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ToddpicogramakaSatan Using that verse poses a similar problem as what we have in trying to establish that the serpent is anything other than a garden-variety snake.
You have to go all the way to the very last book of the Bible to make the latter one work. Revelation calls the devil "that old serpent," which was a common insult at the time and still is to this day, and that is the only link between the two.
Second Peter, to which you allude, was not the very last book but was one of the last. Did God really leave in an apparent inconsistency for that long just to give an answer finally that is that simple? Especially when it's not that simple.
The actual verse in question says, "But there is one thing, my dear friends, that you must never forget: that with the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (II Peter 3:8, NJB). It doesn't simply say that God's days are that long; before saying that it says that a day is a thousand years to him. This is clearly a poetic way of saying that God is so different from ourselves that he exists outside of time itself, time has no hold on him at all. Throughout the Bible after the warning in Genesis and before this piece of poetry, we have God repeatedly telling people that things will happen within a certain time-frame and they almost always happen within that time-frame. It gives no answer as to why he simply told Adam wrong. While it doesn't touch on that at all it is bigger than just describing God as being that different from ourselves.
This was written by a leader in a doomsday cult that had expected the Son of Man to return very quickly after the close of the Gospels and restore the Kingdom. This was not happening. The context is early apologetics about that. It was the same type of stuff we see coming from the Governing Body of the Watchtower today, as we approach the 100 year anniversary of one of their many failed end-times predictions, except without the clunky wording making it humorous.
Instead of," We are undoubtedly living not only in the last days, but in the last part of the last days. Truly, the last part of the last part of the last days. Just before the last day." Not written in a magazine as far as I know, but part of a video shared by the Governing Body and in turn shared by many ex-Witnesses for its cringe value.
We get "The Lord is not being slow in carrying out his promises, as some people think he is; rather is he being patient with you, wanting nobody to be lost and everybody to be brought to repentance. The Day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and melt away, the earth and all that it contains will be burned up. Since everything is coming to an end like this, what holy and saintly lives you should be living while you wait for the Day of God to come, and try to hasten its coming: on that Day the sky will dissolve in flames and the elements melt in the heat" (verses 9-12).
We see this type of language throughout the New Testament, the writers apparently believed they were living in the last days. I use the word "apparently" to acknowledge the possibility that either they didn't really believe that or that wasn't even what they originally wrote. I'm sure they did believe, but I"m not 4 Imprint certain.
