2 Peter 3:8
2 Peter 3:88Beloved, do not let this one thing escape your notice: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
Used to explain apparent delay — what seems long to us is brief to God, so an extended period before the end is no evidence against the expectation. In Watchtower chronology the verse has also been applied to reckoning prophetic periods, and it functions generally to absorb the passage of time since 1914.
Peter's point in context is patience, not arithmetic. Verse 9 gives the reason: the Lord is not slow concerning his promise but is patient, not wanting anyone to be destroyed. The comparison exists to explain mercy, not to supply a conversion rate between divine and human time. It is worth saying that plainly and without scoring a point, because the verse is often pressed into service — by more groups than one — to make delay mean nothing. Peter is quoting the sense of , a psalm about human frailty against God's permanence, and neither text is offering a formula. The relevant question is not how God experiences time but what the passage of time does to a specific prediction. sets that test, and it is about whether the word came true, not about how long it felt. Compare , , .
The NWT reads "one day is with Jehovah as a thousand years," where the Greek of 2 Peter has kyriou. The chapter's "Lord" is contested: verse 4 speaks of the promise of his presence, verse 10 of the day of the Lord coming as a thief, and verse 18 closes with "our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." Printing "Jehovah" resolves that ambiguity in one direction without signalling to the reader that a choice was made. The verse Peter is echoing, , does have the divine name — but Peter's own sentence has kyrios.