Introduction: Building on the Covenant Creation of Sinai
In Part 1 we established that the “heavens and earth” created at Sinai (Isaiah 51:15-16; Deuteronomy 32:6) and destined to pass away in AD 70 are the consistent referent to the “heavens and earth” in Psalm 102, Hebrews 1 and 12, and Revelation 21. Part 2 develops the same theme in 2 Peter. Peter is not speaking of a distant physical end of the material cosmos. He describes the imminent judgment upon the Old Covenant world—the very order God sovereignly “made,” “created,” and “formed” at the Exodus and ratified at Sinai (Deuteronomy 32:6 LXX). This judgment is not asleep and will not be delayed (2 Peter 2:3). It is the same judgment Moses prophesied would come upon Israel in her “last days” when she became utterly corrupt, rejected her Rock, and filled up her sins (Deuteronomy 31:29; 32:5, 20, 29).
The false teachers of Peter’s day are the “spots and blemishes” (2 Peter 2:13) Moses foresaw in that perverse generation (Deuteronomy 32:5; Acts 2:40). Just as many of the original spots and blemishes within the Sinai-created covenant people perished in the wilderness, so these false teachers and the entire Old Covenant order or “heavens and earth” would perish with it in the fiery judgment of AD 70.
With that context established, Peter moves in chapter 3 to remind his readers of the certainty and nearness of this judgment, using typology (including clear parallels such as Jeremiah 4), Psalm 90, and the promise of new heavens and a new earth from Isaiah 64–66.
2 Peter 2: The Context of Imminent, Undelayed Judgment on the Sinai-Created World
Peter opens chapter 2 by contrasting true prophets with false teachers who secretly introduce destructive heresies, “even denying the Master who bought them” (2 Peter 2:1). As Gary Long has demonstrated,[1] this language deliberately echoes Deuteronomy 32:6 in the Septuagint: God as the sovereign Lord who “purchased,” “made,” “created,” and “formed” Israel as a covenant nation.
These false teachers are further described as “spots and blemishes” reveling in their deceptions (2 Peter 2:13). This is a direct allusion to Deuteronomy 32:5, where Israel is called a “perverse and crooked generation” marked by blemishes. Peter identifies the false teachers as the very spots and blemishes Moses prophesied and God ordained long ago that would arise among the covenant people in the last days—those who deny the pre-incarnate “Lord” (despoten) that “created” (agorasanta) them through the exodus event (Deuteronomy 32:6; Isaiah 51:9-16) and would be judged in the events of AD 70.
A brief note on the Greek is in order. The participle ἀγοράσαντα in 2 Peter 2:1 means “bought,” “purchased,” or “acquired.” I do not claim the word itself means “created.” As Gary D. Long has carefully demonstrated in his lexical and contextual study of the verse, Peter is deliberately alluding to Deuteronomy 32:6 (LXX). There Moses piles up three related verbs: the Lord “bought/acquired,” “made,” and “established/formed” Israel as His covenant people through the Exodus. The Septuagint rendering of the third verb carries the sense of “created.” By using the single term “bought,” Peter summarizes the entire cluster. The false teachers are thereby identified as members of that same covenant people who deny the sovereign Master who acquired, made, and formed them. Long rightly calls this the “sovereign creation” emphasis: the pre-incarnate Lord sovereignly acquired and constituted the covenant nation (including the “spots” among them). The reference is therefore to the sovereign formation of the Old Covenant people at the Exodus and Sinai, not to a redemptive purchase by the blood of Christ. The lexical precision does not weaken the intertextual link; it strengthens it.
Their judgment is swift and certain: “Their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep” (2 Peter 2:3, NASB). The judgment is not asleep—it is awake, active, and already in motion. It will not be delayed. This language of non-delay echoes the broader prophetic expectation of the “last days” judgment on the Old Covenant order (cf. Deuteronomy 32:35 LXX; Habakkuk 2:3; Hebrews 10:37).
In fact, in Deuteronomy 32:35 (LXX) Moses teaches that when the “appointed time” (Greek kairos) would come in that last days perverse and crooked generation, God’s coming in judgment would be “ready” and “near.” Peter uses all of the same Greek words in 1 Peter 4:5, 7, 17 to teach that God was “ready to judge the living and the dead” and thus “the end of all things is near” because “the appointed time” (kairos) for judgment had come. This is likewise consistent with Peter identifying his generation as the prophetic one Moses prophesied that would see Israel’s last days end (cf. Acts 2:40; Deuteronomy 32:5, 20).
Just a sidenote—this creates a serious problem for Gentry’s partial preterist hyper-creedalist position. He teaches that the living and the dead in 1 Peter 4:5-7 were judged within an AD 70 “near” time frame but does not adequately explain how that judgment took place or how it relates to the other New Testament passages describing the same eschatological complex. Nor does he harmonize it with Paul teaching that Christ’s coming and the judgment of the living and dead was “about to” be fulfilled (2 Timothy 4:1 YLT), or that the resurrection of the just and unjust was “about to be” fulfilled as well (Acts 24:15 YLT). Are these not references to the judgment and resurrection of Daniel 12:2 that Gentry now concedes was fulfilled in AD 70?
Moreover, the historic creeds (such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed) do not teach two consummative judgments or two consummative resurrections for the living and the dead—they describe a single final eschatological complex. In the same way, neither the creeds nor the New Testament teach two passing aways of the “first heavens and earth” followed by two arrivals of the new. If Gentry places Peter’s “near” judgment of the living and the dead in AD 70 and likewise concedes the resurrection of Daniel 12:2 to AD 70, then the exegetical burden rests upon him to demonstrate why the New Testament requires another resurrection/judgment/new-creation complex thousands of years after the one the inspired writers declared near. His partial preterist attempt to honor New Testament imminence while simultaneously maintaining a second consummation demanded by his creedal system has failed to demonstrate that division from the texts themselves.
Peter reinforces this with examples of past judgments on the ungodly within covenant contexts: angels who sinned, the ancient world of Noah’s day, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Balaam.
A clarification is needed here. When I speak of “covenantal judgment upon those who turn from the truth within God’s people,” I do not mean that every example is identical in kind to the Sinai covenant. The angels, the pre-flood world, and Sodom are broader demonstrations that God’s judgment on the ungodly has never been idle or asleep (2:3). The Noahic flood in particular functions as the great historical type: the same word that ordered the world out of water also brought destruction by water. The “world that then existed” (kosmos) perished; the physical fabric of the planet did not. That precedent supplies the pattern for the greater, climactic judgment that would dissolve the Sinai-created “heavens and earth” by fire in AD 70. Typology requires correspondence and escalation, not identity of substance or identical covenant structures. The pre-flood order does not have to be a Sinai-type covenant for the flood to serve as type.
The false teachers of Peter’s generation are the final fulfillment of Moses’ warning in Deuteronomy 32—they are part of the perverse generation that would not discern its end and would be judged when the covenant world itself was dissolved.
This sets the stage for chapter 3. The same readers who are being reminded of these past judgments are now told that the current “heavens and earth” (the Old Covenant order established at Sinai) are likewise reserved for fire.
2 Peter 3: The Reminder of Imminent Fulfillment
Verses 1–2: A Reminder of 1 Peter 1:4–12 – The New Heavens and Earth as the Imminent Inheritance and Salvation of the Soul
Peter begins chapter 3: “This is now, beloved, the second letter I am writing to you in which I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder, that you should remember the words spoken beforehand by the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior spoken by your apostles” (2 Peter 3:1-2).
This is explicitly a reminder. In his first letter, Peter had spoken of “an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Peter 1:4). He described this as “the end/goal of your faith—the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:9), which was “ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:5) and was “at hand” for the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 1:7, 13; 4:7, 17).
The new heavens and new earth Peter will mention in 2 Peter 3:13 is therefore the same reality: the imminent inheritance and salvation of the soul promised in 1 Peter 1:4-12 and rooted in Isaiah 65. It is not a distant physical recreation of the universe but the full arrival of the New Covenant order—the New Jerusalem, the Church as the bride, righteousness dwelling among God’s people—fulfilled when the Old Covenant order passed away in AD 70.
Verses 3–4: The Scoffers of the “Last Days” – Deuteronomy 32’s Perverse Generation That Would Not Discern Its End
Peter warns: “Knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation’” (2 Peter 3:3-4).
These scoffers arise in “the last days”—the final generation of the Old Covenant (cf. Acts 2:17; Hebrews 1:2; 1 Peter 1:20). Moses had prophesied exactly this in Deuteronomy 31:29 and 32:5, 20, 29: In the last days Israel would become utterly corrupt, turn aside from the way, and reject the Rock (ultimately the Messiah). They would heap up sins until the measure was full. Moses lamented that they were “a perverse and crooked generation” (Deuteronomy 32:5) that would not be able to discern what their end would be (Deuteronomy 32:29).
Peter identifies the false teachers and scoffers of his day as the fulfillment of that prophecy. They are the “spots and blemishes” within the perverse generation (Acts 2:40 quotes Deuteronomy 32:5 directly in the Pentecost sermon). Most would not discern the signs of the times or the nearness of the judgment that would dissolve their entire covenant world.
Verse 4: The Mockers’ Appeal to Unchanging Continuity Since Creation
The scoffers mock the promise of Christ’s coming (parousia/judgment) by appealing to the apparent lack of change: “all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation” and since the time of “the fathers.” They treat the physical stability of the world and the ongoing existence of the temple and Jewish polity as proof that nothing apocalyptic is about to happen.
Peter will answer this by reminding them that things have not always continued unchanged. God’s word has repeatedly created and then de-created ordered realities.
The Typological Heart of Peter’s Argument (2 Peter 3:5-7): Physical Type → Covenant Antitype
This is the decisive exegetical link that both Kenneth Gentry and Tim Martin miss. Peter is not equating the “heavens and earth which now exist” with the physical creation of Genesis 1. Nor is he forcing Genesis 1 itself to be purely covenantal. He is employing classic biblical typology: the physical creation and the Noahic flood serve as a historical type and precedent, while the Old Covenant order (created at Sinai) is the greater antitype facing judgment by fire in AD 70.
Peter writes:
“For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.” (2 Peter 3:5-7)
Notice the deliberate contrast and the unifying thread:
“The world that THEN was” = the physical, pre-flood world (explicitly tied to Genesis 1:2, 6–9 — the ordering of the watery chaos). This world was created and then judged/de-created by water.
“The heavens and earth which NOW exist” = the covenantal order of Peter’s day (the Sinai-created “heavens and earth” of Isaiah 51:15-16 and Deuteronomy 32, still standing with its temple, Law, and priesthood). This order is reserved for judgment by fire.
Some have objected that this reading introduces an inconsistency: if Peter is reminding the scoffers that God’s word has repeatedly created and then de-created ordered realities, how can the only past example (the flood) be treated as a physical event while the present judgment is covenantal? The answer is that typology does not require identical substance. The unifying thread is the power of the divine word—the same word that formed the pre-flood world out of water and then judged it by water is the word that formed the Sinai order and would judge it by fire. Water and fire are both real instruments of judgment; both carry covenantal weight in their respective settings. The difference in mode (physical flood → covenantal fire) and the difference in the nature of the ordered reality being judged highlight the escalation from type to antitype. Jeremiah 4 already models exactly this move: Genesis creation language is redeployed to describe a local, historical, covenantal de-creation without turning Genesis 1 itself into pure symbolism. Peter stands in the same prophetic stream. Selective reading of “world” (kosmos) versus “heavens and earth” is not special pleading; the vocabulary itself invites the distinction. Peter can speak of the kosmos that perished in the flood while reserving “heavens and earth” language for the present covenantal order that is stored up for fire.
The common thread is not the substance (physical vs. covenantal) but the word of God that both creates and judges. Peter’s point is powerful precisely because of the difference in the mode of judgment: water (physical type) versus fire (covenantal antitype). The scoffers assume “all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation” (v. 4). Peter replies: No—they do not. God’s word has a track record of creating order and then dissolving it when the time for judgment comes.
Old Testament Precedent: Jeremiah 4 and the Use of Genesis Creation Language for Local Covenant Judgment
A powerful parallel appears in Jeremiah 4, where the prophet describes the coming Babylonian invasion and covenant judgment upon Judah using explicit reversal-of-creation language drawn directly from Genesis 1. Jeremiah writes:
“I looked at the earth, and it was formless and empty [tohu wabohu];
I looked to the heavens, and their light was gone.
I looked at the mountains, and they were quaking,
and all the hills were swaying.
I looked, and there were no people;
every bird in the sky had flown away.
I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert;
all its towns lay in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.” (Jeremiah 4:23-26)
This is not a prediction of the literal end of the physical universe or a global cosmic catastrophe. It is a vivid, prophetic portrayal of covenantal de-creation—the undoing of the ordered world of Judah as a consequence of her covenant unfaithfulness. The land would be ruined (though not completely destroyed, Jeremiah 4:27), cities laid waste, and the ordered creation seemingly reversed under God’s fierce anger. The same “formless and empty” (tohu wabohu) language that describes the pre-creation state in Genesis 1:2 is here applied to the desolation of Israel’s covenant world.
This example establishes an important exegetical principle. It does not, by itself, prove every detail of the interpretation of 2 Peter 3. What it decisively demonstrates is that an appeal to Genesis creation vocabulary does not require the judgment being described to involve the literal destruction of the material cosmos. Genesis creation language can be—and demonstrably is—redeployed by the prophets to describe historical covenantal de-creation.
That matters directly for Gentry’s argument. If the reasoning is simply, “Peter invokes Genesis 1 creation language; therefore, the judgment he describes must concern the physical cosmos,” Jeremiah 4 defeats that inference. The presence of Genesis creation language cannot settle the question by itself. The referent must instead be determined by Peter’s context, his prophetic background, his temporal indicators, and the covenantal framework within which the language appears.
Peter follows the same well-established prophetic pattern. Jeremiah 4 thus serves as a clear Old Testament precedent showing that Genesis creation language can function typologically to describe covenantal judgment without requiring a literal, physical end of the world. Peter stands in this same prophetic stream.
Kenneth Gentry, in his article “2 PETER 3 AND THE CONSUMMATION (2),” directly confronts preterist readings of this passage. He writes:
“The destruction of the heavens and the earth that he envisions involves the current material creation. Hence, it refers to the distant consummation and not the approaching AD 70 conflagration, despite certain similarities between the two events (since one is the type of the other). Peter expressly refers to the material creation order: ‘from the beginning of creation’ (2 Peter 3:4; cf. Genesis 1:1); ‘by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water’ (3:5; cf. Genesis 1:2, 9); ‘the heavens and the earth which now exist’ (3:7). Thus, he defines the ‘heavens and earth’ to which he refers and which God will replace with a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ (3:10, 13). He is not contemplating the destruction of the old Jewish order in AD 70, but the material heavens and the earth at the second advent.”[2]
Gentry acknowledges “certain similarities” and that AD 70 functions typologically in relation to a greater event, yet he insists the primary referent in 2 Peter 3 must be the future physical consummation because of the Genesis creation language.
In “2 PETER 3 AND THE CONSUMMATION (1),” he further distinguishes his view from partial preterists like David Chilton who apply the new creation to the post-AD 70 era, arguing instead that the passage “points instead to the consummate order which follows the resurrection and the final judgment.”[3] And yet Gentry affirms Peter’s teaching that “the judgment of the living and the dead” was “near” in 1 Peter 4:5-7 and fulfilled in AD 70, while also conceding the resurrection of Daniel 12:2 to AD 70. This creates the very exegetical problem his divided consummation must answer. If Peter’s near judgment of the living and the dead and Daniel’s resurrection belong to AD 70, what textual necessity requires another resurrection, another judgment of the living and dead, and another new-creation consummation thousands of years later? The burden is upon Gentry to demonstrate that division rather than assume it.
Gentry’s own admission that AD 70 bears “certain similarities” to the judgment in 2 Peter 3 (as a type) actually supports the typological reading I am advancing, but he has the type and antitype reversed for this specific text. Peter is using the physical as type for the covenantal judgment in AD 70. The language of “the heavens and the earth which now exist” is defined contextually by the Old Covenant world still standing in Peter’s day—not by an identity with the material creation of Genesis 1.
Jeremiah 4 exposes the weakness in Gentry’s inference. He correctly reads Genesis creation language in Jeremiah as applying to a local covenant judgment on Israel. Therefore, Genesis language itself cannot establish that Peter must be describing the destruction of the material cosmos. The same hermeneutical possibility must be allowed in 2 Peter 3, and Peter’s context must decide the matter. Gentry’s insistence that Peter “defines the ‘heavens and earth’” solely by material creation language overlooks the broader biblical pattern (already established in Parts 1 and 2) in which creation language is routinely applied to covenant formation and de-creation (Isaiah 51:15-16; Deuteronomy 32; and now Jeremiah 4).
Martin’s Gentile-Waters Interpretation and the Flood: Covenant Creation on the Horns of a Dilemma
If Kenneth Gentry errs by reasoning from Peter’s reference to physical creation and the Flood to a future physical destruction of the material cosmos, Tim Martin’s Covenant Creation moves in the opposite direction. Covenant Creation identifies the waters of Genesis 1:2–10 with Gentile nations and thereby pushes covenantal symbolism backward into the creation account itself.
That interpretation encounters a serious exegetical problem when Genesis 1 is followed into Noah’s Flood and then into Peter’s creation-to-Flood argument in 2 Peter 3:5–6.
Genesis itself establishes the natural relationship between these passages. Genesis 1:2 places “the face of the deep” (tehom) in parallel with “the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:9–10 then gathers the waters together and calls them “Seas.” When the Flood arrives, “all the fountains of the great deep” burst open (Gen. 7:11), and when the Flood subsides “the fountains of the deep” are closed (Gen. 8:2). Proverbs 8:27–29 similarly places “the face of the deep,” “the fountains of the deep,” and God’s boundary for the sea within the same physical creation context. Job 26:10 describes God drawing a boundary “on the face of the waters.” Isaiah 51:10 is not itself establishing the Genesis-to-Flood connection, but its reference to “the waters of the great deep” at the historical Exodus further confirms that biblical “deep” language naturally refers to actual waters.
Peter then deliberately places creation and the Flood together:
“By the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water” (2 Pet. 3:5–6).
The precise antecedent of di’ hōn (“through/by which”) in verse 6 has been debated, so my argument does not depend upon claiming that every occurrence of water in verses 5–6 refers to numerically identical water. That is unnecessary. Peter’s larger sequence is unmistakable:
creation → water → God’s word → Flood judgment
followed immediately by:
the present heavens and earth → the same divine word → fire judgment (vv. 5–7).
The earth of the ancient creation was constituted “out of water and through water,” and the world (kosmos) then existing subsequently perished in the historical judgment of the Flood. Peter gives no indication that the water of creation must first be decoded as Gentile nations before his readers can understand the Flood.
This places Covenant Creation on the horns of a serious dilemma.
Horn One
If the waters of Genesis 1:2–10 are fundamentally Gentile nations, what happens when the water/deep complex of Genesis 1 reappears in Genesis 7–8 as “the fountains of the great deep”? Carrying the Gentile-waters premise of Genesis 1:2–10 consistently forward into Genesis 7–8 would imply, at minimum, that the Flood waters themselves are Gentile nations (or Gentile forces). That same logic, if pressed further, readily generates still more allegorical readings (ark as city/community, animals as peoples). Yet Covenant Creation advocates also affirm that Noah’s Flood was a real historical event involving literal water. The system therefore has to explain why the creation waters are fundamentally nations while the “great deep” of the Flood is allowed to remain actual water—or why the premise stops at Genesis 1.
Horn Two
If the Flood waters of Genesis 7–8 and 2 Peter 3:6 are literal H₂O, what textual reason does Peter give us for making the creation water in the immediately preceding verse Gentile nations? Peter gives no obvious signal that “water” should be read covenantally in verse 5 and historically in verse 6. On the contrary, he places creation and Flood together as successive demonstrations of what God accomplishes by His sovereign word.
There is, admittedly, a logically possible third response. Martin could maintain that Genesis 1 water signifies Gentile nations while Genesis 7–8 describes literal water that also carries covenantal symbolism. But the mere possibility of assigning different meanings does not establish them exegetically. The burden falls upon Covenant Creation to demonstrate from the text itself—not from the requirements of the system—why the reader should switch from Gentile nations to H₂O exactly where the system needs that transition.
Martin’s Followers Are More Consistent—and That Consistency Exposes the Hermeneutic
Tim Martin’s Covenant Creation typically makes a limited move. The waters of Genesis 1:2–10 are read as Gentile nations. The flood of Genesis 6–8 is then treated as a historical event that also functions typologically: Gentile armies later “flood” the land in AD 70, and the nations take refuge in Christ, the new Jerusalem. That is typology layered onto a still-historical flood.
Gee de Leon, a Covenant Creation writer and friend of Steve Magua (another leader in the Covenant Creationist movement), does not stop there. In an essay circulating as Noah’s Fortress (“The Ark Was Not a Boat”), de Leon applies the same dictionary to the flood narrative itself.[4] If waters are peoples in Genesis 1, then the waters that rise in Genesis 7 are peoples in violent motion. If a flood in Isaiah 8, Jeremiah 46, Nahum 1, Psalm 124, and Daniel 9:26 is an army, then Noah’s flood is an army. The ark has no rudder, sail, or keel because it is not a boat; tebah is a chest, and the blueprint is a fortress. The beasts, birds, and creeping things are categories of people (Daniel 7; Ezekiel 34; Zephaniah 1; Acts 10). The raven and dove are scouting parties. The rainbow is a war-bow hung up when the campaign is over. Jesus’ “as it was in the days of Noah” is therefore not a comparison between a rainstorm and a siege; both events are the same kind of event—war.
That reading is more consistent with Martin’s premise than Martin’s own published restraint. As already shown, Genesis itself ties the two water complexes together, and Peter then places creation and flood in one sequence (2 Pet. 3:5–6). If the waters of Genesis 1 are fundamentally Gentile nations, the text gives no signal that the “great deep” of Genesis 7:11 has become a different kind of thing. De Leon and others who carry the premise forward are not inventing a new method. They are refusing the unexplained switch Martin’s system requires: nations in Genesis 1, H₂O in Genesis 7, then nations again in AD 70. Consistency demands one substitution all the way through.
The result is not a tighter typology. It is a hermeneutic that replaces historical referents whenever the system needs new ones.
Waters → peoples, then flood waters → armies
Ark → fortress / sealed city
Animals → men and nations
Birds → scouts
Bow in the cloud → a weapon taken out of service
Each step follows from the last. None of them is controlled by a textual marker that says “here the language remains historical; there it becomes covenantal.” The only control is the premise that Genesis must already be written in the later prophetic code.
Peter’s argument in 2 Peter 3:5–7 becomes unintelligible on this consistent reading. He reminds scoffers that they overlook a fact: the ancient world was formed by the word of God out of water and through water, and that same world perished by water. The present heavens and earth are stored up for fire by the same word. The force of the analogy is that God’s word has already created an ordered world and then judged it. If the first “water” is already Gentile nations and the flood is already an army, Peter is not citing a precedent. He is repeating the antitype and calling it a fact the scoffers forgot. The historical type that gives the covenantal fire its force has been dissolved.
The better reading remains the one already argued. Physical creation and a historical flood supply the type. The prophets later use flood-language for armies (Isaiah 8:7; Jeremiah 46:8; Daniel 9:26), and Jesus applies that idiom to the Roman siege (Luke 17:26–27; 21:20–21). Correspondence and escalation do not require identity of substance. Real water can prefigure a flood of soldiers. A real refuge can prefigure flight to the mountains and safety in Christ. A real bow can become, in later usage, the warrior’s weapon laid down after judgment. None of that requires Genesis 1’s waters to be Gentiles or Genesis 7’s deep to be an army.
Genesis gives the historical type. The prophets and Jesus define how that type is reused. Peter applies it to the Sinai heavens and earth reserved for fire in AD 70. The strength of the argument depends on keeping those steps distinct. De Leon, by making Genesis 1 and Genesis 7 the same symbolic event, has not rescued Covenant Creation. He has made its controlling premise visible.
Where Does the Allegorizing Stop?
The severity of the problem should not be understated. If the waters of Genesis 1 are taken as Gentile nations, and that premise is carried into the Flood—as de Leon’s essay does—the implication is at least that the Flood waters are Gentiles. Pressing the same substitution further (waters as armies, ark as city or community, animals as people) moves well beyond ordinary typology.
The larger hermeneutical question therefore becomes unavoidable: Where does the allegorizing stop?
If historical referents can be replaced with covenantal or spiritual meanings whenever a theological system requires it, what principled exegetical safeguard prevents the same method from being applied to the historical narratives of the New Testament? Why could a liberal interpreter not argue that Jesus did not literally multiply loaves and fishes, but that the “bread” merely represents spiritual nourishment for the covenant community? Why must Lazarus have historically come out of a physical tomb if his resurrection can simply symbolize Israel or humanity coming from covenantal death to life? Why insist that Christ’s own resurrection involved an actual historical event if resurrection language can be reduced to the emergence of a new covenant community?
The answer cannot merely be, “because we believe those New Testament events really happened.” The question is hermeneutical: What textual controls require us to preserve the historical referent while also recognizing its theological and typological significance?
Historic Christianity has normally answered by preserving both. Jesus really multiplied bread, and the miracle also carries theological significance. Lazarus really came from the tomb, and his resurrection also points beyond itself to Christ as “the resurrection and the life.” Christ really rose, and His resurrection simultaneously possesses corporate and covenantal implications for those united to Him (a physical miracle pointing to the deeper spiritual one). The theological meaning does not cancel the historical event that carries that meaning.
The same principle should govern Genesis. Real animals can typify nations. A real ark can typify salvation and refuge. A real Flood can establish the pattern of divine judgment. Physical creation can supply the vocabulary subsequently applied to covenant creation and de-creation. None of this requires us to transform animals into people, water into Gentile armies, or Genesis 1 into the Mosaic covenant.
This is why the issue is larger than one interpretation of Genesis. Once the distinction between historical referent and typological significance is surrendered, there is no obvious stopping point internal to the method itself. The same hermeneutical procedure that can dissolve the historical waters, animals, and Flood of Genesis into covenant symbols can, in principle, be used by theological liberalism to dissolve the historical miracles of the New Testament into religious metaphors.
That does not prove that Covenant Creation denies New Testament miracles, nor am I accusing Martin, Magua, or de Leon of doing so. It demonstrates a methodological consequence: a hermeneutic must possess principled textual controls that explain why historical language remains historical in one passage while being replaced by covenantal referents in another.
Otherwise, the controlling principle becomes not what the text says, but what the theological system needs the text to mean.
When a System Begins Controlling the Text: The Dispensational Parallel
Dispensationalism provides an instructive parallel for what happens when the demands of a theological system begin determining how biblical types must function.
Its commitment to restoring national Israel’s Old Covenant institutions in a future millennium leads many dispensational interpreters to expect a rebuilt physical temple, Levitical worship, circumcision, and animal sacrifices after Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice. Dispensationalists commonly respond that these future sacrifices will be memorial rather than salvific. But that answer does not remove the underlying hermeneutical problem: institutions Hebrews presents as shadows surpassed by their fulfillment in Christ are restored after the substance has arrived (Heb. 8–10; cf. Gal. 5:2–4).
The problem is not that dispensationalists deny the sufficiency of Christ simply because they expect millennial sacrifices. The deeper problem is methodological. A controlling theological system requires the interpreter to carry earlier biblical shadows beyond the point where New Testament revelation has brought them to fulfillment.
Covenant Creation risks the opposite but structurally similar error.
Dispensationalism pushes Old Covenant shadows forward beyond their fulfillment; Covenant Creation pushes later covenant symbolism backward into physical creation.
Once the controlling premise is established that Genesis 1’s waters must be Gentile nations, that premise begins determining what the Flood waters, ark, animals, land, seas, and other details are allowed to mean. The interpreter is no longer simply recognizing typological significance in historical realities; the danger is that the historical realities themselves become reassigned covenantal referents because the system requires them. De Leon’s fortress-ark and animal-peoples reading is what that control looks like when it is applied consistently.
In both cases the controlling question should be the same:
Is the interpretation arising naturally from the text and the Bible’s own typological development, or is the theological system requiring the text to produce the interpretation?
This is precisely where the physical-type → covenantal-antitype distinction provides the simpler solution.
Gentry and Martin therefore make opposite errors. Gentry collapses the antitype back into the physical type: because Peter begins with physical creation and a physical Flood, he concludes that Peter’s coming fire must destroy the physical cosmos. Martin collapses the physical type forward into the covenantal antitype: because Peter’s imminent judgment concerns the covenant world, Genesis 1 itself must already be covenantal creation. De Leon simply finishes Martin’s collapse by treating Genesis 7 as already the same symbolic event.
Neither conclusion follows from Peter’s actual argument; both arise from theological systems imposed upon the direction of his typology.
Peter’s argument preserves the progression:
Physical creation → historical Flood by water → typological precedent → Sinai-created covenant heavens and earth → judgment by fire in AD 70.
The historical reality of the type is what gives the antitype its force. Real animals can prefigure nations. A real ark can prefigure salvation and refuge. A real Flood can prefigure covenantal judgment. And physical creation itself can furnish the prophetic vocabulary later used to describe the creation and de-creation of covenant worlds.
There is therefore no exegetical necessity to turn Genesis 1’s waters into Gentile nations in order to establish a covenantal interpretation of 2 Peter 3. On the contrary, doing so creates unnecessary problems for the Flood narrative and obscures the very typological movement Peter is employing.
The Flood remains a real historical judgment by real water upon the world that then existed. It supplies the precedent, not a coded allegory, for the greater covenantal judgment Peter announces upon “the heavens and earth which now exist.”
Genesis gives us the historical type. Peter gives us the covenantal antitype. The strength of the argument depends upon preserving the distinction between them—not collapsing one into the other.
Comparison: Errors of Gentry and Martin vs. the Correct Typological View
| Aspect | Gentry’s Position & Error | Martin’s Covenant Creation & Its Consistent Followers | Correct Typological View |
| Reference to Genesis 1 / Creation Language | Because Peter cites Genesis 1 and the physical flood, the whole of 2 Peter 3—including “the heavens and earth which now exist”—must be the material cosmos and a future physical end of the world. | Published Martin: because the “now” heavens and earth are covenantal, Genesis 1 waters are read as Gentile nations. Followers such as Gee de Leon who apply that premise to Genesis 7:11 (“fountains of the great deep”) are more consistent than Martin’s published restraint; the creation-to-flood water sequence then becomes one covenantal “peoples” complex rather than a physical type.[6] | Physical creation and flood (with Jeremiah 4 de-creation language) function as type. Peter applies that type to the covenantal judgment on the Sinai order in AD 70. Type is not identical with antitype in substance. |
| Genesis 1 Waters and Genesis 7:11 Waters | Treats both as literal H₂O and then requires the coming fire to be equally physical and cosmic. | Martin’s published view needs an unexplained switch: nations in Genesis 1, literal water in Genesis 7–8, nations again in AD 70. De Leon’s Noah’s Fortress reading refuses the switch and treats both water complexes as peoples/armies.[6] That is the more consistent use of Martin’s hermeneutic, and it produces ark-as-fortress, animals-as-peoples, birds-as-scouts, and bow-as-war-weapon. | Genesis itself links the two complexes (tehom, fountains of the deep, seas). Peter then cites them as one historical sequence (2 Pet. 3:5–6). The later prophetic use of “flood” for armies defines how the type is reused; it does not recode Genesis 1 or 7 as Gentile nations. |
| “Heavens and Earth Which Now Exist” (2 Peter 3:7) | Must be the present material heavens and earth; therefore a distant consummation. | Correctly covenantal for Peter’s “now,” but the system then forces Genesis 1 itself to be covenantal. Consistent followers collapse Genesis 1, the flood, and AD 70 into the same symbolic event. | The Sinai-created “heavens and earth” still standing in Peter’s day (Isa. 51:15–16; Deut. 32). Context and Old Testament parallels fix the referent, not an identity with Genesis 1. |
| Mode of Judgment (Water vs. Fire) | Fire must be literal destruction of the material world at the end of history. | AD 70 fire is correct, but the typology is collapsed. On de Leon’s consistent reading, the flood water is already an army, so Peter is no longer moving from a historical water-judgment to a covenantal fire-judgment. | Water (historical flood) is the type of fire (covenantal judgment in AD 70). The correspondence is the word of God that creates and dissolves ordered realities; the escalation is in mode and in the nature of the order judged. Typology does not require identical substance. |
| Ark, Animals, and Hermeneutical Controls | Reads the flood narrative as straightforward physical history and then projects that physicality onto the antitype. | Published Martin usually keeps a historical flood and treats animals/ark typologically (nations in the church, refuge in Christ). De Leon replaces the referents: tebah as fortress, animals as men, raven and dove as scouts. There is no textual marker that stops the substitution. The same method can dissolve New Testament historical narratives into covenant metaphors. | Real animals may prefigure nations. A real ark may prefigure refuge. A real flood may prefigure military judgment. Historical referent and typological significance are both preserved. The text—not the system—decides where the language remains historical. |
| Role of AD 70 | Grants “similarities” and treats AD 70 as a lesser type of a future cosmic event. | Correctly treats AD 70 as the fulfillment in view, but errs by pushing later covenant symbolism backward into Genesis. Followers make Noah’s flood itself the same kind of event as the Roman siege. | AD 70 is the primary referent of Peter’s fire. The flood and Jeremiah 4-style de-creation are types. Jesus already defined the correspondence: “as it was in the days of Noah,” and the coming flood is armies around Jerusalem (Luke 17:26–27; 21:20–21; Dan. 9:26). |
| Common Biblical Theme | Subordinates the prophets’ use of creation language for covenant formation and de-creation. | Forces all creation language into one covenantal category from Genesis 1:1 forward. Consistency with that premise does not yield fuller preterism; it yields a method that can no longer distinguish historical narrative from imposed code. | The word of God creates order and judges it when that order is broken: physical creation → historical flood; Judah’s world → Jeremiah 4; Sinai heavens and earth → AD 70 fire. The pattern is correspondence and escalation, not identity of substance. |
The two competing systems therefore pull Peter in opposite directions. Gentry reasons that because the type is physical, the antitype must also be physical. Martin reasons that because the antitype is covenantal, the type must also have been covenantal. His more consistent followers, including Gee de Leon, simply complete that second collapse. None of these moves follows from Peter’s argument; all of them arise from a system imposed upon the direction of his typology.
The better reading allows both sides of the analogy to remain intact:
Physical creation and Flood → covenantal de-creation at the end of the Mosaic age.
That preserves the historical reality of Genesis while also preserving the imminent covenantal fulfillment of Peter’s prophecy.
John Owen, commenting directly on 2 Peter 3, captures the typological move perfectly:
“The apostle makes a distribution of the world into heaven and earth, and saith they were destroyed with water, and perished… We know that neither the fabric nor substance of the one or the other was destroyed, but only men that lived on the earth… The heavens and earth here intended… do all of them relate, not to the last and final judgment of the world, but to that utter desolation and destruction that was to be made of the Judaical church and state.”[5]
Owen rightly sees Peter moving from the physical type (flood destroying the “world that then was”) to the covenantal antitype (fire destroying the Judaical “heavens and earth”).
This is the same pattern documented in Part 1 and now reinforced by Jeremiah 4: Isaiah 51 uses Exodus/Sinai creation language to describe Israel as God’s covenant world; Deuteronomy 32 applies creation language to the formation of Israel out of Egyptian chaos; Jeremiah 4 applies de-creation language to covenant judgment on Judah. Peter does here what the prophets did before him: he reaches back to physical creation/flood language as a vivid type to illustrate God’s power to judge the current covenant order.
The “elements” (stoicheia) further support the shift. The term should not simply be assumed to mean literal physical atoms or chemical components of the universe. In Paul, stoicheia demonstrably describes elementary religious or world-ordering principles from which believers in Christ have been delivered (Galatians 4:3, 9; Colossians 2:8, 20). Hebrews 5:12 likewise uses the related expression for “elementary principles.” These New Testament uses establish that stoicheia can describe rudimentary principles and structures rather than the physical constituents of the cosmos.
Within Peter’s covenantal and prophetic context, therefore, the dissolution of the stoicheia coheres naturally with the dissolution of the Old Covenant order—with its temple, priesthood, sacrifices, calendar, and elementary structures that were passing away as the New Covenant creation came into its full public and redemptive-historical standing. This lexical observation does not establish the entire interpretation by itself, but it removes the assumption that stoicheia must refer to physical matter and fits the broader covenantal argument already established from Peter’s context.
Peter’s wording in 3:11 is likewise significant: “Since all these things are being dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness” (LEB; cf. Pulpit Commentary: “seeing that all these things are being dissolved”). The present-tense wording is striking and entirely consistent with the covenantal dissolution already underway in Peter’s generation. It should not be made to bear the entire case by itself, since the tense-form alone does not prove that every aspect of the predicted dissolution had already occurred. But when read alongside the New Testament’s explicit teaching that the Old Covenant was already “becoming obsolete and growing old” and was “ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13), and that God was then shaking and removing the created covenant order so that the unshakable kingdom would remain (Hebrews 12:26–28), Peter’s wording fits precisely the first-century transition being described.
The Old Covenant order was not waiting thousands of years to begin passing away. Its temple, sacrifices, priesthood, and elementary structures still possessed an outward historical existence, but their covenantal standing had already been rendered obsolete through Christ. Their final public removal in the fiery judgment of Jerusalem in AD 70 completed that process.
Typology does not require identity of substance; it requires correspondence and escalation. The physical flood (and the de-creation imagery of Jeremiah 4) prefigures the greater covenantal de-creation in AD 70. Just as the physical temple typified God’s dwelling (and its destruction signified the end of the old system), the physical creation/flood typifies the end of the Sinai-created world. Peter’s short verses pack this punch because his first-century readers, steeped in the Old Testament, would recognize the move from type to antitype—exactly as the prophetic use of Genesis imagery in Jeremiah 4 demonstrates.
This typological reading is the consistent, exegetically grounded solution. It avoids Gentry’s futurism and Martin’s over-covenantalizing or spiritualizing of Genesis while honoring the text exactly as written. The word of God that created the physical order and judged it by water (or depicted covenant judgment through de-creation language in Jeremiah) is the same word that created the Old Covenant order at Sinai and judged it by fire in AD 70—exactly as Peter promised.
Verses 8–9: Psalm 90 – God’s Eternity, Man’s Short Lifespan, the Wilderness “Long Time,” and Divine Patience
Peter appeals to Psalm 90 (written by Moses): “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:8-9).
Psalm 90 contrasts man’s fleeting lifespan with God’s eternal nature. Moses writes, “For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night” (Ps. 90:4). Human beings are swept away, sleep, wither like grass, and ordinarily live only seventy or eighty years (vv. 5–10). The point is not that prophetic time indicators can be mathematically converted so that one human day equals a thousand literal years. The contrast is between the brevity of human life and the eternity of God.
That Mosaic and wilderness setting is especially significant in Peter’s argument. Moses’ rebellious generation—the “perverse and crooked generation” of Deuteronomy 32:5—was destined to perish in the wilderness during the forty-year period of judgment. To mortal human beings, forty years is an enormous portion of a lifetime. To the eternal God described in Psalm 90, it is nothing.
Just as Adam perished in shame and dust outside the Garden, the rebels among Israel perished in the desert outside the Promised Land (itself a type of Eden and covenantal inheritance). The controlling theological issue is not biological death considered in isolation, but covenantal death and exclusion from God’s presence, blessing, and inheritance. Physical death occurs to both the righteous and the wicked. The theological contrast concerns whether one belongs to God’s covenantal presence and life or remains outside it in sin and judgment.
Likewise, one can physically die “in Christ” and yet possess eternal life, because physical death cannot separate the believer from Him; or one can refuse Christ and “die in your sins,” remaining outside His presence and New Covenant inheritance. The Garden of Eden and the Promised Land both function as historical realities that also typologically portray access to God, life, rest, and inheritance.
Peter’s use of Psalm 90 therefore fits remarkably well with the wider Mosaic and wilderness framework already present in his argument. Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses concerned with God’s eternity, man’s mortality, divine wrath, the brevity of human life, the sweeping away of a generation, and the plea that God would show compassion to His servants and establish His work. Peter appeals to precisely this psalm while answering scoffers who believe the promised judgment has been delayed.
Some Jewish interpreters took Psalm 90:15-17 as pointing to a future period of joy corresponding to a period of affliction, and later rabbinic tradition preserves the expectation that the Messianic age would last forty years (Sanhedrin 99a)—a tradition naturally suggestive of a second-exodus pattern. Such later rabbinic material should not be treated as proof that Peter’s first-century readers necessarily understood Psalm 90 in precisely that manner. It does, however, demonstrate that the association of Mosaic wilderness chronology, forty years, and Messianic expectation was not foreign to Jewish interpretation.
More importantly, the argument does not depend upon that later tradition. Psalm 90 itself supplies the Mosaic, wilderness, mortality, judgment, and divine-patience framework. Against that background, the roughly forty-year transition from Christ’s ministry to the judgment in AD 70 provides a striking redemptive-historical correspondence to Israel’s original wilderness generation.
Some commentators such as John Gill catch that Psalm 90:5 (“You sweep them away as with a flood”) is an explicit allusion to the Noahic flood, the very judgment Peter appeals to in 2 Peter 3:5–6. This creates a powerful typological link: the same God who swept away the ungodly in Noah’s day and judged the rebellious wilderness generation was about to bring judgment upon the final perverse generation.
The Pulpit Commentary on John 5:5 explicitly connects the man who had been infirm for thirty-eight years to Israel’s thirty-eight years of wilderness wandering (Deuteronomy 2:14), noting that commentators such as Hengstenberg, Wordsworth, and Westcott (in part) saw “a marked correspondence between these thirty-eight years and the similar period of time during which Israel was compelled to wander in the wilderness.” That “long time” of suffering and waiting was enormous from the standpoint of a human lifespan but brief within God’s redemptive purposes.
Peter applies the same divine-human contrast to his own generation. The scoffers thought the delay was long, but it was nothing to the Lord. Peter does not erase the ordinary meaning of the New Testament’s temporal language by appealing to Psalm 90. Quite the opposite: he explains why a period that could feel long to mortal human beings did not constitute divine slowness or failure. God was patiently accomplishing His saving purpose before the appointed judgment arrived.
Psalm 90 and the Two Perverse Generations
| Aspect | Psalm 90 / Wilderness Generation | Peter’s Generation (AD 30–70) | Significance |
| Man’s mortality vs. God’s eternality | A thousand years like yesterday or a watch in the night; life withers like grass (vv. 4–6, 9–10). | Scoffers claim “all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation” (2 Pet. 3:4). | What feels like endless delay to short-lived humans is but a moment to the eternal Lord. Peter is not redefining ordinary temporal language but contrasting human brevity with divine eternity. |
| The “long time” of judgment | Rebellious generation perishes over forty years—a major portion of a human lifetime (Num. 14; Deut. 2:14). | Approximately forty years from Christ’s ministry to the AD 70 judgment; scoffers mock the apparent “delay.” | Forty years can feel long to mortal covenant-breakers while remaining entirely consistent with God’s announced timetable and patient purpose. |
| Swept away as with a flood | “You sweep them away as with a flood” (Ps. 90:5)—seen by John Gill and others as a reference to the Noahic flood. | Peter appeals to the Noahic flood as a type of coming covenant judgment (2 Pet. 3:5–6). | Reinforces the flood typology: the God who judged the ancient world and the wilderness generation will judge the final perverse generation (Acts 2:40/Deut. 32:5, 20). |
| Covenantal death and exclusion | Adam dies outside Eden; Israel’s rebels perish outside the Promised Land—historical judgments that typologically portray exclusion from God’s blessing and inheritance. | Scoffers risk perishing outside Christ and the New Covenant inheritance—dying “in their sins” rather than possessing life in Him. | Biological death considered alone is not the controlling theological issue. The deeper question is covenantal standing: life and inheritance in God’s presence or exclusion in sin and judgment. |
| Messianic / second-exodus correspondence | Psalm 90:15–17 asks for gladness corresponding to affliction and for God’s work to appear to His servants. Later Jewish tradition also associated forty years with Messianic expectation. | The AD 30–70 transition forms a striking forty-year second-exodus correspondence as the remnant is gathered and the unbelieving generation approaches judgment. | The later rabbinic tradition is corroborative rather than determinative; the primary argument rests upon Psalm 90’s own Mosaic-wilderness context and the New Testament’s second-exodus pattern. |
Peter’s use of Psalm 90 is therefore masterful. He shows the scoffers that the period they perceive as a “delay” does not mean that God has forgotten His promise. The contrast is not between “soon” in human language and thousands of years in some hidden divine vocabulary. It is between short-lived human beings, for whom decades consume a substantial portion of life, and the eternal God, for whom even a thousand years are like yesterday when it has passed.
During that same period, God was patient and long-suffering, allowing the righteous remnant to hear the gospel and be saved (cf. the “salvation ready to be revealed” in 1 Peter 1). The apparent delay was therefore not a postponement of the prophetic timetable. It was divine patience operating within that timetable.
This has nothing to do with thousands of years of delay into our future—as futurists often misapply it. Peter is comforting first-century believers that the “long time” the mockers complained about was not divine slowness. That conclusion must be read alongside Peter’s other explicit temporal statements: the judgment was “not asleep” (2 Peter 2:3); “the end of all things” was “near” (1 Peter 4:7); God was “ready to judge the living and the dead” (1 Peter 4:5); and the kairos for judgment had arrived (1 Peter 4:17).
The wicked servant in the parable of Matthew 24 who said, “My master is delayed” (Matthew 24:48) embodies the same attitude Peter condemns. The servant’s mistake was not that the master might literally remain away for thousands of years while still claiming to come within that servant’s lifetime. His mistake was interpreting the master’s patience as permission to disregard the promised coming.
God is not slow; He is patient, and the appointed time (kairos) had come. For people living in the AD 30–70 “this generation,” forty years could indeed be experienced as a “long time” in relation to their lifespans. But this was not a long time to God. During that transitional generation the remnant was being saved and would inherit the salvation and eternal life promised at Christ’s Parousia, while the wicked were filling up their sins and moving toward the judgment that would not be delayed.
The judgment and second exodus anticipated in the Mosaic framework of Deuteronomy 32 and illuminated by Psalm 90 had arrived.
Verse 11: Present Tense – “All These Things Are Being Dissolved”
Peter writes: “Since all these things are being dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness” (2 Peter 3:11, LEB; cf. Pulpit Commentary: “seeing that all these things are being dissolved”).
The present-tense wording is striking and entirely consistent with the covenantal dissolution already underway in Peter’s generation. It should not be made to bear the entire exegetical case by itself, since the tense-form alone does not prove that every aspect of the predicted dissolution had already occurred at the moment Peter wrote. Nevertheless, when read within the broader New Testament description of the Old Covenant order as already passing away, Peter’s language fits naturally within the first-century transition.
Hebrews makes the same point explicitly. The Old Covenant was “becoming obsolete and growing old” and was “ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13). Hebrews 12:26–28 likewise describes God as shaking and removing the created covenantal order so that the unshakable kingdom might remain. The process had already begun through Christ’s death, resurrection, and inauguration of the New Covenant, while the temple, priesthood, sacrifices, and Mosaic institutions still retained an outward historical existence until their final removal in AD 70.
Peter therefore does not describe a physical planet that had somehow begun dissolving in the first century. He writes to believers living during the covenantal transition in which the Old Covenant order was already losing its covenantal standing and moving toward its climactic removal. The destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 completed publicly and historically what had already been rendered obsolete through the cross and the inauguration of the New Covenant.
This coheres with the broader apostolic pattern. Paul could speak of “the form of this world” as “passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31), John could say, “the darkness is passing away” (1 John 2:8) and “the world is passing away” (1 John 2:17), and Hebrews could describe the Old Covenant as “ready to vanish away.” Such language need not describe the dissolution of material creation. It describes the passing of an order whose covenantal authority and structure were being displaced by the kingdom and New Covenant reality established in Christ.
The “elements” (stoicheia) likewise fit this covenantal reading. The term should not simply be assumed to mean literal physical atoms or chemical components of the universe. Paul demonstrably employs stoicheia for elementary religious and world-ordering principles in Galatians 4:3, 9 and Colossians 2:8, 20. Hebrews 5:12 similarly uses the related expression for “elementary principles.” These texts establish that the term can refer to foundational principles and structures rather than the material components of the cosmos.
Within Peter’s prophetic and covenantal context, therefore, the dissolution of the stoicheia coheres naturally with the dissolution of the Old Covenant order—with its temple, priesthood, sacrifices, calendar, regulations, and elementary structures that were passing away as the New Covenant creation came into its full public and redemptive-historical standing.
The lexical point does not establish the whole interpretation by itself. But neither can a futurist simply assume that stoicheia means physical atoms and then use that assumption to prove a physical destruction of the universe. Peter’s usage must be interpreted from the context of the epistle, the Old Testament prophetic background, the temporal indicators, and the New Testament’s broader description of the Mosaic order as passing away.
Verses 12–13: The Promise from Isaiah 64–66 – Non-Physical Apocalyptic Coming and Gentry’s Inconsistent Hermeneutic
Peter concludes:
“Waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the elements will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:12-13).
The promise of the new heavens and new earth comes directly from Isaiah 65:17 and 66:22 (as we saw in Part 1). But Peter also alludes to the broader context of Isaiah 64, where the prophet cries out for God to “come down” from heaven in dramatic apocalyptic theophany to judge His enemies and vindicate His people—just as He had manifested Himself in judgment and salvation in Israel’s past.
Isaiah cries:
“Oh, that You would rend the heavens! That You would come down! That the mountains might shake at Your presence—as fire burns brushwood, as fire causes water to boil—to make Your name known to Your adversaries, that the nations may tremble at Your presence!” (Isaiah 64:1–2).
No interpreter imagines that every Old Testament account of God “coming down,” mountains melting, heavens shaking, stars falling, or creation collapsing requires a literal physical descent of God through the atmosphere or the destruction of the material universe. This is standard prophetic-theophanic language for divine intervention in history.
The broader context of Isaiah 64–66 is therefore crucial. The divine coming, fiery judgment, destruction of covenant enemies, vindication of God’s servants, birth of a new people, creation of new heavens and a new earth, and continuing existence of nations are all interconnected. Peter does not pluck “new heavens and new earth” out of a context about the physical annihilation and recreation of the cosmos. He cites a prophetic promise whose own setting is covenantal judgment and redemptive transformation.
Here Kenneth Gentry’s hermeneutic becomes inconsistent. Gentry takes the de-creation and new-creation language of Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21:1-2 figuratively and applies it to the AD 70 judgment on Old Covenant Jerusalem and the establishment of the New Covenant order. Yet when Peter appeals to the same Old Testament promise in 2 Peter 3, Gentry suddenly insists that the language must refer to the future literal destruction of the material cosmos.
That distinction requires exegetical demonstration. It cannot simply be assumed because Peter also mentions Genesis creation and Noah’s Flood earlier in the chapter. Jeremiah 4 has already shown that Genesis creation language can be redeployed for historical covenantal de-creation. Isaiah 64–66 establishes the prophetic promise Peter explicitly says he is expecting. Revelation 21 employs the same new-heavens-and-new-earth vocabulary. And Peter’s own temporal framework repeatedly emphasizes nearness, readiness, and non-delay.
The consistent reading is therefore that Isaiah 64–66, 2 Peter 3, and Revelation 21 describe the same redemptive-historical transition: the passing of the Old Covenant “heavens and earth” and the full establishment of the New Covenant order.
John Owen again confirms this reading:
“Peter tells them, that after the destruction and judgment that he speaks of (vers. 7-13), ‘We, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth,’ etc. But now it is evident from this place of Isaiah, with chap. lxvi. 21, 22, that this is a prophecy of Gospel times only; and that the planting of these new heavens is nothing but the creation of Gospel ordinances to endure for ever.”[6]
Owen recognized precisely what Peter’s appeal to “the promise” requires: the interpreter must go back to Isaiah and allow Isaiah’s own covenantal-redemptive context to define the nature of the new creation.
Conclusion
From 2 Peter 2 through chapter 3, Peter teaches that the judgment upon the Old Covenant world “made” and “created” at Sinai was not asleep and would not be delayed. The false teachers were the spots and blemishes Moses had prophesied would arise in that perverse generation and would not discern their end. Peter uses the physical Flood—and the broader prophetic pattern of de-creation language illustrated by Jeremiah 4—as typology to show that the same sovereign word that creates an ordered world can also judge and dissolve it.
This distinction between type and antitype is essential.
Peter does not require us to conclude with Kenneth Gentry that because the type involves physical creation and a historical Flood, the antitype must involve the physical destruction of the material universe. Nor does Peter require us to follow Tim Martin in the opposite direction and conclude that because Peter’s imminent antitype concerns a covenantal heavens and earth, Genesis 1 itself must already describe a covenant creation in which the waters represent Gentile nations.
Both approaches collapse Peter’s typology, but from opposite directions.
Gentry reasons that because the type is physical, the antitype must also be physical.
Martin reasons that because the antitype is covenantal, the type must also have been covenantal.
The more consistent development of Martin’s hermeneutic in writers such as Gee de Leon exposes where the second collapse leads. Once the waters of Genesis 1 become peoples, the same premise can be carried into Genesis 7: the Flood becomes an invading army, the ark becomes a fortress or sealed community, the animals become peoples and nations, birds become scouting parties, and the rainbow becomes a warrior’s bow laid aside after battle. The historical type itself has been consumed by the later prophetic symbolism it was supposed to generate.
Peter’s argument preserves something much simpler and more consistent:
Physical creation → historical Flood by water → typological precedent → Sinai-created covenant heavens and earth → judgment by fire in AD 70.
The historical reality of the type gives force to the covenantal antitype. Real creation provides the vocabulary. A real Flood supplies the precedent. Real water can prefigure military judgment. A real ark can prefigure refuge and salvation. Real animals can later function as symbols of peoples and nations. None of those later typological or prophetic uses require Genesis itself to cease describing historical physical realities.
Jeremiah 4 demonstrates exactly how the prophetic method works. Jeremiah uses Genesis 1’s “formless and empty” language, darkness, heavens, earth, mountains, birds, fruitful land, and desolation to portray the historical covenant judgment of Judah. This does not prove every detail of 2 Peter 3 by itself, but it decisively defeats the inference that Genesis creation language necessarily requires a literal destruction of the material cosmos. The prophets themselves establish otherwise.
Peter stands within that prophetic tradition.
He then appeals to Psalm 90 to answer the scoffers’ charge of delay. Psalm 90 does not provide a mathematical formula by which prophetic words such as “near,” “soon,” or “at hand” can secretly mean thousands of years. It contrasts man’s brief lifespan with the eternity of God. For mortal men living seventy or eighty years, decades can feel extraordinarily long. To the eternal God, a thousand years are as yesterday when it is past.
That Mosaic and wilderness context fits Peter’s argument remarkably well. The original perverse generation perished during the forty-year wilderness transition. Peter’s own generation—the final “perverse generation” identified from Deuteronomy 32—was living through another approximately forty-year redemptive-historical transition from Christ’s ministry to the judgment of AD 70. During that period God was not slow. He was patient, gathering His remnant before judgment came.
The wicked servant who says, “My master is delayed” in Matthew 24:48 embodies the same error. Divine patience does not cancel or redefine the promised timeframe.
Peter’s present-tense language concerning things “being dissolved” is therefore significant when placed within this larger New Testament framework. The tense alone does not establish the interpretation, but it accords naturally with Hebrews’ declaration that the Old Covenant was already “becoming obsolete and growing old” and “ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13), and with the shaking and removal of the covenant order described in Hebrews 12:26–28.
The same is true of the stoicheia. The term cannot simply be equated with physical atoms. Paul uses it for elementary religious and world-ordering principles from which believers in Christ had been delivered. Within Peter’s covenantal context, the dissolution of the stoicheia naturally fits the dissolution of the elementary structures of the Old Covenant world.
Finally, Peter explicitly tells us that his expectation of “new heavens and a new earth” is “according to His promise.” That promise is Isaiah 65:17 and 66:22, within the broader context of Isaiah 64–66. Isaiah’s prophecy describes God “coming down,” fiery judgment, covenantal vindication, the birth of a new people, new heavens and a new earth, and the continuing existence of nations. It is not a prediction of the annihilation of the physical universe followed by the creation of another planet.
This covenantal reading of 2 Peter 3 is also held by many other prominent voices such as R.C. Sproul (partial preterist), Gary DeMar, Doug Wilson, Jeff Durbin, and many others who recognize the AD 70 fulfillment of the passing of the Mosaic Old Covenant order and the establishment of the new. Full preterism has consistently taken this position. Tim Martin’s attempt to interject the futurist view and hermeneutic—that the passing away of the heavens and earth in 2 Peter 3 refers to the “heavens and earth” of Genesis 1:1—is a departure from that consistency.
In the end, Martin’s “Covenant Creationist” position, which reads Genesis 1:1 into Psalm 102, Hebrews 1, Revelation 21, and 2 Peter 3, is a compromise with futurism and therefore cannot be seen as consistent preterism. The more consistent application of that hermeneutic by writers such as Gee de Leon—reading the waters of Genesis 1 and the waters of Genesis 7:11 as the same covenantal “peoples” complex—does not repair the system. It exposes the underlying hermeneutical problem by producing the allegorizing of the Flood narrative that Peter’s creation-to-Flood argument does not require.[7]
Kenneth Gentry’s physical futurist reading of 2 Peter 3, while acknowledging typological similarities with AD 70, ultimately contradicts the immediate covenantal context, clear Old Testament precedents such as Jeremiah 4, Peter’s temporal framework, and Gentry’s own figurative handling of parallel passages such as Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21.
And Gentry’s divided consummation creates an additional problem. If the judgment of “the living and the dead” in 1 Peter 4:5–7 was near and fulfilled in AD 70, and if the resurrection of Daniel 12:2 is likewise conceded to AD 70, then what exegetical necessity requires the interpreter to construct another resurrection of the just and unjust, another judgment of the living and dead, and another passing of heavens and earth followed by another new creation thousands of years later? The burden rests upon the partial preterist to demonstrate that division from the text.
Tim Martin moves in the opposite direction. He correctly sees that the consummation of 2 Peter 3 concerns the covenantal world of Peter’s generation, but then projects the covenantal symbolism of the prophets and New Testament backward into Genesis 1 itself. His system cannot comfortably allow physical creation to function as the historical archetype, Sinai as a later covenantal application of creation imagery, and AD 70 as the New Covenant consummation of that typological development. It therefore collapses the stages.
The biblical progression is better preserved as:
Physical/historical creation and Flood → covenantal and prophetic reuse of creation/de-creation imagery → Christological and New Covenant fulfillment → AD 70 consummation.
The Old Covenant order has passed away. The new heavens and new earth—in which righteousness dwells—have come. This is the inheritance Peter promised was “ready to be revealed” and the salvation of the soul that was the goal of faith.
The judgment was not delayed. It came exactly when and how the prophets and apostles said it would.
In the end, I believe the exegesis presented here demonstrates that futurism, partial preterism, and Tim Martin’s Covenant Creationism each distort the biblical movement between physical creation, covenantal typology, and New Covenant fulfillment in different ways. Futurism and Gentry’s partial preterism read into Psalm 102, Hebrews 1, Revelation 21, and 2 Peter 3 another future passing away of the physical “heavens and earth” of Genesis 1:1 when the grammar, context, temporal indicators, and broader Old Testament pattern do not justify it. Martin’s Covenant Creation reverses the error by projecting later covenantal symbolism backward into Genesis itself.
It is time to leave behind Gentry’s failed and creedally inconsistent partial preterism as well as the novel teachings of Tim Martin’s Covenant Creation and the more consistent but more allegorical developments of that system in writers such as Gee de Leon.
I will continue to teach what I believe is the true, consistent, and exegetical full preterist position.
[1] Gary D. Long, “Redemption in II Peter 2:1,” The Highway, https://www.the-highway.com/2Pet2.1.html; see also Gary D. Long, Definite Atonement (various editions, commonly associated with Reformed Baptist and Calvinistic literature on particular redemption).
[2] Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., “2 PETER 3 AND THE CONSUMMATION (2),” Postmillennial Worldview, January 1, 2019, https://postmillennialworldview.com/2019/01/01/consummate-new-creation-in-peter-2/.
[3] Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., “2 PETER 3 AND THE CONSUMMATION (1),” Postmillennial Worldview, December 28, 2018, https://postmillennialworldview.com/2018/12/28/consummate-new-creation-in-peter-1/.
[4] Gee de Leon, “The Ark Was Not a Boat,” unpublished essay circulating as Noah’s Fortress (PDF), https://drive.google.com/file/d/10QUqah5LqcVlEzBHN8vTCxngE9kHCHkV/view.
[5] John Owen, “Providential Changes, An Argument for Universal Holiness,” in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 9 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; repr., Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 134–135.
[6] Owen, Ibid.
[7] Gee de Leon, “The Ark Was Not a Boat,” unpublished essay circulating as Noah’s Fortress (PDF), https://drive.google.com/file/d/10QUqah5LqcVlEzBHN8vTCxngE9kHCHkV/view.
