We’re back in 2 Peter 3 and I invite you to turn there. Peter urges his readers to keep listening closely to the Word of God, because a feature of the last days is scoffers who spread seeds of doubt: Where is the promise of the Lord’s coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.
When you stay attentive to the Word, you’ll keep remembering the truth. The truth is, though, as the prophets foretold and our Lord commanded us to live in light of – Jesus is returning to the earth. V.10 -There is a day of the Lord that will come like a thief – it’ll sneak up on those who aren’t rigorously preparing for it. V. 7 -It is a day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. Those who aren’t living in reference to God – the God who has made Himself known through Jesus – will be judged as failed image bearers and put to an end.
On that day, things will change. Drastically. The Day of the Lord brings a heat, a burning, and heaven and earth as we know them will be burned up…dissolved (v.10)…melted (v.12). And then, v.13, taking their place, as God promised, a new heavens and new earth in which righteousness dwells.
Knowing that the stuff of our present existence is temporary, the Christian church should be characterized by holiness and godliness (v.11). They should look at the world theologically. To be holy is to be set apart, because of God to be different in our approach, in our assumptions, in our calculations, in our priorities. Turn back to Peter’s first canonical letter, in the first chapter:
13 Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 14 As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, 15 but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, 16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” 17 And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, 18 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold,19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.
A holy life isn’t careless. It is not a flailing life. It is not reactive to whatever happens to be pressuring it. It does not drift along to the prevailing spirit of the age. It does not automatically travel in the grooves that are already there. It does not hastily take up the concerns and outcries of the world.
Rather, it is attentive, obedient. Submissive to God. Ready to respond to God. Thoughtful. Deliberate. Vigilant. Focused. Focused. Focused. Living in view of the end.
And specifically, Peter says, the holy life is fueled by constantly remembering the high price paid to redeem us out of the world, out from the coming destruction in the day of the Lord: that high price being the precious blood of Christ.
As we take the Lord’s Supper this morning, of course we are remembering the suffering unto death of Jesus. For us. The point isn’t that we carry around this burden: hey, stop having fun, you’re forgetting that Jesus had to suffer and die for you.
Rather, one of the reasons to remember Jesus’ death is to re-fuel the logic of holiness. A high price has been paid for you. If your life hadn’t seem meaningful or valuable before, it certainly is now! You might have been drifting until now, buying into whatever version of reality is set before you. Following what’s always been done. But now! You’ve been purchased with the life blood of the best of men, the Son of Man, the Man in full. Purchased in pain. How shall we then live?
Not drowsily. Not aimlessly. Not hopelessly. Not drifting according to the currents of the world. Not thoughtlessly or ignorantly. Not as we used to think or speak or act. Not casually. Not sentimentally.
So roll up your sleeves, get your head in the game, be totally ready to receive the gift that’s coming when Jesus arrives. Don’t lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. You didn’t know any better then; you do now. As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, “I am holy; you be holy.”
17 You call out to God for help and he helps—he’s a good Father that way. But don’t forget, he’s also a responsible Father, and won’t let you get by with sloppy living.
18-21 Your life is a journey you must travel with a deep consciousness of God. It cost God plenty to get you out of that dead-end, empty-headed life you grew up in. He paid with Christ’s sacred blood, you know.
What should the church do in view of the day of the Lord? Look at this world theologically. Be holy. And…back to 2 Peter 3: 14: in lives of…godliness.
To grasp what godliness is, I like Peterson’s paraphrase we just quoted from: your life is a journey you must travel with a deep consciousness of God. That’s a good start to defining the word godliness: traveling with a deep consciousness of God. But then also: preparing to act in obedience to God. Choosing, acting, speaking, thinking in reference to God. Fighting to think and live in the presence of God. Fighting off despondency, ennui, excitement, and whatever else in order to see God. Eliminating those distractions, those weights, those sins that prevent us from enjoying God.
Looking at the world theologically. That’s where the scoffers went wrong. They’ve taken it easy on themselves. They’ve accepted what’s right in front of them, on the surface. Or what’s been given to them. They haven’t worked at holiness and godliness. They haven’t concentrated. They haven’t looked around and thought. They haven’t looked at the creation…through the creation and to the Creator.
It’s not enough to just experience what’s going on. But rather, equipped with the truth of Scripture, you have to observe and think of God. For instance, there is this drowsy idea that wants to steal over you: everything is as it always was and will always be thus.
But that’s just not true, Peter says in v.5. Thing have not always been as they are; in fact thing haven’t always been. “And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was over the face of the earth.” And then things changed…because of God. God changed things. He spoke… “by the word of God.” His word is the reason for being.
This is a world from the Word. We are living in an idea and command of God. We are living in an idea and command of God. All of this – blue whales, herons, kidneys, beards, time, space, galaxies, synapses, imagination, fire, air, water, magenta, tusks, volume, gravity, surprise, lore, farming techniques etc etc – everything comes out of and continues by the Word of God.
To be godly, to look at the world theologically, is to be immersed in the truth: This is my Father’s world. The world is full of the grandeur of God! This world has meaning out from God. This world continues because of God. There are no impersonal processes afoot:
[God] sends out his command to the earth
His word run swiftly.
He gives snow like wool
He scatters frost like ashes.
He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs,
Who can stand before his cold.
He sends out his word, and melts them,
He makes his wind blow and the waters flow.
The psalmist focuses on just one process, what we label as the water cycle, to make the larger claim: everything that happens in the world is by the word of God. It’s not “it rained.” It’s God sends out His word and causes rain…
I know, brothers and sisters, I feel it too: for the past 150 years the western world has been assaulted by secularism: God is not the creator; this world has accidentally and impersonally come into being; you’re a clump of cells floating on a cooling planet traveling through an empty space and life is essentially purposeless, meaningless.
We’re involved in this contradiction: we’re self-seeking… but because God isn’t around, we’re really not there either… everything is gray and purposeless and undifferentiated. If we see something beyond meaninglessness it’s just a construct we’ve built over impersonal reality. We’re self-seeking without selves.
Kierkegaard: In fact, what is called the secular mentality consists simply of such men who, so to speak, mortgage themselves to the world. They use their capacities, amass money, carry on enterprises . . . perhaps [to] make a name in history, but themselves they are not. Spiritually speaking, they have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything, no self before God, however self-seeking they are otherwise.
But we resist the secularism. We deliberately reject the scoffing. Rather, we the Church fashion lives of godliness: we work at the truth: in everything to see the centrality of the Word of God. Everything exists and continues because of God’s Word. God’s Word is what makes the difference.
Along this vein, in verse six Peter continues his rejoinder against the scoffers who says everything just stays the same, by remembering that the earth has already passed through a cataclysm. The water out of which the world was formed when God spoke once burst out and flooded the world. And what was it that released the waters over the world? The same mouth that said “let there be” gave the order to overflow and engulf the earth. Point being: no matter what the scoffers have to say, reality is always set by the Word of God.
And, Peter goes on in v.7, that dread and powerful Speaker has already given a word about the future, and the heat that currently warms the earth and allows life and smores will at the Lord’s coming become an inferno that destroys. Like a thief the day of the Lord will come, and then “with a roar” the heavens will come apart (v.10).
God has allowed it to be possible for Himself to be forgotten by those made in His image. In His providence He has authorized the darkness to be that thick. But keep that darkness out of the Church. Look at the world theologically, Church. Awake, Christian, out of the slumber of mind that says everything will be as it’s been, everything will be fine. Remember that it is the word of God that gives and takes away; that already has created, has destroyed; that will again destroy and will again create.
Of course, there’s a point to be made. Christ said, “I am coming quickly.” It appears that the New Testament writers assumed that He would probably come in their lifetime. And now, we’ve got 2023 – almost 2 millennia after Jesus has disappeared into the clouds. Antiquity has come and gone; middle ages; renaissance, reformation, industrial revolution, enlightenment, reconstruction, modernity, postmodernity…
Where is the promise of his coming? What do you have to say about this delay?
But, Peter says, look at the world theologically – what delay? God is not us. He reckons time a whole lot differently than we do. V. 8: Do not overlook this one fact beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
Now, I don’t think that Peter is giving us an exact formula for how God measures time. But let’s just use his numbers. Given these numbers, for every second of our experience, God experiences nine months. Every second that comes and goes for God is filled with events and interaction and processes and development and accomplishment.
Then again, by God’s calculations, Jesus’ birth in the Bethlehem barn happened this past Friday!
God has such a strange relationship to time, we feel, and yet the truth is probably that we have a strange relationship to time. Time is an oppressor, an enemy. We mishandle time by procrastinating. We are baffled by time – when we were small our aunts used to pinch our cheeks and say to us – you’ve gotten so big, I can’t believe it, where has the time gone?
I recall someone wearing a t-shirt that read, “I miss today.”
I remember a Weds night when I was baffled and oppressed by time. It was Ben’s last night at home before Tonia taking him to college. I wasn’t prepared for the rush of thoughts, much of them tinged with regret and sadness. But also bewilderment. We gathered as a Church on Weds night, and then afterward I stood at the gate and remembered stuff – I recalled bringing the boys to the building to clean; back then neighbor Joe was still alive and would take his walks up and down the street, across the street during the services the Volantes would putter in their garden and John would bring vegetables by, Peyton Manning was at the helm of the Broncos. What happened? How did it develop?
“Does anybody realize what life is
while they’re living it- every, every minute?”
Well, God does. And God is never flummoxed by time. He is the Creator of time and still Lord over it. Not bound by it. He’s handling it perfectly. A lot differently from us, and yet perfectly.
Look at the world theologically, brothers and sisters. We are to look at the fact that the Lord Jesus hasn’t returned to destroy the ungodly and think one thought about God: He’s not willing that any should perish. The Divine will is that all should change their trajectory, that in their flight from God men and women should stop and turn back to Him, that instead of choosing hunger and frustration and passing thrills they would drink from the fountain of Life, from God Himself. That instead of following the course of this world, they would live aligned with the creative and sustaining Word. Rather than living dishonestly, posing, living for the praise of other people, owning secret shame, we would come clean to the Light of the world. “All that is not God is death,” and God in every moment bears this in mind and waits and works for our repentance. Waits for us to believe in Him, to look at the world theologically.
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There’s an argument stretching back to the earliest biblical commentators. Will God totally destroy and remake the heavens and earth? Or will He deeply refine, renew the heavens and earth we know now?
I won’t take the time now to go through the whole argument, but I believe that God will deeply refine and renew the heavens and earth we know now. The backbone of this position is that phase #1 of the ultimate Day of the Lord and re-creation is in the past. The new creation began when Jesus was raised from the dead. The old creation was judged and destroyed in the body of Jesus at Calvary. And, of course there was discontinuity and continuity between the body who died and the body who rose from the dead.
The point being: we all have to reckon with the Day of the Lord and – in a way – choose which one we’ll take part in: either the penultimate Day of Judgment when the Lord Jesus as our substitute in our place came under the wrath of God. And Jesus, still in our behalf, is raised from death and judgment.
Or we’ll be the object of the ultimate Day of the Lord when the Lord Jesus Christ descends as our adversary, and his judgment falls on us the wicked who haven’t lived in reference to God, and out from there will be no survivors.
At her baptism Bea read a passage from Acts which was an extended quote from the prophet, Joel. Now Joel is all about the same topic that Peter treats here: the Day of the Lord. The coming judgment. And there’s a key sentence in those prophecies of judgment: Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Look to the Lord Jesus who at Calvary took the penalty for your sins upon himself. Look to the Man who in His body reconciled the creation to its creator. Call on the Logos, the Word of God, the Creator and Sustainer and Definer and Meaning of All that there is… and be saved by His power. Have you called on Him? Will you?
This Communion meal is for those who have called on the Lord Jesus and have been baptized into His Body. It is a time to remember the price that was paid for our holiness, for our being set apart to life, to glory, to God. Use this time to thank Him. Use this time to re-commit your thoughts and priorities and training to God. And ask God to do His work among these who have become your people through the work of God.