2 Pet 1.16-21

seeing and hearing

(2 Peter 1.16-21)

Jason Procopio

You film nerds out there may remember this. In 2011, Steven Soderbergh directed a film called Contagion. It was about a deadly virus that spread throughout the world, and the global scientific community’s response to contain that virus. It was an excellent film, but it’s not exactly the kind of movie you’d want to watch over and over again. So people went to see it, it got great reviews…and then it kind of disappeared. 

Then last year, of course, Covid-19 hit—and suddenly people who had forgotten all about Contagion were thinking about it again. Between January and March 2020, it became one of the most-streamed, downloaded and pirated movies in the world.

Now obviously we can understand why Contagion was suddenly current again—it was about a global pandemic. But it’s not the only pandemic movie out there. The reason people were coming back to this one in particular is because it was so eerily prescient. The virus in the film was worse than Covid, but the way the world responds to the virus in the film was remarkably similar to what actually happened in our lives last year: the obsessive use of hand sanitizer, general quarantines, public wearing of masks, social distancing (like, they actually use that phrase, ten years before we all started using it on a daily basis), variants of the virus that mutate… 

Watching that movie again, in 2020, was horrifying, and unsettling…but strangely captivating too. Because what we mainly felt was recognition. What we saw on the screen was fascinating because we recognized these same things in our own day-to-day lives.

As strange as it may sound, I believe that feeling we got watching Contagion last year—that feeling of recognition—was very similar to what Peter must have felt in the years following the resurrection of Jesus Christ—except instead of being frightening, it was glorious. Peter had two different pillars grounding his conviction that these things were true: he had his own experience with Christ, and he had the testimony of Scripture, in which the prophets told thousands of years in advance what was going to happen.

In today’s text, Peter wants to share that experience, that recognition of truth, with us.

We’ll be in v. 16-21 of 2 Peter 1 today, and essentially in this text Peter shares with us the two pillars of his own conviction, so that we might share them: he reminds his readers of what he and the other apostles saw, and what they heard from Scripture.

We Have Seen (v. 16-18)

We’re going to begin by reading v. 12-15 (which we saw last week), just to give us the context for what he says.  

12 Therefore I intend always to remind you of these qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have. 13 I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up by way of reminder, 14 since I know that the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me. 15 And I will make every effort so that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things. 

So over the last two weeks we saw together what Peter says God has given us, and why it is so essential: God has given us faith through the work of Jesus Christ, and with that faith he has given us everything we need to live for him. For that reason, we are called to feed our faith and see it grow, by working to develop the character of Christ in ourselves—in this way, we will be fruitful in our knowledge of him, and have assurance of our salvation. This is what the Christian life looks like—it is the process of growing to be like Christ.

We ended last week in v. 12-15, where Peter says that these things are so essential that he constantly comes back to them, stirring up his brothers and sisters by reminding them of these things. 

Now, instead of moving on to a new subject, he adds even more ground for his reminders: these things are not just important, they are true. Essentially, Peter reminds his readers of these essential things, and then asks, “Why should you recall these things? Why should you listen to what we (the apostles) say, and keep our teaching on the forefront of your minds? Because our teaching didn’t come from us.”

V. 16:

16 For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” 18 we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.

Luke—the man who wrote the gospel of Luke—was a close friend of the apostle Paul. He traveled with him, he served with him, he observed him closely. Luke was an intelligent man—he was actually Paul’s doctor. So when Luke went about writing his gospel, he didn’t just repeat things he heard from the apostle Paul. Why? Because for the things he wanted to write about, Paul wasn’t actually there. 

So Luke did the work of a responsible investigative journalist: he went around collecting eyewitness testimonies. He talked to people who were there. Now I know this kind of process is more complicated in the age of fake news, but generally speaking, if one person says they saw a ghost, people will write him off as crazy. If thirty people say they saw the same thing, it’s a little more difficult to discount.

The main witnesses whom Luke would have interviewed for his work in writing his gospel were the apostles, because they were there. They were present with him for the main chunk of the time about which Luke was writing. He based a good portion of his gospel on the gospel of Mark, which in turn was based on conversations Mark had had with Peter, because Mark traveled with Peter in the same way Luke traveled with Paul.

Do you see what I’m getting at? When the apostles told the story of the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, they spoke about things they saw with their own eyes.

This is why in v. 16, Peter changes the perspective of his writing from first person singular to first person plural: from “I” to “we.” He saw these things, and so did the other apostles, and the many people who followed Christ along with them. 

In everything he and the apostles told these churches about Jesus, they didn’t tell them something that they heard from someone else—they were there. He says, We were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

The example he gives of the “majesty” they saw is the event which is called “the Transfiguration” (Matt 17, Mark 9, Luke 9). 

Late in his ministry, before going to Jerusalem to be crucified, Jesus took Peter and James and John to the Mount of Olives to pray. On that mountain, they saw Christ “transfigured” (as Matthew said) before their eyes. This word “transfigured” in Greek is “metamorphoō”—a word we can easily recognize. On the mountain, Jesus was changed before the apostles’ eyes. The gospel writers say that his face shone like the sun, his clothes became as white as light (Matthew 17.2). The veil of his humanity was peeled back for a moment, to reveal the glory of his divinity. 

So when Peter says that Jesus Christ received honor and glory from God the Father, and that the Father proclaimed about him, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” it wasn’t a dream, and it wasn’t just something Jesus told them; he says (v. 18): we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.

Now of course if Peter—or even Peter, James and John—had only seen the Transfiguration (just seen one extraordinary, supernatural event), it could have been written off as a hallucination.

But they had seen far more than that. They had seen people healed. Dead people raised. Demons cast out. Peter had walked out on the water with Jesus, in view of the disciples. They had seen the resurrected Christ. They had seen him ascend into heaven after telling them that he would come again to claim his church. And since then, extraordinary signs, piling up on one another, in the work of the Spirit to establish the church.

And for these things we don’t have just one witness, or three, or even twelve. After Jesus’s resurrection he appeared to more than five hundred people. And during his life, many more than that had witnessed his miracles.

You get the idea. Peter is writing these words knowing full well that he is about to die. Knowing full well that he is more than likely going to suffer an excruciating death for his faith (and he did). 

And he will not give his life for a myth. Or a story. Or a dream. These things happened, Peter says, and he knows they happened because he was there, as were many others.

We Have Heard (v. 19-21)

Now even taken on its own, the eyewitness testimony of Peter and the apostles would have been compelling. But even more compelling is the fact that the things they witnessed—the person and work of Jesus Christ—was predicted amply and accurately by prophets who spoke on behalf of God and who lived thousands of years before. All of Jesus’s disciples were Jewish men, and as such they would have learned the Scriptures well during their childhood. These were not secret texts.

The figure prophecied in the Old Testament, the one God said would save his people, was referred to as the Messiah. There are many lists of messianic prophecies out there, but here’s a small snippet of a list compiled by Dr. Walter Kaiser (President of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary)—prophecies which directly and personally predicted the Messiah’s coming.

Eleven psalms celebrate the person and work of the coming Messiah; they predicted that he would be rejected (Psalm 118), that he would be betrayed (Psalm 69, 109), that he would die and be resurrected (Psalm 22, 16).

The prophets themselves predicted that he would be born of a virgin (Isaiah 7.14), that he would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5.2), that he would be preceded and announced by John the Baptist (Isaiah 40.3-5, Malachi 3.1); that he would enter Jerusalem as the crowds shouted “Hosanna” (Zechariah 9.9, Psalm 118); that his side would be pierced (Zechariah 12.10), that he would suffer for the sins of the world (Isaiah 53.6), that he would be killed with criminals, and yet buried among the rich (Isaiah 53.9).

There are many more we could sample. 

All of these, Peter would have known. And all of them (except Jesus’s birth) happened before his eyes, in addition to so many other things Jesus did that were never predicted—little surprises God had kept saved up for his people. So we can see why Peter would not want to stop at his own eyewitness account, but really press on the fact that the things he saw with his own eyes were things that God had predicted thousands of years earlier, as further proof that the things he has been teaching didn’t come from him, but from God himself.  

V. 19:

19 And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, 20 knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. 

So he says that the apostles have the prophetic word—the prophecies of the Old Testament prophets—more fully confirmed, in that they themselves saw it come true. The thing is, no one in Judaism held the Old Testament prophecy in any doubt. They wondered and they lamented and they prayed to God, “How long until you bring these things to pass?” But no one doubted that these prophecies would come to pass.

So imagine the stunning assurance that Peter and the other apostles must have felt, when they saw these prophecies, which were already sure in their minds, play out in front of their eyes! Imagine what it must have been like to hear these prophecies, in which they already believed, and then to see them happen. God took their previous assurance, which was already strong, and loaded another, even better assurance on top of it. 

And this is what Peter is trying to pass onto his readers—assurance stacked upon assurance.

He’s saying, “These things we’ve been saying to you for years…they don’t come from us; they came from the Holy Spirit. And the prophecies of the Old Testament didn’t come from the prophets either; they came from the Holy Spirit too. Neither we, nor the prophets are making these things up.” 

No prophecy of Scripture, he says, comes from someone’s own interpretation. That is, no biblical author looked at the world around him and analyzed the events he saw and out of his own mind came out with a prophecy we find in Scripture. If the prophecy is there, it didn’t come from the prophet. Rather, these men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. 

This is what the apostle Paul was saying when he said that All Scripture is breathed out by God (2 Timothy 3.16-17). Under the inspiration of the Spirit, the prophets spoke the words of God in exactly the way God wanted them to, while still retaining their own personality and style. 

And the same thing is true, Peter suggests here, of the writings of the apostles. Now, of course at this point Peter probably didn’t know that this letter would later become accepted as part of the canon of Scripture; but he knew that the things he and the other apostles had been teaching came from the Holy Spirit of God, in the same way the Old Testament prophecies did. And so he attaches the same authority to the teachings of the apostles as he does to the writings of the prophets. (He’ll say something similar about the apostle Paul’s writings at the end of this letter, when he refers to Paul’s letters as Scripture.)

Let me put it a different way. God’s Word is trustworthy because he gave his message and confirmed it through the prophets who announced the coming of Christ under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And then he allowed men who were eyewitnesses to these events to testify to them, also under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It wasn’t just about what Peter and the apostles said; the Spirit wasn’t a writing assistant. He not only guided their words; he guided their recollections of the events they recounted, helping them to see and remember and recount the right things—just what we would need to know.

This inspired and trustworthy Word of God, Peter says, is like a lamp shining in a dark place. When you wake up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and the room is dark, and there’s just one tiny source of light in the room, what do you do? You look at that light; you focus on it, to orient yourself and know where you need to go. 

Think of how relevant this image would have been to the Christians to whom Peter is writing—Christians living under persecution, facing suffering and possibly even death for their faith. There are some situations in which the suffering is so intense that you can no longer make sense of what’s going on around you—everything is a potential threat. How do you go on in such a situation, where all you see around you is dark?

You look to the light. You pay attention to the light. You focus on the past promises of God, many of which have now been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, in order to place a grounded trust in the other promises of God which speak of another, second coming of Christ—the end of our suffering and pain, the coming of the glory of God for which we were created. You look at the promises which have been fulfilled, in order to place a firm hope in the promises that will be fulfilled.

That future hope—that second coming of Christ—is what Peter is referring to when he talks about the “day dawning” and the “morning star rising”. This is the greatest hope of the Christian: the day when all of God’s promises will find their perfect fulfillment. And we anchor our hope in those future fulfillments of God’s promises by looking at the myriad of ways in which he fulfilled his promises in the past.

And what is beautiful here is that he doesn’t just describe a massive, historical, cosmic event—though Christ’s return will be exactly that. He talks about the day dawning, and the morning star rising in our hearts. 

In other words, Christ’s return won’t be simply global. It won’t be simply cosmic. It won’t be impersonal. He wants to remind us that when Christ returns for his church, that means he will return for us. He knows who we are, and he hasn’t forgotten about us, and he is coming back for us.

Conclusion

We talked about the movie Contagion earlier. That movie, which came out in 2011, was the result of interviews with professionals from the WHO, who through their expertise were able to predict how a global pandemic would play out—and in many details, they were right. When we watched the movie last year, it rang true in a way it didn’t when it first came out, because of the recognition we felt, seeing on the screen what we were actually living in real life.

The prophets of the OT were not experts in their field. They were not magicians or storytellers. They were, in most cases, ordinary men. And yet they told God’s people how God would save them, and were correct in what they said, because they spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Peter heard the words of the prophets, written thousands of years before, since his childhood. And in his lifetime, before his eyes, he saw those prophecies come true—he and all the other eyewitnesses to Christ.

If we are fascinated because we recognized a few superficial similarities between a ten-year-old movie and what we see happening in the world around us today, what do you think Peter’s feeling was when he recognized perfect similarities, deep similarities, between the word of the prophets which came thousands of years earlier, and what he lived day after day with Christ for three years—what he saw in his own life after Christ’s ascension—what he saw fulfilled in the church as it grew?

And what should our feeling be to have received his testimony?

That is the question which Peter is trying to push on us here…and this is what will be difficult for many of us. Because I know what some of you might be thinking at this point. Peter’s trying to explain why we can trust our Bibles, and he’s using arguments from the Bible. A common objection to this line of thought is that it’s a cyclical argument—you can’t use the Bible to prove the authenticity of the Bible. And on the surface at least, I’d agree with that: it is a cyclical argument. 

Now there are lots of reasons why it’s not really a cyclical argument: the number of ancient manuscripts we have for the Bible far exceeds the number of ancient manuscripts we have for nearly every other ancient work in existence. The coherence of the books we have in the Bible, written by different authors over millenia, is striking. 

But in the end, none of that will convince an unbeliever who doesn’t want to be convinced. And we need to be okay with that fact. You will never find sufficient proof—at least not this side of eternity—to shut down every critic. 

The thing is, the church has always known this. The final, ultimate proof for the Christian of Scripture’s authenticity comes from Scripture itself. The Westminster Confession of Faith says this when describing why we should accept the authority of the Bible: 

The . . . incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection [of the Scriptures], are arguments whereby it does abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God: yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts. (Article 1.5)

John Calvin put it this way in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1.7.4):

The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. 

Peter proves his message by reminding us that he saw with his own eyes what the prophets had predicted. But here’s what we need to remember: the same thing is true for us. We didn’t see Jesus Christ physically walk on the earth, but if the Holy Spirit of God has given us faith, has brought us from death to life by giving us new birth, then we are seeing proof of Scripture’s authenticity with our own eyes, too—every day of our lives.

What Peter described in v. 1-15 of chapter 1 was the experience of God-given faith which bears fruit in our own lives. And what he described there is what happens in us when we place our faith in Christ and become his disciples, committing to follow him, with the help of the Holy Spirit. What we see here on the page, written two thousand years ago, is what we see played out in our own lives, if only we would pay attention.

We have three solid pillars on which to ground our faith: the prophetic Word of God; the eyewitness testimony of the apostles; and the fulfillment of these promises, the fulfillment of what they describe to be the Christian life, experienced firsthand by us every day of our lives.

Friends, we can trust this book. These are not myths, and they are not mere stories. They are the very words of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and applied to our hearts by that same Holy Spirit.

We can trust that what the apostles tell us about the life of Christ actually happened—this is not a made-up story, but a story which really took place in real human history. We can trust that what they tell us about our salvation is true—that the Son of God truly did take on human flesh and live a perfect life and suffer our punishment in order that we might be declared righteous before God: that he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53.5).

We can trust these things. And because we can trust these things, we can also trust that one day, the promises of Christ’s return will be fulfilled as well. He will come back to earth; he will renew the earth and ourselves; he will remove every trace and every effect of sin and bring us into his eternal kingdom, where he will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things will have passed away (Revelation 21.4).

So open your Bible this week. And when you do, pray that you might realize the weight of what you’re doing. When you open your Bible to read it, rest in what you read—feel the solidity of your assurance, like a man who’s just spent a long period of time on a boat, and steps off the boat onto dry land, and feels—for the first time in a long time—something steady under his feet. Pay attention to the word which has been proclaimed to you, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.