Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

2 Peter 1:12-21

The writer next expresses his resolution to use the brief portion of life now remaining to him in recalling the attention of his readers to the great truths to which he has been referring, and in making provision for the recollection of them after his own decease. He avows the deep solicitude which he feels in regard to this, and his anxiety that the gift of Divine grace, and the obligations connected with it, may not be forgotten or thought little of, when the living voice of apostolic teaching ceases to admonish and remind. He is at pains to explain why he has made such a resolution and entertains such anxiety. It is because of the certainty and gravity of that ‘power and coming' of the Lord, which had been proclaimed by his brother Apostles and himself. He is desirous to have the minds of his readers filled with this above all things, and their lives coloured and directed by it, because every other Christian interest and all Christian duty are bound up with it. In words touched with the light which is shed by the solemn recollection of the past, the aged writer speaks of the witnesses to which he can appeal in behalf of the certainty of these things which had been preached with respect to the Lord's Coming, and the manner of life which befitted its anticipation. These witnesses are found in the transfiguration scene and the voice of prophecy. The verses form a paragraph complete within itself, with a character and with contents entirely its own. It comes in, however, quite appropriately as an intermediate section. It makes a natural appendix to the first division of the Epistle, which is itself a kind of summary of subjects handled at greater length, but with much the same phraseology, and in much the same spirit, in the First Epistle. It also prepares the way, particularly by the prominence given to the ‘power and coming' of the Lord, for the very different paragraph which follows in the next chapter.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

2 Peter 1:12-21

Old Testament

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