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.”
2 Peter 3:3-4 (NIV)
The Question Written Ahead
Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come. Peter puts that down as a forecast, and then he writes out what those people will say, in their own wording: “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.”
Their argument holds up better than anyone would like. Whoever waits long enough gathers the same evidence: the people who were waiting died, and the mornings kept coming. Peter calls them scoffers, following their own evil desires, and he leaves every syllable of their sentence where it stands.
His answer goes at their memory. They deliberately forget, he says, that long ago the heavens came into being by God’s word and the earth was formed out of water and by water, and that the world of that time was deluged and destroyed by those same waters. Then he moves to time itself, where with the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.
That question belongs to more people than the scoffers. Anyone who has waited on God through a long enough stretch has thought it in gentler words and has been ashamed of thinking it. Peter puts the weight on the word deliberately. The scoffers forget on purpose. A tired believer thinks the same sentence and then goes back to remembering what God has already done.
He called these people dear friends, and he wrote out for them, ahead of time, the worst question anyone would ever put to them. I think he wanted them to meet it on a page before they met it in a person.
A Prayer to Remember
Give me patience that outlasts my own lifetime, and give it to me on the days when waiting looks like nothing happening at all. I have thought the same thing the scoffers say, in a quieter voice, more than once. You have not forgotten what you promised, and you are not late.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
