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| What the Apostle Peter Predicted Regarding the Last Judgment.
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Chapter 18.—What the Apostle
Peter Predicted Regarding the Last Judgment.
Let us now see what the Apostle
Peter predicted concerning this judgment. “There shall come,”
he says, “in the last days scoffers. . . . Nevertheless we,
according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth,
wherein dwelleth righteousness.”1403
There is nothing said here about
the resurrection of the dead, but enough certainly regarding the
destruction of this world. And by his reference to the deluge he
seems as it were to suggest to us how far we should believe the
ruin of the world will extend in the end of the world. For he
says that the world which then was perished, and not only the earth
itself, but also the heavens, by which we understand the air, the
place and room of which was occupied by the water. Therefore the
whole, or almost the whole, of the gusty atmosphere (which he calls
heaven, or rather the heavens, meaning the earth’s atmosphere,
and not the upper air in which sun, moon, and stars are set) was
turned into moisture, and in this way perished together with the
earth, whose former appearance had been destroyed by the deluge.
“But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word
are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment
and perdition of ungodly men.” Therefore the heavens and the
earth, or the world which was preserved from the water to stand in
place of that world which perished in the flood, is itself reserved
to fire at last in the day of the judgment and perdition of ungodly
men. He does not hesitate to affirm that in this great change men
also shall perish: their nature, however, shall notwithstanding
continue, though in eternal punishments. Some one will perhaps
put the question, If after judgment is pronounced the world itself
is to burn, where shall the saints be during the conflagration, and
before it is replaced by a new heavens and a new earth, since
somewhere they must be, because they have material bodies? We may
reply that they shall be in the upper regions into which the flame
of that conflagration shall not ascend, as neither did the water of
the flood; for they shall have such bodies that they shall be
wherever they wish. Moreover, when they have become immortal and
incorruptible, they shall not greatly dread the blaze of that
conflagration, as the corruptible and mortal bodies of the three
men were able to live unhurt in the blazing furnace.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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