Following last week’s message, we find Apostle Peter continuing his warnings about the false teachers and their harmful heresies that made it into church. Here in particular, he reminds his readers to focus on the messages spoken by the holy prophets and the Lord himself (3:1).
Previously, Peter wrote that the Old Testament prophets did not speak on their own accord but “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2Peter 1:21) and now he places the commandments given by him and the rest of apostles on the same level of inspiration and importance.
The teachings of the apostles were at the same level (if not even more, in some sense) with the teachings of the Old Testament prophets. According to apostle Paul, the church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone…“(Ephesians 2:20).
Peter pleads with his readers to avoid the false teachers and their teachings and to ‘keep their eyes” focused on the words of the prophets and apostles. The warning in this particular passage is that scoffers will emerge in the last days, who, while following their own evil desires (ch.2; 3:3) they mock the idea of Christ’s return by saying: ”Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation” (v. 4).
Today, we still have scoffers saying: “Where is the promise of His coming?” and we have a new “breed” of “scoffers”: those attempting to predict the Lord’s coming. The failure rate of all these predictions is 100%. How can I say that? Well, we are still here, aren’t we? The Lord is still to come!
The obvious question that we need to ask is: “Why are all these predictions wrong?”, “What are we missing in the biblical text? “How can our hermeneutics framework be so off?”
My goal this morning is to offer another angle or an alternative perspective to this hotly debated issue.