Q. I recently heard someone say, in order to support the idea that we need to care for creation, that the statement in 2 Peter often translated as “the earth and everything in it will be burned up” would be much better translated “the earth will be found.” Do you agree with that? I was always under the impression that the Biblical teaching was that the earth would ultimately be destroyed, which seems consistent with Revelation 21 when it talks about a new heaven and a new earth “coming down” to replace (?) the first heaven and the first earth after they have passed away.
The issue in the 2 Peter passage is not actually one of translation, but of textual criticism. This is one of the many places where the ancient manuscripts we have of the Bible differ in what they say, and so we need to try to figure out what the original reading was.
One principle of textual criticism is that the reading that best explains the origins of the others is most likely to be the original. And while there is actual a much wider variety of readings than usual in this case, there is one reading that does seem to account for all the others. But this is only because that reading seems to make so little sense in the context that it appears to have generated a variety of attempts to account for it.
Many ancient manuscripts do indeed read, “The earth will be found.” This would mean, on the face of it, that if you look for it, it will still be there. But this seems to contradict the other things Peter says will happen on the “day of the Lord”: “the heavens will disappear with a roar, and the elements will melt and disintegrate.” So we would actually expect Peter to say just the opposite, that the earth will no longer be found. He seems to be offering a Hebrew-style poetic parallelism, with the three-fold repetition that was used for finality and emphasis. Creation is being depicted in three parts, and so we would indeed expect something like, “The heavens will disappear, the elements will melt, and the earth will be gone.”
As Bruce Metzger helpfully documents in his Textual Commentary on the New Testament, ancient copyists dealt with this apparent problem in a variety of ways. Some added a negative: “The earth will not be found.” Others added an extra term to create readings such as, “The earth will be found dissolved.” And still others changed the verb: “The earth will disappear,” or, “The earth will be burned up.”
Modern scholars, Metzger continues, have made their own proposals. One has suggested that arga, “useless,” dropped out after erga, “works,” because of the similarity between the two words, and that the original reading was, “The earth and the things in it will be found useless.” Other scholars have proposed Greek terms that are similar in sound and spelling to “will be found” and that seem to accord better with the context: “will flow,” “will flow together,” “will burn to ashes,” “will be taken away,” etc. (If I had to choose one of these, I’d choose arthesetai, “taken away,” because it’s the most similar to eurethesetai, “found.”)
Finally, I would add, Bible translations, if they don’t choose one of the alternatives (“burned up” is most common), offer their own interpretations of what “will be found” might mean. But these are uniformly negative, in keeping with the general sense of the passage, rather than positive in the sense of the earth being preserved: “the earth and the works on it will be disclosed” or “exposed” or “seen for what they are” or “laid bare” or “exposed to the scrutiny of judgment.” So there really isn’t a mandate for creation care in those translations.
I personally think that if “found” is the original reading, it most likely has a sense of “laid bare” or “exposed,” that is, of everything being stripped away. But even if this is a description of the destruction of the physical creation, and even if the passage you cite from Revelation does depict the present heavens and earth ultimately being replaced, I still think there is a mandate for us to take good care of the creation while it’s here and while we are living on it.
As I say in another recent post on this blog, “We express our faith in what we believe Jesus will do when he returns by the way we live as we are expecting him. Under the reign of Jesus, the physical creation [whether new or renewed] will be healthy and beautiful. And because we believe that, we should do everything we can to help it be as healthy and beautiful as possible even now. Otherwise, Jesus would have every right to ask us, ‘If you knew that this was what I was going to do when I came back, why didn’t you get started on it while you were waiting for me?'”
So I think it’s actually helpful to point out that there likely isn’t a direct statement in 2 Peter to the effect that “the earth and everything in it will be burned up.” I think it’s helpful to observe that this statement rather says, more cryptically, that the earth will be “found.” As we’re trying to puzzle out what that means, we might end up thinking a little more carefully about how we can take good care of this earth while we still have it. And I believe that would be a good thing.
Good Question 
I don’t know if this is too… um… simplistic and child-like of a possibility, but the first thought that came to mind for me at the beginning of this post was the idea of “lost and found”. We certainly talk a lot about that idea as Christians. Could it be that it relates to this idea? Our Earth has been lost and lost and lost for so long… on the Day of the Lord, will it finally be found? And I thought of the lost sheep and the lost coin – everything else is disregarded but this one lost thing, for it to be found. Gosh, I’d like to be right because that’d be one of the most hopeful things I’ve ever heard!
I think it’s important not to take the passage in 2 Peter in a vacuum but to fit it alongside other passages throughout Scripture that talk about judgment, cleansing, and the purification of sin.
In ancient Israel there were actually two methods of cleansing for holiness-water and fire. Those objects which could withstand fire were to be cleansed by fire; everything else (obviously including people) was to be cleansed with water.
I believe that at the final judgment during the final, one-time-for-all-time-at-the-end-of-time Day of the Lord (what we commonly call Judgment Day), the earth itself will be the notorious lake of fire of Revelation 20, burning up everything that gets thrown in it (that which is raised in the 2nd resurrection, the resurrection unto death–i.e., the unsaved, all those who names are not written in the Book of Life). I believe this fire will be a purifying fire that will burn away every last bit of impurity in the creation, and that the earth that appears after the fire burns out (the fire is unquenchable, but not eternal–the destruction it causes is eternal, but the fire itself only burns as long as it has something to burn–and can’t be put out before then) will be the “new heavens and new earth”–purified and cleansed forever and ever.
So I believe the earth will still be here (it would actually be a form of victory for Satan if the earth itself were destroyed, since control over the earth is what he’s striving for–destroying the earth would essentially be admitting that Satan corrupted the earth too deeply for God to restore it, thus letting Satan win), but it will be purified and cleansed in the final judgment of fire, at which point in time it will be restored and renewed, and will stay that way forever and ever.
Thank you for sharing these thoughtful reflections.