible Study on II Peter 1:1-11 (short)

Peter has come a long way since that night he denied even knowing Jesus. Now an established leader in the growing international movement called the Church, he has proven a faithful and consistent disciple of Christ for many years. But that morning on the beach has never been too far from his mind: ‘When you are old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go’. Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God (John 21:18-19). That death is now immanent (II Peter 1:14). But Peter has changed much. Once his willingness to die had been about proving himself greater than the other disciples. Faith in Christ had still been about his own glory. But now he has learned the way of Christ. Now, as he faces death, it will be about the glory of God… which includes a deep concern for the Church he is leaving behind. Such is the transformative power of his persistent faith in Christ - or better: the Christ in whom he has persistent faith. And that precious faith is shared by us all (1:1). Peter has grown into the righteousness bestowed upon him by his God… another reason he is so acutely aware of the preciousneess of the Church!

Peter’s concern for the good of the Church has already found expression in a previous Epistle. First Peter focuses on external threats that might cause Christians to stumble, and the Church to lose her vocation. In this second letter, the Apostle turns his attention to internal threats. It’s as if, while the Body of Christ remains the Church militant it contains a number of viruses that lurk in its spiritual physiology. Any of them could become active and deadly at any moment. Peter’s letter looks to strengthen the Church’s immune system, pre-empting any such outbreak.

The first ‘virus’ that Peter identifies is a malevolent apathy. Simply settling down, plateauing, cruising as a Christian. That may not sound particularly malign, but Peter dreads it infecting the congregations he has pastored over the years. A Christian that is not striving, actively pursuing maturity, ‘craving pure spiritual milk so that by it they may grow up [their] salvation’ (I Pet.2:2), a Christian who has settled down, satisfied with the progress they have made, content with their experience of Christ, at ease with their involvement in the life and mission of the Church - such a Christian is in grave spiritual danger.

Questions:

How would you recognise a Christian who has plateaued in thier faith? Why do you think it is spiritually dangerous to do so?

How does ‘settling down’ in the Christian life, and no longer striving spiritual maturity contradict God’s vision for our life (1:3)?

What does Peter mean when he talks about 'participating ‘in the divine nature’ (1:4)? How do His ‘great’ and ’precious’ promises enable us to enjoy that particiaption?

Read vv.5-7. Is Peter suggesting there is an order to the way spiritual and moral virtue develops in our life and character? How would that change your approach to Christian development?

How would you help someone who was stagnating to re-start their spiritaul growth, so that they were possessing ‘these qualities in increasing measure’ (1:8)?

What would an ‘ineffective and unproductive’ Christian look like (1:8)? Are things really as binary as Peter is suggsting in verse 8?

How could you help somone to remember what it means ot have been cleansed from past sins (1:9)?

Why do so many Christians struggle with the ideas of ‘calling’ and election’, when they are so clearly taught in the Bible?

Do Christians receive different kinds of welcome into the eternal kingdom?