2 Peter 3:5

For this they willingly are ignorant of More accurately, For this is hid from them by their own will. The English phrase "they ignore" exactly expresses the state of mind of which the Apostle speaks. The ignorance of the scoffers was self-chosen. They closed their eyes to the truth that the law of continuity on which they laid stress was not without exception. There had been a great catastrophe in the past. There might yet be a great catastrophe in the future.

that by the word of God the heavens were of old The history of the creative work in Genesis 1 furnishes the first example that the order of the universe was not one of unbroken continuity of evolution. In "the word of God" we may see a reference either (1) to the continually recurring formula "God said" in Genesis 1:3; Genesis 1:6; Genesis 1:9, or (2) to the thought that it was by the Eternal Word that the work of Creation was accomplished, as in John 1:3; Hebrews 1:2; and we have no sufficient data for deciding between the two. Hebrews 11:3 ("the worlds were framed by the word of God") is exactly parallel to St Peter's language, and is open to the same diversity of interpretation. In any case the words are a protest against the old Epicurean view of a concourse of atoms, and its modern counterpart, the theory of a perpetual evolution.

and the earth standing out of the water and in the water More accurately, and the earth formed out of water and by means of water. The words carry us back, as before, to the cosmogony of Genesis 1. The earth was brought out of chaos into its present kosmos, by the water being gathered into one place and the dry land appearing (Genesis 1:9). It was kept together by the separation of the waters above the firmament from those that were below the firmament (Genesis 1:6). The Apostle speaks naturally from the standpoint of the physical science of his time and country, and we need not care to reconcile either his words or those of Genesis 1 with the conclusions of modern meteorological science. The equivalent fact in the language of that science would be that the permanence of the existing order of the world is secured by the circulation of water, rising in evaporation, and falling in the form of rain, between the higher and lower regions of the atmosphere, and that there must have been a time when this circulation began to supervene on a previous state of things that depended on different conditions.