God's Patience

God’s Patience
2 Peter 3.11-18
Early Christian Letters for Everyone


11Since everything is going to dissolve in this way, what sort of people should you be? You should live lives that are holy and godly, 12as you look for God’s day to appear, and indeed hurry it on its way – the day because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the elements will melt with heat. 13But we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth, in which justice will be at home. That is what he has promised.
14So, my dear family, as you wait for these things, be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, in peace. 15And when our Lord waits patiently to act, see that for what it is – salvation! Our beloved brother Paul has written to you about all this, according to the wisdom that has been given him, 16speaking about these things as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them which are difficult to understand. Untaught and unstable people twist his words to their own destruction, as they do with the other scriptures.
17But as for you, my dear family, be on your guard, since you have been warned in advance. That way you won’t be led astray through the error of lawless people and fall away from your own solid grounding. 18Instead, grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and saviour Jesus the Messiah. To him be glory both now and in the day when God’s new age dawns.
Amen.


We were looking through an old photograph album one evening, identifying family members as they were fifty years ago. Can he really have had a moustache like that? Was she really wearing that kind of dress? Yes: he did, and she was. It’s fascinating, especially when you pick out resemblances with the next generation and the one after that.

But in one picture there was a different sort of surprise. There was someone we all recognized – but he wasn’t part of the family at all! He didn’t live anywhere near them. We knew of him because, by a much later marriage, he had come into the family as a kind of honorary uncle. But what was he doing there back then?

The answer was quite mundane; he was staying with a friend nearby, and together they had come over for a quick visit. Just a coincidence. But I thought of this sudden surprising appearance as I was pondering Peter’s sudden reference to someone we haven’t been thinking about at all: St Paul! What is he doing here in verse 15, making as it were a guest appearance on someone else’s show?

The answer is that, by the time this letter was written, Paul’s letters had already been circulating for some while in many of the churches, both in Turkey and Greece (where all of Paul’s letters except Romans were addressed), and possibly further afield as well. Many early Christians were energetic travellers, and there is every indication that texts – letters, gospels and so on – were copied, taken from place to place, and studied. And what Peter is saying here fits closely with a theme which, though not all readers of Paul now realize it, is in fact very important in his writings as well. We have already spoken of the patience to which we are called: patience in our dealings with one another, patience with God as we wait for the day of the Lord. Now we must consider God’s own patience.

This is, after all, the right way round. We might present a somewhat comical sight, stamping our little feet with impatience while the creator and ruler of the universe calmly goes about his own business, knowing infinitely more than we do about how to run his world. No: the proper perspective is to regard anything that looks to us like ‘delay’ as an indication not that we have to be patient with God, but that God is having to be patient with us.

Which is just as well. If God were to foreclose on the world, and on ourselves, straight away, what would happen? This was already a theme which Jews before the time of Jesus were pondering, as they agonized over the apparently endless delay in waiting for God’s promises to be fulfilled. God, they concluded, was holding back the great day, leaving a space for more people to repent, for lives to be transformed, for the world to come to its senses. One should be grateful for this ‘patience’, not angry with God for failing to hurry up when we wanted him to.

This is very much what Paul has in mind in a passage like Romans 2.1–11. It might be worth looking that up and pondering it; perhaps this is the sort of passage Peter has in mind. For Paul, ‘God’s kindness is meant to bring you to repentance’ (Romans 2.4). But if you don’t avail yourself of that opportunity, the result will be the opposite: what you do instead with that time, with that interval before final judgment, will just make matters worse when the day finally arrives (Romans 2.5 –11).

This seems to be what Peter is saying, too. ‘When our Lord waits patiently to act, see that for what it is – salvation!’ (verse 15). God’s patience is our opportunity. It is our chance to work on the holy, godly lives we ought to be living. It is our chance, too, to spread the gospel in the world. Since we know that the day is coming, the day when new heavens and new earth will emerge, filled to the brim with God’s wonderful justice, his glorious setting-right of all things, we should be working towards that already, here and now.

This is the point where a wrong view of what God intends to do will really damage both our understanding and our behaviour. If we imagine that God wants simply to burn up the present world entirely, leaving us as disembodied souls in some kind of timeless ‘eternity’, then why should we worry about what we do here and now? What does it matter? Why not just enjoy life as best we can and wait for whatever is coming next – which is of course the answer that many philosophies have given, in the first century as well as today. But if God intends to renew the heavens and the earth – as Isaiah had promised all those years before (Isaiah 65.17; 66.22), then what we do in the present time matters. It matters for us that we are ‘without spot or blemish’ (verse 14). It matters for God’s world as a whole.

All this comes together in the closing paragraph of the letter, which sums up well the two main things Peter has been saying all through. First, be on your guard! This doesn’t mean adopting a fault-finding, mean-spirited approach, ready to criticize anybody and everybody in case some of them turn out to be heretics. It means, once more, the wisdom of the serpent. Don’t imagine that there are not lawless people out there, ready to lead you astray with smooth talk. Don’t imagine there won’t be times when it feels the natural and right thing to go along with them. If that wasn’t a real danger, we wouldn’t need the warnings. And that real danger is that we might fall away from the solid grounding we have received in the faith.

But, second, the message isn’t all negative. There is such a thing as sustained and lasting growth in Christian character, faith and life. It is your privilege and birthright, as a follower of Jesus, that you should ‘grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and saviour Jesus the Messiah’. This looks right back to the opening section, in which Peter urged his readers to add one thing to another: faith, virtue, knowledge, self control, patience, piety, family affection and love. Some of these, such as self-control and patience, he has expounded at some length. Others he has left for his readers to work out for themselves.

I have a sense that this letter might be a word for our times. If our desire is to bring God glory both now and in the day when his new age dawns we could do a lot worse than study it carefully, pray it in, take it to heart, and put it into practice.


Taken from Early Christian Letters For Everyone by Tom Wright