II Peter 3:8-15a
“Ready for the Fire”
December 4, 2011 - Second Sunday in Advent

         Some giant sequoia trees started growing before Jesus was born. Those trees I told the children about are ancient. The oldest known one is estimated at 3,5000 years old. From the perspective of the old conifers we’ve named General Sherman and General Grant and Lincoln, human beings have life spans like fruit flies.

         Our text from II Peter 3 today begins with the fact that God’s perspective on time is even more vast than a giant sequoia’s. God not only watched those great trees grow from seedlings, He has seen mountains rise up from the earth and then crumble, watched oceans fill and later go dry, has been witness to the slow carving of the Grand Canyon by movement of water.

         Age affects your perception of time. At four years old, three weeks wait yet till Christmas feels terribly long because it’s a measurable percentage of your whole existence. A year is an eternity, because it’s a quarter of your life. But in your thirties, forties, fifties and beyond, smaller bits of time shrink in relation to how long you’ve lived. As I plan to put up Christmas lights on our house tomorrow, it feels like I just took them down weeks ago. Time compresses and flies faster as we age.

         Consider God’s age. Something like that compression of time must be true for Him—“a thousand years are like one day,” says Peter in verse 8, quoting from Psalm 90 verse 4. For a person whose age is beyond measure, years flow by like seconds. But there is another side to God’s experience of time passing. To what the Psalm said, Peter added the first part of verse 8’s equation, “a day is like a thousand years.” God is such that in even in brief stretches of time, He enjoys a vast infinity of experience.

         You might remember those slowed time fight scenes in “The Matrix” where seconds are stretched out and the characters have all the time they need to see everything around them and choose their reactions. God’s experience is always like that. He sees everything happen all at once and doesn’t miss any of it. Nothing slips by too fast for him. He has all the time He needs for any event that arrives.

         From our own experience and imagination, we grasp a little of what time is like for God. The passing of millennia holds small significance from an eternal perspective. Yet God created us. He knows our limitations. He realizes how difficult it is for us to see time as He does. A day for us is still a day, twenty-four hours, which in hard circumstances drag on forever or in happy times are gone before we know it.

         That’s why Peter says more about God’s delay of our world’s end. It’s not just verse 8, that God sees time differently. We might still say then that God is slow, like the ancient ents in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. But there’s verse 9. God is not slow. God is pa­tient. God is patient with you, says Peter. He’s waited two thousand years to bring things to a close because He wants everyone possible to have the opportunity to know and love Him. He desires  everyone to repent from sin and turn to Him in faith.

         God’s delays not just because He is eternal, but as the hymn says, because “the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.” He hold’s back the end for our sake. He’s waiting for every last man, woman and child to have the chance to become what He made them to be, His beloved children. That’s not something which can happen in a day, or evidently even in a thousand years. It’s a long-term project.

         When the end does come, however, it will come surprisingly quick and unexpected. In verse 10 Peter quotes Jesus Himself, Matthew 24:43, to say that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief.” It was a key idea among early Christians. Paul recalled it in I Thessalonians 5:2. John the apostle repeats it twice in the book of Revelation. Christ will return and bring a swift, sudden end, like the unexpected arrival of a thief.

         It’s easy to get focused on what follows then in verse 10. The heavens pass away with a cataclysmic roar, the very elements dissolve in fire, and the earth is stripped bare. Peter repeats the first two events again in verse 12. Christ’s return is the end of the world, we say. Everything will be burned up and destroyed. It what’s often called “the Apocalypse.”

         The word apocalypse doesn’t mean what we think it means. It’s not what Francis Ford Coppola meant “Apocalypse Now” with Kilgore rhapsodizing about how he “loves the smell of napalm in the morning.” It’s not even the bloody desire for death portrayed in Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” An “apocalyptic” event is not primarily about fiery destruction on a mass scale. Apocalypse means “revelation,” something which is going to be revealed.

         The end of verse 10 points to one side of what will be revealed: “the earth and everything done in it will be disclosed.” The coming of Jesus will be the end of secrets. It’s again what Jesus Himself said, Luke 8:17, “nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed.” The fire of the end will burn away all our covers, all the clouds we wrap around the things we say and to do to deceive ourselves and others. All our hidden deeds and hidden motives will be made known. That’s what apocalyptic fire will reveal.

         Our lives will be stripped bare of all pretense and concealment. When Jesus comes again, the sort of people we are will become obvious. Through the years of this life we are able to mask and cover hearts and souls full of anger, envy, lies, lust and pride. But like fire sweeping through and clearing a forest of undergrowth so the ground can be seen, our Lord’s fire will sweep our souls bare to reveal what’s really in them.

         Like those forest fires, though, there is another, happier purpose to the clearing of the ground. God wants to grow something new. And Peter tells us God would like to plant the seeds for that new life now. Verse 11 asks us to consider, “Since all things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be?” If we truly believe the day is coming when all our secrets will be found out, how do we want to live?

         Peter answers his own question for us, saying we ought “to be leading lives of holiness and godliness.” That’s the way to live in the light of the world’s fiery end, to be the kind of people who are ready for a fire which will reveal our inner selves. When John the Baptist preached the first coming of Jesus as we read from Mark’s Gospel, he said the same thing. Jesus would come with a baptism of fire. The way to be ready was to repent and seek forgiveness.

         Schools and businesses run fire drills. We change the batteries in our smoke detectors at home. We pay for fire insurance. We do it all to be ready for fires which might burn up temporary possessions and threaten our physical lives. What, asks Peter, are we doing to be ready for God’s holy fire which will reveal the truth about our spiritual lives?

         Advent is the time to make ready not just for the lights and warm fireplaces of Christmas, but also for the blaze of our Lord’s return. It’s time to remember that this world as it is now is not forever, that the buildings and clothes and electronic devices we try to save and protect will not survive a fiery ending. What will last is the character, the good we grow in ourselves and in those around us.

         You know the rule about fleeing a burning building. Don’t stop to collect anything but your children. Those precious photos, that manuscript, that laptop full of data—none of it’s worth your life. So in the fire of our Lord’s coming, what is worth your soul? Hanging onto your anger with a person who hurt you? That money you are fighting about with a friend? That bad little habit no one else knows about? Pride which keeps you from asking for forgiveness, or giving it? Is any of it worth risking your soul in the fire? That’s Peter’s Advent question for us. Will we let go of all that and live lives of holiness and godliness?

         Verse 12 adds another amazing dimension to our being ready for the fire of Jesus’ return. Peter says we ought to be “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God.” If, like Jim shared with us last week, we hate waiting, we can help that day come sooner. Our lives make a difference in God’s timetable.

         In Mark 13:10, speaking about His return, Jesus said “the good news must first be proclaimed to all na­tions.” As we heard in our text, verse 9, God wants everyone to be saved. That’s why He’s waiting for the end, so everyone can hear, so everyone gets a chance at salvation. So if you and I help accomplish that mission, it speeds things up.

         It’s clear, though, that Peter means we hasten the day of the Lord not just by talking about Jesus but by the way we live. Our spoken witness for the Lord speeds His day when it is combined with a purity of life which vouches for what we speak. People come to faith in Christ when they see our external witness backed up with integrity. That’s why we preach the Gospel and house the homeless in this same room. Doing both sorts of things brings closer that great Day we’re waiting for.

         We are confident the day is coming. We have our Lord’s promise, says verse 13. And we’re waiting not just for fire, but for what the fire will make possible. We’re not hoping and praying for all the bad things and people to be burned up. We’re waiting for the trees that will grow when the fire has cleared the ground, for the good that will come when there is room for it. “We wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.”

         Our struggle in waiting for the Lord, is partly a feeling of not being at home. That’s because it seems so often that righteousness is not at home. People doing good work get fired and people who do evil like abusing children get protected. You try to help out someone in need and they take advantage of you. You tell the truth and it’s not believed. It feels sometimes like goodness doesn’t have a place in this world. That’s exactly why God will use fire to make this world over, into a place where righteousness is at home.

         God wants you and me to feel at home in the world where righteousness will be at home. So He invites us to change our lives now, to let the fire do its work now. He doesn’t want the fire to burn us up. He wants the fire’s light to burn in us.

         Our propane camp lantern uses an old fashioned cotton mantle. The amazing thing about these mantles is that you burn them before they can be used. You tie it on the gas outlet and then light it with a match before ever turning on the gas. The cotton burns away leaving behind a pure white residue with thorium in it. Now when you turn on the gas and light it, the thorium in the mantle glows with incredible brightness.

         That’s what God wants His fire to reveal in us. Verse 14 says, “strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish.” When Christ comes again, He wants to find the glowing light of peace and holiness in us.

         What does it mean for you this Advent? Maybe uncov­ering a lie you told, or asking forgiveness for words you spoke. Perhaps it’s quitting some habit which darkens the light of Christ in you. It could be effort to do more good for people in need or to speak a word of witness to a friend still in the dark. Holiness is like any good light. It shines in many directions and covers a whole spectrum of activity. Find out where God wants to restore the glow in you right now and then cooperate with Him.

         If you have a long wait to see results from your ef­forts, it does not mean God has forgotten you. God is not slow. God is patient. Our text ends with the words from verse 15, “and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.” God wants everyone to be saved, to glow with the light of His love and grace. That means He wants to save you, to make you ready for the fire. God wants to fill you with the light of Christ and make you at home in His new world. Waiting is hard, but waiting is grace.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj