The End of the Universe, Part 1 (2 Peter 3)

and economic of a person and a liberation from a certain system of morality. We opposed morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom,” end of quote. Don't give philosophers too much credit...please. Do not consider them pure intellect. Hedonistic philosophers, naturalists and atheists who deny God allow themselves to be carried away by their passions. Therein lies the real reason to believe in atheism, evolution and liberal theology. The Bible, if taken seriously, interferes with your sexual freedom. That's what Paul Johnson makes so vividly clear in The Intellectuals. They must deny that God...the God who judgesSin and sinners exist to free themselves to their lusts without restraint and without guilt.

So underneath the denial is the motive of ridicule and the motive of immorality. There is another argument that they make that Peter identifies, the argument from ridicule, the argument from immorality, and thirdly, the argument from uniformity... the argument from uniformity. Verse 4, they say this: “Where is the promise of his coming?” What do you mean by that? Hey, where is He? He is not here. Most believers, as I said, thought He would come during His lifetime. He did not come. He hasn't come yet. False teachers take advantage of this, not only emotionally through ridicule, but intellectually, I suppose they try to rise above their admitted immorality by saying it is a historical bad deal.

It is a bad historical perspective. It's a bad philosophy of history because look, everything stays the same... everything stays exactly the same as it's always been. “Where is the promise of his coming forever since the fathers fell asleep, if everything continues as it was from the beginning of creation?” That is definitely a revisionist historical view. Since the fathers fell asleep... that is, the patriarchs of the Old Testament, the people from the beginning, the first people continue just as they were from the beginning. Actually? You would call this... I would call it immutable uniformitarianism... immutable uniformitarianism, immutable uniformity.

This comes from Thomas Lyle, this comes from Darwin, this comes from the Huxleys... father and brothers. But it did not originate with them. It originated with Satan. The satanic lie is that there will be no catastrophic judgment in the future. The satanic lie is that divine intervention will not come to the created order, it never has. Everything always continues exactly the same. Everything moves at the same natural and uniform rhythm, it always has and always will. This is like saying, "I've never died, so I never will." Actually? I've never been sick, so I never will be.

I have never had cancer, so I will never have cancer. What kind of argument is that? This denies miracles. This denies the Old Testament story of what I call miracles of judgment, because the acts of God in the Old Testament that were judgments of God that brought about death and disaster were miraculous interventions of God. Supernatural trials. Most miracles before Christ came here, the vast majority of miracles in the Old Testament were miracles by which people died, not by which people were healed. Skeptics want this evolved

universe

, this evolved planet, this closed system of fixed, inviolable, natural laws to be impersonal and continuous, with no moral law or moral legislator in charge of anything.

Sensual sinners find their only hope of sinning without guilt in the fable that everything remains the same and judgment never comes. It may be difficult to convince a quarter of a million people in Indonesia after the tsunami that everything is business as usual. It may be difficult to convince the hundred thousand people who died in a recent earthquake that everything is business as usual. I read a book this summer, a fascinating book. Once I started it, I couldn't put it down. Its title is The Great Influenza. I don't normally read a book about the flu, I never read a book about the flu in my life.

And when I started reading the book I was afraid of getting caught up in graphs, charts, and clinical jargon that I couldn't even understand. But it is a brilliant book. A New York Times bestseller, written by John Barry, who is extremely talented as a researcher and writer. It is masterful, it is monumental in what it achieves as a book, as active research and presentation, it is one of the best I have read in my entire life. It's the story of the flu, the flu as if you've never known it, but as if some of your parents did.

Let's go back to the year 1918, the year of the great war, the First World War. There are some hogs in western Kansas. These pigs have somehow contracted a virus from birds; All flu viruses originate in birds. These pigs managed to transmit this virus to some young people. These young men are drafted into the military because the United States is raising troops to fight in World War I. They are sent to a camp in the eastern

part

of Kansas. They go to camp. There are about forty thousand men trapped there and the flu they have infects the men there.

Now remember, it's 1918. There has never been a real cure for a disease in the history of the world until 1885. Get it? They didn't even understand the pathology of the disease. No one ever cured anyone of anything. So medical art is deadly, not life-giving. They do not know what to do. They don't understand quarantine, they don't understand isolation. They don't even understand the virus. They don't even know what a virus is and what it does. They don't know that a virus is not a living thing like a bacteria, it is a semi-living thing that attaches itself to the DNA of a living cell, encodes that cell with its own DNA, and then spreads through the cellular system.

There are so many different types of viruses that this one happens to be the most virulent in human history. And before its course ends in twenty-four months, are you ready for this? One hundred million people died... one hundred million worldwide. Some of your parents lived through that, that's why you're here. Horrific. The doctors didn't know what to do about it. It is probably the most important moment in the history of American medicine because in the horror of those hours, those days, and those months, all of our country's great medical institutions were founded. The largest investigation in the history of medicine in the United States was conducted while they were trying to solve the problem.

They never solved it, thirty years later they couldn't solve it. They never believed it was a virus, they thought it was bacteria. The bacteria... the virus managed to mutate to that level of virulence and has since mutated down to a much less virulent form that we typically experience during flu season. There is no reason to explain why it became so virulent then and why it is less so now. But it could happen again. The thing is, not all things continue the same way. That little half-creature that exists in a fallen world killed a hundred million people.

How fragile is life? Who are you kidding? Evolution is simply a tool, atheism is simply a tool, agnosticism is simply a tool to free the sinner so that he can satisfy his lusts. Those are the arguments...the ridiculous, the immorality, the uniformity, everything remains the same. That is revisionist history. We know better. By the way, the Great Influenza of that twenty-four month period killed ten times as many as died in Europe in the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague. As far as we know, he was the greatest murderer in human history. On the other hand, there is the argument of the saints.

Those are the arguments of the mockers, let's return to the text. What about the arguments of the saints? How is Pedro going to help us? How is he going to equip us to not be victims of these things, of ridicule, uniformity and immorality? Then Pedro presents some arguments. Arguments of the scoffers, arguments in favor of the saints. First, from the Scriptures… from the Scriptures, verse 1: “This is now, beloved, the second letter that I am writing to you, in which I am awakening your sincere mind as a reminder.” I love that phrase: “Your sincere mind… your undefiled mind… your waxless mind… your true understanding.” I am awakening your pure faculty of spiritual discernment.

First of all, friends, we find our answer to criticism in the Scriptures and we come to the Scriptures with a mind that has been transformed. We have the mind of Christ, 1 Corinthians 2. Romans 12, “We have had the renewing of our minds to know what is the good and perfect will of God.” So Peter recognizes that as believers, contrary to the false teachers, verse 12 of chapter 12, who are like irrational, irrational animals, instinctive to be captured and killed, or verse 17, springs without water, fogs driven by a storm, or verse 22, dogs returning to vomit or pigs wallowing in the mire, according to verse 1 we have been given a pure mind that can be moved.

And what awakens that pure mind? Verse 2, “I want to awaken your pure mind as a reminder…what is that?…do you remember…what?…the Word spoken beforehand by the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord. and Savior spoken by your Apostles.” This is Peter's reference to the Scriptures, the Old Testament and the New Testament. And Peter has already said, back in chapter 1 verse 19, “We have the most certain word of prophecy, whereby you do well to keep watch for a lamp that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises.” tomorrow in your hearts. .

First, know this: no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation or origin. No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke on behalf of God,” that is Scripture. So, we have an inspired Scripture. We take our purified minds that have been purified by the work of regeneration. We return to the words spoken beforehand by the holy prophets, referring to the Old Testament, and to the commandment of the Lord and Savior that came through the Apostles, that is the New Testament. Where do we go to refute the skeptics?

Let's go to the Word of God. You can go back to the Old Testament, you will read a lot about judgment. Psalm 2, Isaiah 13, Isaiah 24, Isaiah 34, Isaiah 51, many of the minor prophets, Zephaniah, Malachi, all kinds of places in the Old Testament where the holy prophets of old spoke about the final judgment. There are prophecies in Isaiah about the end of this world as we know it and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. And also, the commandment of the Lord, the entole, literally the law of the Lord that was spoken and written by the Apostles, that is, the New Testament... the New Testament, 23 of 27 books written by the Apostles themselves.

And they tell us a lot about divine judgment. Words like those of the apostle Paul tell us a lot, including Peter, about the end times: “It is right that God should repay those who afflict you with affliction, that he should give relief to those who afflict you and to us also when the Lord Jesus is revealed.” from heaven with His powerful angels in flames of fire, giving retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus and they will pay the penalty. of eternal destruction, far from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power”, promises like that, which are found in the Old Testament and also in the New Testament.

So, we argue against the skeptics of the Scriptures. The Scriptures of the Old Testament and the New Testament give us clear revelation about the coming judgment that will be brought upon men in the explosion of God's final wrath, mediated through the one He has appointed as judge, Jesus Christ. Then Peter moves on to a plot of history... a plot of history. Verse 5, “When they maintain this,” that is, that all things continue from the beginning as they were, immutable uniformitarianism, when they maintain that everything follows the same path, says sarcastically: “It escapes their attention… . They escape that by the Word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed from water and by the water by which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.” Ah, minor detail.

They ignore the fact of the Flood. It escapes them that you can go to the top of the flat cliffs of the Grand Canyon and find seashells and it's not just Christians who find them. I have one on my desk that was found a mile from my house. “It escapes them”, literally in Greek they close their eyes to the facts, or in the authorized version, the King James, they willfully ignore them. This is the path of deliberate ignorance, of convenient ignorance. They seek evil. They look for sin. They seek the freedom to be immoral and that colors everything.

They exercise their deceitful lies in the church. Romans 1 says that they consider themselves wise and in reality they are foolish, deliberately and willfully ignorant. It never surprises me that a Christian believes that the Bible can put an end to the arguments of an atheist evolutionist. That doesn't surprise me because his arguments are neither reasonable nor intellectual. They intentionally refuse to recognize this massive historical event that undermines the entire concept of uniformity, namely the Flood, the universal world Flood by which God destroyed the entire evil world except eight people. How many people did he destroy? I don't know if we can reach aPraise Him.

So don't worry about it. As Rick says, "Step on the grass, shoot a deer, drill for oil." Very well, the rest next week, let's pray. It is so wonderful, Lord, to be able to turn to Your Word and find the answers to things that seem so difficult for the society in which we live to understand. We are so grateful, Lord, Your Word is so amazing, so powerful, so consistent, so true. You are such a great God, what privileges we have to know You, be loved by You and serve You. May we be faithful in everything, giving You honor in the name of Your Son.

Amen.