“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)
It is sad that many Christians today are so eager to appear intellectual they are willing to compromise God’s clear revelation to do so. 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). Yet because evolutionary “science” has alleged that the earth is billions of years old, multitudes of evangelicals have fallen in line, rejecting God’s plain statement of fact and then trying to find some interpretive loophole to hide behind.
Our text verse 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.”
No, 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. In context, the apostle is condemning the last-day uniformitarians (those who teach that “all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation”) as “willingly ignorant” of the tremendous significance of the historical facts of creation and the Flood (2 Peter 3:3-6). Real written records only go back a few thousand years, and to attempt to calculate any date before that requires use of a premise which, in context, the Scriptures have just condemned! God says the uniformitarians are willingly ignorant and then urges those who believe His Word to “be not ignorant.” The only way we can know the date and duration of creation is for God to tell us, and He says He made all of heaven and Earth in six days, and not so long ago! HMM
