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I am naturally glad to know that you have found these occasions profitable, and gladly, if God so will, will we come, would come back and hold other sessions in other years. But let me repeat how much of the profit of these occasions has been due to those who have been prepared to come along, uh, older folks to lead the discussion groups, I am exceedingly grateful to you. To you, I hope, uh, I say I hope I have not trodden on any of your corns or undermined your authority in any way by giving expression to different views from what you have expressed or anything like that.
It is exceedingly kind of you to come along and cooperate in this fashion. The strength of these occasions lies very much in the hands of those who lead the study groups and take the things seriously and fill in and correct the, uh, things that I'm able to say and gently, in their wisdom, adjust the things that I say amiss. Very grateful to you, and I shall be reminding my brethren at Apsley Street that it's no good they're prevailing upon me to come next year, unless they can prevail on some of you to come along as well. Oh. Now we come to the final passage in our, uh, uh second Peter and chapter three.
And I'm going to read, just to begin our session, verses fourteen to the end. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that you look for these things, give diligence that you may be found in peace, without spot, and blameless in his sight. And account that the long suffering of our Lord is salvation, even as our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote unto you. As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, wherein are some things hard to be understood, which the ignorant and the unsteadfast rest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.
You therefore, beloved, knowing these things beforehand, beware lest, being carried away with the error of the wicked, you fall from your own steadfastness, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. So let us look once more at our survey of the thought flow of this chapter three. Four parts to the chapter, each of them introduced by the affectionate greeting, beloved. Beloved, remember.
Beloved, forget not. Beloved, wherefore, beloved, give diligence and consider. Therefore, beloved, beware and grow. And we've been observing how here Peter deals with those objections to the Christian faith that have particularly to do with the doctrine of the second coming, eh, if not the end of the world. When men, on scientific grounds, deny the possibility of divine intervention.
And we tried to make the point earlier that we are not against science as Christians, but for science. God give us more physicists and chemists and cosmologists and astronomers, Julesy. And, uh, I nearly said a few less social scientists, but of course not, we need a lot of them as well. But, you know, we could do with more Christians who are biologists and astronomers and cosmologists, couldn't we? If only for the fun of it. It is God's universe, and uh, our blessed Lord, through him it was all made. We honor him by studying his handiwork as scientifically as we possibly can.
What we have to be careful about is two things. We have to notice the boundaries, the limits of science, where all good scientists themselves would tell you that beyond this science cannot go, and it becomes the proper area of metaphysics and then faith. Some people do not always distinguish between those things. They are generally not the leading scientists, but the lesser scientists and the general popular writers. Then, of course, we must distinguish between the facts as proved, demonstrably proved by science, and all sorts of theories that are merely working hypotheses.
We mustn't make the basic mistake of treating a hypothesis as though it were a fact. And then we must try, particularly us theologians, if I may for the moment group myself with them, we must try and bring our science up to date. No good telling the world that they can't be expected to believe the Christian faith because science teaches such and such, when at the best it was only a theory and has long since been abandoned by modern scientists. You'll see. If we're going to object to biblical doctrine on the grounds of science, we better make sure our science is up to date at any rate.
But that said, here we dealt with the argument against the doctrine of the Second Coming. Where is the promise of his coming? The argument that is erected on the basis of history and a certain scientific and philosophical argument. That nature is a closed system, an unbroken chain of cause and effect. It always has been, it always will be, and there can be no intervention. We have seen how Peter answers those objections. And he not only gives us the answers, but herein sets us an example of what we should aim at in our teaching.
We need to be aware, at least some of us, of the arguments that the world is going to erect against our Christian gospel. We ought to prepare our young people as they go out into the world and point them, not making them anti-science, pray God, encouraging them to be scientific, but giving them the answers of God's word to the false criticisms that sometimes are erected in the name of science. We mustn't let ourselves become a little ghetto where we simply preach the gospel and don't even know what the world is saying and don't know their arguments and therefore don't know the answers.
Peter was up to date. He knew what the world was saying. He could tell the believers beforehand to prepare them for the shock, what one day they would have to meet. Know it, he says, in advance. Yes, remember the words of the Lord Jesus. But know in advance that those promises of his second coming that the Lord Jesus gave us, they will be opposed and criticized in your educational circles, in the world at large, and they will be opposed on these grounds. Know it in advance. And if we know it in advance, we shall not be mere innocents. We shall be prepared for the shock, and we shall, pray God, understand the answers to the criticisms.
Now we move to another problem, and then after that to the final two paragraphs of exhortation. The second problem, more of a problem than it is an argument, can be summed up as we have done it, the apparent delay in the coming of Christ. The coming of the Messiah was a something promised, of course, in the Old Testament. And it is our Christian belief that when our Lord came the first time, he fulfilled a large number of Old Testament prophecies, uh, by that first coming.
He left a lot more unfulfilled and promised that those would be fulfilled at his second coming. Already in Peter's time, people were beginning to say, it appears, why hasn't he come? The writer to the Hebrews has to comfort his contemporary Christians saying, you have need of patience, yet a little while, and he that shall come will come and will not tarry. Thousands, hundreds, nearly two thousand years have gone by, and still he hasn't come. Why is that? And can we think, is there any justice in the view that, well, look, perhaps it isn't ever going to happen?
Some people have given up hope completely, haven't they? And some of them have gone so far as to say that Christ must have been mistaken when he said, this generation shall not pass away, but all these things shall be fulfilled, that he was mistaken, and that's too bad. That, of course, is not so, and it is not the answer that Peter gives to the problem here. Now he turns to answer it. So let us look, uh, to the, uh, problem then and to the answers that Peter gives it. Why the long delay? Answer number one, verse eight: forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
We should perhaps notice what that verse does not mean. It was early taken by some of the church fathers as though it meant that wherever in the prophets, like the prophecy of Daniel, you have some prophetic dating given you. After one thousand twelve hundred and thirty years of the tabernacle, uh, I'm sorry, after one thousand twel- two hundred and thirty days shall the tabernacle be cleansed or the temple be cleansed, that you can say, ah, twelve hundred and thirty days or twelve hundred and thirty five days. Well, now count a thousand years every day, and that will bring you to the date of the Lord's coming. That is utter nonsense. That is not what these verses are saying.
It is not saying that the times given us in the prophets are to be interpreted one thousand year for every day mentioned. It is making a general proposition about the way that God counts time. And you'll notice he puts it, uh, two ways, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and then he puts it the other way round, a thousand years is as a day. Do pray notice that it is put both ways. In other words, God does not count time as we do. And if we are thinking about this problem of the apparent delay in our Lord's coming, here is number one answer to it.
What may seem a long time to us doesn't necessarily seem a long time to God at all. Two thousand years at our counting to him might seem merely two days. He does not count time as we do. But notice, on the other hand, a day to him could seem a thousand years. Now, I suspect that all of us, in some sense, understand in our minds a little bit of this same principle. We have all sorts of ways of counting time ourselves. You can use it, uh, you can count time by your clock, whether it's an old-fashioned clockwork clock with sensible hands, or whether it's one of those things that comes in and out, uh, uh, uh, and puzzles your eyes, uh, and tells the time that way round.
Never mind, you can count time by clock. Or if you're very clever, you can count it by the decay of some atom or other. Or the beats of some pulsar stars. All sorts of ways of counting time with. But whatever mechanism you use, and you can count time in that way very exactly, there's another sense in which time bears upon us. Did upon me when I was at school, I know. No week of the holidays lasted the same length as a week of school did. I mean, that was obvious to any sensible person. And of all the periods at school of forty minutes, the longest forty minutes was mathematics, of course, you see.
Playtime, pooh, Fifteen minutes, well, equivalent about fifteen seconds, you'll see. Yes? And since we've grown up, we've tended to feel like that sometimes, haven't we? A fortnight's holiday is gone before you can turn round. One day's pain, how long is that? Some things come all too quickly, don't they? Age and decay. Oh, how quickly life has gone by, sir, hasn't it, since you were twenty five.
You didn't think it was going to go so quickly. It took you such a long while to get to twenty five. It took me ages to get to twenty five. I thought I should never get there. I got there by dint of great effort up the hill. It took forever. I just got there, but it was like getting on the top of the mountain. I started to slide down with ever increasing speed, nearly at the bottom now. The speed of going down was ten times what it was coming up to twenty five. We don't just count time by clocks either, do we? God doesn't. With him, a day could be a thousand years.
It could indeed. Oh, I could tell you of certain things that God has done on one day. Do you know what he packed into one day? He went and saved John McCoy one day. Paul, what a job. He filled that one day of twenty hours with a work that's going to last eternally. Yes. That's how God judges the day. And I, as a believer, could take an ordinary common Monday, couldn't I? And make the work of that Monday last eternally.
Or I could take three weeks and fritter them away and do nothing, and it's gone like that and nothing to show for it. God doesn't count time like we do, therefore. That leads us on to the point that his patience, that is his long suffering, he has not yet staged the second coming of Christ, and certainly not the end of the world. Why hasn't he done it? He promised he'd do it. Well, you mustn't read his patience as though it was slackness in fulfilling his promise.
You know, I promise you that I'll come round and cut your lawn. I promise it in May, but I forget it through May, and I forget it through June, and you remind me in July, and I still forget it. I'm being slack to the fulfillment of my promise. I might get round to it in August, but I've been rather slack in fulfilling it. You mustn't suppose that God is being slack, that nearly two thousand years have gone by and our Lord still hasn't come. His patience is not slackness, it is calculated patience. He's not willing that any should perish, says the verse, but that all should come to repentance. I'm glad God was patient, aren't you?
I don't know whether Peter was patient or impatient, or Paul, or my first century fellow Christians, but I'm glad God didn't listen to them and stage the second coming of Christ in the first century AD, aren't you? For one very good reason, I shouldn't have been here. I wouldn't have got saved. I wouldn't even have got born. And God, who wanted to save the large number of the redeemed, was prepared to wait. There's a lovely story told us in the gospel. It's the story of Jairus and his little daughter, you know, and she was desperately sick.
So he came to the Lord Jesus and asked the Lord Jesus that he would come and lay his hands on his daughter and save her from dying. And our Lord began to go. And as he's going, the crowd got round him, and presently a woman came. She had an issue of blood, and she pressed forward, and she touched the hem of his garment. And our Lord stopped and spoke to the dear woman. And I suspect Jairus was fuming, if only you knew. Why are these foes coming now? If the Lord doesn't come soon, my girl will die. There's all these folks holding him up. Well, they did hold it up, hold the Lord up.
By the time he'd had a word with the woman and healed one or two more, there came a man from Jairus' house saying, trouble not the master, your girl- your daughter is dead. Too late. Hadn't come quick enough. And when our Lord heard that, he said, fear not, Jairus, only believe, and she shall be saved. What, you say she's died? Yes, I know, said our Lord. But you see, that's not the end of it. I shall come and I shall raise her from the dead, Jairus. And that he did with his three apostles, they entered in, and with mum and dad. Our Lord came and raised the girl from sleep and restored the family circle.
Ah, thus shall it be for multitudes. You'd like the Lord to come before you died, wouldn't you? I know you would. Oh, joy or delight, should we go without dying? But what happens if the Lord gets held up saving some Ethiopians or something? Cool, if he does that too long, you who are eighty five and a half. He mightn't come before you pass away. Tell me, would you really want to have it that the Lord just say, right, well, I'm going to come before she passes away, and the other Ethiopians not get saved then.
He's not slack, you see. He has in mind the great company of the redeemed. He's not willing that any perish. He wants them saved. For that purpose, he's prepared to wait, oh, how long. Thank God he waited till I came along in the nineteen twenty fives plus. And I, in my turn, must be prepared to see him wait yet longer, if need be, mustn't I? But then you see, look, uh, uh, what, um, uh, verse, uh, twelve says, or verse eleven. The fact that our Lord waits doesn't mean that he's going to wait forever.
The day of the Lord will come. What a long day it will be, what tremendous events it will see happen, in itself a long age of our Lord's reign and the eventual destruction of heaven and earth. The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, and all shall pass away and be destroyed. But now Peter comes to the third bit of a lesson. Seeing that these things are thus all to be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in all holy living and godliness, looking for and earnestly desiring the coming of the day of God, by reason of which the heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, and according to his promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
Notice, first of all, that phrase, that verb, looking for and earnestly desiring, he says. Well, that may be one translation. The Greek actually says hastening. As the old hymn has put it, that all that look for hasten. That is literally what the Greek means. And some have thought that's an impossible translation. How could I possibly hasten the coming of the Lord? You say, surely the time is fixed. What can I do about hastening it? There you are, thinking in terms of the clock, aren't you? Do you think there's going to be a big grandfather clock in the walls of heaven?
And God will look at the clock, oh, the time has come now, the clock says so. He doesn't count time like that. Take an example, for instance. He said to Abram at one stage, Abram, I'm going to give you this land and to your seed, I'm going to give it to you. Not just yet. Well, when? And he gave two answers to that question. There was one, a sort of a chronological answer, after so long, after so many hundred years. There was another answer. Not going to give it to you yet, he says, because the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full. In other words, God's purposes and when they happen are determined in part by the behavior of people down here.
To give Abram the land, he must turn out the Amorites. He won't turn out the Amorite. When will he turn out the Amorites? When their iniquity has come to its full. God runs his universe on moral principles, not just on the question of a clock. You say, what's holding him up then to have this great day of the Lord come? Well, you perhaps, or you. Are you ready for it? We've just saw the thing, seen the thing, haven't we, as it refers to salvation. Goodness me, some of you, twenty years ago, and if the Lord had come then, you'd have been lost.
Wouldn't you? You weren't saved. Ooh, so I'm saved now, though. Thank the Lord for that. And you're ready for the Lord to come. Praise the Lord for that. You'll say, yes, like the dying thief I am, I trusted the Savior. If the Lord came tonight, I'm ready to go. Thank the Lord for that. Oh, what a wonderful assurance it is. If the Lord came tonight to be with the Lord, entrance into what for you will be the eternal kingdom. You're ready to go. My brother, my sister, you ready to go? You've done all the preparation you want to do.
To make sure it will be an abundant entrance, not just an entrance. You've made all the progress you would like to make, and now you're just kicking your heels. You can't think of any further progress you could make in the Christian life. Well, I can. Not you, I mean me. I was saying years ago, decades ago, I'm glad the Lord didn't come when I was, uh, 20, and I'm glad he didn't come when I was forty.
And as a believer, mark it, I'm glad he gave me the opportunity to repent of wrong attitudes in my life as a believer. Do you know what I mean? I remember a silvery-haired elder in the church in which I was at one stage. He'd had a very busy life up in, in, in the city of London all his years and retired to the country parts from which he came. And as his advanced old age, he said to me, I am grateful to God, said he one day to me, for giving me these last few years upon my life.
What a bonus they have, have been to me to put things right. And get right with the Lord. And make further progress. In the Christian path. Isn't it so? I wish the Lord would come tomorrow. If he comes, I'm ready, cleansed by the blood of Christ, to enter in. And another side of me says, Lord, well, well, I wouldn't mind, Lord, if you didn't come, because there are certain things I'd like to get right in my life. If we are looking for this great thing, pray consider how tremendous it will be eventually at the end of our Lord's reign, the whole earth and its works burned up.
And new heavens and a new earth in which dwelleth righteousness, and I'm looking for that. Well then, what manner of persons ought we to be? Well, I tell you, we ought to be taking every minute we could, every opportunity we can, for making progress, as Peter exhorts us, and preparing ourselves for that great and august coming of the eternal kingdom of our Lord. Give all diligence, says Peter, to add to your faith. And we shall need the time to do it in, shall we not?
And with that, he comes to his final exhortations. We may be grateful for our Lord's patience, in that it gives generations of men opportunity to repent, and us included, and us find forgiveness of sins and justification and peace with God. In that sense, the basic preparation for entering eternity. We may be grateful for our Lord's patience that also gives us as his believers time for progress. So that our entrance to that eternity may not be just a bare entrance, but an abundant entrance.
Well then, now let's come to the practical implications of it all. Since you look for these things, so what? A new heavens and a new earth in which dwells righteousness. I'm really looking for that. Well, obviously it has implications for the way I live now, doesn't it? He that hath this hope in him, as John would put it, purifies himself, even as he is pure. If I am living unrighteously, unrepentantly conducting my affairs and my business unrighteously, cheating in business or whatever.
It makes a nonsense of my claim if I then claim I'm looking, really looking for a world in which righteousness dwells. Now look what he first says here, two things we've got to do. Give diligence that you may be found of him. Let me underline that verb. What a lovely concept it is. It goes back, of course, to the way our Lord Jesus spoke. He talked of his servants. And he said, you know, blessed are you if when the master comes, he may find you watching, waiting, diligently carrying out your tasks to be found.
You know what it is? Mother goes down to the supermarket and she leaves six-year-old uh, to look after four-year-old and says, now she'll be back soon, now don't you get up to your tricks, or some silly words. And she comes home and finds them. Oh, oh, they weren't quite expecting her to be back so soon. What she finds will leave undescribed, but you know what I mean. They suddenly discover that they've been found by mother. She found them doing this, that, and the other. What shall the Lord find us doing when he comes.
You're diligent that you may be found in peace, in peace with God, of course, in peace with my brethren, insofar as is in me, in peace with all men. I may be found in peace without spot and blameless. Sure, I cannot be sinless, but I could do something about the old spots, couldn't I? And see to it that I have been, as best I know how, following his word, and where I have failed, I've confessed it. Blameless? Suppose he came more quickly than we thought.
How would he find us? And count this, he says, that the patience of our Lord is salvation, meaning presumably that the patience of our Lord means opportunity for salvation. In all the senses that we have been considering it. Salvation for the unconverted, opportunity to repent and believe and be saved and forgiven and receive eternal life. Opportunity for salvation in the life of the believer, to be saved from this and that and the other wrong attitude and wrong activity. Count the time valuable.
Don't get too impatient for the Lord to come. His patience means opportunity for salvation. What a sad thing it is when the ignorant and the unstable, instead of seeing that this long apparent delay is there for our salvation in all senses of that term, they take hold of scripture and they rest it and twist it to make endless problems out of it, uh, and they do it to their own loss and destruction. And finally, he has another couple of, uh, ideas for us.
Beloved, he says, now for the fourth time, knowing these things beforehand. And you will see what Paul, what Peter has in fact been doing, won't you? Let me put that back our general survey of the passage. He said, beloved, remember, here he dealt with the, what we may call roughly the scientific difficulty. Then he said here, don't forget this, and he dealt with this other problem, the problem of the delay. Here in three, he turns to give us the positive side of this delay.
The reasons for it, now the positive side, count that our Lord's patience is salvation. You can't supposed to get converted, chance for believers to make progress in the Christian life and find salvation practically working out. In other words, three is related to this one here too. four is related to this first one, and to all those other false teachers that we read of in chapter two. Therefore, knowing these things in advance, he says.
So let's look at the thing in a little bit more detail. Knowing then these things beforehand, that there are these false teachers coming. You may be forearmed, forewarned, and therefore forearmed. The danger is that when they come, their arguments will sound so specious, and so many will follow their perverse ways, it will create a tremendous pressure, and their way of life is the thing that's done nowadays. Oh, how sorry I am for my younger brethren and sisters.
When they go out into the world these days, it's different from what it used to be. When I was their age, there was a certain decency amongst men. Oh yes, sin was sin, and there was every kind of temptation, but there was a sort of a different temperature in society. Now the pressure is that you're odd if you do not conform to this modern world standards of immorality and free love and the rest of it. The pressures are enormous. Knowing it in advance, forewarned, forearmed. Beware lest being carried away by the error of the wicked.
Now notice what he says. He doesn't say lest you lose your salvation, of course not. No believer can lose his salvation. But a believer can temporarily be carried away by the error of the wicked and fall from his own steadfastness. In and another direction, Peter fell from his steadfastness at one stage, didn't he? Found the pressures building up against him, even though he had been warned beforehand by Christ, found the pressures building up against him too big and succumbed to them. In the wilderness, we are told that when Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, those jolly old apostates, rose up to challenge the apostleship of Moses and the high priesthood of Aaron.
Then a lot of the ordinary Israelites listened and oh, oh, yes, they've got a point there, and began to side with them. And got carried away by the error of the wicked. And God had to take some drastic steps and say, don't you realize that these men are nothing short of utter apostates? Get clear of them. The bulk of Israel had to stand clear of them while God opened the ground and swallowed up those apostates. But the fact is that at the beginning, many in Israel were carried away by the error of the wicked.
And it can happen. So we do well to know these things beforehand and be warned and ready to meet the pressures, lest we be carried, uh, we be carried away by their error and temporarily fall from our own steadfastness. It is not given to me to judge. I do not speak in any Pharisaic spirit. I too have felt the pressures. It is not my goodness, if at all, I stand, and God knows in what things I have compromised where I shouldn't. And I think of young folks I've known.
Oh, how strong they were in their Bible class, in their college days, and then the pressures proved too much. And whether they are still believers is a question that you couldn't give a clear answer to. Oh, my elder brethren, that is not time for criticism. It is time to make sure we built in them first the faith, and not just innocent little ditties, but the faith, and equipped them under God as best we could, and forewarned them of what they had to face, and gave them the answers in advance.
And if then they should fall, God make us intercessors and give us the patience to try and bring them back, like our Lord brought Peter back, and he was restored and in turn was able to make his brethren steadfast. Beware lest you be carried away. What's the best way not to be carried away? Well, to grow. But grow! Pity the dear Christian man or woman that has stopped growing.
The most elderly saint is still to grow. Life's biggest battle lie at the end. When our faith will still be tested. And Satan take advantage of our frailty and weakness. Then still is a time for growing. And the last years are not wasted. If they are giving the final touches of perfection to our faith. We need to be making progress all the time, but grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus.
He has grace to give us. He has knowledge to give us. We may go to him honestly with our problems and say, Lord, I'm finding difficulties and I don't find the answer to these intellectual questions. He will not rebuke us. He has knowledge to give us, if in humility we will go to him with our doubts and our problems, and he will eventually give us the evidence and the answers, and so test our faith and cause our faith to grow. But grow is what this epistle is about. There comes the day of eternity.
It will be here soon, and I fancy for many of us all too quickly. The great day of eternity. Oh, but then what a wonder it shall be. What a thing it is to be ready for it in the sense of saved and redeemed, with the assurance of eternal life, and I shall never come into condemnation, and I shall never be lost. Oh, what a triumph of the grace of God it is. To him, says Peter, to our blessed Lord and Savior, be the glory, equal with the Father and our Redeemer as well. To him be the glory. And now he is available with all his divine power to lead us to make progress by his grace and by his knowledge.
And thank God when we get home and can survey the progress we made, to then again our song shall be, to him be the glory. For all I shall ever be, I shall owe it to his magnificent grace. To him be the glory now. We already taste it, don't we? We sense it. We feel the throbbings of eternal life that runs in our spirit already. To him be the glory now, for his is already the triumph, and to the day of eternity. Soon it shall be here.
So let us just remind ourselves of what, uh, the lessons have been. This world is temporary. There is an eternal kingdom. Progress here, all true progress here, will have eternal consequences there. Then what is the progress I particularly need to go in for?
In this epistle, this is the progress that Peter urges upon us. Seeing these things are so, give all diligence, and in the power of your faith add virtue, knowledge, self-control, endurance, godliness, brotherly love, and love. Thus shall an abundant entrance be ministered to you into the eternal kingdom. Thus you will actually hasten the day of that coming.
Let all that look for hasten the coming of that day by earnest consecration, to walk the narrow way by gathering in the lost ones for whom our Lord did die. For the crowning day is coming. By and by. And now to our study sessions. These are the study questions for the eleventh seminar.
The significance for us of the end of the world. These questions are being given in the revised order. Question one: Does chapter three verse eight teach that wherever prophecies like Daniel chapter twelve verse eleven and twelve refer to days, each day should be taken to mean a thousand. If not, what is chapter three verse eight teaching? Does chapter three verse eight teach that wherever prophecies like Daniel chapter twelve verses eleven and twelve refer to days, each day should be taken to mean a thousand years.
If not, what is chapter three verse 8 teaching? Question two: Why has the day of the Lord still not come, nearly two thousand years after Peter was writing? Chapter three verse nine and fifteen. Why has the day of the Lord still not come Nearly two thousand years after Peter was writing. Chapter three, verses nine and fifteen. Question three: Does the fact that God wishes that all should come to repentance, chapter three verse nine, mean that everyone will eventually be saved?
Question four: Chapter three verse twelve should be translated, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God. How can we hasten the coming of that day? Chapter three, verse twelve should be translated, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God. How can we hasten the coming of that day? Question five: What is it about the new heavens and the new earth that, if I am really looking for them, will affect the way I live?
Chapter three, verses eleven to fourteen. What is it about the new heavens and the new earth that, if I am really looking for them, will affect the way I live. Chapter Three verses eleven to fourteen. Question six: Can I really hope that the Lord will find me without spot and blameless when he comes? Can I really hope that the Lord will find me without spot and blameless when he comes? Question seven: Can you quote any passage in Paul's writings where he says, as chapter three verse fifteen suggests, that God is long suffering and would have all men to be saved?
Question eight: Is it possible for a believer to be carried away with the error of the wicked? Chapter three verse seventeen. If so, in what ways? Is it possible for a believer to be carried away with the error of the wicked, chapter three, verse seventeen. If so, in what ways? Question nine: What does it mean to fall from your own steadfastness? Chapter three, verse seventeen.
What does it mean to fall from your own steadfastness? Chapter three, verse seventeen. Question ten: Consider the first half of chapter three, verse eighteen. How does its exhortation fit in with the main message of second Peter? Consider the first half of chapter three verse eighteen. How does its exhortation fit in with the main message of second Peter.
