In his song “Creed,” the late Rich Mullins set the words of the Apostles’ Creed to music. If you have never memorized the Apostles’ Creed, which is a basic statement of Christian beliefs, listening to that song would be a great tool to help you do that. The song consists of the words of the creed set to music, but with an inserted chorus that goes like this:
“I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am. I did not make it; no, it is making me. It is the very truth of God, not the invention of any man.”
I love that chorus. It is refreshing to hear a popular Christian artist say that doctrine, which is simply another word for Christian beliefs and teachings, is what makes us who we are. Doctrine is central to the Christian life. That’s different from the attitude that far too many evangelicals exhibit toward doctrine. Perhaps you have heard someone say, “Doctrine just divides,” or “I don’t want to bother with doctrine. I just want to love Jesus.” The suggestions that come across in such statements is that doctrine gets in the way of real Christian life. But in reality, nothing could be farther from the truth.
Peter’s main point in this second letter, which we are finishing today, is that doctrine directs. What we believe points us to a particular way of living, and that is why Peter is so concerned to correct false doctrine, particularly related to the second coming of Christ and the final judgment. Think about it: if you became convinced by false teachers that Jesus was not actually going to come again, and that there would be no final judgment, no day of reckoning for sins, wouldn’t you be tempted to draw the conclusion that fighting against sin today really isn’t all that important? Peter sees that false teachers use false teachings to justify their sinful behavior, and so he recognizes the directive nature of doctrine. And in response he reaffirms sound doctrine and lays out the proper conclusions that flow from it about how we are to live in this present time.
Sound doctrine leads to faithful practice. Now, I don’t mean that this happens automatically. There are plenty of people who can cross all their theological t’s and dot their theological i’s who do not, in fact, live godly lives. So I’m not saying that sound doctrine alone is a sufficient condition for godliness. We must take care that the doctrine we believe we also embrace with hearts that truly love God. Sound doctrine alone is not sufficient, but it is necessary. That is, we will never be able to pursue godliness without sound doctrine. And so my purpose in working through these last few verses of 2 Peter is to expound the main doctrine that Peter reminds us of and then unpack three applications for our lives that flow out of it.
Let us note first, then,
All of chapter 3 has been focused on this issue. Just as a reminder, look back up to verses 3-4: “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.’” The false teachers Peter warned about in chapter 2 are the scoffers of chapter 3 who assume that things will go on indefinitely as they always have. Christ will not return, there will be no judgment to come. That means that there will never be a final answer to sin. God must not really disapprove of our sin, because he is never going to do anything about it. And so there really is no such thing as “sin” anymore. God has no standards. We have complete freedom to follow our desires in whatever direction we want to go. Why should I fight against my own desires if God himself is not opposed to them? A moment’s reflection will indicate that this pattern of thinking has become pervasive in American society today. The average American does not seem to believe that there is a day of judgment coming, and as a consequence of that, there really are no objective standards revealed to us by God that should regulate our behavior now. All that matters is what the individual desires. If a man wants to call himself a woman, then the issue is settled. His inner desires trump reality. If a woman wants to “marry” another woman, then the issue is settled. Her inner desires determine what marriage is. There is no objective order to the world because there is no understanding that a sovereign God who created the world is also going to judge the world. And so instead of conforming to the reality he has determined, we just get to make up whatever reality we want. You see, doctrine directs our lives.
In response to this teaching, Peter has already made powerful arguments in 3:1-13, and he comes back to one of those arguments in verse 15. Here he interprets the apparent delay of Christ’s return and the final judgment in a different way than the scoffers. Rather than assuming that the fact that Christ hasn’t returned yet is an indication that he never will, Peter tells us something far more insightful. Verse 15 reads, “And count the patience of our Lord as salvation.” Here Peter tells us to interpret the apparent delay of Christ’s coming as an expression of God’s patience. Every moment that Christ has not yet returned is another moment that we have to pursue holiness in our lives. And it is another moment in which God is exercising patience toward you if you are outside of Christ and in need of repentance.
I want to speak for a moment to those who either have not professed faith in baptism or perhaps who have in the past but are not walking with the Lord now and are thus not giving evidence that you really know the Lord. In his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards expounded this biblical doctrine: “There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” His point was that every moment that unrepentant sinners do not plunge into hell is a moment that was not owed to them; it was sheer grace alone. In the application section of the sermon he said to the unconverted among those gathered to hear him: “Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock. Were it not for the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment.” In other words, what is keeping you out of hell this very moment is not your good health. It is God’s patience alone, which is not owed to you one bit. You must allow yourself to grasp the deadly seriousness of your situation.
But the good news is that God’s patience serves the purpose of your salvation. As long as you Christ has not yet come again, and as long as you still draw breath, it is never too late to turn from your sins and turn to Christ. No matter how great your sins may be, Christ is greater. No matter how long you have given yourself over to sin, Christ’s atoning death is fully sufficient to remove them all from you in one moment of faith. I call upon you who need Christ today: if your heart is beating right now, it is because God is showing you patience. Do not despise that gift.
And so, Peter says, count the patience of God as salvation. But then Peter goes on to make reference to Paul and his letters. Verses 15b-16 say, “just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” Why would Peter bring up Paul’s letters here? It is probably because the false teachers tried to appeal to Paul to support their case. Paul, after all, argued very strongly that believers are not under the Law. If you take that teaching out of context, you can twist it to mean that Christians are not under any moral standards at all. And that is probably what Peter means when he refers to some things that are hard to understand in Paul’s letters. I don’t think Peter means that Paul’s writings are not clear; I think he means that Paul writes things that are capable of being misused fairly easily if you remove them from their proper context. But false teachers don’t just twist Paul’s writings; they do that with all the Scriptures, silencing the true Word of God by imposing their own twisted interpretations on it.
Interestingly, I want to zero in on two things Peter says about Paul’s writings here. One is that he says in verse 15b, “just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him.” Peter may be referring to the letter of Galatians, or possibly Ephesians or Colossians. We’re not sure. But note that he speaks of “the wisdom given to him” that enabled him to write. In other words, Peter is saying that Paul wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And that leads to a second observation about Paul’s writings: in verse 16, Peter refers to Paul’s writings alongside “the other Scriptures,” indicating that he regards Paul’s writings as Scripture. Although the New Testament frequently refers to Old Testament writings as Scripture, this is one of only two apparent occasions when a New Testament book refers to other New Testament writings as Scripture. In 1 Timothy 5:18, Paul seems to quote the Gospel of Luke alongside the book of Deuteronomy as Scripture. And then here in 2 Peter 3:16, Peter places the writings of Paul in the category of Scripture. The reason this matters is because the authority of the Bible is established, not by any external authority such as the Pope or the church, but by the Bible’s own testimony to itself. The Bible itself tells us what it is, namely, that it is the inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word of God.
Now that’s more of a sidenote. In this section, Peter’s main point is to show us how to think rightly about the return of Christ, and that means believing that it will occur, and with it will come the final judgment and the new creation, and the apparent delay of these things we experience now is merely God’s patience as he leaves the door of salvation open for a bit longer. This is the sound doctrine we are to believe.
And so having expounded the main doctrine from this passage, we turn now to
In the remaining verses I see three particular applications the flow out of the doctrine Peter has taught us. If the final judgment is indeed certain to come, and the present time is a time of God’s patience, what should we do? How does this doctrine give us direction?
First,
(1) Live a life of repentance (v. 14)
In verse 14, Peter writes, “Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these…” What are “these” that we are waiting for? Peter is referring to what he just said in verse 13: “But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” “These” in verse 14 is the new creation. The coming of the new creation is associated with the second coming of Christ and the final judgment, of which Peter has written in all of verses 1-13. Since you are waiting for these, “be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace.” The doctrine of the second coming leads to the conclusion that we must be diligent now. We must make every effort to repent of all sin so that, when that day comes, we will be found without the spot or blemish. Now, there are two senses in which “without spot or blemish” applies to believers at the final judgment. On the one hand, it could refer to the fact that we are clothed in the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ counted to us by faith. That is the legal basis for our entrance into the new creation, and that is a precious truth about our standing with God. But I don’t think Peter is referring to that reality here. Another sense in which we could speak of being without spot or blemish would be, not in the sense of being perfect, but rather of having no overt moral stains that are the result of a failure on our part to take sin seriously and thus to repent of it. You see, being a Christian doesn’t mean you won’t ever sin, but it does mean that you won’t love your sin and commit yourself to it. We must make every effort to repent of all known sin in our lives regularly, knowing that Christ will certainly come again, and we will stand before God on the last day.
Think of it this way: when you make peace with sin and simply accept it as part of your life, then put yourself at war with God. But Peter says we must make every effort to be at peace with God when Christ comes. That peace is an objective reality for all those in Christ, but it is also worked out subjectively when the Spirit of God convicts us of sin and leads us to hate and seek to turn from it. That process of regular confession of sin, seeking forgiveness, and turning from it is something that we never grow out of in this world. Jesus taught us a model prayer (Matt. 6:9-13) that I think he intended us to pray on a daily basis. I believe he intended that because he taught us to pray for our daily bread. How often should you pray for daily bread? Daily. And in that very same prayer Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matt. 6:12). If this is a daily prayer, and it includes asking for forgiveness, that indicates to me that Jesus intended us to make confession of sin (which necessarily includes repentance) a daily practice.
In the Middle Ages in Europe, the Latin translation of the Bible that was most used by the Catholic Church translated Jesus’ command in Matthew 4:17 in this way: “Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” When a medieval person heard the words “Do penance,” he assumed that referred to the occasional practice of going to a priest to confess your sins. In response to this translation of Matthew 4:17, Martin Luther made this argument in the very first of his famous 95 Theses: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent!’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” He was making the point that repentance is not an occasional practice we engage in as part of the church’s sacramental system. For followers of Jesus, repentance is what happens in all of life, as we daily grow more and more to see the sin that remains in us and go to war with it. One day Christ will certainly return, and the final judgment will come. So make every effort now to be found before him without spot or blemish and at peace with God when he comes by living a life of daily repentance.
And then a second application:
(2) Guard yourself from those who will lead you into sin (v. 17)
In the previous application I focused mainly internally, on the sin that still remains in our hearts. Here my focus is external. Not only must we make war on sin by repentance, but we also must take steps to guard ourselves from falling into sin through the influence of others who might lead us astray. In verse 17 Peter says, “You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand [namely, that false teachers twist the Scriptures to make their points], take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.” Peter warns us against falling under the influence of false teachers whose teachings will lead us into sin and, ultimately, into falling away from the faith entirely.
It’s one thing to be tempted to commit a sin that we know is wrong. It’s another thing to be convinced by a false teacher that sin is not actually sin. One book that I have our pastoral apprentices read every reading cycle is entitled God and the Gay Christian by Matthew Vines. What makes this book somewhat unique is the fact that Matthew Vines claims to believe in the inerrancy and authority of Scripture, but he affirms homosexuality by arguing that the Bible never condemns faithful, monogamous homosexual activity. The reason I have our apprentices read it is because I want them to see the kinds of arguments they will almost certainly encounter at some point in their ministries and be prepared to answer them. False teachers such as Matthew Vines don’t tempt people to sin by saying, “Yes, you know it’s wrong, but don’t you still want this sin really badly?” Instead, they say, “This is not wrong! God is fine with it. Follow your desires with no pains of conscience.” And Matthew Vines can do all kinds of impressive moves with the Bible to make it sound like he is an authoritative voice on this issue.
How do you protect yourself from these kinds of false teachers? I want to give you three words of direction. First, stay immersed in the Bible. Let the Word of God do its work in you as you listen to its teachings daily and repeatedly. Second, stay immersed in the life of the church, where you are surrounded by other like-minded believers and are under the teaching and authority of faithful pastors. When you start to have theological questions, don’t be afraid to bring those to your pastors. We would applaud you for asking; we would never shame you for honest inquiries, and we would do our best to help you. You need a strong community around you to resist the pull of the spirit of this age as it comes through false teachers. And then third, I would urge you to read old books, or books that help you understand old ideas. There is far more wisdom in the past than in the present, and if we only read books from the present age, we will not be aware of the blind spots of the present age. Yes, generations past had their own blind spots, but listening to them will help point out to us our own blind spots and give us categories of thought that enable us to resist the spirit of this age when it seeks to lead us astray. This is why some of our Sunday School classes are devoted to retrieving the good teachings and examples of the past. Be diligent to guard yourself from false teachers who will seek to lead you astray.
And then finally, a third application:
(3) Pursue Christ (v. 18)
The fight against sin cannot be purely negative. What I mean is that we will never defeat sin by focusing on fighting sin. The purpose of turning from sin is because it stands opposed to Christ, and our goal is to get more of Christ! You will never overcome sin if you do not simultaneously pursue Christ.
It is interesting to me how Peter gives his final command in verse 18: “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” We don’t normally command growth. Your children don’t have to be told to grow. That’s a biological process that happens mysteriously as they live their lives. Moreover, it is doubly interesting to me that Peter commands not only growth, but growth in grace. Grace is God’s favor upon us. Grace refers to divine action. How can we be commanded to grow in something that God does? Shouldn’t we rather wait passively for God to do it all? No, what I think Peter is saying here is that we must seek to grow in our experience of God’s grace. We must seek to enhance our ability to comprehend the grace of God that has been given to us. We must, in other words, constantly seek to take in how deeply God has loved us in Christ. And that requires supernatural power, but the fact that God must do it in us is not a call for us to remain passive. We must meditate on the truth of the gospel and its implications for our lives in order to grow in grace. To grow in grace is nothing other than to grow in knowledge—experiential, relational knowledge—of Jesus Christ. Peter speaks of the same reality in two ways in verse 18, and that reality is pursuing Christ with all that we have.
One of my favorite stories in the Gospels (Mark 2:1-12) is the story of the paralytic whose friends brought him to Jesus but found that the house where Jesus was teaching was too crowded to get in. So they carried their friend on his mat up to the roof of the house (roofs were flat and accessible in that setting). And they tore a hole in the roof so they could lower their friend with ropes to Jesus. Think about the social awkwardness of that situation. Imagine you’re sitting inside that packed house, your attention on every single word that Jesus is sharing, when all of a sudden you hear something coming from the roof, and you look up to see some men tearing a hole in it! Some of the debris from the roof is probably falling in on some of the people’s heads inside, maybe even some on Jesus’ head. And then there’s Peter sitting next to him, and in all likelihood this event took place at Peter’s house, and there he is looking up at some goofballs tearing a hole in his roof. When I was a kid I once set off the alarm for the emergency exit at Golden Corral. I remember being terribly embarrassed because I was the center of attention, but not in a good way. I got everybody’s attention by creating a disruption. How much more did these guys cause a disruption? But you know what? They didn’t care. They had one goal in mind: we have to get to Jesus, and nothing is going to stop us. And they knew Jesus’ heart well, because when they laid their friend before him, Jesus didn’t look up and rebuke them for disturbing the gathering. He said, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” When I read that story, I see an example of men whose sole purpose was to get to Jesus, and nothing else mattered. And that’s how I want to live my life.
Now, you might respond: “Well, of course they wanted to get to Jesus. They had a pressing need. Their friend was paralyzed.” And are you any less needy of him if you are not paralyzed? You see, the point of the story is not that we would say, “Well, if I ever have a big need like that, I know where to go.” The point of that story is to be a living example to all of us of how much we need Jesus. And it is a picture of what Paul declares is the purpose of his life in Philippians 3:10-11: “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” Grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ. Make it your life’s goal to pursue Christ. If you are trying to fight sin without pursuing Christ with all that you have, you’re just playing games. This is all about Jesus.
And that’s the note on which Peter closes: “To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.” It is a bit unusual for doxologies in the New Testament to be directed specifically toward Christ rather than toward God the Father. And yet Peter, who referred to “our God and Savior Jesus Christ” in the introduction to his letter (1:1) has no trouble ascribing glory to Christ forever here at the end. The Christ we pursue is no mere man. He is God himself revealed to us, given for us.
I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am. I did not make it; no, it is making me. It is the very truth of God, not the invention of any man. Doctrine directs life. Our doctrine of the final judgment to come, when Christ is revealed from heaven, must motivate us now to make war on sin, to guard ourselves from false teaching, and to pursue Christ daily. May we pursue him now by eating and drinking at his table. Amen.