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In these words St. Peter advises them to make an holy and wise construction of the forbearance of God in his delaying to come to judgment, not to think that God neglects them under sufferings, or is well-pleased with the perverseness of the wicked world in sinning; but his patience and long-suffering towards them is hereby displayed, in order to the bringing of them to repentance, and by repentance to salvation. Account that the long-suffering of God, that is, the design of God in his long-suffering, is the sinner's salvation.
Here note, That patience and long-suffering in God is an ability or power in him, not only to delay the execution of his wrath for a time, by a temporary suspension of it towards them that perish, and shall feel it at last; but to delay the execution of it towards others, in order to their eternal salvation, that they may never feel it.
Observe next, How this apostle, to add to the strength and authority of what he had spoken concerning the certainty of Christ's coming, and their duty to be in a ready preparation for it, doth make mention of St. Paul as bearing witness, in several places of his epistles, thereunto.
Even as our beloved brother Paul hath written unto you in all his epistles speaking in them of these things. As the prophets had all one mouth, so had the apostles also, speaking all the same thing.
Observe lastly, The testimony given by St. Peter to St. Paul's epistles. He acknowledges, 1. That there were some things in them hard to be understood.
Mark, He doth not say many things, much less that all things in St. Paul were hard to be understood, but some things only. How vainly then doth the church of Rome produce this text, to prove the obscurity of the whole scripture? whereas the great and necessary things to our salvation are so plainly revealed in scripture, that even babes in Christ do apprehend and understand them. And though there be difficulties in other points, more remote from salvation, yet they are so for our exercise and trial, to excite our most intense study and diligence.
Note farther, Who the persons are to whom the scriptures are hard to be understood, to the unlearned and unstable, who wrest and pervert them to their own destruction. The original word rendered to wrest, is a metaphor taken from torturers, who put a man upon the rack, they torment him so long till they make him speak what he never meant to speak; so these wrest a sense out of scripture which the Holy Ghost never intended. Scriptura obscuritas non nova regtula necessitatem, sed spiritus illuminantis et ministerii exponentis necessitatem ostendit. Bishop Davenant.