1FROM SIMEON PETER,
servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,
to those who through the justice of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ share our faith and enjoy equal privilege with ourselves.
2Grace and peace be yours in fullest measure, through the knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord.
3His divine power has bestowed on us everything that makes for life and true religion, enabling us to know the One who called us by his own splendour and might. 4Through this might and splendour he has given us his promises, great beyond all price, and through them you may escape the corruption with which lust has infected the world, and come to share in the very being of God.
5With all this in view, you should try your hardest to supplement your faith with virtue, virtue with knowledge, 6knowledge with self-control, self-control with fortitude, fortitude with piety, 7piety with brotherly kindness, and brotherly kindness with love.
8These are gifts which, if you possess and foster them, will keep you from being either useless or barren in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9The man who lacks them is short-sighted and blind; he has forgotten how he was cleansed from his former sins. 10All the more then, my friends, exert yourselves to clinch God's choice and calling of you. If you behave so, you will never come to grief. 11Thus you will be afforded full and free admission into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
12And so I will not hesitate to remind you of this again and again, although you know it and are well grounded in the truth that has already reached you. 13Yet I think it right to keep refreshing your memory so long as I still lodge in this body. 14I know that very soon I must leave it; indeed our Lord Jesus Christ has told me so. 15But I will see to it that after I am gone you will have means of remembering these things at all times.
16It was not on tales artfully spun that we relied when we told you of the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and his coming; we saw him with our own eyes in majesty, 17when at the hands of God the Father he was invested with honour and glory, and there came to him from the sublime Presence a voice which said: 'This is my Son, my Beloved, on whom my favour rests.' 18This voice from heaven we ourselves heard; when it came, we were with him on the sacred mountain.
19All this only confirms for us the message of the prophets, to which you will do well to attend, because it is like a lamp shining in a murky place, until the day breaks and the morning star rises to illuminate your minds.
20BUT FIRST NOTE this: no one can interpret any prophecy of Scripture by himself. 21For it was not through any human whim that men prophesied of old; men they were, but, impelled by the Holy Spirit, they spoke the words of God.
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