Living with the End in Mind – 2 Peter 3v1–18

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29d ago

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Well, evening folks. As Alan said, we are back in Peter’s second letter this evening, so if you’ve got a Bible handy, we’re going to come to the last chapter of this fascinating New Testament book, and indeed the last words that we have, certainly, of the great apostle Peter. So, 2 Peter chapter 3, and you’ll find that on page 1,223 of the Church Bibles.

(0:30 – 1:13)

Let’s hear God’s word. Dear friends, this is now my second letter to you. I have written both of them as reminders to stimulate you to wholesome thinking.

I want you to recall the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets and the command given by our Lord and Saviour through your apostles. Above all, you must understand that in the last days, scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, where is this coming, He promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.

(1:14 – 2:07)

But they deliberately forget that long ago, by God’s words, the heavens came into being, and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also, the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word, the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgement and destruction of the ungodly.

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends. With the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness.

Instead, He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar.

(2:07 – 3:31)

The elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destructions of the heaven by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.

But in keeping with His promises, we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where righteousness dwells. So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless, and at peace with Him. Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom that God gave him.

He writes the same way in all His letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort as they do the other Scriptures to their own destruction. Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position.

(3:32 – 4:06)

But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To Him be glory both now and forever. Amen.

May God bless today’s reading of His inspired and holy words. I think 2 Peter has a little bit of the feel to it that we have with 2 Timothy. That is, they are both letters from apostles who are sensing that their ministries are running out.

(4:06 – 7:32)

In 2 Timothy, Paul is very much a man coming to the end of his race, and he is urging Timothy to take the baton forward. And here in 2 Peter, that other great apostle Peter is anticipating his own departure. We saw that in chapter 1 and verse 15.

And I will make every effort to see that after my departure, you will always be able to remember these things. And Peter’s concern, like Paul’s, was to encourage Christians, those who would continue in the faith after him, to keep going and to keep the faith. And key to keeping the faith is going to be staying true to all that the apostles have taught.

That’s why, as Colin pointed out in chapter 1, Peter isn’t writing this letter to introduce to the church some new doctrines, but rather to remind Christians of the truths that the apostles have been preaching from the very beginning. Because it’s those teachings and that gospel that will keep Christians in the truth, keep them secure, and enable them to be holy. So, Peter restates at the start of chapter 3, where we read tonight, Dear Friends, this is now my second letter.

I have written both of them as reminders to stimulate you to wholesome thinking. That’s just what he said in chapter 1, verse 12. So, I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have.

Peter’s point is, remember what we, that is the apostles, have taught you and stick with that. And that is absolutely essential, because the only true form of Christianity is apostolic Christianity, the Christianity that has come to us from those primary first-generation apostolic witnesses, the people who, like Peter, weren’t chapter 1, verse 16, following cunningly devised fables, but who had seen and heard and encountered Jesus firsthand, personally, eyewitnesses of His ministry, His life, His death and resurrection. The people that Jesus had spoken to prior to His crucifixion in that upper room, John chapter 14, it will be on the screen.

And He said to that group of apostles, But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything that I have said to you. Now, of course, that’s a verse which is often misused or misunderstood. Sometimes people read that verse, and they immediately want to apply it directly to themselves, in the sense to think that Jesus is saying to them that they can get their theology, as it were, directly from heaven.

(7:32 – 9:03)

But Jesus is speaking in that context, in that verse, to the apostles. After all, you can only be reminded of something you had been there to hear in the first place. So, Jesus isn’t saying in a verse like that, Hey, Andy, you can have your own mystical private pipeline of truth.

Rather, Jesus is telling the apostles the Holy Spirit will ensure that they are able to pass on the teachings they have received directly from Jesus, and can do that with confidence, because the Holy Spirit will bring to mind the things that they had heard themselves. And the application for us, therefore, of course, is we can trust the apostles. We can trust what they said as reliable sources.

And that’s really important, because ultimately, everything you and I know about Jesus comes to us through the apostles. See, Peter’s words in verse 2, where we read tonight, he says, I want you to recall the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets, we’re thinking of those Old Testament writers, and the command, and I take it that’s the gospel command, given by our Lord and Saviour through your apostles. Think about it.

(9:04 – 11:55)

Jesus never wrote a book, didn’t even write a blog. Quite amazing, isn’t it? Everything that we know about Jesus is mediated to us through that apostolic screen. So when people drift away from apostolic teaching, that is the teaching of the New Testament, they are drifting away from Jesus.

They’re drifting away from truth. They’re drifting away from the Word of Life. It’s always a big danger.

People start to pick and chose this bit of John and that bit of James, or they start playing off Jesus against Paul. And the effect is, of course, that when we go down that road, we’re just making up our own religion, aren’t we? The gospel that suits me, which, of course, is exactly what the false teachers in chapter 2 had done with the toxic effects that Colin took us through last week. But if the threat to truth in chapter 2 was truth twisters, the threat to Christian security in chapter 3 is truth scoffers, not those who want to manipulate biblical teaching, but those who just mock it.

Those who approach to apostolic teaching as just to laugh at it and to sneer. And the particular truth being mocked in chapter 3, of course, is the second coming of Jesus. The truth, the belief, the foundation of the gospel that Jesus, who had lived and died and risen again and ascended into heaven, would come back, something that was taught directly by Jesus himself.

Again, we’ll see some verses on the screen. Jesus’ words in Matthew 24, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.

Men of Galilee, they said, why do you stand here looking into the sky? Acts chapter 1, the angels to that apostolic group, this same Jesus who’s been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven. The return of Jesus was the great anticipation and hope of the church. This wasn’t some kind of second tier, top shelf, subsidiary doctrine.

(11:55 – 12:42)

Indeed, it’s estimated that the second coming is mentioned or alluded to in the New Testament on average once every 25 verses. There’s an utterly central belief. But of course, time had passed, the years ticked by, the apostles were starting to die out, and Jesus hadn’t come back.

Indeed, life, as the scoffers were very quick to point out, just seemed to go on in the same old way, verse four. Everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation. Ever since our grandparents died, nothing changes.

(12:43 – 13:12)

So Christians, give up. It’s not going to happen. Move on.

Admit you’re wasting your time. You’re following a pipe dream. And if that was unsettling in 60 AD, what about 2025 AD? Well, Peter wants us to know that such cynicism and sneering actually reveals great ignorance.

(13:13 – 18:31)

It’s ignorant because it doesn’t understand why things are stable, why things continue in the first place. Why is the world able to go on at all? What’s the basis for that? One of the great apologetic questions sometimes called the cosmological argument or the contingency argument is, why is there something rather than nothing? In other words, something can’t come from nothing, and yet here we are. The universe exists.

And we observe that everything that happens has a cause. So what is the cause that brought about the universe? And the only answer to that is, for that to happen, you need to have something that doesn’t have a cause, but was just eternally existent itself, but yet can produce and cause and create the universe that we see and are part of. And the Christian argument, indeed the theistic argument, is that God is the best and really only plausible answer to that question, which is perhaps in a less philosophical way, I think, the point that Peter is making in verse 5. But they deliberately forget that long ago, by God’s Word, the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water.

That is, the world only exists because God brought it into being in the first place through his words. So don’t arrogantly tell us that the world can never end when you’ve got no explanation for how it started in the first place. But there’s a further ignorance to their scoffing, because actually the world that God created hasn’t always just continued in the same old way.

It hasn’t always just existed without disruption, because the same God who created it, separating the waters from the land and the land from the sky above, water from water, you see there in verse 5, has intervened before. He has brought about a global calamity in the past, the flood, verse 6. And if he brought about such a judgement then, he can do it again. I wonder if you came across the BBC news article from just a couple of weeks ago, 19th of May, so very hot off the press.

It was entitled, Solving the Mystery of a Dinosaur Mass Grave at the River of Death, about some amazing excavations going on in Alberta, Canada. And it was subtitled, Hidden Beneath the Slopes of a Lush Forest in Alberta, Canada is a Mass Grave on a Monumental Scale. I’ll give you some of the text of the article.

It says, thousands of dinosaurs were buried here, killed in an instant on a day of utter devastation. Now a group of palaeontologists have come to Pipestone Creek, appropriately nicknamed the River of Death, to help solve a 72 million year old enigma, how did they die? So far the team has excavated an area the size of a tennis court, but the bed of bones extends for a kilometre into the hillside. It’s jaw-dropping in terms of density, she tells us, one of the palaeontologists.

All of this detailed research in the museum and at the two sites is helping the team to answer the vital question, how did so many animals in Pipestone Creek die at the same time? We believe that this was a herd on a seasonal migration that got tangled up in some catastrophic event that effectively wiped out, if not the entire herd, then a good proportion of it, Professor Bamforth says. All the evidence suggests that this catastrophic event was a flash flood, perhaps a storm over the mountains that sent an unstoppable torrent of water towards the herd, ripping trees from their roots and shifting boulders. By the same words, the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgement and destruction of the ungodly, verse 7. But the scholars aren’t just ignorant of history, they’re also ignorant about God, because their God seems to be a very small, and limited God.

(18:32 – 19:47)

Just because a few decades, never mind a few centuries, seems a long time to them, they assume that such a timeline can’t possibly be credible in terms of the return of Jesus. But of course, God’s time scales, His perspective and time is far above ours. Verse 8, for an eternal God, a couple of millennia is no more than a weekend.

Just indeed, as God’s infinity means He has all the time in the world to attend to your emergency today. In Colin Hansen’s book, written on the spiritual and intellectual formation of Tim Keller, he notes an illustration used by one of Tim Keller’s intervarsity leaders, I guess that was one of his UCCF leaders when he was at university, a very formidable woman called Barbara Boyd, who had a big formative shaping effect on Tim Keller in his early days. So who knows, Lucy, one of your students might be the next Tim Keller, and we’ll quote you in years to come.

(19:47 – 20:46)

But Barbara Boyd used to use this illustration. She said, if the 96 million miles between the earth and the sun was equivalent to the thickness of a sheet of paper, so just think of a sheet of A4 paper, that was the equivalent of the distance from the earth to the sun, the distance from the earth to our nearest star would be a stack of sheets of paper 70 feet high, and the diameter of our little galaxy, just one of countless in this infinite universe, the diameter of our galaxy would be a stack of papers 310 miles high. Hebrews chapter one tells us that Jesus sustains all that by the power of his words.

(20:47 – 21:56)

Barbara Boyd would then smile and say, you don’t ask somebody like that into your life to be your assistant. Do we really think that Jesus can’t handle a 2000 year wait or a 3000 year one? But there’s more to this wait than even the bigness of God’s being. Because verse nine is also because of the bigness of God’s heart.

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise as some understand slowness. Indeed, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. You see, every extra year, every extra minute is a gospel opportunity.

It’s another day, it’s another moment when men and women can turn to Christ and bow the knee and find salvation. So don’t think that God is dragging his feet or he’s being slow because of some kind of lack of urgency. Quite the opposite.

(21:56 – 22:20)

It is the intensity of God’s compassion that holds him back. So when that day comes, when judgement can be delayed no longer, there’ll be no excuses. God held the door of escape open even beyond the point that his scoffing opponents thought was reasonable.

(22:22 – 22:58)

Always bear in mind, verse 15, that our Lord’s patience means salvation. But says Peter, the day will come like a thief in the night when the last soul will be saved and the sin-sick, rotten, rebellious, and ungodly world will be purged of all its evil. The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.

(23:00 – 24:08)

And you maybe saw the news reports recently of the anniversary of the Belsen-Burgen concentration camp, April 1945, when the British forces moving across northern Germany came across that camp. And they discovered the unspeakable horror of that place. You might have seen some of those harrowing, really disturbing pictures of what they found.

And after they had rescued as many as they could, the final act was to turn their flamethrowers on it. So rotten, so diseased, so contaminated, so odious, that the only fitting final act was fire. And Peter says, and so it will be for this world, full of its violence, its greed, its sex trafficking, its corruption, its abuse.

(24:10 – 24:18)

It’s why the gospel is so precious. It’s why God waits. It’s why our witness is so vital.

(24:19 – 25:47)

Because for those who can come to Christ, there is hope beyond that day. The hope of new creation, verse 13. We are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where righteousness dwells, a world without concentration camps, without prisons, without hospitals, without asylums, without cemeteries.

So says Peter, Christians, verse 11. In the light of this reality, in the light of that coming judgement, what kind of people ought you to be? What kind of life should you be seeking to live now? And the answer, verse 11, holy and godly lives. Verse 14, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless, and at peace with God.

Because not only do you have a great hope in the face of this frankly terrifying judgement which awaits this world, you also have the opportunity to prepare for it. This time of year, people, to change the mood slightly, are often thinking about getting kind of beach body ready. I don’t know if that’s you, it never occurred to me to be honest, but apparently that’s a thing.

(25:47 – 26:55)

You know, people are thinking, oh, we’re a couple of months out from the summer holidays and I’m going to be walking across the beach in my trunks or my swimsuit, so I should maybe start getting in shape, you know, I should start getting prepared, lose a few pounds. Well, Peter says, your destiny isn’t walking across a beach, it’s to walk through the streets of the new Jerusalem, of a new heavens and a new earth where righteousness dwells. So now’s the time to start getting in shape, not physically, but spiritually.

To put away wasteful and destructive habits, to deepen your knowledge of God, to push towards God, to become more like Jesus. And notice in verse 14, Peter uses the language of effort. Make every effort to get ready for that day.

Be diligent as the ESV puts it. I think Colin noted a couple of weeks ago that that language of effort is quite challenging to us today, especially in our culture. We’re very sensitive, aren’t we, about coming across as demanding or putting pressure on people.

(26:56 – 28:58)

I mean, especially in the church, because after all, we’re grace people, aren’t we? The gospel isn’t about works. And of course, that’s true. We can never achieve our salvation through good deeds or self-improvement programmes.

But while we aren’t to work for our salvation, the Bible tells us we are to work out our salvation. That is to live our lives in the light of our salvation in ways that honour God, to take hold of the blessings of salvation by the choices we make and the habits we cultivate. And Peter says that is going to involve a measure of effort.

You’re going to have to push against the grain to do that. You’re going to have to deny yourselves at times when those desires will pull you away from God, choosing to do things that require a bit of exertion and discipline, because in the longer term, those are the things that will strengthen us spiritually. I think I mentioned this little quote that I quite liked.

I came across a while ago, and the quote is, discipline is choosing what I want most over what I want now. Discipline is choosing what I want most over what I want now. That’s why we study for exams.

That’s why we go to the gym. That’s why we do housework. We’d always much rather in the moment be watching a film or eating a pizza or sitting in the garden.

But we know in the long run, a better job, a fitter body, a cleaner kitchen is going to be more satisfying and more rewarding. So where my a bit of extra effort pay dividends. Again, that will be a personal thing to ask God to search your heart.

(28:58 – 29:10)

You know yourself. Here’s a few suggestions if the cap fits wear it as, it used to say. What about a Bible reading plan? We’ve been encouraged about that at Greenview in recent days.

(29:12 – 30:02)

I mean, it will be a bit embarrassing to get to heaven having been a Christian for 20 years and not to have read through the whole Bible even once. Maybe get along to the prayer meetings if you can. Maybe taking on that church job and responsibility.

And again, not for the legalistic kind of formula of ticking a box, but because in those places, in those ways, you are giving yourself sacrificially and hopefully prayerfully and lovingly to the service of others. And through those things being changed, becoming more like the person you are trying to be. Maybe investing more of our resources in kingdom work.

(30:03 – 30:16)

Maybe it’s needing to speak to someone about that besetting sin. Maybe it’s reprioritizing some aspects of your family life. They all take a bit of effort.

(30:17 – 31:07)

They’re not our natural default, and they’re not always easy. But they are the pathways to greater holiness, to more wholesome thinking, verse 1. To being more like Jesus, which is our ultimate destiny and will be our ultimate joy. As John the Apostle puts it just over the page in our Bibles, in chapter 3 of his first letter, we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him.

All those who have this hope purify themselves. God in His merciful patience is waiting. But Jesus is going to come back.

(31:08 – 31:33)

The things of this age will be dissolved, and new heavens and a new earth will dawn. So says Peter, let’s be the people that God has destined us to be, growing in grace, verse 18, and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. And the Lord bless these thoughts from His word.

The post Living with the End in Mind – 2 Peter 3v1–18 appeared first on Greenview Church.

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