To Encourage You

2 Peter 3:3-7 “Knowing this, first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.’ For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.”

Do you wish you knew the future?  It is often because we don’t know the future, that we are so tempted to worry about it.  The truth is, none of us really knows what will happen in the next five minutes, let alone even later in this day, this week, this month, or this year.  James informed us that we shouldn’t presume on the future.  We are told in James 4:13-15 “Come now, you who say, ’Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” 

However, there are some things that we can know about the future, and in fact, there are some things that God wants us to know.  He has spoken of these things throughout His Word.  But does He know?  Because we are so prone to doubt Him, He has given us hundreds of prophesies in the Scriptures to demonstrate that He knows the future.  He has boldly told us what is coming, and He started this from the very beginning.  In Genesis 3:15 He said this to Satan: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”  And of course, this is exactly what happened.  It was the Pharisees, of whom Jesus said, “you are of your father, the devil” (John 8:44), who instigated the plans to crucify Christ (i.e., bruise his heel), but it was on the cross that Jesus “destroyed the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8) (i.e., bruised his head). 

God prophesied hundreds of things regarding the first coming of Christ, e.g., His virgin birth, His birth in Bethlehem, His escape to Egypt at the time of Herod’s murder of the children born at the time, His suffering, His death on a cross, and His resurrection. God told us before it happened about the rise and fall of the kingdoms of the Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Greeks, and Romans (Daniel 2 and 7).  He, and only He knows exactly what will happen tomorrow, and He knows what will happen 1,000 years from now.  And it is this omniscient God Who has told us that Jesus is coming again.  Yet, men, who know nothing about the future, will foolishly mock at this to their own peril.  God has told us what He wants us to know about the future.  And He wants us to live on that basis. 

So, is that how you are living?  The answer to that question will determine your future.  The answer to that question will determine if, in the end, you will be “like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.  In all that he does, he prospers” or like the wicked, who in the end, “are like the chaff that the wind drives away” in the infallible prophesy of God recorded for us in Psalm 1.