2 Peter 3:9

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The context

2 Peter 3 addresses a specific crisis: scoffers who ask where the promised coming is, pointing out that everything continues as it always has. The chapter answers with a comparison — a thousand years are like a day to the Lord — and then with verse 9, which reinterprets the delay itself. Verse 10 follows at once with the day arriving like a thief.

The letter addresses congregations under pressure from teachers the author regards as corrupt. Its authorship is contested: the traditional attribution is to Peter, and much scholarship treats the letter as pseudonymous. This verse does not settle that question, but readers should know it is live.

The words

Bradynō means to be slow, to delay, to hold back. Makrothymeō, in the next clause, means to be long-tempered — patient with people rather than merely slow with a calendar. The sentence turns on that contrast: apparent delay is actually patience.

Chōrēsai, from chōreō, means to make room for, to contain, to have space for. A spatial image serves a moral point: God is not willing to make room for people to perish. Apōleia is destruction; metanoia is a change of mind and direction.

The pronouns carry the weight. "Not wishing that any should perish" uses tinas, "any"; "that all should reach repentance" uses pantas, "all." Both are relative to the "you" addressed, and how far that extends is the point at issue.

What this passage establishes

The delay of the promised day is not weakness or indifference. It has a purpose, and the purpose is stated: room for repentance rather than ruin. The verse forbids reading the passage of time as evidence that God has forgotten or failed.

What it does not establish

It does not, by itself, settle whether God's wish is a decree. Theologians have long distinguished a will that commands from a will that determines. The verse uses the language of wish, not decree; the distinction is imported from elsewhere.

It does not fix the scope of "all." Calvin read "all" as all the elect, gathered from every kind of person; Arminius and Wesley read it as every individual without exception. Both have defenders, and an address to one congregation does not adjudicate.

It does not promise that all will in fact repent. The verse states God's disposition and its purpose, not an outcome — and verse 10 goes on to describe judgment falling.

How the church has read it

The verse has been a battleground for four centuries. Calvin's commentary takes "all" as the elect and reads the patience as God's gathering of his own; the Arminian tradition, and later Wesleyan theology, read it as a plain statement of God's universal salvific will and a standing invitation. Augustine's distinction between the will that commands and the will that grants shaped the Reformed reading, while Catholic exegesis has generally leaned toward the universal sense.

First pass, written October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.