I am a sinner saved by grace.

Ephesians 2:5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—

Ephesians 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,

If I were to think of myself in any other terms would be an insult to the gift of God.

Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

God made man perfect and gave him dominion over creation but then sin entered.

And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you,
    ‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3

The curse fell on man because of disobedience, but dominion was not taken away. With dominion man began battling between themselves for dominance.

Psalm 12:5 “Because the poor are plundered, because the needy groan, I will now arise,” says the Lord; “I will place him in the safety for which he longs.”

God’s grace prevails.

2 Peter 3:16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.

Imagine if you would for a moment that Peter is admitting that Paul’s letters to the churches are a puzzle even to him. Peter admits that he doesn’t always get it. But rather than twist Paul’s words to his own understanding, he warns us not to do what he might have done himself.

If you have a puzzle to put together and you cut a piece to make it fit you have made the piece that should fit there useless. That piece, in order to make it fit somewhere else, must be cut. In doing that you now have three pieces that need to be cut to fit. By the time you get through cutting all the pieces to fit, the picture doesn’t match the image on the box.

I am suggesting that Peter might have tried to make sense of Paul’s wisdom, given to Paul by our Lord, which was withheld from Peter. At some point in Peter’s struggle he might have been told not to cut corners. I can only imagine that Peter might have done that because I have done that myself in the past.

I am neither ignorant nor unstable but I choose to believe that the bible is true even if I have not been given insight into everything.

2 Peter 1:20 knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation.

Nor am I a scoffer.

2 Peter 3:3 knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires.