Now if you would please keep your Bibles in hand and turn to 2 Peter. As Gary mentioned a moment ago, please do join us this Wednesday evening where there will be a ministry fair and we will recognize and celebrate some of the ways the Lord has blessed us in the year behind us, and then we’ll be rolling out our new church-wide teaching theme for 2021 and 2022. And in the wake of that, God willing, next Lord’s Day in our morning service we will begin a new sermon series in conjunction with the teaching theme as our fall ministry program gets underway in earnest. And so there are some exciting developments coming in the next two weeks; and I really hope you’ll join me in praying for God to bless us richly.
For now, we are going to turn our attention to 2 Peter chapter 3, verses 15 through 18, as Peter concludes his important letter to the churches. Several of the major themes that have occupied our attention over these months together in 2 Peter reappear in summary form here and we are going to consider them together under three very simple headings. First of all in verse 15, Peter teaches us how to think about time. How to think about time. Then in verses 15 through 17, he teaches us how to think about the Bible. How to think about time. How to think about Scripture. And then finally, verses 17 and 18, he teaches us how to think about life. How to think about time. How to think about Scripture. How to think about life. Before we consider those themes, we’ll read the passage; before we do that, as always, let’s pause and pray and ask for the help of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray.
Holy Spirit, You inspired these words. Would You come now and illuminate our understanding, for Jesus’ sake, that all glory might be His, that we may indeed have fellowship with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. For we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Second Peter chapter 3, beginning at verse 15:
“And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.”
How to Think about Time
At the height of the pandemic last year, a man was being interviewed at home by the BBC, live on TV over Zoom, about the potential impact of the lockdown on his business. And everything was going well with the interview when suddenly, mid-sentence, everything froze. And a message appeared on the screen for everyone to see – “This free Zoom meeting has ended. Thank you for choosing Zoom!” That means – now get this – the BBC apparently had neglected to purchase an unlimited professional license for Zoom, still using the limited free version, and so live on national television their interview ran out of time and rather unceremoniously shut down. How embarrassing.
One of the major themes that Peter has focused on in this letter has to do with the way we think about time. On the one hand, he has insisted, hasn’t he, that the time is short. Do not presume upon God. The day of the Lord will come unexpectedly, he says, “like a thief,” while we are asleep and unsuspecting in the middle of the night – verse 10. Or we might say with the BBC, the end will come like a free Zoom session abruptly interrupting us in the middle of a sentence one day. And yet on the other hand, Peter has also has to answer the false teachers who were troubling the churches. They were pointing out Jesus hasn’t returned and He apparently has not kept His promise as quickly at least as they expected that He would. “Where is the promise of His coming?” remember, they were saying. “Maybe He’s not coming back at all.” And so as we saw back in verse 9, Peter pointed to the patience of God. “The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish.”
And now, as Peter wraps up his letter, he returns to that theme once again – important themes are worth repeating, after all – and so here by way of reminder – reminders being another major theme of Peter’s letter – here he is teaching us one more time about how we should think about time itself. You’ll see it in verse 15 if you look there with me please. Verse 15, Peter says, “Count the patience of our Lord as salvation.” So every day that Jesus does not come back proclaims the Lord’s patience with us. And Peter is anxious that we make use of that patience while we still can. You need to count it as salvation, he tells us. Grasp for yourself the salvation provided while there is a window still open for it. God’s patience is all in service of salvation. He wants to save sinners. He does not wish that any should perish.
So do not count the Lord’s patience as an opportunity to live however you please. Do not count the Lord’s patience as a window for selfish indulgence. Do not count the Lord’s patience as a space for you in which to indulge your sin. Do not conclude from the fact that judgment has not yet come that judgment never will come. No, Peter says you must count the Lord’s patience as salvation. Evaluate it correctly. Understand the time. See what’s really going on. God is restraining His righteous wrath in order to offer you mercy. So do not presume upon His patience and trample underfoot His grace. Repent and believe in Jesus, because one day, you know, the Zoom session is going to end, the thief is going to come, the day of the Lord will arrive, and judgment without mercy will fall.
Such an important issue to face honestly, isn’t it? Have you faced it honestly? How do you think about time? Is it time to play? Is it time to indulge? Is it “me” time? No, here’s how to think about time. Every passing moment displays the patience of the Lord. He is so patient with you, offering salvation to the world through faith in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. So what will you do with the time available to you, I wonder. Can you say today that you are ready for whenever the Zoom session happens? Whenever the thief comes? Whenever the day of the Lord arrives? Or have you been putting it off, you know – running away, hiding from Jesus, hiding from your own accusing conscience, thinking, “There’s plenty of time yet. No need to get serious about the Christian Gospel quite yet.” That is a terribly dangerous assumption to make. Peter’s counsel is to count the patience of the Lord as salvation. Time is shorter than you think. Today, today, the Lord Jesus in His great patience offers you mercy. Come and take it! One day the offer will end, you know, and so accept His offer while there is still time. How you think about time. How do you think about time?
How to Think about the Bible
Then secondly, look at verses 15 and 16 and notice what Peter says about how to think about the Bible. “Count the patience of the Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” So apparently, many of Peter’s readers have read Paul as well. There is some speculation amongst the scholars that the reason Peter brings up Paul at all at this point is because some of the false teachers were claiming their position was really Paul’s position. And so if Peter objects to them, it’s really a conflict that Peter has with the apostle Paul. There is a division amongst the apostles themselves. Peter is the one who is out of step with Paul.
But look at how Peter speaks about Paul. He is, he says, “my beloved brother.” Peter loves Paul. He counts him his brother, a friend, a fellow worker in the Lord’s cause. And that unity is not merely relational, interpersonal affection. It is profoundly theological and convictional, isn’t it? “We teach the same things,” he’s saying. “We are in fact in lockstep together. What I’m asking you to do, what I’m asking you to think about time, about Scripture, about life, it all aligns perfectly with Paul’s teaching on these same matters. Count the patience of the Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you.” And so Peter and Paul are in lockstep.
But as Peter makes that claim, did you see how he characterized Paul’s letters? They were written, verse 15, “according to the wisdom given him.” That is to say, they were not the products of his own fevered imagination. The wisdom they display comes from outside of himself. It comes from God. It was given. It’s not natural. Peter is claiming for Paul, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, do you see, which is why at the end of this verse Peter lumps Paul’s letters in – look at this – with the other Scriptures. That’s extraordinary. Such an important statement to see. The false teachers distort Paul “as they do the other Scriptures.” Peter is referring there to the Old Testament. And so for Peter – get this clear in your minds – for Peter, Paul’s letters have the same status as Moses’ writings as they do the other Scriptures equal to the Old Testament, precisely because just like Moses, just like Isaiah, just like David, like the writers of the Old Testament, Paul was writing under wisdom that was given. That is to say, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
Of course in a note that drips with more irony than I suspect Peter intended, Peter is also quick, isn’t he, to point out that divine inspiration does not mean that everything in Paul’s writing is equally easy to understand. There are some things in them, he says, that are hard to understand. That’s because some things are hard in themselves to comprehend by virtue of inherent complexity or mystery. Or it’s because some things are hard to articulate by virtue of our finitude and our limited vocabulary. It’s all true enough, although having reached the end of Peter’s writing in the New Testament it’s hard not to want to say as Peter uses Paul to illustrate how some Biblical authors are difficult to understand, that this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Haven’t we seen plenty of difficult places in Peter as well as in Paul? None of us can see our own flaws as clearly as we can see them in others, and Peter is no exception.
All of that said, the point itself that Peter is making is really very important. We confess “claritas Scripturae” – the doctrine of the clarity of Scripture – but we do not mean by that to say that everything in the Bible is equally easy to understand. Instead, listen to the way the first chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith paragraph seven puts it. I think this gets at the point brilliantly with marvelous balance. “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all. Yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned but the unlearned, in a due use of ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” The Bible is the wisdom of God to us, but it calls us by its complexity and its profundity as well as by its simplicity and its clarity to think, to engage deeply for ourselves with the text. It’s not just baby food, you know, like a jar of butternut squash puree – without any effort you can digest it. Some parts of Scripture require a mature palate. They require deep thinking and careful study. And God has set it up that way; He’s done it that way purposefully in His manifold wisdom so that we grow and we mature. It stretches us, that by the diligent exercise of our minds under the guidance and illumination of the Holy Spirit, in understanding the truth, the truth might begin to reconfigure our minds and rewire not just what we think but how we think.
In an age of instant information and silly memes and 280 character tweets, God has given us a collection of 66 ancient books that challenge us and stimulate us and sometimes defeat us and defy us and baffle us because He wants us to move from baby food to something more substantial so that we can grow. So some things in Paul, and I dare say in Peter too, are difficult to understand, and yet those things that are necessary to be believed for salvation are plain and clear and unambiguous so that everyone and anyone can understand them and be saved. “The Bible,” as someone famously put it somewhere, “is shallow enough for an infant to paddle in and deep enough for an elephant to swim in.” You can grasp its central message instantly and yet spend your whole life plumbing its depths and never fathom it all.
But there is a warning that we need to pay attention to at this point, isn’t there? Do you see it in verse 16? Look at verse 16. Precisely because some parts of the Bible can be hard to understand, false teachers, whom Peter characterizes, notice, as “ignorant and unstable,” false teachers will cease upon those complexities and twist the meaning of the Word of God in service of their own agenda. In other words, because these men do not have a basic grasp of the Gospel, they are ignorant, and they do not possess a godly character, they are unstable. When they encounter hard passages in the Bible they see an opportunity to promote ideas they have imposed upon the text rather than teach what they have found in the text. And look, whenever you are listening to the Bible being taught, that needs to be your first question, your starting principle. “Is the teaching I am hearing explaining what Paul or Isaiah or Moses or Peter put into the text when they wrote it? Or is it, rather, what the preacher or the Sunday school teacher or the Bible study leader is imposing upon the text? Are they finding what they want to find rather than what God has put there for us to find?” Such an important question because the path to spiritual disaster is paved with impositions upon the text of Scripture. But the sure highway to holiness and happiness lies in finding what God, through the authors of the Bible, has put in His Word for us to find and embracing it in faith.
So let’s be asking ourselves, “How do I approach the Bible? Do I give up when I bump into hard texts? Do I impose what I want to find upon the text and then claim for my opinion God’s inspiration? Or do I wrestle with the text praying for light from the Lord, for the help of His Spirit who inspired the Word, comparing harder passages in the Scriptures with easier passages that deal with the same subject that I might find light from the Scriptures themselves; consulting the teaching of the church on these passages from across the ages, until by the grace of God I grasp the truth, and more importantly, the truth begins to get ahold of me?” How we think about time. How we think about the Bible. Are you lazy with the Scriptures? You will not grow if you spend your days only eating butternut squash puree, you know. God wants you to develop a taste for a mature diet.
How to Think about Life
And finally, look at verses 17 and 18. Here’s how we’re to think about life – what it’s for, what our basic game plan ought to be. Look at the text, verse 17 and 18. Negatively, first of all, Peter says, since you’ve been forewarned, now that you know what to look for, now that you can spot someone mishandling the Scripture, “take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and so lose your own stability.” That’s what happens when you’re swept away with false teachers and their errors. We lose our own stability. Peter has already said the false teachers are characterized by ignorance and instability, and so it’s no surprise that if we follow them they’ll make us unstable too. And just to be clear, by “unstable,” Peter does not mean psychologically unstable. He means spiritually and ethically unstable. We might say we become vulnerable to a fall, unstable, when error gets a grip on us. So take precautions. That’s Peter’s advice.
And the best defense, the best precaution against error is what? It’s the truth! The best defense against error is the truth. And so he says positively in verse 18, “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” These two always go together, don’t they – growing in grace, growing up, and growing in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; putting down roots. So know Him better. That is Peter’s counsel. Stick close to Him. Study all the Scriptures can teach you about Jesus. Is He, I wonder, the grand object of your fascination? Is He? Do you love to learn about Jesus or do you think you already know all you need to know about Him? What a terrible conclusion to reach – “I know all I need to know about Jesus.” I wonder if you wife or your husband would feel the same way if you said that of them. Isn’t the mark of a marriage that’s growing and healthy that you are still learning about one another and discovering wonders in each other?
How can you say you love the Lord Jesus but still be indifferent to knowing Him better? You never can exhaust the mysteries of His person and His work, His equality with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the unity of the blessed Trinity, the union of His two natures – He is God and man in one person without confusion or mixture, separation or division. His sinlessness as a man; His learning obedience by the things that He suffered. His representative work as our second Adam, the efficacy of His sufferings and death; the glory of His resurrection, His ascension, His heavenly session at the Father’s right hand. He is now the exalted Lord before whom angels and saints bow in adoration. His present rule over all things. He is coming again to judge the living and the dead at the end of the age and a thousand other details and dimensions of who He is and what He has done all remain to be explored, to lose yourself in till your knees buckle and you cry out in adoration and wonder and praise. There are glories in Jesus to lose yourself in. You will never exhaust them. Don’t ever say, don’t ever say, “I know enough of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
And Peter says, as you do, as you get to know Him, you will grow; you will grow in grace. And the net effect, verse 18, will be that all the glory will be His, “both now and to the end of eternity, to the day of eternity. Amen.” And that, ultimately, is Peter’s real agenda here, isn’t it – his real objective for our lives. This is what he wants. He wants you to see what your life is really for. It is for knowing Jesus and growing in grace so that He might have all the honor and all the praise and all the glory, now and always and forever.
So here’s a suggestion. When you wake up each morning, before you get out of bed, before you’ve opened your eyes, tell yourself why you are alive. “I am alive today to bring glory to Jesus Christ. God has given me another day. My heart continues to beat, I draw breath one more day, to bring glory to Jesus Christ.” And then pray, “Lord, give me the help of the Holy Spirit to fulfill my purpose.” Start your day, would you, by orienting yourself toward Jesus. He’s the pole star. He is True North by which you must navigate your way through every day. He is the target at which to take aim every day. Jesus, His glory – not personal ambition, not making partner, not sealing the deal, not doing well in the exam, not impressing that boy or attracting that girl – your priority, your primary business every day, today and tomorrow and into eternity, is to glorify Jesus Christ. That’s what you are for. God has made us for this end and we will never find freedom, never feel that basic rightness about our lives for which we are all seeking till we fulfill our purpose. And our purpose is not to be made much of, but to make much of Jesus Christ.
How do you think about time? Is it yours to play with since you have so very much of it? Or will you begin here today to see that the patience of our Lord offers you salvation? And won’t you take His offer freely and come trust in Jesus? And how do you think about the Bible? For sure, there are parts of it that are hard to understand, but won’t you stick with it, wrestle with it, work at it? The more you get into the Word, the more the Word gets into you and the more like Jesus you become. And how do you think about your life? What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you for? What is the overriding and dominant ambition of your heart? Are you for you? No, God has made us for Himself and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Him. Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. You are for Jesus Christ, and may He give you the help of His Spirit to fulfill your purpose at last.
Let’s pray together.
O Lord, we confess to You how we have presumed upon Your patience and saw time as our own plaything for the indulgence of our pleasures. We’ve not gotten serious about You. We’ve used You to salve our consciences while we indulge our sin. Please forgive us. We confess how we have neglected Your Word. Every time we are confronted by a difficult passage we give up and turn to something easy. The Scriptures lie closed far too often on our shelves. We do not know them, and so they don’t really have a hold upon the way we think as they ought. Please, O Lord, have mercy on us. And we confess that we have lived our lives too much in pursuit of our own glory. We know that You have made us for Yourself to be to the praise of Your glory, and so as we bow before You in renewed repentance, we ask, O God, for the mercy of Jesus Christ and for grace to begin today at last, bending our knees to Him as Savior and Lord, to fulfill our true design that all praise might be Yours, in Jesus’ name. Amen.