God’s promise is not slow
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2011 · 19 June 2011
So far we have seen an emotional argument, a moral argument, and an intellectual argument from these false teachers. They deny what Jesus, Paul and Peter and what everybody else in the Scripture said about His return. In fact, they tell us that those verses are not inspired by God.
Now let's look at the argument of the saints for the Second Coming. We've seen the scoffer’s argument against it, now let's see the argument of the saints. These are just absolutely marvelous as Peter responds to the argument of the scoffers.
Now Peter's going to give us several arguments. Argument number one is the argument from Scripture. For this we look at the opening of 2 Peter 3 :1- 2. As he starts to get into the subject, he says, "This is now, beloved, the second letter I am writing to you in which I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder."
Look, he says, I want to stimulate that new mind and I want to stimulate the truth that you already know so that your sanctified reason and your spiritual discernment will be able to understand false doctrine and give a proper rebuttal to it.
Verse 2, "You should remember the words spoken beforehand by the holy prophets." That is a reference, to the Old Testament. The Holy Spirit inspired Old Testament had much to say about final judgment when scoffers come along.
In 2 Peter 1:20, 21 he talks about the Old Testament. He says no prophecy of Scripture, that is the Old Testament, is a matter of one's own interpretation, 21for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.
But that's not all. Go back to 2 Peter 3:2 and see what else Peter says. Remember not only the words spoken beforehand by the holy prophets, but “remember also the commandment of the Lord and Savior spoken by your apostles.” What's that? That's the New Testament.
There are 27 books in the New Testament, 23 of the 27 refer to the Lord's return explicitly. One which doesn't explicitly speak of the Second Coming is Galatians but it implies the Second Coming. Galatians 1:4 says that Christ gave Himself for our sins that He might deliver us out of this present evil age. That implies the Rapture and our deliverance.
There are 260 chapters in the New Testament and there are 300 references to the Second Coming. The New Testament is replete with warnings about judgment, information about the Lord coming to gather His own, teaching about the fact that He will judge the wicked, establish His Kingdom and bring in eternal righteousness.
God says the purpose of His coming is to complete the salvation of the saints, to be glorified in the saints, to be admired by the saints, to bring delight to hidden things of darkness, to judge, to reign and to destroy. That's only the first argument, there are three more.
Peter says the second argument for the Second Coming is from history. 2 Peter 3:5-6 says, “5For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, 6by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.” Did you know that the earth was formed out of water and by water?
So when the heavens existed long ago, spoken into existence by the Word of God, at the same time the earth was formed from some kind of watery mass. Genesis 1:1 says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Peter said God spoke the heavens into existence and the earth was formed out of some watery mass.
If you study carefully the six days of creation, for the better part of the first three days He gives the form, and then He starts to create the creatures starting at the end of day three and moving to day six to fill up the void. So it starts out as formless.
So God gives it form, look again at Genesis1: 2, "And darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters." Now we find out that this water now has a surface. If it has a surface it must have a shape. God pulled it into a sphere.
Then in verse 3, God said, "Let there be light, and there was light," and all of a sudden there existed light. There weren't any bodies, there weren't any stars, there wasn't any sun, there wasn't any moon, there was just light. And all of the spectrum, all of the rays that go across the whole spectrum of light were created.
So in Gen.1:6, "And God said let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." So there was a watery mass and then there was an expanse of space, and then there was water like a canopy surrounding it. God just spoke the heavens into existence in a couple of days.
But He wasn't done. Verse 9, "Then God said, 'Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place and let the dry land appear." And dry land is injected into the watery mass and all of a sudden it starts to rise up everywhere and the water gets collected into rivers and lakes and seas. And the earth begins to take shape.
And you know what God said about it in verse 10, "It's good." It was better than good. It was a perfect place for man to live. He had a canopy shelter all around the earth which completely blocked the sun's ultra-violet rays totally, a perfect environment. And man lived in that world of long ago.
How perfect was the world? Read Genesis 5 and just look at how long everybody lived. The average length of a person's life on that list is 900 years plus. Why? Because there was no direct sunlight, but there was a mist that watered the ground, it says that also about the Garden of Eden. It filtered all the ultra-violet damaging rays of the sun and beautifully watered the earth with dew, a perfect environment.
And in the next three days God filled up the emptiness with plants and animals, fish and man. But even in that perfect environment man fell into sin and God looks at the world in Genesis 6:5 and saw that the wickedness of man was great and every intent of his heart was only evil continually, and God was sorry He created the whole thing.
And God said I'm going to use the same thing that I created it from to destroy it. What is it? Water. And so it says in 2 Peter 3:5-6, “For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, 6 by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.”
Peter says, "Through which the world that then existed perished." He's not talking about the physical world; he's talking about the order of the earth, that is a canopy above, the water separated below, the heavens in the middle, long life, all of the dew that waters the ground, the tremendous ability of the earth like in a greenhouse to grow everything and to grow it very large.
And by the way, that's where the dinosaurs came from. They came from the pre-flood era and they flourished and grew so large. That old order, that old canopy order, that old system of life was totally flooded by water.
How did God do it? Well there's so much water everywhere, Genesis 7:11 says, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life in the second month on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open and the flood gates of the sky were opened."
The canopy broke up and the earth, the springs and the fountains and the sources of water burst and water came roaring out of the center of the earth. And water came torrentially falling from the sky. Genesis 7:22 tells us of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life died.
It was a worldwide flood because there was a canopy that surrounded the whole world. Genesis 8:2, "The fountains of the deep, the flood gates of the sky at the end were closed when it ended." God used the water below, to burst forth, and God sent the water from above crashing down upon the earth. Water came from everywhere. And this was judgment. The whole world was destroyed.
Don't say all things continue as they have from the very beginning. No they haven't. We're not into uniformitarian evolution. God created all this in six days, and then God in a moment in time destroyed the whole heavens and earth that was.
We now live, my brothers and sisters, in the second heaven and earth. It's a different system. Nobody lives to be 900 plus or anywhere near that. The Bible says that we are in that second heaven and earth, and we're waiting for the new heaven and earth number three.
By the way, it should be a curiosity to you to know that as archaeologists study the world and as those who study ancient culture study the world, they find the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians all have creation stories that have a primeval ocean as the element out of which the universe originated.
If you throw a leaf in your backyard, for illustration's sake, how long does it take for it to become a fossil? What? It never becomes a fossil. If you throw a leaf in your backyard and some day a massive earthquake comes, your backyard splits and slams back together with great pressure, you might have a fossil.
Catastrophe, not uniformity explains fossil records, strata. So these false teachers refuse to face true history. They make up their own history without divine intervention so they can live like they want to live. Things have not continued as they were. There was devastating total judgment on the whole world in the past and there will be also total judgment in the future.
Look at 2 Peter 3:7, "The present heaven and earth are by His Word reserved for fire," not water. Remember the rainbow. What did the rainbow signify? God will never destroy the world again by water. So this time it's being reserved to be destroyed by fire, see the rest of verse 7, "Kept for the judgment, the day of judgment, and the destruction of ungodly men."
This world is waiting the destruction of fire. And when you read about the future judgment of the world, we very often read about fire. In Isaiah 13 it says, "When the final Babylon is destroyed it will be destroyed as were Sodom and Gomorrah." How were they destroyed? By fire and brimstone.
The prophet Isaiah, who had so much to say about judgment and so much to instruct us, says in 66:15, "For behold the Lord will come in fire and His chariots like the whirlwind to render His anger with fury and His rebuke with flames of fire,"
Again in Malachi 4:1 fire; Micah 1:4 fire; Daniel 7:9, 10 fire; Matthew 3:11, 12 fire, John the Baptist said He's coming back with fire. 2 Thessalonians 1: 7, 8 is so graphic, "When Jesus comes He'll be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire."
When God flooded the world He spared the godly, how many were there? Eight...Noah, his wife, three sons and their wives. God has a book, Malachi says, and He writes the names of those who belong to Him in it. And when He comes in judgment by fire, it's going to be for the ungodly, not for us.
So when this whole world goes up in smoke, this whole universe is burned to a crisp, we're not going to be around. We will be delivered out before the day of the Lord judgment ever hits. That judgment, by the way, will destroy this universe and out of it will be born the new heavens and the new earth.
Look at 2 Peter 3:12-13 for a moment, "The heavens are going to be destroyed by burning, the elements are going to melt with intense heat, 13 Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells."
There's the third argument I need to give you briefly, that's the argument from eternity. We've seen the argument from Scripture, the argument from history, and now the argument from eternity. Verse 8, "But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as if a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day."
He's quoting Psalm 90: 4. Peter says, "Why don't you look at it from God's side? From your viewpoint it looks like a long time, from His viewpoint, no." You can't confine God to your schedule. What he is indicating there is some of these Christians have been sucked in to the false teacher’s unbelief.
They say that God never does anything because He's impotent or indifferent and the delay is so long that maybe He can't act and maybe He won't act. God is looking at it in a totally different way. For you it's been two thousand years and that is a long time, for God it's like a couple of days, that's all.
One last argument based on the character of God. Peter says the certainty of the coming of Christ can be argued from Scripture, from history, from eternity's view, and fourthly, from the character of God. 2 Peter 3:9. "The Lord is not slow about His promise as some count slowness but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance."
Do you know why there's the delay? It's not because the Lord is slow about His promise. It's not because He's unfaithful to His Word. But the reason He's delaying is not impotence and indifference, the reason He's delaying is patience for people to repent.
God is long suffering, which means He is very patient. You remember 1 Peter 3:20 wrote about the patience of God in the days of Noah, how long did it take Noah to build the boat? One hundred and twenty years and the whole time he preached the righteousness of God.
In 2 Peter 3:15, see what he says? "The patience of our Lord leads to salvation." It's because He doesn't want anyone to perish, but He wants all to come to repentance that He waits. Acts 1:8 says, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
He is waiting for you, Christians, to go to your neighbors in Colorado and even to the Unreached People Groups all over the world to proclaim the gospel of Christ.