Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana. So verse five, but also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control,

to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness,

to godliness, brotherly kindness, and do brotherly kindness love.

So sometimes people want to take lists like this and like super literalize them

I'm looking at you folks with the ordo saludis and justification sanctification glorification

try and make this a process so this is not what's happening here it's not trying to set

forth this wooden process,

like, oh, here are the stages of the Christian life, right? You start with this and then you move

on to this and then you move on to that, right? Notice that the verb here is add to, right? So you're not moving from one to the other right it's you don't settle in

one spot in your Christian life right but that we press on in all of these things you also notice

none of these things are sort of finite, right? Like if we

understand faith is faithfulness, it's not like, okay, well, I have, I can check faithfulness

off the list. I have been faithful to God for a sufficient period of time. I can now not worry

about it. Right. Like, right, it's not like a finite thing like i or i have achieved virtue right or now my

knowledge of god is perfect right like that's not something that happens right but so this these are

all areas in which we progress this additive right element so there's faithfulness and then virtue.

And virtue is related to the categories.

So the Greek that 2 Peter is written in,

I've said a couple times it's very different,

but to put a finer point on it,

it's aping classical Greek.

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