We continue our look at the teaching of 2 Peter this morning, and so do keep your Bibles in hand and turn with me this time to the New Testament scriptures, to 2 Peter chapter 3. You will remember that Peter has been responding to the claims of false teachers. They were saying, “The Lord Jesus is never going to return!” so chapter 3 verse 4, “Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation. So where is He? He’s not coming back.” That’s what they were saying. And in verses 1 through 10 of chapter 3, we saw Peter expose the flaws in their thinking. He pointed to the perspective of God, remember, “who is not slow in keeping His promise as some think of slowness, but rather for Him, one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.” And in particular he highlighted the purpose of God behind this apparent delay in Jesus’ coming. It is all because, Peter says, “He is patient with us, not willing that any should perish.” He wants you to repent. The reason Jesus hasn’t come is because God wants sinners to come and trust in Jesus while there is yet time. That was last time.
This time, we consider verses 10 through 15, and we’re going to see Peter build on that argument and draw out for us some of the practical implications of the certainty of Christ’s return. What difference ought this truth – the certainty of Jesus’ return – what difference ought it to make in our lives? We’re going to consider his teaching under two simple headings. First of all, our destiny. Peter talks about what is going to happen, he describes briefly, though in vivid terms, what the end of history is going to be like – our destiny. Then secondly, in light of our destiny he spells out our duty. If this is how all things end, then he asks, verse 11, “What sort of people ought you to be? How ought we to live today in light of the certainty of the final day?” So those are the two simple themes. We’ll be thinking about our destiny and our duty. Before we think about them let’s pause and pray and then we’ll read God’s Word together. Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, we come crying to You now to give us the Holy Spirit to open our eyes that we may indeed behold marvelous things out of Your Law, for we ask this in Your name, amen.
2 Peter chapter 3, beginning at verse 10. This is the Word of God:
“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.
Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. And count the patience of our Lord as salvation.”
Amen.
In Argyll, on the west coast of Scotland, you can visit the picturesque seaside village of Oban. Up on Battery Hill, overshadowing the multicolored facades of the tenements that line the harbor, there is a strange building. It’s known as McCaig’s Folly and it just dominates the skyline. It’s a circular wall of arches, two stories tall, and it looks a bit like the Colosseum in Rome. That gives you an idea of what we’re talking about. It was intended as a very public display of McCaig’s wealth and power. It was supposed to house an art gallery and a museum with a central tower adorned with statues of himself and his siblings and their parents. It was supposed to be an abiding monument to McCaig’s family, but McCaig died before the project could be finished. He did leave an annual sum of money to ensure its completion but then his will was contested by his heirs and the work stalled completely, leaving only the arched outer wall. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a pretty enough structure with a stunning view on a clear day across to the island of Mull, but when you think about it, the whole thing is a rather sad, tragic reminder of the dangers of building a legacy that is rooted in this world. Money runs out, family fights and squabbles and refuses to honor the will, the construction project stalls, and a shell of a building stands as mute testimony to the emptiness and folly of pride.
Our Destiny
In our passage today, Peter is asking us to think about our legacy. The end is coming, and if you work for a legacy that is rooted in this world, it just won’t last. Notice what he tells us about the end that is coming. Here is our destiny, first of all. Our destiny – look at verse 10. “The day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.” Verse 11 adds, “all these things are thus to be dissolved,” and verse 12 says that on the coming day of God, “the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn!”
The End Will Be Sudden
I want you to see two things here in particular very quickly. First of all notice the end will be sudden, and secondly, the end will be comprehensive. Do you see those two emphases in these verses? It will be sudden, first of all. We have looked at this before; I think it bears repeating, however. Peter says, “The day of the Lord will come like a thief.” The day of the Lord will come like a thief. He’s saying when the end comes there will be no warning. Borrowing language from Jesus in Matthew 24, remember, “The end will come like a thief in the night.” You won’t see it coming. That’s the point. There is no early warning system to give you a heads up when Jesus is on His way. It’s going to be sudden. In other words, you do not have the luxury of putting honest dealing with Jesus for yourself off till another day. You do not have that luxury. You do not know the day or the hour. You cannot afford to be asleep in the dark when He comes. Peter wants you to be ready today. Are you ready today?
The End Will Be Comprehensive
It’s going to be sudden in it’s appearing, and it’s going to be comprehensive in it’s scope. The day of the Lord will sweep up everything into its fire. The language of “the day of the Lord,” comes of course from the Old Testament prophets. It’s sometimes used in the Old Testament to speak about a particular visitation of divine judgment in the midst of history as God defends His people Israel and destroys their enemies. But very often it speaks of the final day to which all the other days of the Lord were pointers and precursors. So just to cite one example, listen to how Isaiah 13:9 and following speaks of the day of the Lord. Isaiah says, “Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel with wrath and fierce anger to make the land a desolation and destroy its sinners from it. For the stars of heaven and the constellations will not give their light. The sun will be dark at its rising and the moon will not shed its light. I will punish the world for its evil and the wicked for their iniquity. I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless. I will make people more rare than fine gold and mankind than the gold of ophir. Therefore, I will make the heavens tremble and the earth will be shaken out of its place at the wrath of the Lord of hosts in the day of His fierce anger.”
And you find that language or language analogous to it throughout the prophetic literature of the Old Testament scriptures, so that as you read it you cannot escape the pervasive expectation in the Old Testament of a coming day of ultimate justice and judgment that will sweep the whole cosmos up into it. And so in our text Peter is building on that tradition, that understanding of God’s purposes. “The heavens will pass away with a roar,” he says, “and the heavenly bodies” – the word there means, “the elements will be burned up and dissolved.” The material universe, the world you love, won’t last. Listen to the physicists, J.D. Barrow and Jay Silk, describe the end in scientific terms. They say this. “Whereas the beginning appears to have been regular and quiescent to a high degree, the final state will be chaotic and violent. All galaxies, stars and atoms will dissolve into nuclei and radiation. Then the nuclei will be dismembered into protons and neutrons. They in turn will be squeezed until the quarks confined within them are liberated into a huge cosmic soup of freely interacting quarks and leptons.” Nothing, nothing will be untouched. Nothing.
Isn’t that what makes McCaig’s Folly so very sad in the end? This is what makes legacy building tragic, do you see? It’s like, you know, at the beach with your children, spending hours building a sand castle just out of the reach of the surf. You dig a huge hole. There is a massive mound of sand. And then you make tunnels and bridges and walls and ramparts and turrets and towers. And when it’s done, you stand back and look at your handiwork and “Wow” – it’s a marvel; a masterpiece of monumental sandcastle engineering. But give it a few hours. The tide is coming in and there are no ramparts of sand that can keep it out. I wonder if that’s your life. Is that what you’ve been doing? Beautiful, elaborate, impressive sandcastles on the beach, doomed to crumble beneath the tide of God’s judgment when it comes. “Do not waste your life,” Peter is saying. What is rooted in this world, what is invested in this world, what is valued by this world, just won’t last. “What are you doing living for it?” That’s his question.
There is hope. Do you see how Peter says there will also be a new beginning beyond the ending? Look at verse 13. “According to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” The best analogy I can think of for what we are being taught here and in the rest of the New Testament is to compare the new creation of the cosmos to the resurrection of the body of the individual Christian. Just think about it. Our bodies are destroyed in the grave. In many cases, by the time Jesus comes at the last day there will be no physical remains to speak of. And yet the Scriptures promise there will, nevertheless, be a renewal, a reconstitution of our bodies at the last day in glorious resurrection. And in the same way, the New Testament teaches us the whole material universe will be destroyed by fire. “Dissolved” is Peter’s repeat word. And yet still there will be a renewal and a reconstitution, a new heavens and a new earth will come.
And notice the text says that at last it will be a place where “righteousness dwells,” where righteousness makes its home. There will be a correspondence, a complete coherence between the perfect moral purity of the people of God and the perfected physical environment in which they come to live. Right now, right now if we follow Jesus we often feel out of place, dislocated, away from home, even amidst all the bright, fading beauties of this world because this world is not our home. It’s not our home. We are on our way toward a new creation and toward the home of righteousness. Here, we have no enduring city. Like Abraham, we are to look for another city, a city which is to come whose architect is God. How confident are you, I wonder, that the home of righteousness will be your home? That, I think, is the question this passage asks of us.
Our Duty
And it leads us neatly into the second thing I want you to see here. First, our destiny, and now our duty. In light of the end of all things that Peter summarizes in these verses, he then asks us in verse 11 what sort of people ought you to be? How should we then live? What is our duty in light of our destiny? And we can sum up his answer in three words. If we are to make it to the new heavens and the new earth, if we are ever to enjoy life there, there must be three things that characterize us. There must be patience, there must be purity, and there must be peace. Patience, purity, and peace.
Patience
Citizens of the new creation are marked by patience first of all. That comes out in the repeat word that Peter uses to describe our posture this side of the new creation. “But we wait for Jesus to come” – do you see it in the text? What does he say we are always to be doing? We are waiting. Over and over again. Verse 12, “We are waiting for and hastening the coming day of God.” Verse 13, “We are waiting for new heavens and a new earth.” Verse 14, “Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these.” This life, this life is the waiting room. What is yet to come is the real thing. But the waiting that Peter has in view here isn’t a sort of passive, inactive, you know, twiddling our thumbs wondering when things are finally going to kick off. What Peter has in mind, rather, is faith-filled anticipation. It is the confidence, eager expectation of the swift fulfillment of the divine plan.
But before we move on, did you notice the apparent tension in verse 12? Look again at verse 12 closely. Do you see the apparent tension? Peter talks about “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God.” Isn’t that interesting language? Waiting requires patience but hastening the coming almost presupposes a kind of impatience, a desire to see it all hurry up and be done with. So how do these two ideas fit together – waiting and hastening the day of God? Well I think what Peter is saying when he calls us to “hasten the coming of the day of God” is something like this. He’s saying something like, “Live in such a way that you make the time fly.” Make the time fly. He does not mean that there is something, anything that you or I could ever do that would make God move up His timeline. That’s not his teaching. “Well, I was going to bring the world to an end a thousand years from now, you know, but since Strain made that decision yesterday, you know I realized I think I can get it done next Tuesday!” That is not what Peter means.
I think Peter means something more like what parents mean when it suddenly hits them how quickly time has flown past, how quickly their children have grown. They learn to drive. It’s their eighteenth birthday. They go to college. They get married. But your mental picture of them is still of a little boy or a little girl playing in the sprinkler system in the backyard when they’re five or six. It seems like yesterday. The time has flown past because you’ve loved them and you have invested in them and you’ve walked through everything with them. “I want you to live in such a way that the waiting time till Jesus comes will fly past,” he says. “I want you to love Him and invest in Him and serve Him and extend His kingdom and live for His glory and time will fly in your Master’s service.”
As I was thinking about these two ideas, waiting with patience and hastening the day, living in such a way that the time flies, it struck me, it actually struck me that the feeling of being homesick sort of captures both at once. Doesn’t it? Think about it. There is a kind of patient endurance of where you are right now, coupled with an irrepressible longing to be someplace else that’s really home. That’s homesickness. And isn’t that what Peter says we ought all to feel as Christians? God wants us all homesick for heaven. Homesick for heaven! Are you homesick for heaven? I think that actually may be a large part of God’s design and purpose behind the trials through which He allows us all to pass through – your sorrows and your sickness and your suffering. Brothers and sisters, what is He doing? One of the things He is doing is slowly severing the bonds that hold you here and awakening in you more and more a longing for home where righteousness dwells. So Peter’s first word of application is patience.
Purity
The second word is purity. Purity. If we are to live in light of the end, he says, we are to live lives of radical purity. Of holiness, of likeness to Christ. Look again at verse 11. What sort of people ought you to be? “In lives of holiness and godliness.” Interesting, holiness and godliness, there are plurals, which I rather like. Live lives marked by holinesses and godlinesses. By holy doings and godly things. Lots of them! In every area, in every sphere, in all your activity, in your relationships, in your marriage, in your parenting with your children, with your siblings, at work, at play, at rest, in what you won’t watch and won’t say and won’t do, in how you speak, how you think, where you go, in what you read and look at and laugh at and love. A holy person, a godly person, is characterized by lots and lots and lots of little holinesses and godlinesses every single day.
And it doesn’t happen by osmosis. It doesn’t happen automatically. Peter makes this point forcefully in verse 14, doesn’t he? What does it take to live a life like this? Look at verse 14.
“Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish.” The language of being “without spot or blemish,” you might recognize from the sacrificial system of the Old Testament scriptures. It was used to describe in particular the Passover lamb. So 1 Peter chapter 1 verse 19, Peter describes Jesus as a “lamb without blemish or spot.” He is the holy one. The pure one. The righteous one. And Peter wants us to be like Him with lives dedicated to God as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to Him.
And we are to be diligent in pursuit of this, he says. You could translate that verb, “make every effort to live without spot or blemish.” It takes work; you can’t coast, you see. There’s no easing your way into glory. There are no saints in heaven, none, who are presently basking in the white-hot majesty and holiness of Jesus that surrounds them who did not labor in this life to be as holy as a redeemed sinner can be on the earth. Think about the athletes competing right now in Tokyo at the Olympics and all the preparation and the training in which they engaged before the games began. You are training for heaven. Heaven is the place where righteousness dwells. No one can go there who is not righteous, so do not settle – that’s what Peter is saying to us. That’s how you can hasten the day. That’s how you wait with expectation. That’s how you prepare for glory. How will you be found by Jesus when He comes?
Mark Johnson, one of the commentators, is one to something I think when he says, “The problem with many people is they say on the one hand, ‘When we die, we want to go to heaven,’ but when asked if they really want God and His righteousness in their lives here on earth, they give an altogether different response. The same can be strangely true for Christians,” he says. “They say they’re looking forward to spending eternity with God in heaven, but they find it hard to endure one hour a week in His presence on earth. How will those who cannot endure a Lord’s Day with God enjoy eternity with Jesus hereafter?”
Peace
Patience, purity, and then the last word is peace. Look at verse 14 one more time. “Be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace.” Living in light of eternity means living in peace. At least one translation adds the phrase, “with Him”, at the end of that sentence. “Be diligent to be found at peace with Him,” because that’s what Peter really has in view – life reconciled to God through faith in Jesus Christ. So listen, this may be our last words, but it must be your first priority. This may be our last word; it must be your first priority. This is where all the rest that we’ve said really begins. He won’t find you spotless and without blemish when He comes if He doesn’t find you first of all at peace with God through faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus came, you know, to make peace. Did you know you are not by nature at peace with God? You are in enmity against God, alienated from Him, and Jesus came and bore the estrangement, bore the condemnation my sin, your sin has deserved, at the cross to make peace, to reconcile us to God. He came the just for the unjust to bridge the gap and reconcile us to God, to make peace.
We need to take refuge in Jesus. He’s the only hiding place from the fire that will destroy the elements on the last day. Your only hope – please hear me – your only hope when this world melts in the heat of the wrath of God is to know that the fury of the wrath of God due to your sin has already spent itself, exhausted itself at the cross of Jesus Christ where He took it and quenched it in His sufferings in your place. Our last word needs to be your first concern. Are you at peace with God through faith in Jesus Christ? Busy, kindly, charitable unbelief won’t qualify. Worldly, indifferent, precise head-knowledge of the Gospel just won’t do. You must come to Him acknowledging your sin and pleading with Jesus, “Will You save me and forgive me and deliver me and be my Rescuer at last?” Are you at peace with God?
So Peter tells us about our destiny, doesn’t he? The world won’t last. This world, it won’t last. Please don’t live for it. Please don’t build your legacy here. And then he tells us about our duty. There is a new world to come, a home of righteousness, so get ready here to live there forever! Remember C.T. Studd’s famous lines. They sum up Peter’s message perfectly, don’t they? “Only one life twill soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.” When the day comes, what of your life will last? Let’s pray together.
Lord Jesus, we know that You are coming soon. Help us to trim our wicks and have our lamps burning brightly when You do. Help us to be prepared for the day the thief comes. Help us now today, every one of us, to be reconciled to You by repentance and by faith, clinging to, claiming Your merits, Your obedience and blood. You alone are our hiding place. Help us to hide ourselves in You and help us as we do to resolve to live for Your glory, to enter the training regime that will prepare us for glory to come, to wait and to long. Give us a heavenly homesickness, a longing to be with You at last. For we ask this that we might be, to the praise of Your glory, in Your name. Amen.