Biblion Bible Commentary
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They Willfully Forget
2 Peter 3:5-7
5 For they willfully forget that there were heavens from of old, and an earth formed out of water and amid water by the word of God, · WEB
The claim that nothing has ever interrupted the world's regularity requires forgetting the one time it did — and the forgetting is described as deliberate.
They willfully forget. The charge is not ignorance; the verb makes the omission an act. What has been left out of the mockers' survey is the world's origin and its ruin, both of which happened by the word of God.
There were heavens from of old, and an earth formed out of water and amid water by the word of God. That is Genesis in a clause — waters divided, dry land appearing Genesis 1:6–9 — and it establishes that the present order is not self-existing but spoken. Verse 6 then supplies the interruption: by which means the world that existed then, being flooded with water, perished. The regularity the mockers appeal to has been broken once, comprehensively, and the record of it stands in the same Scripture they are disputing.
Verse 7 completes the parallel. The present heavens and earth, by the same word, are stored up for fire, reserved for the day of judgment. The argument is now symmetrical: spoken into being, once destroyed by water, presently held by the same word, and reserved for fire. Regularity is not the world's own property. It is a word being kept.
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