2 Peter 3:4

2 Peter 3:4. and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? The ‘coming' is again expressed here by the word parousia, ‘presence;' as to which see on chap. 2 Peter 1:16. The question, put with triumphant scorn by these mockers, repeats the cherished terms used by believers the ‘promise ‘in which they trusted, the ‘coming' which they looked for with vivid expectancy, the very form (‘His Coming,' not ‘ Christ's Coming,' or the ‘Lord's Coming') in which they were accustomed to refer to Him who was so much the one object of their thoughts as to need no identification by name among them. ‘Those who believe,' says Bengel, ‘having the heart filled with the memory of the Lord, easily supply the name.' John repeatedly exhibits this style of reference to the common Lord of Christians, without naming the name, e.g. 1 John 2:6; 1Jn 3:3; 1 John 3:5; 1Jn 3:7; 1 John 3:16; 1Jn 4:17; 3 John 1:7. With the scornful incredulity expressed in the question compare such O. T. passages as Isaiah 5:19; Malachi 2:17, which record similar gibes flung out against the words of the prophets in the ancient Israel. For the interrogative form, which imparts the tone of mocking triumph to the denial, compare also Psalms 42:3; Psalms 79:10; Jeremiah 17:15.

for from the day when the fathers fell asleep all things continue thus from the beginning of the creation. These words indicate how the scoffers will reason out their rejection of the promise. Their argument will be taken from the delay in the fulfilment of ‘that blessed hope' (Titus 2:13) of the Christian brotherhood, and from the unbroken uniformity of things. The idea seems to be that, taking it for granted that some great disturbance in the system of the world will be necessarily involved in such an event as the Advent of Christ, and failing to see any signs of an interruption in the old order, they will deride the event itself. The precise force of the terms, however, and the exact relation in which the several parts of the sentence stand to each other, are very differently interpreted. The ‘fathers' are variously understood as the patriarchs of the human race, the patriarchs of the Jewish nation, all those to whom the promise was given, the men of the first Christian generation, or generally those who preceded each particular generation. Undoubtedly it would be most natural, did other things permit, to suppose that the patriarchs of Israel were meant; in which sense the phrase ‘the fathers' occurs, e.g., in Romans 9:5; Hebrews 1:1. But as the writer speaks here of a state of things which belongs still to the future, and as the fact that the O. T. patriarchs died before the fulfilment of the promise of the Lord's Return would be a strange argument for these mockers to urge against the Christian hope, it seems necessary to understand by ‘the fathers' here those who stood in a relation to the Christian Church resembling that occupied by the Jewish patriarchs to the Church of Israel. The first generation of Christian believers received this promise (Acts 1:11, etc.), and lived in the hope of its sure and speedy fulfilment. They died without witnessing that, and this would be used with their children as an argument for discrediting the promise itself. The second specification of time seems to be added in order to give emphasis to the first, and to exhibit in the strongest possible form the constancy of the natural order of things. The meaning is the same as if the sentence had taken this more regular form: ‘In spite of this promise, your fathers to whom it was given have passed away, and all things still continue the same since then, as indeed they have continued from their first creation.' Greater vivacity is added to the assertion of unbroken uniformity by the use of the present tense ‘continue' (the verb itself also is a compound form expressing continuance persisting through an indefinite length of time), and by the simple ‘thus' by which the idea of ‘as they are,' or ‘as we see them,' is conveyed. The A. V. tames down the abrupt confidence of the utterance by inserting the words as they were after the ‘continue.' The phrase ‘fell asleep' (with which compare John 11:11; Acts 7:60, Acts 13:3; 1 Corinthians 15:6; 1 Corinthians 15:18; 1Co 15:20; 1 Thessalonians 4:14, etc.) is now to be noticed. The expression, frequent as it is in the Pauline writings, is found only this once in Peter. On the lips of scoffers here it may be, as is supposed by some (e.g. Lillie), another instance of ‘ironical accommodation to the dialect of faith and of the hope of the resurrection.' The comparison of death to sleep is one which lies near at hand, and is by no means peculiar to Scripture. In Homer (Il. xiv. 231, xvi. 672, 682) Sleep and Death are twins ‘of winged race, of matchless speed but silent pace,' and the goddess Aphrodité is represented as hasting over the sea to the island of Lemnos in quest of the cave of Death's half-brother, Sleep. In the literature of many nations sleep is recognised as ‘death's image.' What is peculiar to the New Testament use of the natural figure (and in part also to its Old Testament use) is the new conceptions with which Revelation has filled it the hopeful conceptions of rest, continued life, and, above all, reawakening in newness of energy. So to the Christian the grave has become the cemetery, i.e the dormitory or sleeping-place. ‘All the bodily pains, all the wants of human sympathy and carefulness, all the suddenness of the wrench from life, in the midst of health and strength, all this shall not prevent the Christian's death from deserving no harsher name than that of sleep ' (T. Arnold).