INTRODUCTION
1 Simon Peter, the servant and Apostle of Jesus Christ,
To those who have obtained our common sacred faith in the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ:
2 May abundant grace and peace come to you in the knowledge of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ.
3 His divine power has granted you every requisite for life and piety through the knowledge of Christ who called us to his glory and holiness. 4 Thus he has given you his splendid and precious promises. He has enabled you to become partakers of the divine nature through which you escaped from worldly passion and corruption.
VIRTUES
5 For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue; your virtue with knowledge; 6 your knowledge with continence; your continence with patience; your patience with piety; 7 your piety with brotherly love; your brotherly love with charity.
8 Those who possess these virtues abundantly will become effective and fruitful in understanding our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 Those who do not possess them will remain blind, shortsighted, and forgetful of the fact that they have been cleansed, of their old sins.
10 Therefore, brethren, strive more earnestly to confirm your vocation and election by practicing these virtues. Then you will never fail. 11 On the contrary, you will be triumphantly admitted to the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
12 Consequently, I shall be ready always to remind you of these matters, although you know them and are well established in the true religion. 13 I consider it my duty, as long as my earthly life lasts, to arouse you by a reminder.
14 For I know that my departure from the earth is impending, as our Lord Jesus Christ has notified me. 15 I will also see to it that, after I am gone, you will always remember my message.
DIVINITY OF CHRIST
16 When I preached to you about the divine power and the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, I was not telling you fictitious myths, but actual facts. Indeed, we have been eye-witnesses of his exaltation.
17 Christ was honored and glorified by God the Father, the supreme Master of the Universe, with this proclamation: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” 18 We actually heard this proclamation coming from heaven when we accompanied him on the holy mountain.
19 Thus the message of the Prophets was fully confirmed. You will do well to pay attention to that message as to a lamp shining in a dark room, until the dawn breaks and the morning star arises in your hearts.
20 Of course, you must first understand that no prophecy of the Scripture is a matter of private interpretation. 21 For prophecies were not uttered by individuals for their own private purposes, but by holy men of God who were inspired by the Holy Spirit.
HERESY
1 There were false prophets among the people in the past, and there will be false teachers among you in the future. They will try to introduce abominable heresies. They will repudiate the Master who redeemed them. Thus they will bring swift destruction upon themselves. 2 Many individuals will adopt their impious doctrines and will revile the true way of life. 3 In their greed these men will exploit you with their false arguments. But their doom is impending and their downfall is inevitable.
RETRIBUTION
4 For God did not spare Angels when they sinned. He plunged them into Tartarus and banished them into dark dungeons until the Day of Judgment.
5 Be did not spare the sinners of the ancient world. Yet he preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought the Flood upon godless mankind.
6 He condemned and reduced the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, as a warning to ungodly men of what punishment was coming to them. 7 Yet he saved the righteous Lot who was distressed by the licentious conduct of unprincipled men. 8 The soul of that righteous man who lived among them, was tortured day after day by what he saw and heard of their behavior. 9 For God knows how to rescue pious men from trial and to punish wrongdoers when the Day of Judgment comes, 10 especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling sensuality and despise authority. These men are arrogant and presumptuous. They are not afraid to scoff at the glories of the unseen world. 11 Now even the Angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a reviling judgment upon them before the Lord.
12 But these men, like irrational animals, mere creatures of instinct, born to be caught and killed, revile what they do not understand. They will perish in their own corruption. 13 Thus they will receive the reward of their iniquity. They count it a pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are a blot and a disgrace. They revel and feast in the luxury of their own banquets along with you. 14 Their eyes are full of adultery and sin. They know how to entice unsteady souls. Their hearts are trained in greed. They are children of malediction.
15 They have left the straight path and gone astray. They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor. He loved dishonest gain. 16 But he was rebuked for his perversity. A dumb donkey spoke with human voice and restrained that mad prophet.
17 They are waterless wells. They are clouds of smoke driven by the storm. They will be condemned to the utter darkness of the abyss. 18 With high-sounding nonsense they entice with licentious passions of the flesh those who have just escaped the influence of false teachers. 19 They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For a man is the slave of the vice that overcomes him.
20 These men have once escaped the vices of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Now they are again enticed and overpowered by them. So they fall into a state which is worse than the previous one.
21 It would have been better for them never to have found the righteous way of life than after finding it to turn away from the holy commandments delivered to them. 22 What has happened to them proves the truth of the proverb: “The dog turns back to his own vomit, and the washed sow wallows again in the mire.”
THE SECOND COMING
1 My dear friends, this is the second letter I have written to you. In both of them I have tried to refresh your memory, 2 and call your attention to the predictions of the Holy Prophets, and the command of our Lord and Savior given to you through his Apostles.
3 In the first place, you must know that in the last days impostors, guided by their own selfish interests, will come, 4 and say to you: “What is the matter with his promised coming? For ever since our forefathers went to their rest, everything has remained as it was from the beginning of creation.”
5 They deliberately ignore the fact that by the command of God heavens were created long ago, and an earth formed out of water and by water, 6 by which the old world was flooded and destroyed. 7 By the same command the present heavens and earth have been stored up for fire, and are kept for the last day when godless men will be condemned and destroyed.
8 Now, my dear friends, do not overlook the fact that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.
9 Moreover, the Lord does not delay his promise, as some men think. He is really showing his patience with you, because he does not want any men to perish. On the contrary, he wants them all to come to repentance.
10 The Day of the Lord will come suddenly and unexpectedly. Then the heavens will pass away with a tremendous roar. The elements will be dissolved in heat. The earth and all its contents will be burned up.
11 If the universe is to be dissolved in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? To be sure, holy and pious men, 12 who expect and wish to hasten the coming of the Day of the Lord. On that day the old heavens will be dissolved and the elements will be melted by heat. 13 But according to the promise of the Lord, we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness will reign.
14 Therefore, my dear friends, while you wait for this transformation, strive earnestly to appear blameless, irreproachable, and peace-loving in the sight of God. 15 In the meantime, you may be sure that the delay is meant for your salvation, as our beloved brother Paul wrote you in all his letters with the wisdom God had given him.
16 True, in those letters there are some obscure passages, which the ignorant and restless heretics are distorting to their own ruin, as they are doing the rest of the Scriptures.
17 So, my dear friends, now that you are forewarned, you must be very careful. Do not let those wicked men mislead you and turn you away from your firmly established faith. 18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Glory to him both now and forever. Amen.