Why Bother If It’s All Going to Burn Up Anyway?

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. There will be times of suffering and persecution, the book says, but the fundamental vision of the end is not simply that the world collapses and buries us. The fundamental picture is that God overcomes the world.

It would seem odd, then, for Peter to proclaim that the world will simply dissolve and disappear. Is there recourse to an answer other than the idea that Peter and John simply have different understandings of the end of time? A closer look at 2 Peter shows that 2 Peter 3 in fact gives the same vision as John, just in far more compact form.

The first verses of the chapter make it clear that the fate of the earth is not, in fact, Peter’s main concern in this chapter. 2 Peter 3 counters those who said Jesus would never return. Verse 4 quotes the scoffers: “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.” The fate of the earth is the means by which Peter proves his main contention, confidence that Jesus will return. Modern interpreters must be wary, then, against making Peter say things he was not trying to say, and the main point of chapter 3 is simply that there will be an end to history, that Jesus will return.

Peter proves his point by developing an extensive Old Testament parallel, the parallel between his own time (also ours, in terms of the broadest sweep of redemptive history) and the time before the Flood of Genesis 6-8. Peter’s comparison is typological, showing the similarities (though also differences) between the two parallel events.

Imagine how long it took Noah to build the ark. What must his neighbors have been saying?

     Neighbor: “Noah, why are you building that monstrosity of a thing?” 
     Noah: “Well, because God’s going to destroy the world.” 
     Neighbor: “Really?” 
     Noah: “Yes, really.” 
     Neighbor: “When?” 
     Noah: “Soon.” 
     Neighbor: “It’s been a long time you’ve been working on that, old man. You’re just off your rocker.”

People before Noah’s time, Peter asserts, would never have imagined that a great, cataclysmic world-destroying and altering flood would come to judge their sin. Similarly, people in Peter’s time were scoffing, “Jesus said he’d come back soon. Doesn’t look like it. Come on, he’s never coming back.”

So, Peter says, remember that God destroyed the earth once before, with the Noahic flood, a flood that wiped out every living creature except Noah and the animals with him on the ark. But that flood did not simply dissolve the earth. Quite the opposite: it cleansed the earth, even watering it to make agriculture and human society possible after the flood. In verse 6 Peter calls that a perishing and a destruction, but that destruction did not simply cause everything to evaporate. It laid the foundation for a new and better future, one God gave to Noah and his descendants, a chance to again fill the earth and subdue it.

It would follow, then, that the fire of verse 7 will work the same way. It will be a destruction, but a destruction that will cleanse and purify the earth, not simply vaporize it. The image of a fire is fundamentally a rebirth, not simply a scouring and disposal. Verse 13 indicates that a new heavens and new earth will follow, and the sustained comparison means it should be understood not as a brand new creation out of nothing, but a restored heavens and earth. Peter believes in ages of biblical history, with changes between them, dramatic changes, but changes that have a similar effect.

The fire Peter references, then, is not the end of everything. The physical earth will be transformed, but it will still be here. Just like the flood had been chaos returning, but a new creation emerging afterwards, so with the conflagration of the end times. It will be a chaos returning, but also a new creation emerging, just a greater creation. Examining Peter’s broader parallel, instead of reading v.10 in isolation, it helps us see what he really means.

The image would be this. I have visited Yellowstone National Park twice. The first was in the early 1990’s not long after devastating fires swept through in 1988, the largest fires in the history of the park. It turns out that the enormity of those fires resulted from a land use mistake over prior decades. The community thought that we should fight all forest fires instead of letting some burn when they did not threaten structures. Smokey the Bear was an accidentally too-successful spokesman, and for decades across the American West we worked to prevent and quickly extinguish forest fires. The result was a buildup of more and more underbrush, matted pine needles, leaves and wood.

It turns out that if a fire burns through with just a normal amount of underbrush, it cannot get up into the crowns of the trees. The fire burns through, clears it out, but the trees live, and some types only germinate, in fact, when there is fire. The mistake of the decades before meant that dynamic no longer functioned. Instead, it seemed the fires had burned everything. Over 3000 square kilometers, 36 percent of the park, were devastated, much burned completely, now just a vast field of ash with standing dead tree trunks. It looked like nothing could ever live in those areas again, and indeed, phrases such as “the death of Yellowstone” were in the popular vocabulary.

I went back to Yellowstone two years ago, this time taking my children. And those same areas have sprouted, grown, developed. The fires seemed like they were the end of Yellowstone, but in fact they have been its rebirth, letting it return to what it should be. The process is still underway, but the fire did not permanently eliminate life.

That is the fire from 2 Peter 3. Worldwide, seemingly just destroying and dissolving all, but — just like the flood — not actually the end, but the transition from one age to another. But even greater and even better – the flood scoured the whole world, but the fire will dissolve the whole world. And yet, not because it disappears. The vision of the end is God with us, our renewed bodies living on this earth forever. Verse 10 is just an elaboration on that expectation and hope. There will be a destruction; there is a vision of fire; but after that fire, to use the ESV translation, the earth and the works done on it will be exposed. The fire and the flood are fundamentally parallel.

Why, then, has the church not read 2 Peter 3:10 this way? Undoubtedly, part of the explanation is the atomism which often characterizes a modern approach to Scripture. Verses are simply lifted from context, quoted separately as discrete entities and therefore easily misunderstood. Texts always mean in context, an insight that is often forgotten in a modern church that reads quickly, not deeply.

Particularly in the history of understanding 2 Peter 3:10, however, the King James translation looms large. As mentioned, the KJV ends verse 10 reading “the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” The King James Version of the Bible, of course, was a masterpiece of literature and formative in the very development and standardization of English as a language. With utmost respect for what it was and is, we also must note that the textus receptus, the Greek text on which it was based, was excellent for its time but has been far surpassed by modern scholarship.

The KJV translators were, indeed, translating a Greek word that means “to be burned up” at the end of verse 10, but further research over the centuries, especially the discovery of many more ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, has made it abundantly clear that the Greek word originally written at the end of verse 10 was not katakaisetai (“to be burned up”) but heruisko (typically translated in most contexts as “to be found”). In other words, the KJV translators did wonderfully for their time, but later research has shown their translation to be incorrect, largely because their original text from which they translated was incorrect. The Greek text, and almost all the who study the Greek text, are unanimous that heruisko is the actual word written in the best Greek manuscripts of 2 Peter.

Translational inertia, though, is real, especially for something as formative in a language and thought as the KJV has been in the English language and therefore in English language scholarship. Already in 1964, Bo Reicke was terming the form of heruisko (“to be found”) in 2 Peter 3:10 “a lectio difficilior which should not be altered, in spite of the evidence of certain MSS, to conform with the verbs in vs. 12, or in any other way.”[i]  More recently, Richard Bauckham called it “undoubtedly the best reading.”[ii]  Modern translations such as the NIV and ESV therefore have begun to translate the end of verse 10 in ways such as “will be found/will be exposed/will be laid bare.”  Movement has begun at the academic level, but in the popular consciousness, the old understanding hangs on, that Peter’s vision of the end is that it all burns up.

Even beyond the translational inertia is the challenge of interpretation. If what Peter wrote is “to be found” instead of “to be burned up,” commentators struggle to define what he meant, even to the point where some choose to default back to “be burned up” in spite of the textual witnesses.[iii] Nonetheless, the proper procedure is not to assume he wrote something else, but to grapple with the word Peter did write. Doing so yields a range of possible translations and interpretations. 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.[iv] 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.[v]

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. The reason that people have been able to misinterpret Peter’s words here is that there is a melting. The image still is fire. Not just Peter, but many ancient Jewish documents of the time, as well as other biblical texts, talk about the world ending in fire. So, there is a dissolving, but that dissolving is not the end; it is the step before the end. The elements will all dissolve, but they will dissolve to be judged and purified, for the earth and all that is upon it to be brought into the age to come.

If so, then what Christians do today matters.

When it comes to creation care, this means we should care for this earth right now, because we are living on the earth we will live on in eternity. It means Adam and Eve’s role as tending the Garden is not obsolete, but that we continue it today, because this is the same planet on which God intends to be with us forever. There is every reason for Christians to engage deeply with the things to protect this world, because it will be refined, not obliterated.

This means justice right now matters. When a young man or woman is trafficked, we do not simply rescue him or her as a chance to share the gospel, not even simply because a just world is better, though both are true, but because his or her body matters. That body will be changed, but just as Jesus already has his new body, yet one recognizable as his old body raised imperishable, so will ours be. There is every reason to fight for justice, because our culture will be refined, not simply wiped away.

And this means culture matters – art, architecture, music, industry, and more – culture matters because it will be purified, not simply wiped away. There is every reason to live for God now, because even our deeds and desires will be refined, not dropped away.

This exactly the point Peter makes as he ends his letter. Verses 11–13 say this truth of the end should change our lives now. Verse 11 indicates it ought to spur believers to holiness and godliness, not a holiness and godliness apart from the world, uninvolved and just biding time until we can smugly watch it all burn. Quite the opposite, what will happen at the end is that it will all “be found” – not just the earth, but also – verse 10 – the works that we have done on it. In what sense will they be found? In the sense that we will finally see their true value. What will happen at the end is that the value of what we do now will finally be seen.

Peter is suggesting that there will be an end; there will be an epochal change to that of the new heavens and new earth. The scoffers will be proved wrong, and Jesus will return, and it will purify this earth and all that is done on it. We can wait for it. It will come.

[i] Bo Reicke, The Epistles of James, Peter, and Jude: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, AB 37 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964) 185.
[ii]  Richard Bauckham, Jude-2 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 50, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1983) 303.
[iii] See Al Wolters, “Worldview and Textual Criticism in 2 Peter 3:10,” Westminster Theological Journal 49 (1987), 406.
[iv] Bauckham 321-322.
[v] Wolters 412.