A Word in Season: No Slack Promise (2 Peter 3:9)

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We can and we should trust our God. Sometimes it is as simple as that.

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We need to take God at his word for all things. The scriptures insist upon the reliability of God, the fact that he is the

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God of truth. In fact, the letter to the Hebrews defines him as the

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God who cannot lie. If God were not to speak truth and to be true to the truth that he speaks, he would un -God himself, for he is indeed truth.

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And every word that proceeds from the mouth of God can and should be taken and relied upon utterly.

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The apostle Peter is pressing that home in 2 Peter and chapter three.

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He's writing the second letter to his beloved saints, and he wants them to understand the absolute reliability of God with regard to the things that he has said.

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And he's doing so in a context that would sound very familiar to me and to you, in which there is this derision, this disdain for the idea that the

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Lord Jesus Christ is going to return again in his glory to judge the entire world.

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These things have been spoken to us. There's no doubt about them according to the word of God.

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They're plainly written, not just cobbled together vaguely from one or two different places.

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But again and again, it is insisted that this is the hope and expectation of God's people, that Christ will return, that the world will be remade, that we will be with him forever and forever in bodies that are just like his resurrection body.

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But, says Peter, scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts and saying, where is the promise of his coming?

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Now, you'll notice that these are typically people who do not want Christ to come again.

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They're walking according to their own lusts. And when we stop believing that Jesus Christ will come again, then not only does our hope get dented, but it opens the door for all kinds of wickedness.

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After all, if there's no day of accountability, why bother living any kind of a holy life?

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If there is no second coming, if there is no day of judgment, then we might as well eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

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But again and again, the scriptures insist upon the fact that the saints of God are watching for and waiting for the return of their beloved master, the

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Lord Christ. And so when people say, well, everything just keeps going the way it always has, they forget willfully, they put out of their minds so as not to take into account that God not only brought the world into existence, but that he also destroyed it in the flood, that he wiped out everything that was on the surface of the earth, apart from Noah and his family and the animals who were with him in the ark.

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And that the heavens and the earth, which are now preserved by the same word are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and the perdition of ungodly men.

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So there's a parallel there that we ought to take into account that not only has

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God spoken, but that God has already shown his power to make and to preserve and to destroy.

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And we shouldn't forget then that the God with whom we have to do is the infinite, eternal and unchangeable

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God. With him a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.

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God does not measure time in the way that we do, he's not subject to it as we are, he is above it.

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It is not to him a constraint, it is not to him a barrier, it is not to him a test of patience as it is with us.

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And so Peter concludes in chapter three in verse nine, that the Lord is not slack concerning his promise as some count slackness.

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There's no giving it, it's not a baggy promise, it's not something that is going to collapse, it is not something that is irrelevant and pointless, a mere form of words, the way that some count slackness.

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Just because we are having to wait from our perspective does not mean that God is proving in any way unfaithful.

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His word is sure, he is long suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

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The fact that God holds back his judgment is a mark of his patience and his readiness to ensure that all his people are gathered in to him.

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And so let us not imagine that God is slack with regard to this or any promise that he makes.