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 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. (2 Peter 3:14-16)

Our faculties of perception need to be trained. I’ve been reminded of this over the past few years as I’ve attempted to teach our boys how to ride their bikes. Sure enough, my own driving instructor back when I was 15 said the same thing I find myself saying now. “Your hands will go where your head goes.” In driving, of course, you need to learn to cut this connection so that you can check your blind spots without running someone off the road. But for teaching kids to bike it is enough simply to say: “keep looking forward! Keep your eyes on the path!”

Peter used the word for this phrase “looking forward” twice in yesterday’s passage and again in the beginning of today’s. From what Peter has earlier said about false teachers—it seems that not everyone was “looking forward” to Jesus coming again. Instead, they were looking around with greed and lust at all the material satisfactions they could enjoy in this life. Jesus didn’t seem to be coming anytime soon, so they contented themselves with living in the moment, rather than keeping eyes fixed on the Christ who stood ever before them.

This remains an easy distraction for us all. Jesus didn’t come during our parent’s lifetime, after all. Nor in that of our grandparents nor any of the hundreds of years before them. It is easy therefore to lose sight of the path—the direction that history flows. It is easy to believe that the world we see is all there is. And if that’s the case—then we need to secure our own lives and resources, our own pleasures and purposes. If there is nothing beyond this world then the meaning of this life has to be something we forge in the fires of our own authentic refinements. Many people—Christian and otherwise—do exactly this. But are they looking forward? Are we?

Peter has spent his letter addressing, accusing, and correcting this at times malicious diversion. He has thumped the same theme over and over. The scriptures are reliable. Jesus is coming again. And judgement comes with him: setting things right, making things whole, and ensuring justice and righteousness flow. Remember, remember, remember and do not forget. Keep looking forward! Keep your eyes on the path!

Finally here at the end now, Peter begins to assume that we’ve heard him. “Since you are looking forward” he says, “peddle toward the prize.” At the beginning of the letter, we heard about the “everything” gifts God had given to equip us for the journey of living out his calling. We were told then to add virtues to our faith. Now Peter wraps it up with the encouragement to reconcile the living of our lives with the one who stands before us. That “author and perfector of our faith” that the writer of Hebrews tells us to “fix our eyes on.” “Since you are looking forward,” Peter writes, “make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him,” that is—with the one we’re looking to.

So where are your eyes? Where your eyes go, your hands and energies in this life will go too. Keep looking forward, and let the vision of Jesus shape your living.

As you journey on, go with the blessing of God:

Grace and peace to you many times over as you deepen in your experience with God and Jesus, our Master. Grow in the grace and understanding of our Master and Savior, Jesus Christ. Glory to the Master, now and forever! Amen! (2 Peter 1:2; 3:18 MSG).

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. 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. 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 destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. (2 Peter 3:11-13)

A few things about “the end” bear mention here: the surprise, the sanctification, and the steadfastness it calls us to.

First, the surprise. God may indeed be patiently waiting for his grace to have its impact before the day of Christ’s appearing and the time of judgement arrives. Yet when that day finally does arrive—it will come suddenly! Throughout the Bible this theme is repeated—by Jesus particularly. “Keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour” he says in Matthew 25 (v.13).

Secondly though, as I alluded to yesterday, we have this tendency to view judgement in a negative way. As a cruel, angry god with poor emotional self-regulation coming to wreak vengeance over petty grievances. That is never the Biblical picture though. Firstly—God is a Spirit. The Bible condescends to our comprehension when it makes emotional references to God, so we must understand that what we have in God is both a being beyond our comprehension, and also one who holds all things in perfection. Aristotle once said: “Anybody can become angry—that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.” Exactly. But God can do those things. In God—a perfect love, a perfect knowledge, a perfect justice, and a perfect intervention are all held together.

So what we ought rather expect in judgement is what marginalized and oppressed folks the world over have long longed for—like the widow of Jesus’ parable facing down the unjust judge, day-in and day-out demanding justice—they want justice. They want to be saved from those who have unjustly stolen, lied, cheated, and used violence, manipulation, and power against them, but also to see that those wrongs get righted. Judgement may be distasteful for us who have grown up in peace and plenty. But for those who have suffered under dictators and fled in fear of their lives—the notion that a God of justice might see their plight, save them from it, and see it redressed is a comfort and a grace.

This second word then is “sanctification.” God comes with fires of judgement not like a toddler toward an ant hill—to indiscriminately destroy—but to refine, to cleanse, to purify and burn off all impurities and burn away all chaff such that what remains is just, true, right, and beautiful. The fires of judgement burn, not only so that justice might be done in human lives and communities, but also so that every trace of sin and evil might be done away with. The “creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” is the way Paul says it in Romans 8 (v.21).

So, the third word: be steadfast. Continue to live congruently with this promise God has given. The false teachers understood God’s delay in coming as God being late. And if God didn’t care to honour his commitments, why should we honour ours? One could also imagine a less rebellious scenario. God has forgotten about us and so slowly we drift off to sleep too, forgetting about him. Either way—by rebellion or sleepy forgetfulness—the delay can lull us to a false sense of security that nothing’s coming down the tracks.

Not so, says Peter. He echoes again what the scriptures everywhere declare: God is coming suddenly to sanctify—so be steadfast! Remember and do not forget! More on what that means tomorrow.

As you journey on, go with the blessing of God:

Grace and peace to you many times over as you deepen in your experience with God and Jesus, our Master. Grow in the grace and understanding of our Master and Savior, Jesus Christ. Glory to the Master, now and forever! Amen! (2 Peter 1:2; 3:18 MSG).

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.” 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. 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 judgment 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. (2 Peter 3:3-9)

Many great tales in our world are woven of the stuff that 2 Peter references. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is one of them. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Galadriel speaks of the ring of power, and says: “some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.”

Tolkien speaks through Galadriel here of something quite commonplace. Us human folk can live no where else but in the present moment we inhabit. So events of the distant past and promises given for the future can equally pass from history, to legend, to myth, to becoming lost entirely.

This is what Peter confronts. The line between remembering and forgetting is very thin indeed. All it takes is a few people to question the narrative, to buck the norms, to “reinterpret” things according to their liking for the foundation underneath our feet to unravel. In nothing more than the serpent’s words from Eden, whole worlds of meaning and cohesion can be undone. A wee seed of doubt: “did God really say…?” That’s all it takes.

The serpent’s voice echoes in the words of the scoffers (and in the words of Morgoth and Sauron in Tolkien’s world). The lie enters when Peter’s scoffers ask “where is this ‘coming’ [Jesus] promised?” It is an argument from silence, or an ad hominem attack against God’s faithfulness—logical fallacies we are warned not to entertain.

Peter responds that these scoffers have made a deliberate choice to forget the scriptures and the Word of God that created the world, spoke in judgement and in redemption in the days of Noah, and that has decreed an end to history when all will be set right and made well in the cleansing and justice-bringing of God.

Peter invites us to make a different choice: to deliberately choose to remember what we have received in the scriptures instead of forgetting it. God is still faithful to his promises. Jesus will come again.

One other doubt is addressed here too though. We tend to find God’s judgement too indecent and, well, “judgemental” for modern consumption. Yet don’t all our most satisfying stories and movies still end with a “putting things right” that resolves the narrative tension? And when they don’t—like in the movie Marriage Story that matches our modern sensibilities of “no resolution please”—we’re left with nothing more than a discordant, restless malaise. Yuck.

Peter writes to remind us both that the scriptures are a reliable witnesses to His-story (God’s), but also that this God in whom we have believed is a Good God. His desire in judgement is not to punish, but in his patient, merciful forbearance to restore all people to himself. The narrative tension will be resolved to justice, but God is willing to wait long years and ages for a positive resolution. Will we wait as patiently as God, in hope and trust that the one who began this work will see it through? Peter invites us to, even as he sends us out with a blessing.

Grace and peace to you many times over as you deepen in your experience with God and Jesus, our Master. Grow in the grace and understanding of our Master and Savior, Jesus Christ. Glory to the Master, now and forever! Amen! (2 Peter 1:2; 3:18 MSG).