Sermon Tone Analysis

13 But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

14 Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace.

15And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 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.

17 You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.

18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity.

Amen.

The title for my sermon today, Holding Tight to Truth Together, has been the theme for the past sermon year, which concludes today.

One of the great privileges of being a preacher and getting to study the Bible as a vocation is that, as with anything, teaching a subject means you learn more than you can ever teach to others.

I want to share with you this morning something about what God has been teaching me over the past year.

What I want to do today is to put before us the great promise of the Bible and help us to align our lives in line with it.

I want to argue that the promised end of the gospel story informs the present task of the Christian life.

I want us to hold tight to truth together and thereby to see a transformation within our church that will reinvigorate us for sustained and fruitful gospel ministry in the year ahead of us.

So, first, I want us to consider the truth we hold together, namely, the promise of God that we believe and that we are trusting he will bring to completion.

Second, let’s consider how it is we can hold tight to this truth, the preparations we should make since we expect God to fulfill his promise.

Then, lastly, as we hold tight to this truth together, we catch a glimpse of the kind of people we will become.

The Promise We Believe

First, what is the promise of God that we believe, the truth that we must hold to?

What is it we are expecting God to do in the future?

God’s Great Promise

This is a question that Christians do not seem to answer very clearly.

If we were to survey professing Christians about the hope they have, what it is they expect God to do, we would surely not receive a unified response.

I’m guessing that most would say something about how their faith in God helps them handle the great challenges of life, to find purpose and meaning in it perhaps.

I’m sure many would say that they have hope that God will accept them into heaven when they die.

I’m not denying the truth of such claims.

But they all miss the mark.

The God of the Bible makes clear, from Genesis to Revelation, what his great promise is, and the muddle that most Christians seem to be in on this point is a serious problem.

How is it that we don’t seem to know the main thing the Bible promises?

We do, in fact, know it; the problem is that I’m not so sure we believe it.

Or at least we seem to downplay it in favor of some of the other suggested responses to the question of what God has promised to do.

Looking back to the beginning of this chapter, Peter states that he has now written two letters to stir up his readers, urging them to remember what the Old Testament prophets had predicted and what Jesus had commanded in light of those predictions.

And what was predicted was God’s final judgment on the world, his setting everything right again.

This is the great promise of the Bible, and it has to do not with simply navigating through life’s great challenges or being assured of peace after death, important as those things are.

It has to do with the world we live in now.

Optimism and Pessimism

Like Peter in his two letters, I, too, want to remind us of this great promise.

Holding tight to it will mean not that we believe the world will get better and better until, finally, we have ushered in the kingdom of God in its fullness.

In spite of the rhetoric of every politician, we do not have to keep believing that our best days are ahead of us—provided, of course, we give him or her our vote.

At the same time, we must reject the all-too-pervasive belief that the world is “going to hell in a handbasket” and that the consolation is that we will soon enough find rest in “the sweet by and by.”

The truth we believe about what God is going to do for the world is neither the optimism of the progressives nor the pessimism of the fatalists.

So what do we believe?

Look now at verse 13 and note it well: “But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.”

The promise of God is a new creation, when God does for the entire cosmos what he did for Jesus of Nazareth on Easter Sunday.[1]

In other words, it is not that God will do away with the world but rather, having subjected it to death, he will raise it from the dead.

That is how we are to read the apocalyptic language Peter uses in verses 10-12.

The world being “burned up” is compared to the floodwaters in Noah’s day (vv.

5-7) which destroyed “the world that then existed” and led to the one that exists now.

Similarly, we believe that God will again do something dramatic, resulting in a new heavens and new earth that is the redemption, but decisively not the annihilation, of the old.

The Righteous New World

The Bible encourages us to imagine what life in this new creation would be like, but however we do imagine it to be, it is still a creation of time, space, and matter.

It is still something like the world we experience now, complete with food and animals, with rivers and mountains.

The Christian expectation here is in line with the Jewish one, for the “new heavens” and the “new earth” is promised first in the Old Testament.

Peter is referring to the prophesy of Isaiah 65 and 66.

It was to Israel in exile that God promised to create “new heavens and a new earth” where “the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind” (Isa 65:17).

The new creation will include a world “in which righteousness dwells,” or where righteousness “is at home” (NRSV).

This righteousness is not simply a reference to the moral behavior of individuals but to an entire culture of equity and justice.

What every progressive can only dream of the Christian gospel promises to deliver.

The coming of Jesus did nothing but confirm that God would keep this promise, for in his resurrection we see a glimpse of what is to come.

We must wait for it, for it is not yet here as promised.

But the promise has already begun to be fulfilled, so we must now work for it.

Not “for” in the sense of “in order to earn it,” but in the sense of “with an eye toward, for the benefit of.”

We work for the new creation not like we work for a paycheck we don’t yet have but like we work for the employer and his business which is already here.

The Preparations We Make

The challenge of the Christian life, as with any other worldview, is to now see if one can live consistently with his or her beliefs.

We can consider the answer to the conditional if/then statement: If we believe that God is going to deliver on his promise of “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells,” then what is the way we ought to live our lives?

Peter’s answer to that question comes in verse 14. “Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace.”

The promise we are waiting for informs the preparations we now make while we wait.

Waiting Is for Getting Ready

But we need to consider for a moment the difference between waiting for something unexpected verses waiting for something anticipated.

Suppose you have a house on the beach of the ocean.

There are certain things you will need to do to prepare for the possibility of a hurricane.

You know a hurricane could come, but it is also possible a hurricane won’t come, at least not for a very long time.

Your preparations for a hurricane will be very different if you’ve been told by the meteorologists not that a hurricane might form and hit your house but that a hurricane has formed and is heading your way.

The promise of God we are waiting for—the new heavens and new earth—is the promise of the kingdom of God which Jesus plainly declared was imminent.

And when Jesus’s disciples encountered him after Easter, they understood that the long-awaited promise of God was now unfolding before their very eyes.

Here before them in a physical but immortal body was “the beginning, the firstborn from the dead,” (Col 1:19).

A new creation was now underway.

So, like the owner of the house on the beach, noticing the dark clouds starting to form, it really is time to get busy.

The kingdom of God is at hand.

What should we do?

Holy Preparations

Again, note Peter’s answer to the question: “Be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace.”

To be “without spot or blemish” is a way of describing a perfect sacrifice free from any moral impurity.

Peter is saying that since we are waiting with anticipation for the full arrival of the kingdom of God, a new creation in which righteousness dwells, we had best get busy making ourselves fit to enter it.[2]

This makes perfect sense.

If we anticipate a great king coming to dine with us at our house, we will surely do everything we can to ensure that the meal is the best, that the house is spotless, and that we have properly groomed for the occasion.

But someone is sure to object that talking like this is legalism.

But it is Peter who says this, and Paul, too.

The reference to Paul in verses 15-16 reminds us that what Peter is saying here is consistent with what Paul often writes about.

For example, Ephesians 1:4 says that “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.”

In Ephesians 5 Paul says that Christ gave himself up for the church “so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph 5:27).

Colossians 1:22 says that God has reconciled us to himself through the death of his own Son “in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.”

Twisting the Scripture

How did we ever get to a place where we thought that God did not really care about our moral behavior?

One way we got there was by misreading the Bible, a problem that Peter brings up right here in verse 16.

It is not because Paul or the other biblical writers are not clear in their communication but because of the misinterpretation of their communication by the “ignorant and unstable.”

So long as we do not keep the clear apostolic teaching in front of us, we will tend to misunderstand the more difficult passages.

And I’m suggesting that for many of us the clear apostolic teaching we’ve not kept in front of us is the great promise of the new creation, and this has caused a lot of problems for the church.

For example, thinking that the Bible’s primary message was how we might get “into heaven” upon our unfortunate death, we’ve not taken seriously the call to Christian holiness.