2 Peter 3:6

2 Peter 3:6. whereby the then world being flooded with water perished. The term used for ‘world' here is the one (cosmos) which describes it as a system of order and beauty, and presents it (in distinction from another term aeon, which deals with it under the aspect of time) under the aspect of space. It has a wide variety of application in the N. T., being equivalent, e.g., sometimes to the whole material universe (Matthew 13:35; John 17:5; John 21:25; Acts 17:4; Romans 1:20), sometimes to man's world or the system of things of which he is the centre (John 16:21; 1 Corinthians 14:10; 1 John 3:17), sometimes to the totality of men occupying that system (John 1:29; John 4:42; 2 Corinthians 5:19), and sometimes to the ‘world' in the ethical sense of the totality of men living without God and outside His kingdom (John 1:10; 1 Corinthians 1:20-21; James 4:4; 1 John 3:13). Here the phrase need not be restricted to the idea of the world of men, or of living creatures, but may cover the whole order of things, with the men occupying it, which existed prior to the Deluge. As the participle, which is rendered ‘overflowed' by both the A. V. and the R. V., is a form cognate to the noun fur ‘flood' (e.g. in chap. 2 Peter 2:5), it should be translated ‘flooded' here. When it is said that the ‘then world, perished, it is obvious that the meaning is not that it was annihilated, but that it was broken up, had its ‘order' destroyed, and was reduced to another form. The verb is the one for which the advocates of annihilation or conditional immortality, as the Scripture doctrine of the end of the unrighteous, claim the sense of absolute destruction, or final extinction a sense not accordant with such occurrences as the present. The main difficulty here, however, is in the statement of the means by which this perishing came upon the old world. The ‘whereby' of the A. V. represents a plural relative, ‘by means of which things,' the antecedent to which is not apparent. Some take it to refer to the ‘heavens' and the ‘earth,' the idea then being either that the antediluvian world of living creatures was destroyed by the heavens and the earth uniting to overflow them with their waters (Hofmann, Beza, Fronmüller, etc.), or that the material system perished by means of the very things of which it consisted, in so far as the heavens and the earth, which made its constituents, broke up (Bede). Others (Calvin, Lumby, etc.) suppose it to refer to the before-mentioned ‘water,' the writer using the plural relative instead of the singular, because he had in his mind the two several relations of water, as substance and as instrument, to the formation of the old world, or the two several waters, namely, those from above the firmament and those from beneath. In support of this interpretation (which on the whole is the most widely accepted) appeal is made to the Mosaic record, which represents the windows of heaven as opening as well as the fountains of the great deep as being broken up. On the analogy of the indefinite ‘whereunto' in 1 Peter 2:8, some give the ‘whereby' here the general sense of ‘by means of which circumstances,' or ‘in consequence of which arrangement of things.' Probably the best explanation, however, is to regard the relative as referring to the two things last mentioned, viz. the water and the W ord of God; the point then being this, that the old and seemingly constant order of things perished by being overwhelmed with water, the agents of the destruction being the agents that first formed our earth and heavens, namely, the creative word of God and the element of water on which it acted. And this unquestionable fact was sufficient refutation of the argument from all things having continued without change since the beginning of the creation.