2 Peter 1:12-21
By way of reminder, this second letter of Peter’s was written to encourage the believers to grow in their faith. To help them, Peter is going to address four topics to help believers grow. Last week, we looked at the first one, the opportunity to participate in God’s Divine Nature. Today, we are going to look at the value of true prophecy.
What is prophecy? We tend to think of prophecy as predicting what is going to happen in the future. There can be an element of that in prophecy, but prophecy really refers to any truth revealed by God. There are debates regarding whether the office of prophet is still active today.
Most of these debates miss the point because we use the wrong definition of prophecy. If someone is calling themselves a prophet because they believe God has told them what is going to happen in the future, especially when Christ is going to return, they are most likely not acting in an official role as a prophet.
If, however, any of you are witnessing to someone else about the truth of Christ, that He came, lived a sinless life, died on the cross for the forgiveness of sin, rose again on the third day, and is going to return one day, you are acting as a prophet because that truth has been revealed to you by God. That does not mean you can go around calling yourself “prophet” and declaring that everything you say comes from God.
This is off-topic, but just because you believe you have a spiritual gift, whether it is tongues, interpretation, healing, prophecy, whatever, does not mean that you can exhibit that gift in all situations anytime you want. It is still there for God’s glory to be used when He designs it to be used.
Coming back to 2 Peter, there is value in true prophecy to help the Christian grow in their faith. We must know when God is calling us to prophecy and when what we think is just our opinion, and also we must be able to test the spirit when others claim to speak on behalf of God.
Being able to do this comes about by participating in God’s Divine Nature. As we grow and become more like Christ, we are better able to discern God’s voice in ourselves and others.
Therefore, as Peter says in verse 12, I will always remind you about these things, even though you know them and are established in the truth you now have. One thing we tend not to like is to be reminded of things over and over again. After enough times, we want to shout “I know!” at the person. But Peter is going to make it a point to remind us that we need to be reminded of these truths over and over again.
The purpose behind reminding someone of something is so they remember it and not forget it. Remembering is not simply an intellectual exercise. Remembering in the Bible often speaks of doing and obeying. We need to be reminded of whose we are and what we are meant to do. Continuous reminding leads us to meditate on these things. What Peter means by “these things” is the great promises of God that enable us to participate in His Divine Nature.
There is danger in always looking for something new. If we look for something new in Scripture long enough, we will manufacture something new. Our tendency is to then declare to everyone what God has revealed to us. Maybe, or maybe not. That new revelation still must fit into the long established truth, so being reminded of that truth over and over again is important.
This doesn’t mean we should never look for new truths in Scripture. We are not meant to always think something means what we first understood it to mean. We are meant to grow, but part of the growth process is being able to sift through true and false prophecy.
Peter is going to go on in verses 13 through 15 by declaring he thinks it is right, as long as he lives, to wake us up with a reminder. Peter knows that his life is going to end at some point. He knows that because Jesus told him he would be killed. As Peter gets older, he has to realize that the time is getting nearer. Once he is gone, he wants the believers to be able to recall these things he has reminded them of.
For the rest of this chapter, Peter is going to speak directly about prophecy. To begin, in verses 16 through 18, he is going to recount the eyewitness account of what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration. Peter is reminding them that they are not following cleverly contrived myths. Peter was a firsthand witness to the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
When Peter says, “we have made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” he is speaking of the return of Christ. When we get to chapter 3 in a few weeks, we will see that one of the false prophecies was that Jesus was not going to return. Peter is reminding the people of the truth of Jesus’ return based on his eyewitness account.
Peter and others heard God speak directly about who Jesus is while they were with Jesus on the holy mountain. But don’t blindly just take Peter’s word for it; this has been strongly confirmed by Scripture.
This is an important point. When someone declares something to be the word of God, or even a word from God, it must still conform to the rest of Scripture. When confronted with someone claiming a new word from God, we need to be reminded of God’s previous words, so we can test this new prophecy. Only Jesus confirms all the promises made in Scripture. Peter is saying that what he witnessed on the Mount of Transfiguration makes all the prophecies of the Old Testament more confirmed than ever before.
The part about the morning star rising in your hearts is from Numbers 24:17. This is how Peter interprets this passage in the book of Numbers, and it is confirmed in various places in the book of Revelation, where the morning star is Jesus’ kingdom and it is given to believers by Jesus.
Peter ends this part by reminding us that no prophecy of Scripture comes from a prophet’s own interpretation, his included. The reason for this is that no prophecy ever came by the will of man. Instead, men speak what God says, and the Holy Spirit carries it along. This shows us that the Holy Spirit is not simply a New Testament phenomenon. The Holy Spirit has always been active in the life of God’s people.
The big takeaway here is that God is the source of everything that Scripture says. It is not just the parts of the Bible we call “the Prophets” but everything that is said, because whenever someone speaks the truth of God they are uttering prophecy.