Peter may have meant that the earth and all the works done on it will be exposed, in the sense of being judged, which would fit the broader context of his argument quite well. He may also have meant that the earth and all the works done on it will be refined, a quite intriguing proposal in light of images from the book of Malachi. Whether either of these proposals or even another is the best way to ultimately understand the meaning of 2 Peter 3:10, a simple evaporation of everything, burning up with nothing left, is not the meaning Peter intended.

Many moons ago when I was in college and dinosaurs roamed the earth, as a relatively new Christian, I was an environmental studies and public policy major, something that was a relatively new concentration at that point at the academic level and something that made me somewhat suspect among many Christians in the United States. I remember talking with a friend of mine, and she said, “I don’t really worry that much about protecting the environment, because it’s all just going to burn up anyway.”

I remember at the time, not knowing that much about the Bible yet, but thinking, “That just feels like it can’t be right.”  But I didn’t really know what else to say, because, after all, that was the end of things, right?

A bunch of years and two careers later, when I became a Bible professor and started teaching, the same question would come up, though not in the same way. People would, in essence, say, “Well why do the arts matter? After all, God’s just going to burn up this world and take us to heaven.” Or, “Why worry about justice on this earth?” Or, “Why dig wells for villages that need water?” Or, “Why feed the hungry? All we need to do is save souls, because that’s all that really will last, anyway. The rest is just going to burn up at the end.”

As a professor and pastor, I would always reply, “But yes, what type of a fire is it? Yes, a refiner’s fire.” I always got away with it, but that was largely from the power dynamic of me being the professor and the so-called expert. And I always worried I was bluffing…

The issue is largely 2 Peter 3:10: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed” (2 Peter 3:10, ESV).

And if that is not enough, many translations, including the old RSV, which many Protestants used at the time; the Jerusalem Bible, which was a major Roman Catholic translation; and the King James Bible, all translate the last word, “burned up,” ending the verse, therefore, as “the earth and the works that are done on it will be burned up.”

Well, if that is the case, again the question — why do we care? About the environment, culture, the arts, urban planning, any of that? It will all just going to dissolve and burn up at the end of time. If so, whither any Christian doctrine of social engagement, much less of creation care, business, government, or anything else?

Gabriel Chevallier wrote about the trenches of World War I in his novel Fear, “This Earth is a burning building, and all the exits have been bricked up.”  Many Christians repurpose that quotation as about the broader evangelistic task of the church, bringing in 2 Peter and adding, “I’m just trying to get everyone I can out of the building, off the earth, before it collapses.” After all, that is what Peter says is coming.

Part of the challenge is the very word typically used for the end of time: apocalypse, as in the “the Apocalypse of John,” a common name for the last book of the Bible. The immediate images engendered by the word are grainy and gritty, maybe nuclear annihilation or environmental catastrophe. Under the influence of the book of Revelation (the aforementioned Apocalypse of John), as well as modern culture, Christians hear “apocalypse” and immediately think of burning barrels and the world of Halo or Cloverfield Lane or Furiosa, some post-apocalyptic societal breakdown, grim and dark, gritty and ruinous.

This, however, is emphatically not the Bible’s vision of the end. The Bible’s picture of the end is beautiful, not that world of nuclear disaster and burning oil drums. The book of Revelation does have fire and terrifying images, of course; however, those images are the prelude to the end, not the end itself. The end of the book of Revelation is actually a picture of beauty, a city, a city the Bible calls the New Jerusalem, one perfect and gleaming in every way. The New Jerusalem is not just the city at its best, but the city as if it were perfect:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:1–4, ESV)

This fundamental image of the end is God with us. John goes on in the next verse: “And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new’” (Revelation 21:5, ESV). The picture that follows is beautiful, meant to be the most beautiful picture of a city a Jewish-Christian audience could possibly envision: John’s description of the New Jerusalem. Far beyond beauty, though, John’s picture is meant to evoke all sorts of Old Testament images, that the entirety of the New Jerusalem is not just a redux of the Temple, but a Holy of Holies, a place perfect for God to be.

Even more to the point, John’s image of the end purposely evokes all sorts of images from the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1-2: the river of the water of life, the tree of life, nothing accursed, a place fitting for God to be with mankind. And Jesus declares to John through the angel, “These words are trustworthy and true” (Rev. 22:6, ESV).

As Nicholas Piotrowski wrote for The Washington Institute in 2020, apocalyptic is not what Christians typically think it is. Apocalyptic is, in fact, a type of literature, one whose essence is to show the reader a more-real world that is unseen, a genre of writing in which an otherworldly being narrates a revelation to a human recipient. That revelation discloses some sort of transcendent reality which relates both to this world and to the supernatural world. There are approximately 40 examples of this type of literature from Jewish and Christian sources from about 250 BC to 150 AD, some canonical and many from outside the Bible. Apocalyptic, then, does not of necessity even involve telling the future. An apocalyptic work might tell about the future, but it might not. It just has to be in this form and tell about both this world and the supernatural world. What makes something an apocalypse, then, is that it shows us there is a more-real reality than the one we think we are living.

Dr. Piotrowski therefore explains an apocalypse with the following story. He says, imagine you have a beautiful spring weekend day. You decide to take a drive, and the air and the day are beautiful. You put on your favorite music, and you drive. Without knowing it, you get used to the speed, so you start going faster and faster and faster. Off in your thoughts, singing along with the melody, the wind in your hair, you have not a care in the world. Everything is absolutely perfect. However, what you are not seeing, because you are off in your own world, is the police cruiser right behind you in your rearview mirror, carefully tracking and calibrating your speed. There is a more real reality just behind you, about to break in. You see, it turns out you were living in a dream world, with a disaster just behind you, more real than the world you were thought you were living in, until suddenly the real truth of the unseen world becomes manifest to you. Dr. Piotrowski often calls this “the apocalypse of the police car.”

In the book of Revelation, then, the Bible says there is a more real reality than this one we see, a message essential for the persecuted church of John’s time to hear. And that reality is that, in the end, after the fiery judgment, God is going to make this world something perfect, something beautiful. The ordeals and judgments end in Revelation 21:8, but the book does not end until chapter 22. After the fire, there comes a city, a perfect and beautiful city.

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