Creation or Judgement: One day - 1000 years?

“Beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Peter 3:8)

Some Christians today are willing to compromise God’s clear revelation. God has made it as clear as plain words could make it, that “in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is” (Exodus 20:11). At face value each day appears to be 24 hours. 

Yet because evolutionary “science” has alleged that the earth is billions of years old. 2 Peter 3:8 is perhaps the key verse of the so-called “progressive creationists” who try to correlate the days of creation in Genesis with the supposed 4.6 billion-year system of evolutionary geological ages, by citing Peter as agreeing that “one day is a thousand years.”

But, Peter is saying that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years”! That is, God can do in one day what might, by natural processes, take a thousand years. 

2 Peter 3:8 “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years are as one day.” 

What this statement is intended to prove is disputed. 

All exegetes recognize that it derives from Ps 90:4 (LXX 89:4), but then they divide into two groups: 

(1) The verse shows the “the Day of Judgment” (v 7) will last a thousand years (Spitta; Strobel, Untersuchungen, 93–94; von Allmen, RTP 16 [1966] 262); 

(2) Others infer eschatological delay, and conclude that the author has here produced an original argument which has no known precedent or parallel in the literature.

The first group point to the many Jewish and second-century Christian texts in which an eschatological chronology is based on the formula, “A day of the Lord is a thousand years.” This formula seems to have been a standard exegetical rule, derived from Ps 90:4 (RSV: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past”), but existing as a relatively independent formulation. 

The usual procedure is to quote a text in which the word “day” occurs; then the exegetical rule, “A day of the Lord is a thousand years,” is cited, often with a further literal quotation of Ps 90:4 to support it; the conclusion is therefore that where the text says “day” it means, in human terms, a thousand years.

The exegetical rule was sometimes applied to the Genesis creation narrative, to yield the idea that the history of the world is to last six thousand years, six “days” of a thousand years each, followed by a millennial Sabbath 

Although it is sometimes said that the rule was only applied to eschatological matters (von Allmen, RTP 16 [1966] 262 n. 1; cf. Strobel, Untersuchungen, 93), this delimitation is not in fact true. The rule was sometimes used to prove from Prov 8:30 that the Torah preceded the creation of the world by two thousand years (Gen. Rab. 8:2; Lev. Rab. 19:1; Cant. Rab. 5:11). Moreover, the earliest attested and the commonest use was with reference to Gen 2:17, where the “day,” understood as a thousand years, could include the 930 years of Adam’s life (Jub. 4:30; Justin, Dial. 81; Irenaeus, Adv Haer. 5.23.2; Midr. Ps. 25:8; Gen. Rab. 19:8; 22:1; Num. Rab. 5:4; Pirqe R. El. 18). 

However, all these applications of the exegetical rule are strictly chronological. The point is not, as originally in Ps 90:4, to contrast God’s everlasting life with the transience of human life, but simply to yield the chronological information that one of God’s days, when Scripture mentions them, is equal to a thousand of our years.

If these parallels are to govern the interpretation of 2 Pet 3:8, then the v must mean that “the day of judgment,” mentioned in v 7, will last a thousand years. Verse 8 is then not a contribution to the debate about the alleged delay of the Parousia, but an almost parenthetical explanation of the eschatological expectation set out in v 7.

Now it is true that 2 Pet 3:8 appears to cite the current exegetical rule in the first half of the saying (“with the Lord one day is as a thousand years”: this is closer to Ps 90:4 than the usual formulation of the rule in the rabbinic writings, but for comparable forms, cf. Barn. 15:4; Justin, Dial. 81; Irenaeus, Adv Haer. 5.23.2; 5.28.3), while the second half of the saying (“a thousand years are as one day”) could be understood as a quotation of Ps 90:4 introduced to back up the rule. 

However, this distinction between the two halves of the saying is not very natural. If the two halves are taken together as complementary, they do not readily appear to be an instance of the usual exegetical rule used in chronological calculations. 

Moreover, the proposed exegesis of v 8 is very hard to sustain in context: 

(1) The introductory words of v 8 formally indicate a fresh line of thought (see Form/Structure/Setting section), not an explanatory footnote to v 7. 

(2) If v 8 means that the day of judgment will last a thousand years, it contributes nothing to the argument against the scoffers. It is hard to believe that in such a brief section the author would have allowed himself this quite redundant comment. 

(3) It is hard to see how a thousand-year-long day of judgment could fit into the eschatology of 2 Peter.

Neyrey (Polemic, 298–300

Bauckham, R. J. (1998). 2 Peter, Jude (Vol. 50, p. 306). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.