Our Father in heaven, we trust the words that we have just sung have not been uttered in vain, but they come from the depth of our hearts. Speak, O Lord. Renew our minds. Help us grasp the heights of Your plans for us, truths unchanged from the dawn of time that will echo down through eternity. So we pray, Lord, that by grace we would stand on Your promises, by faith we would walk with You as You walk with us, and with ask that You would speak, O Lord, that Your church, that this church, would be built up and the whole earth would be filled with Your glory. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

We come this morning to 2 Peter chapter 3, toward the very end of your Bibles, before you get to the three letters to John, Jude, and Revelation, we have 1 and 2 Peter. This morning chapter 3, verses 8 through 13.

2 Peter 3, beginning at verse 8:

“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to His promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.”

It is the season of the year when many of us think about our days and our calendars, many of us perhaps making resolutions and it’s just a turn of a calendar from December to January in one sense, but it marks the beginning of a new year so many of us think about new habits or new disciplines or exercise or new eating habits. I did see one person put on social media yesterday, “I don’t mean to brag, but I’m only one day behind in my Bible reading plan.” So that may be where you are at.

One of the differences between the Christian view of the world and many Eastern religions is how they view time, how they look at history. In many Eastern religions, history is basically cyclical and it just repeats itself and you have a process of reincarnation, and the goal perhaps with karma is to live such a good life that you can come back instead of a cat, a dog, or a dog a cat, whichever one you think is better. And the goal in many of these systems is to have final release from this endless cycle of death and rebirth, to escape this cycle.

By contrast, the Christian view of history has a definite starting point and a definite ending point. The fancy word is “teleology,” which has to do with the study of how things finish, or how things end. In the Christian view, history is going somewhere. It had a beginning, time as we know it, Genesis 1:1, and history will have an ending point, where the age to come will become this age, and the new heavens and the new earth will come down.

The day that marks that transition is often called, in Scripture, the day of the Lord. One author describes it as God’s decisive and final intervention in history to judge His enemies and to save His own people. The prophets looked forward to it, and we have it often in the New Testament, especially here in 2 Peter.

One of the things that the false teachers in Peter’s midst were saying was that the day of the Lord would not come, that there would not be this cataclysmic ending to history, and because of that they gave great license to live a life of sexual immorality and defying authority and so one of ...