2 Peter 3 – The End of Time: Part 2 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Dear friends, this is now my second letter to you. I have written both of them as reminders to stimulate you to wholesome thinking. I want you to recall the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets and the command given by our Lord and Saviour through your apostles.

2 Peter 3:1-2

Transcript

Good morning. As you head into this day, we want to just take a minute and open up the Bible and say to God, what do you have to say to me personally today? I love how God speaks into my life personally at the same time as He’s speaking to other people around me in a different way, sometimes through the same passage or the same Bible teaching.

God Himself is alive. He’s in your life, and He wants to speak to you. That’s why we open the Bible every day, because God speaks to us through His Word, the Bible, and it’s not just esoteric truths that live in some theology book somewhere. The Bible is so full of such practical things that shape our lives in meaningful ways.

So as we start this day, just come with an attitude of prayer that says, God, I’m listening. What do you have to say to me?

We’re going through the 3rd chapter of the book of 2 Peter in the New Testament of the Bible today.

And we started off yesterday with the beginning of this chapter where Peter says, I just want to remind you of some things you already know. Things that have been written by the prophets in the Old Testament, things that Jesus has said. He goes on to say –

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Know this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires.

Well, we certainly see that today, don’t we? There’s plenty of people both in the news and in academia, but also people we know personally who are just scoffers, they’re sceptics, and they don’t want God in their lives, they just want to follow their own sinful desires in life and say it’s OK, anybody can do whatever they feel like doing.

They will say Peter says, Where is the promise of Jesus coming?

I mean, Christians talk about the fact that Jesus is going to return one day. Well, where is that?

He goes on, for this is still quoting the people, saying, Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. It’s all just keeping on going.

They deliberately overlook this fact that the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the Word of God. And that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished in the great flood that God sent.

But by the same word as God used to both create this world and to flood it with water, by that same word, the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire. Being kept until the day of judgement and destruction of the ungodly.

So sceptics are there. There’ll always be sceptics around, and they’ll say, Where is the promise that Jesus is coming back? Is God really involved in this world? Isn’t everything just going on by its natural laws, just as it has since the beginning, and it’s gonna keep on going.

And Peter says they’re missing out on something really important. They’re deliberately overlooking. God is involved in this world. He already destroyed it once with the flood, and He’s going to destroy it in the future with fire. There will be a day of judgement and destruction of the ungodly.

If you’re living for God, and you look at the people who seem to be leaving God out of their lives and you look at their secular lives and you think, oh, that actually really looks fun to be able to just pursue pleasure and gratifying my own desires when I want.

Don’t forget.

Things are not over yet. God is real.

There is a day when he’s going to bring this world to a close, and there will be a day of judgement, and the ungodly in that day will wish that they had lived for God.

I’m John North.

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