2 Peter: Faith In A Skeptical World Sample

(focuses especially on vv. 20–21) 

If there is one lesson to be learned from the fulfilled testimony of Scripture as it prepares the world for our King, it is this: this gospel message has most certainly come from God! We can be proud of our Bibles when we carry them in public because we know that it is nothing less than the word of God. 

In verse 20 the ‘above all’ (NIV) or ‘first of all’ (ESV) is helpfully showing us that this is of utmost, primary, foundational importance. Most theology textbooks find it logically helpful to begin by affirming how we know what we know about God, and why we approach the Bible for knowledge of Him. To see the Bible as a good but merely human book is to reject what the Bible screams out to affirm from cover to cover – that it is God’s word. 

While written by around 40 people over a period of more than 1,400 years, we perceive the Divine Author behind it all (v. 21). How did this work? Were the Prophets who ‘spoke from God’ (v. 21) possessed by Him, or acting like human typewriters mindlessly writing words that turned out to be His? Stott puts it well when he says, ‘God spoke His words through their words in such a way that their words were simultaneously his. As a result, what they say, God says.’*

It was not ‘the will of man’ (v. 21) that motivated, inspired, or governed what is written in Scripture. Rather, Peter says we are right to credit the Holy Spirit for that (v. 21).

The Book of Acts provides examples of how that might have looked. In Acts 4:8 Peter is ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’ while he boldly preaches a message that is dear to his own heart as well as to the heart of God. It is simultaneously Peter’s message and God’s message which the Spirit had impressed upon him. The Holy Spirit ‘carried along’ (2 Pet. 1:21) the human authors of Scripture so that we can say that this book, authored by humans, is ultimately ‘from God’ (v. 21). 

Reflection

Are you humble and contrite as you read God’s word in the form of black ink on white paper, or as you hear His word spoken at church? 

*John Stott, Evangelical Truth (IVP, 2011), p. 60, italics mine.