Evidence suggests that Peter was executed under the reign of Emporer Nero, and this likely served as kind of a ‘farewell’ speech from Peter.  It was addressed to the same group of people as his first letter.

Peter directly addresses 3 different objections or challenges to the faith that were apparently being made there in these communities, which serves as a great point of discussion for us.  First was this idea that the apostles made everything up...that Jesus was just a figment of their imagination and creation.  Then Peter argues against the second objection, which is an argument that there actually won’t be this final reckoning where Jesus returns again, and that people won’t REALLY be accountable for their choices in the end.  Side note - the motivation for this argument from these corrupt teachers is the same as the argument that people generally make when they follow this line of argument...they are trying to justify their behavior.  We know from this and other sources that these teachers were making a bunch of money and were sleeping around in very inappropriate ways, so they were no doubt having a lot of world fun and hoping not to have it catch up with them; we do the same thing ourselves.  Peter really goes after this idea using historical Biblical lessons as sources and examples.  Peter doesn’t want us to use Grace as an excuse to live free of judgement...there is a difference between freedom from using Grace for the sake of living recklessly vs. using Grace to empower us to live for God...that’s really where Peter is driving with that.  And lastly, Peter addresses the argument that this final judgement isn’t coming because it has been supposed to come for generation after generation and has never actually happened...they argue, “Why would it happen now?”.  And Peter does something really interesting and really powerful as the counter to this argument...he offers perspective.  Instead of asking “Why now?”, he essentially asks a question for rhetorical pondering of “Why is God taking so long?”, which is a question we can carry around with us and think about.  And he reminds us that something dosn’t come from nothing, that creation is really pointing at a Cretor, and that we can’t just look blindly past that.  We have to remember that our human conception of time is really distorted in that it blinds us to God’s conception of time.

As a note, some see the differences in style between 1 Peter and 2 Peter as reason to doubt Peter’s authorship.  In reality, Peter has a secretary or someone who actually recorded his teaching for him, and it is much more likely that this was a different person rather than the author (Peter) being different.  This would be a much simpler and much more likely explanation.  Assuming this is true, this was likely written, as I said in the beginning, during the reign of Nero and likely in the mid-60s.

Tomorrow we will do the read-through...this will be a great one!