Montgomery - II Peter

Chapter 1

1:1  Simon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have obtained an equally precious faith with us in the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.

1:2  Grace and peace be multiplied to you by the God and Father of Jesus our Lord.

1:3  For his power divine has granted to us everything needful for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and virtue.

1:4  By these he has granted his promises to us, precious and splendid; so that through them you may become partners of the divine nature, now that you have escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

1:5  For this very reason do your best to add to your faith manliness, and to manliness knowledge,

1:6  and to knowledge self-control, and to self-control stedfastness, and to stedfastness piety,

1:7  and to piety brotherly love, and to brotherly love, love itself.

1:8  For if these virtues are yours in abounding measure, they render you not idle nor unfruitful, until you come into the full knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

1:9  For the man who lacks these virtues is blind, short-sighted, forgetful of his cleansing from his old sins.

1:10  So, brothers, take diligent care to make your calling and election sure; for if you do this, you will never stumble.

1:11  For so the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ will be richly supplied to you.

1:12  I shall therefore be always ready to remind you of all this, even though you know it, and are firmly founded in the truth which is with you.

1:13  So I think it right, as long as I am in this "tent," to rouse you by way of reminding you,

1:14  since I know that the time for me to strike tent comes swiftly on, even as our Lord Jesus Christ pointed out to me.

1:15  So I will do my best to enable you, even after my departure, continually to call these things to mind.

1:16  For we were not following cunningly devised fables, when we told you of the power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eye-witnesses of his Majesty.

1:17  For he did receive honor and glory from God the Father, when there was borne such a voice to him from the Majestic Glory, This is my Son, my Beloved, in whom I delight;

1:18  and this voice we ourselves heard, borne to us out of heaven, when we were with him on the holy hill.

1:19  And so we possess the word of prophecy made yet more sure. Unto this you do well to give heed as to a lamp shining in a dark place, till the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

1:20  But first be assured of this - that no prophecy of Scripture is of private interpretation.

1:21  For no prophecy was ever brought by the will of man; but moved by the Holy Spirit, men spoke for God.

Chapter 2

2:1  But there were false prophets, too, among the people, just as among you also there will be false teachers. These will secretly bring in destructive sects, denying even the Master who bought them, and bringing swift ruin upon themselves.

2:2  Then there will be many who will follow their immorality, because of whom the Way of the Truth will be maligned.

2:3  In their covetousness, with cunning words, they will make merchandise of you; those whose doom has not been idle from of old, and whose destruction has not been slumbering.

2:4  For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them down to Tartarus, and committed them to chains of darkness, and reserved them for judgment;

2:5  if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon an ungodly world;

2:6  if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and reduced them to ashes, thus holding them up as a warning to all who would live ungodly;

2:7  and he delivered righteous Lot who was worn out by the lascivious life of the wicked

2:8  (for that righteous man, living among them, tormented his righteous soul in seeing and hearing, day after day, their lawless deeds),

2:9  then be sure that the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to keep the wicked (who are even now enduring punishment) for the "Day of Judgment";

2:10  especially those who spend their lives following the flesh in the lust of defilement, and in despising all authority. Audacious and wilful, they feel no awe in railing against dignities;

2:11  even where angels, though surpassing them in strength and might, do not bring a railing judgment against them before the Lord.

2:12  But these men, like irrational creatures, mere animals, born to be taken and destroyed, continually rail about matters of which they know nothing. In their corruption they will surely be destroyed,

2:13  suffering wrong as the wage of wrong which they have done. These are men who count it pleasure to carouse in open daylight; they are spots and blemishes reveling in their deceit, even while they are feasting with you.

2:14  They have eyes full of harlots, eyes that cannot stop sinning. They entice unsteady souls. Their heart is trained in greed. They are an accursed generation.

2:15  They have forsaken the right way; they have lost their way, and followed the road of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved the wages of wrong-doing.

2:16  He was, however, rebuked for his own transgression; a dumb ass spoke with a man’s voice, and stopped the madness of the prophet.

2:17  Such men are like waterless springs, or mists storm-driven; for them the blackness of darkness has been reserved.

2:18  For speaking great swelling words of vanity, they entangle, by their lasciviousness, in the lusts of the flesh, those who are just about to escape from the men that live in misconduct.

2:19  They promise them liberty, while they themselves are slaves of rottenness! (For indeed a man is the slave of anything which masters him.)

2:20  For if, after having escaped the pollutions of the world, through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, men are again entangled in them and overpowered, their last state is become worse than their first.

2:21  Indeed it would have been better for them not to have known the Way of Righteousness, than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy command delivered to them.

2:22  In their case it has happened according to the true proverb, The dog returns again to his own vomit, and The sow, after washing, to her wallowing in the mire.

Chapter 3

3:1  This is now my second letter to you, beloved. In both of them I am stirring up your pure minds by putting you in remembrance.

3:2  I want you to recollect the words that were foretold by the holy prophets, and the command of your Lord and Saviour, given you through your apostles.

3:3  Know this first, that mockers will come in the last days, in their mockery, men who walk the way of their own lusts

3:4  and say, "Where is the promise of His coming? For since the day that our fathers fell asleep everything continues as it was from the beginning of the creation."

3:5  For they willingly ignore the fact that there were heaven, from of old, and an earth formed out of water and through water, by the word of God;

3:6  and that by the same means the world which then existed was destroyed by a deluge of water.

3:7  But the heavens and earth that now are, by the same word of God, have been reserved for fire, and are being kept for the Day of Judgment, and for the destruction of ungodly men.

3:8  Do not forget this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

3:9  The Lord does not loiter over his promise, as some men esteem loitering; but he is longsuffering toward you, not purposing that any should perish, but that all should pass on to repentance.

3:10  But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief; and on that Day the heavens will vanish with a crash, the heavenly bodies will melt with fervent heat, and the earth and all its works will be burned up.

3:11  Now since all things are in the process of dissolution, what kind of men ought you to be, in all holy living and piety;

3:12  while you look for and hasten the coming of the Day of God. At its coming the heavens, being on fire, will be dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt with fervent heat.

3:13  But according to his promise, we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness makes her dwelling.

3:14  And so, beloved, since you are looking for these things, continually give diligence that you may be found in peace, unspotted and blameless in his sight.

3:15  Regard our Lord’s longsuffering as salvation; even as our dear brother Paul also wrote to you, according to the wisdom given to him.

3:16  It is the same in all his letters when he speaks of these things. There are indeed some things in his letters hard to understand, which the ignorant and the shifty wrest, as also they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

3:17  Do you therefore, beloved, because you know these things beforehand, be on your guard lest you be led astray by the error of the wicked, and so fall from your own stedfastness.

3:18  But grow continually in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and unto the Day of Eternity, Amen.