4 . . .“For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.” 5For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, 6through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.
The return of Christ and the end-time judgment are unique one-off events, once-in-a-creation occurrences. Skeptics argue these warnings are bogus because they haven’t come true already. God’s judgment hasn’t happened after thousands of years of warnings, so the likelihood of them happening in the future is remote, they think. In may be that there were specific false teachers who said these specific words, “all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.” In other words, if God were going to judge world—He would have done it already!
That argument, of course, is specious; it sounds logical to some minds but is completely invalid. The illogic can be refuted by observing that one cannot be certain that a future event will not happen until one has traversed through the entire future. Denying God’s future judgment is a precarious position to hold, and in light of the potential consequences, quite dangerous. When Christ returns with judgment, the argument of the skeptics will be proven patently false. The promised judgment will be devastating for them.
Peter enlists two one-off events in history. The first is the creation of the world, the beginning of everything. Now Peter is not writing to answer all the questions of cosmologists today or to settle the young-earth or old-earth debates among creationists. He is simply pointing out that the creation of the universe (in general) and the earth (in specific) are by nature one-time occurrences. Before they happened, there was an indeterminate time period (one may question the meaning of time when talking about “before” creation but beyond the scope of Peter’s writing).
Peter’s reference to water is significant in that Noah’s flood represents God’s judgment, which took place hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years after the creation of humankind. Peter’s point is that the flood was predicted by God to Noah (see Genesis 6).
Of course, mocking carries emotional weight, and often is the tool of last resort for skeptics and false teachers to convince people to abandon sound teaching. In rebuttal, Peter simply lays out the historical facts; God has acted in the past in unique ways, and the fact that He hasn’t yet brought the promised judgment is simply the nature of singular, unique events that have not yet come.
Lord, help me resist the teaching of anyone who uses mocking in their teaching.
0 Comments