But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.
2 Peter 3:13 (NIV)
Where Righteousness Lives
But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. Peter has been writing about fire. The heavens disappear with a roar, the elements are destroyed, and the earth and everything done in it is laid bare.
Since everything will be destroyed in this way, he asks, what kind of people ought you to be? He answers his own question. You ought to live holy and godly lives, as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. The answer is a way of living.
He names the new world by who lives in it. Peter says nothing about the streets or the light or the weather. Righteousness lives in that world and keeps an address there, and the way things get done is simply the way they get done, ordinary and unremarkable, the way the floor is level in a house built by someone who cared.
Holy and godly reads like nothing at all until you try an afternoon of it at work. Doing the right thing here takes deciding, usually more than once before lunch, and it costs the person doing it something they wanted. The looking forward comes with an instruction attached to it. Make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. Every effort means this afternoon, and then the next one.
The waiting has run long, and Peter gives a reason for the length. He is patient, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. The delay is room held open for people who haven’t come in yet, and everyone already waiting walked through on those same terms.
Two women who share a shift in a men’s tailor shop can tell how the afternoon is going by the radio. If it’s on at four, the work is going fine. If one of them reaches over and kills it, there is a suit that has to be at a funeral on Saturday and the sleeves are wrong.
They will hem what is in front of them until six. On Saturday a man will stand at a graveside in a suit that fits him, and neither woman will be there to see him in it. That’s a long way from a new earth, and it’s pointed at one.
A Prayer to Remember
Keep me at the work in front of me while I wait for a world I have not seen. Make the right thing ordinary in my hands this week, in the places where nobody is checking on me. And when the waiting looks like nothing happening at all, remind me that the door is being held open for somebody I have not met.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
