Inquiring Minds… Mockers and Their Mocking

Part 2

Nathan Jones: Okay, turn in your Bibles to II Peter 3. We’ll start with verse three. It says, “Knowing this, that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lust and saying, where is the promise of His coming? And since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. For this, they willfully forget that by the word of God, the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of water and in the water by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth, which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until that final day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. But beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack or slow concerning his promise as some count slackness, but is long suffering towards us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”

Tim Moore: Wow, that ending is tremendously encouraging, and we’re going to get back there, but let’s go back to verse three because I think in each verse there are elements that we need to really unpack. So in verse three, it talks about the last days. It says in the last days, mockers will come. When does that occur? What is he talking about?

Dave Bowen: Well, you go back to the last days, you go back all the way back to the time of Jesus basically. We’ve been living in the End Time since the time of Jesus and we’ll go until we’re raptured out with Him. So we’re talking about a whole, we’re talking about generation, after generation, after generation.

Tim Moore: Now we can actually make that point biblically. It’s not just an opinion that we’re spouting that we’re in the last days. It’s I John 2:18 that says, “Children,” John writing to Christians, “it is the last hour, and just as you’ve heard that the antichrist is coming, know that he is already here. And we know that it is the last hour.” He reiterates it twice.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Tim Moore: So in this context, we are living in the last days and the whole Church Age, essentially, is within these last days. But there’s another last days that we sometimes refer to.

Nathan Jones: Yeah, and I’d add that because in the context, if we’re talking context here, he’s going to explain what these three things these people reject, these scoffers reject in the Last Days, which wasn’t part of the first century, but would be a definition or defining characteristic of the end of the Last Days. So we could almost call it the last of the Last Days.

Tim Moore: Ah, very good.

Dave Bowen: Don’t you find it interesting he’s talking to the Church?

Nathan Jones: Yes.

Dave Bowen: When you say scoffers and mockers, he’s not talking to those who are rejecting Jesus, don’t know Jesus. These are believers, these are people in the Church that would be mocking and scoffing. Why would that happen?

Tim Moore: Well, I’ll even ask one question before we get to the why is how can we prove that it’s within the Church? And I think that’s contained in the very next verse where it talks about the ones who say, where’s the promise of His coming? All continues just as it has since the Creation. Folks, people who are not in the Church don’t believe He’s coming at all.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Tim Moore: It’s just Christians who have heard He’s coming, and yet they’re the ones that are mocking sometimes.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Tim Moore: And far too often.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Nathan Jones: And in the context too, if you go back to verse one is Peter’s writing the beloved, he’s writing the Church. He’s saying this is an issue that’s going to be part of the Church. So he’s talking about apostasy, possibly even heresy in the Last Days. And he’s talking preferably to the End Times that particular period that Jesus said would lead up to His return where the signs of the End Times, as we’ve covered many times, will increase in frequency and intensity. So these three things that these people are going to reject will increase in frequency and intensity the closer we get to His return.

Tim Moore: Do you think it’s a sign of people’s natural inclination toward impatience? I mean, I myself have a tendency toward being impatient. I’ve often said I can’t wait till I get some patience.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Tim Moore: You know. I’m eager for the Lord to give me that.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Tim Moore: Sometimes my own mortal self, I struggle with being impatient. Is that what leads over to this actual sin of scoffing at the Lord’s coming?

Dave Bowen: Well, I think every generation since the apostle Paul has thought they would be the last generation. I jokingly say one of them would be right, you know, but I think people kind of get casual about that, too. Well, it didn’t happen then, it didn’t happen with my grandfather; he used to talk about it. But people have to understand, things have to happen biblically before we get to that point where we do have the final End Times. Jerusalem’s got to be a nation. That didn’t happen till 1948.

Nathan Jones: Or Israel.

Dave Bowen: Israel has to be a nation. Jerusalem has to be the capital of that. That’s 1967. And the Jews, the Jewish people had to be back in the homeland. The recalling…there’s only two regathering in the Scripture. One from Babylon after 70 years, and one at the End Times.

Tim Moore: Now, lest we conflate and maybe all this confusion, when you say things have to happen, what they have to happen biblically is before the Second Coming.

Dave Bowen: Yes.

Tim Moore: But we would submit that from Scripture, there’s nothing that has to happen…

Dave Bowen: Before the Rapture.

Tim Moore: Before the Rapture.

Dave Bowen: Correct.

Tim Moore: So throughout Church Age history…

Dave Bowen: Correct.

Tim Moore: …Church people, Christians would’ve thought the Lord could come at any time. Very quickly thereafter, at some point in that mix, Jerusalem has to be reestablished as a capital city of a regathered Jewish people in Israel.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Tim Moore: But we’ve seen that happen before our very eyes. And so we know that we’re living in both.

Dave Bowen: But how exciting is it that we are the generation experiencing that?

Tim Moore: Exactly.

Nathan Jones: Yeah, and that’s what the Lord said. We’re that Genea, that era that sees Israel return as a nation again, is the one that we’ll see these signs. And I think particularly what we’re seeing here, what we’re going to read in the next three characteristics of this end time, particularly pertaining to the end of the Last Days. Because again, we’re talking about context. We have to take all the prophecies about the End Times and put them inside that larger context, and that larger context says these are signs that point–And there’s some particular characteristics, which I’m excited we’re going to get into, that show that this wasn’t a belief system earlier than the 1800s. This is more of a modern belief system.

Dave Bowen: Yes.

Tim Moore: Okay, let’s get into that conversation because we know that there have been people who would scoff, but it is in the Last Days when Christians become impatient and say He’s never come. My grandparents were expecting Him…

Dave Bowen: Right.

Tim Moore: My great grandparents. But there’s also some other ideologies that blend in. And Peter prophetically foretells some of these other ideologies.

Nathan Jones: And what’s interesting is as Christians get impatient, they start looking around for possible answers. And so they look at what the world is bought into, and they start integrating it into what the Church believes and try to harmonize it, and so yeah.

Tim Moore: Okay, don’t beat around the bush. What are we talking about?

Nathan Jones: Evolution.

Tim Moore: Okay.

Nathan Jones: We’re talking about evolution.

Tim Moore: Yes.

Nathan Jones: I mean, before Darwin, they had spontaneous generations in the Middle Ages where they watch an apple fall to the ground and all of a sudden flies are buzzing around it and they conclude, well, the apple transformed into those flies. Well, we think that’s ridiculous. But all this evolution did is said okay, you put millions of years between the apple and the flies, the brain can’t comprehend it. And soon you’re like, oh yeah, you’re right. I guess that could happen. And that’s what the people believe. They started denying Genesis one…

Tim Moore: Right.

Nathan Jones: And two. They started denying that there is…and you and I, we guys, we’ve been on the speaking circuit, we’ve talked about a young Earth. And we have Christians come up to us angry saying, how can you, you know, make the Church look so stupid that you don’t believe in evolution? Well, that is what the scoffers are saying. They are denying that God created things just by speaking.

Tim Moore: And that comes directly from verse five, “for when they maintain this.” What? That he might not be coming because everything just goes on in a natural order that never changes. All right, and so in verse five, “and 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 through which the world…” at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water. And so the scoffers who would buy into the lie that uniformitarianism has created the world through the process of evolution, would undermine the testimony of God that said, no, that’s not how it happened. I created. As a matter of fact, I created in how many days exactly?

Dave Bowen: Yeah, I think it was seven days.

Tim Moore: Yeah, seven, six days created. The seventh was a rest. And fairly recently.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Nathan Jones: We actually believe it.

Dave Bowen: And it’s interesting you brought that up. I talk about the young Earth and the old Earth. And you will go to science, everybody thinks it’s an old Earth. But again, Scripture has to interpret Scripture. Does the Bible address this? And I believe it does In Genesis 5, we get a genealogy. And most people don’t understand the genealogy. But we get how many years there were from Creation to the Flood. So we know it’s a young Earth. And from a practicality standpoint too, people say, well, it’s been millions and billions of years. The science has proved that. I say, wait a minute, how well do you know the Lord? Do you think He would let Satan control anything for millions and billions of years? That makes no sense at all.

Nathan Jones: You’d have to have death before there was life.

Dave Bowen: Yes.

Nathan Jones: And your point about uniformitarianism is fantastic because that is a modern scientific belief that they observe and say, okay, everything has been the same then as it is now. And so they can’t understand cataclysmic events, which brings us up to the second thing they deny. And you brought it up, the Flood.

Tim Moore: Yes.

Dave Bowen: Yes.

Nathan Jones: They will deny that the Earth was deluged or judged in the Flood. Why? Because they don’t want God judging the Earth.

Tim Moore: Now we’re going down a rabbit trail for a moment, but you can go to the Grand Canyon and other national parks and our US government still has plaques and other…

Dave Bowen: Yep.

Tim Moore: It’s descriptions of how ancient rivers carved this huge canyon over millions and millions of years. Which is patently ridiculous because you can also go to some of the canyons that were formed after the volcano at Mount St. Helens blew up and they loosed land with water in a very rush, or rapid rush and carved canyons out even of solid rock in a matter of hours and days. And they say, well, that was an exception. But the Grand Canyon was carved by this little bitty river over millions and millions of years.

Nathan Jones: Which is impossible because water doesn’t run upstream.

Tim Moore: No it doesn’t.

Nathan Jones: It flows down so the Colorado could never have carved the Grand Canyon.

Dave Bowen: But what you brought up, too, what they use for that comes from this chapter, too. That one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. So they say, see, the Bible tells you it took many, many, many years.

Tim Moore: No.

Dave Bowen: But they’re taking out context. What that passage means here in Peter’s writing is that God is outside of time when He’s not restricted by time.

Nathan Jones: And that’s why the Bible goes, I think in detail in the Creation account to say there was evening and day, a day. Why it uses the word Yam. The word Yam always means a 24 hour day. It’s not day age where, as we get, it says a day is like…and another thing, too, I know we’re skipping ahead, but it’s important to understand this belief in evolution, is that it says as. In other words, time for us might seem short, but for God, what is a thousand years to an eternal being, you know? But it’s not saying that the days of Creation were like a thousand years.

Dave Bowen: Correct.

Nathan Jones: Or actually, or let’s even go even farther, a million years. Well, how would that happen? You’d have plants growing without actual sunlight for a million years.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Nathan Jones: That’s impossible.

Tim Moore: It’s impossible. We’ve all talked about and studied how some plants; animals are symbiotic. They have to coexist for each one to survive. And so evolution, folks, is patently false. We do not believe in it. It goes back to what is said in verse four. The very people that are scoffing are scoffing at what? The promise of His coming. And that begs the question, who made a promise that He would come? Jesus Christ promised He would come again. The Word of God promises over and over, He will come again. And so if they deny the promise, if they scoff at the promise, they’re not scoffing at just the idea, they’re scoffing at God.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Tim Moore: And His promise, His eyewitness, just as those who deny the Creation account would say, well, God said it, but I don’t believe it. I’m going to go after this other ideology, this other theory because God’s testimony is not trustworthy. Boy, you’re on very shaky ground and you call yourself a Christian if you believe these things. No, I trust the Word of God. I trust His promises because He is faithful and trustworthy.

Dave Bowen: And we all should be in that boat. We all should be like that. But sadly, whether that be at the church or at the universe, I ask people, how many promises in the Bible are directly for you from God? Can you give me 10? If I give you a piece of paper, could you write me 10 promises in the Bible that pertain to you from God? And I’m yet to have people say, yeah, I could do that. And there’s hundreds of them.

Nathan Jones: Oh sure.

Dave Bowen: So I say before you throw things away, realize what you’re pushing away and what you’re giving up with all the blessings and hope and promises that are just for us in God’s Word. That’s where the mocking I think comes from as well.

Nathan Jones: And we’ve got to be very clear here, gentlemen, because there are Christians, solid Bible believing Christians who for some reason don’t believe in Genesis one and two, they believe in evolution, but that doesn’t mean they’re not saved. And so I want to, let’s say this here, they’re not saved. Now if they’re denying the Flood, that’s a big question because then you’re really getting to the point where to you the Bible has been spiritualized and all.

Now for the third category, and you already brought that up, excellent, is that the third thing they deny is that Jesus Christ is ever going to come back and judgment will come upon the world. So we’re almost talking about, we know this, Peter’s addressing the Church here, but he’s also addressing other groups. You’ve got middle of the road heretical or apostate groups, but then you’ve got also complete unbelievers because it’s not that the Christians don’t want judgment to come to the world. The unbelieving world doesn’t want judgment to come to the world.

Tim Moore: You make an excellent point, Nathan, that Christians are those who trust in Jesus Christ and His saving work at Calvary, that He died, that He was buried, He was resurrected, He ascended to the right hand of God the Father. And if I trust that He died in my place, He took upon Himself the wrath of God that I deserve, then I’m saved. Everything else comes after that fact. But there is a disconnect. If I say, well, I believe that, but I don’t believe in, let’s say the virgin birth, or I don’t believe in Creation, or I don’t believe in this and this and this and this. I can hope to be saved and that is the Blessed Hope, but inevitably, there is such a disconnect, a cacophony of my ideology and my beliefs that if it’s not destructive to me, it will be destructive to my children.

Nathan Jones: Mm.

Tim Moore: To my grandchildren because they will say, well they don’t even, you know, they’re picking and choosing. One time I was in air force training and in part of our indoctrination, in a mock prisoner of war camp, they started reading passages and said, do you believe in that? And they would rip a page out of the Bible…

Dave Bowen: Right.

Tim Moore: and just wad it up and throw it away. Very offensive, but they were making the point, if you don’t believe it all, you don’t believe any of it. And so we as Christians, we either have to accept the Word of God in its entirety or we’re starting to pick and choose where we believe.

Nathan Jones: Yeah, it’s a slippery slope. Because…

Tim Moore: Very slippery.

Nathan Jones: …because you know, many solid Christians are confused about the Creation account. And it’s an educational thing…

Tim Moore: It is.

Nathan Jones: to bring them up. But there are primary doctrines that are sought. You can’t be saved, you can’t be a born again believer unless you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the only way to salvation, that He resurrected. I mean these are essentials.

Tim Moore: I’ve had dear friends who would say I’m a Christian, but evolution. And my question to them is, what do you typically read? Well, I read all these books by evolutionists and I asked them, have you read the Word of God lately? Well, you know the Gospels. Do you read the Word of God or do you take in other things? And I quote CS Lewis who said one of his characters who was kind of the bad guy, he read all the wrong books. And I tell Christians, I tell our viewers, make sure you’re reading The Book, which is God’s eyewitness testimony of the beginning, the end, and His plan for all humanity.

Dave Bowen: And that ties us right back to the passage here, getting ahead of myself a bit, verse 17. Verse 17 says, be on your guard so that you’re not carried away. And what’s important there is those two little words, so that, because when you see those two words, it’s a transition. What’s before that is the teaching, be on your guard. After that is so that you don’t carried away. That’s the application. So why should I be…

Nathan Jones: Excellent.

Dave Bowen: Why should I be in God’s Word? Why should I be focused on that? Be on your guard, be in His Word so that you don’t get carried away. Carried away to what? Everything that we’re talking about here, which believers get carried away.

Tim Moore: And again, if it’s not for your own salvation, that it’s very dangerous to go down the slippery slope, then are you going to allow your children or your grandchildren, others you have influence on to be further down that slope and slip away into an eternity away from the Lord.

Nathan Jones: Yeah.

Tim Moore: It’s very dangerous.

Nathan Jones: I think a lot of Christians who buy into evolution are confused. They think that, well, science is facts and it’s, there’s no bias to it and all that. But we know the unbelieving world, wants a world without God. Matter of fact, some of the leading atheists says that they believe there’s a God, but they just can’t stand the thought of it. It’s so horrible to think that there’s a God. So they created this system, and that’s what Darwin did, a system that removes God out of it and tries to make a naturalistic explanation for being.

And so again, I think we got two groups here because like you said, there are the Christians who are just falling into a lie and they’re down that slippery slope. They’ll start other things in the Bible like the Flood, they’ll start denying, but when it comes to saying, we don’t think that Jesus Christ is ever coming back, that’s the unbelieving world. They don’t want the Lord to come back. They don’t want judgment to come upon them. As one atheist told me once, he says, I just want God to leave me alone. Why can’t He leave me alone? That’s their cry.

Tim Moore: You know, I actually enjoy debating atheists. Because I’ll ask them, “Have you been to every corner of the cosmos?” “Well, no.” “Have you even been to every part of the world?” “Well, well no.” “But yet you have enough knowledge that you can exclude the possibility of God, let alone the reality of God.” And very quickly they realize, you know, that’s a little bit of a stretch. All right, I’m an agnostic and they come partway. But here in verse eight, not just verse eight, but we understand that God is outside of time. I think that’s the context of this verse where a day is like a thousand years. The Lord can look down and say creation, the end, Tim, Nathan, Dave were born. And He sees it all with equal clarity.

Dave Bowen: Correct.

Tim Moore: Because He’s not confined to time as we know it. You know, my memory fades after a few hours. Some of y’all have probably seen that. My wife will tell you it fades after a few minutes sometimes. But God’s memory does not fade and He sees the entire timeline of human existence equally clear because He’s outside of time as we know it. And I think that’s what’s communicated.

Dave Bowen: And we’ve got to come back to the main thing. Make the main thing the main thing and that is seeing this through God’s perspective, not through man’s perspective.

Tim Moore: Yes.

Dave Bowen: Because once we start seeing it through our eyes, then we get off and everything else, then we try to justify that. And the Scripture’s very clear. There’s warnings. Don’t get carried away, be careful with this. Don’t be deceived. And that’s what’s marking. We have to make sure we see it through God’s eyes and have God’s perspective. And the only way of doing that, as you said, is to be in God’s Word.

Tim Moore: So this brings us to the great choice that faces humanity. And really, I think you cited in another episode we had in our Inquiring Minds series how God offers either life or…

Dave Bowen: I lay before you life or death blessings or cursing’s…

Tim Moore: Blessings or cursing.

Dave Bowen: Of Deuteronomy, but He says, what? Choose life.

Tim Moore: Choose life. So right here we see the blessings or the curse. The curse comes first in verse seven where it says the very Earth itself, Heaven and Earth are being reserved for fire kept for the day of judgment and the destruction of what? Ungodly men. And you think, well surely that’s not me. Folks, all of us are ungodly. Men, women, boys, girls, unless we are covered by the blood of Jesus Christ.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Tim Moore: And He looks upon us and sees His Son. And so the wrath of God abides on all who reject Him. And that’s why the Earth is awaiting judgment. And not just the Earth, mankind.

Nathan Jones: But that’s tied into another sign that the apostle Paul gives Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:1-5, where he explains what the personality of these people who deny the Creation, the Flood, and the Judgment. He says, “Know this in the last days,” here we go again, again, the last days, “perilous times will come for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving.” He goes on and on. He says, “They have a form of godliness but deny its power.”

Dave Bowen: Right.

Nathan Jones: We have seen, especially in the Western church, so many churches just leave Christianity, adopt a form of godliness but deny His power. And what are the three things they always deny? The Creation.

Dave Bowen: Right.

Nathan Jones: The Judgment and the Flood and the judgment of the Second Coming.

Dave Bowen: And it opened this way, verse three says, you know, they follow their own lust. So they follow their own evil desires.

Nathan Jones: Yes.

Dave Bowen: So even again, we come back to our passage that’s point blank in the beginning.

Nathan Jones: And what is when we follow our losses? Because we put ourselves in place of God, we say we know better than God.

Tim Moore: We know.

Nathan Jones: We become…

Dave Bowen: Idolatry.

Nathan Jones: Idolatry. Yeah, isn’t it funny you think that ah, idolatry is all in the past and all. It’s still here today.

Tim Moore: It’s still here today. So there’s the downside, the curse if we will, but then we come to the great blessing and that is in verse nine that shows the true heart of God, His compassion, that even as He’s talking about wrath, really His motivation is to extend mercy because He is waiting. Even His delay in fulfilling His promise is because He is wishing that no one would perish. So He’s offered a pardon to all who would accept. But really the choice is ours. The choice is yours on whether we will embrace this salvation that He offers.

Dave Bowen: Right, God’s Word is trustworthy.

Nathan Jones: You had a fantastic statistic you shared beforehand about if the Lord had just raptured everybody off this planet in 1900, how many people would be missing from Heaven?

Dave Bowen: Well, that goes back to Arizona Christian University and they did some stuff with George Barna. I wanted to find the research to verify this, but they estimate it that if, because people say why isn’t He coming back, why isn’t He coming back? When’s He going to come back? If He would’ve come back in the 1900’s, there would’ve been about 1 million people in America saved. So, but if He comes back now 125 years later, there’s close to 2 billion people.

Tim Moore: Worldwide.

Dave Bowen: Yeah, so…

Tim Moore: And throughout time for these last 2000 years.

Dave Bowen: Right. So I mean is it worth 100 years to have brothers and sisters for eternity from 1 million to 2 billion?

Nathan Jones: But just think when that last Christian is saved, maybe, you know, you’re talking and sharing the Gospel with somebody. Maybe they’re that last person of the Church Age that will trigger then Jesus calling, My Church is complete, My Bride’s complete. Let’s take her home.

Dave Bowen: And instead of banners and balloons, we get the Rapture.

Tim Moore: There you go. As eager as I am for Him to come, sometimes I realize that from God’s own perspective, Tim Moore worrying about Tim Moore’s homegoing is somewhat self-centered. The Lord is not just worried about my homegoing, my homegoing is already secure.

Dave Bowen: Yeah.

Tim Moore: Whether it’s today, tomorrow, whether we go together or He calls me before you guys. But He is worried about all humanity.

Dave Bowen: Yeah.

Tim Moore: And not worried. He has concern and He has compassion for, and so it is too self-centered even sometimes to say, Lord, I want you to come for me. Whereas He is again, trying to extend His love to all. But we are called to be in a commissioning, a co-laboring with Him because even as He doesn’t want any to perish, He’s given us a mission to proclaim the Gospel, to share that Good News with whoever we come in contact with. And not just the three of us, but everyone who’s put their faith in Him.

Dave Bowen: To be salt and light.

Nathan Jones: Amen. Well, how do we live in these dark times, Tim? Because we’re getting called to share the Gospel. I think you have some resources here…

Tim Moore: Yes.

Nathan Jones: that I find really fascinating to help because folks, we can barely deep dive into this in 27 minutes or so. But if you get these resources, it’ll really expand more on what we’re talking about.

Tim Moore: Well, let me just say this, in terms of deep dive, all of our materials that we have, not only through Christ in Prophecy, but on articles in our magazine, are available on our at christinprophecy.org. There we feature teachings by Dave Bowen through his Deep Dives, through podcasts. And so you can find a smorgasbord of information on any topic that we discuss here to take a deeper dive. But we also have today two resources for you from Dr. David Reagan’s prolific pen, Living for Christ in the End Times and Living on Borrowed Time: The Imminent Return of Jesus. And both will give you some real timely insights for how you can serve Him right now as we wait for the Lord’s homeward call.

So fellas, I think that there is clearly a warning to those who would dally with false teaching here, a warning to us to stay focused on what the Lord says and to trust in Him and to be about His business while He waits. I had a great friend, Gary Varvel, that recently said, even in an email to me, “Onward until upward.” And so certainly we should continue onward as Christian soldiers.

Dave Bowen: And I think it’s important to understand, God repeatedly tells us this. You can go through Proverbs 13, Proverbs 3, Psalm 14, Psalm, I could go on and on with verses, God continuously gives us this message and His Truth. That’s how it’s important and how important it is for us to understand, mockers, scoffers will come, but we need to stay focused and true to God’s Word.

Nathan Jones: And that’s a big question inquiring minds want to know. They go why is Jesus seeming to take forever to come back? Especially folks that went through the Jesus movement, they expected by the 80’s or so they’d be out of here. And so I point them right to, right here to 2 Peter 3:9, “For the Lord is not slow concerning his promise. He doesn’t count slowness, but he is long suffering toward it.” Isn’t that long suffering, “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” You know, if the Lord came before 1973, I wouldn’t be going to Heaven.

Tim Moore: And you know what? There’s another deep question we can explore another time in verse 12 that we can actually hasten the day of the Lord by being intentional about sharing the Good News as is His heart, so that none would perish.

Nathan Jones: Right.

Closing

Tim Moore: Well, there you have it, folks. As eager as we are for Jesus to come and rapture us to Heaven, we consider it a privilege to be serving Him in such a time as this as we wait.

Nathan Jones: We also consider it a blessing that He has given us time to co-labor with the Holy Spirit in proclaiming the glorious Good News of the Gospel. Jesus, God’s only begotten Son, lived a sinless life and He suffered a horrible and unjust death, taking on Himself the punishment for our sins. He was buried, but by His own power, He came to life again and He ascended to Heaven. And He sits at the right hand of God the Father. And He is coming again.

Dave Bowen: Now if you recognize that you fall short of the perfection demanded by God, just confess your sins and your sinfulness and believe that Jesus died for you. Trust in Him and He will save you from your sins and from the wrath of God that will soon be poured out upon the Earth.

Tim Moore: Folks, you know Peter realized time was short when he wrote his second letter almost 2000 years ago. God has been patient all this time because he did not want anyone to perish. Clearly, He does not want you to perish.

We have prayed that if you are watching this program and have not already trusted in Jesus Christ for your salvation, you’ll do so today. And if you’re following Christ already, we pray that you will embrace His Word, coming to know and love His prophetic Word, and looking forward to all the promises He will fulfill.

Both your salvation and your deepening relationship with God is made possible by Him and brings joy to Him. As Peter said at the close of his letter, “To Him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.” And Godspeed!!

Nathan Jones: Christ in Prophecy is made possible through the faithful and generous support of viewers like you. Please consider making a donation to Lamb & Lion Ministries so that we can continue broadcasting the message of Jesus’ soon return. Thank you and God bless you.

End of Program