heavens shall pass away
2 Peter 3:10
3:10 heavens shall pass away. The “day of the Lord” will be terminated at the end of the millennium with the long-awaited renovation of the old earth by fire. The earth will not be annihilated, any more than it was annihilated at the time of the Flood, but will be completely changed and purified, made new, as it were. All the elements themselves have been under God’s curse (Genesis 3:17-19), so they must be burned up, along with the vast evidences of decay and death now preserved as fossils in the earth’s crust. Possibly this will be a global atomic fission reaction (note the word “dissolved” in II Peter 3:11), or else simply a vast explosive disintegration, involving transformation of the chemical energy of the elements into heat, light and sound energy. What remains after the global fiery disintegration will be other forms of energy, so that, although God’s principle of conservation still holds, the solid earth will seem to have “fled away” (Revelation 20:11).