To Encourage You

2 Peter 3:10-13 “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.”

What do you know about the future?  More than that, what do you know about your future?  As the saying goes, “Nothing is certain in this world, except death and taxes!”  And while that saying is a popular one, it is not true, for there are many things that are certain about the future, beyond death and taxes. We just need to know where to look to find out.  But there is only one place to look, and that is God’s Word, for it is God alone who actually knows the future. He knows exactly what is coming to each and every one of us in precise detail.  Much of it He has told us. And what He hasn’t told us, we don’t need to know, for we can be sure that the God Who loves us with an infinite love would have told us if it had been good for us. 

One of the things that He has told us, because He wants us to know, is that there is extreme global warming coming to this world someday. He talks about it in the verses above.  In fact, it will be a warming that goes beyond this globe – for “the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly” (2 Peter 3:7).  In this stark language, God is telling all of us that pretty much everything we see is going to perish someday.  We see premonitions of this right now, as the natural pathway of most everything around us is to wear out, decay, or die.  In scientific terms it’s call entropy, which is the natural tendency of everything that exists to go from a condition of order to disorder and decay.  Our cars rust, our buildings, unless we constantly fight against it, fall into disrepair and fall down, our bodies get old, our health declines, and we die. 

So, if this is true, if these dismal prospects are coming, what should we do in the face of it? As the apostle Peter says in the verses above, “Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be?”  And the answer we receive throughout the Scriptures, in the precious words given to us from our Creator, is to be about those things that will not pass away. Thankfully, God has told us exactly what these are.  For example, Jesus told us in His Sermon on the Mount to “not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21).  In other words, we are to use our possessions to glorify God, rather than to accumulate them to ourselves.  As we use what God has given us to bless others in ways that are intended to lead them to the knowledge of God, we are storing up our “treasures” in heaven.  And then someday, just as one young man saw how Jesus took his five loaves and two fish to bless a multitude, we will one day know how Jesus has done the very same thing with the things we have given Him. 

But it is not only our things that are perishable.  God has warned us that our works, if they are not done to glorify Him, will one day perish as well.  In 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 the Holy Spirit speaks through the apostle Paul to believers with these words: “According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.”  Elsewhere, the Bible tells unbelievers that the loss, for them, will be total in the end.  We are told that for the one without Christ, “even what he has (right now) will be taken away” (Matthew 13:12). 

So, “what sort of people ought we to be” as we live this life in a world that is passing way with bodies and possessions that are passing away with it?  We are to be people with lives focused on eternal things, like eternal life, the glory of God, and treasures that are laid up in heaven.  In the words of the Christian martyr Jim Elliot: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”  And that’s exactly the sort of people we ought to be.