The Patience of God

Do you ever wonder why we are still here? Why has God let the world continue for as long as it has? God has kept every promise that He has ever made except the promise about Jesus’ second coming. In 2 Peter 3:8-9 ESV, we find out why Jesus has not returned. It reads:

“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

God isn’t slacking! He is not just being slow. He is not indifferent about passing judgment. He is patiently waiting on everyone to repent, obey the gospel, and follow Him. Why is He so patient towards us? Because  God, who loves us all so much that He sent His Son to die for ALL of us, does not want anyone in the human race to be lost!! Notice that verse nine says that he doesn’t “wish” or want anyone to perish, but it doesn’t say that no one will. Unfortunately, there are many people who have passed away in a lost condition. However, there are people being baptized for the remission of their sins every single day. I see it on Facebook. I hear about it from other people. God’s word, the Holy Spirit, is still alive and doing its work here on earth. God is continually adding people to His church every day, because the Bible is alive and working in people’s hearts!! 

Listen to Hebrews 4:12 describe the living Word of God,  “For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” 

As long as there are souls being saved, then I have faith that God will continue to be patient. God already knows everyone who is going to become a Christian. He already knows everyone who will stay faithful until death. He already knows everyone who is wayward at this moment, but will eventually be restored. Only God knows the exact day that He will send Jesus back to get us. The angels don’t know and even Jesus Himself doesn’t know. (Matthew 24:36, 44) Jesus compares His coming to a thief in the night. If we knew exactly what time the thief was coming to rob us, would we not be prepared at exactly that moment so that we could stop him? (Matthew 24:43) 

Peter makes this statement in 2 Peter 3:10 directly after our key verses, “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.” 

So….upon hearing all of that….do we need to continue to test God’s patience by thinking that we have all the time in the world to get our lives right? It is a dangerous way to live, my friends. I procrastinated getting my life right for years. I tried to justify things that I was doing that were wrong, and I made excuses for the things that I was not doing that I should have been doing. I’m so thankful for God’s patience. I know He has waited patiently for a really long time for me to somewhat get my act together. If you are reading this, and you are not a Christian, or you are not being a faithful Christian, then you are who God is patiently waiting on. How long will He wait? We don’t know! Don’t take chances with your soul. God is patient, but we don’t know the hour when He has planned to send Jesus back. Plus…..we don’t know when our life will end. Anything can happen at any moment to cause our life to be over. At that point, God’s patience for us is over, and we don’t get another chance. Is God waiting on you? 

Jesus compares the end of time with the flood of the old testament in Matthew 24:37-39 when He says, “For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” 

No one knew when the flood was going to destroy the earth, not even Noah. Speaking of patience, let’s think about Noah for a moment. He waited patiently for 120 years while building the ark, from the time God told Him to build the ark until the time of the flood. All that time, He was trying to warn the people, and get them to change their evil ways while they all laughed and made fun of him. God waited patiently for Noah to build the ark so that He could bring about the judgment that was needed for His plan to continue. You see….a day, 120 years, a thousand years….it makes no difference to God. He definitely works within our human time zone, but He isn’t concerned about the length of time things take, just like He isn’t concerned about how old we are when we get our life right with Him. It only matters that we do it before our time runs out here on earth. Think about that.

Do you remember waiting for Christmas Eve or your birthday to come when you were a kid? It was so hard to wait, but you had no choice but to be patient. Do you remember being in the car for a long trip and saying, “Are we there yet? How much farther?”? As an adult, I get impatient when I am in a traffic jam or when I get put on hold on the phone for a few minutes. Our time is precious to us, and we don’t like to waste it. We are always in a hurry to get where we need to go. That being said, I believe we all need to slow down and enjoy our moments more. That is just a free opinion, but easier said than done, right? But what is time to God? We know that God’s patience is so much greater than ours simply because of this statement in 2 Peter 3:8, “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” This simply means that God will wait as long as He has to wait for His plan to unfold. Whether it takes a day, or a thousand years, God will wait until the time is right, just the way He waited until the time was just right for Jesus to be born. Things that seem like a long time to us are not a long time to our eternal God. This part of the verse has been taken out of context by so many people. I have heard some people try to make this relate back to creation. They try to say that, because of this section of this one verse, we can’t say that one day during the week of creation was a regular day as we humans know it. They say that each day of creation could have been thousands, millions, or billions of years long. This is just not true. The Hebrew word for day (yom) in Genesis 1:1 is the same Hebrew word for day that is used throughout scripture. If we can’t trust that when God says a day, He means a day, then can we trust anything that He says? God speaks to us in our time zone. He is the one who made time!! He would not speak to us about a day of creation in Genesis and mean millions of years, and then turn around and speak of a day later in scripture as meaning a regular day. That is confusing, and God is not the author of confusion. (1 Corinthians 14:33) Most of the book of 2 Peter is focused on being ready when the Lord comes again and watching out for false teachers while we are here. Why would Peter have thrown in something that refers back to creation and time in this context? The answer is….he wouldn’t have and he didn’t!! This is just another of the evolutionists’ desperate attempts to prove their theories. Moses spoke of the days of creation when giving the commandment about keeping the Sabbath day holy. 

In Exodus 20:11, he says,  “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” 

There is no doubt about it. God made the earth in six literal days and rested on the seventh day.  If God was speaking things into existence, then why would He need a million years within each day to create everything? Don’t let evolutionists cloud your mind with their baseless theories. Nothing they have ever said has been proven. In fact, the majority of their theories have been disproven by the Bible. Watch what your kids are being taught in school, because the devil wants them. Through the teaching of evolution, Satan can put doubt in our children’s minds, and then it can grow and spread until they don’t even believe God’s word at all any more. Please watch out!! Dinosaurs are so much fun for kids to learn about, but make sure to teach them with the Bible as the main source of information, and don’t buy books and materials that talk about dinosaurs living “millions of years ago”. That is contrary to God’s Word. There are wonderful materials out there that teach children all the wonders of the dinosaurs while keeping the information in line with the Bible. Check out apologeticspress.org for some great materials. Here is the bottom line my friends, we either take all of God’s Word to be the truth, without twisting it to fit what man says, or we don’t take any of it. 

So…what led up to Peter penning our key verses in 2 Peter 3:8-9 about the patience of our great God? If we go back to the beginning of the letter, we see that the book is written to: 

“those who have obtained like precious faith with us by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ..” (2 Peter 1:1 NKJV)

The book is a letter that was written to those with “like precious faith” the same as Peter,  which means it was written to Christians. The letter is Peter’s final pep talk to his readers before his impending death. He tells his readers to “make their call and election sure” with diligence after giving them a list of attributes to add to their faith, which included, virtue, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love. He tells them if they abound in these things, then they will never be unfruitful and they will never stumble. (2 Peter 1:5-11) Does this not sound like a motivational speech when you read these verses? It is certainly motivational for me. This short book is packed full of encouragement for us as Christians. And the example that Peter sets before us is amazing!! Here he is, knowing that he is on the verge of death (martyrdom) just as Jesus had told him in John 21:18, and what is his main concern? The souls of his fellow Christians after he has passed on is his main concern. Listen to these verses, 

“...I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things, though you know and are established in the present truth. Yes, I think it is right, as long as I am in this tent, to stir you up by reminding you, knowing that shortly I must put off my tent, just as our Lord Jesus Christ showed me. Moreover I will be careful to ensure that you always have a reminder of these things after my decease.” (2 Peter 1:12-14)

According to 1 Peter 5:1, Peter was an elder in the Lord’s church. What an example for all elders today!! Peter wanted his flock to have this letter as a set of reminders, words of encouragement, and a pick-me-up after he is gone. He wants them to have something that will be passed down through the generations. This letter was probably written sometime between 65-68 AD, before Peter was martyred in 68 AD, and here we are still getting the pep talk from Peter today. I love it!  In 2 Peter 2, Peter uses this entire chapter to warn Christians about false teachers. He says that many will follow them and “the way of truth will be blasphemed”. (2 Peter 2:1) Is this not a picture of not only the world, but the religious world as well today? 

He gives them a very eye-opening statement in 2 Peter 2:21-22 when he says, “For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”

In my opinion, this may be one of the scariest statements made in the whole Bible, especially for people who have fallen away and left the Lord’s church. I can just imagine standing before God on judgment day knowing that I had salvation in the palm of my hand, but I followed a man’s opinion and turned my back on the truth. Or…maybe I just gradually became unfaithful and left the church, because I didn’t grow and bear fruit. Or…maybe I was there every time the doors were open, but I was not living my life outside of those doors the way that God would have me to live it. Wow. Just thinking about having Jesus, and then throwing Him away would have to make that moment so much worse. The analogy of the dog and the sow paints a picture of how God feels about us when we go back into the world after becoming a Christian. It makes me think about how He has felt about me in the past, which brings me full circle…back to God’s patience. 

But why is Peter reminding them of God’s patience? Why does he bring this subject up? If we back up to 2 Peter 3:1-4 we see the reason. It reads: 

“This is now the second letter that I am writing to you, beloved. In both of them I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder, that you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles, 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.””

Peter said that there would be people (scoffers) who would mock us and make fun of us for what we believe. The world says things like… “Do you really believe He’s coming back? It’s been so long! Do you really believe all that heaven and hell stuff? That stuff is all myths and fairy tales.” And then this one, “Do you really believe that Jesus was God’s son and was resurrected from the dead? He was just a regular guy who was a little radical.” And this, “Where is God? If He was coming back, He would have come back by now. Just do what you want, because if God even exists at all, He isn’t interested in us.” Have you heard things like this? Sadly, I have! I’m sure we have all heard variations of these statements. Wow! Peter called it, didn’t he? Aren’t we scoffed at just like Peter said we would be, because we follow the Bible and trust in God to keep His promises to us. Are we surprised? They mocked and made fun of Jesus for saying that He was God’s Son. Jesus said that the world would hate us, but not to worry because it hated Him first. (John 15:18-19) This is why Peter was inspired to write about the patience of God. Because He knew what we were going to be faced with. Peter was an elder….a shepherd of the Lord’s church who gave us one last phenomenal pep talk before he was martyred for the cause of Christ. Peter knew that God had been patient with him when he was weak in his faith, and guilty of denying Christ three times for fear of what men might do to him. Look back through Bible history at the patience of God. God has given everyone free will to make decisions for themselves. God doesn’t force anyone to follow Him. He never has! God has patiently waited as people all down through history have made bad decisions and turned away from Him, then made good decisions and turned back to Him, over and over again. God destroyed the earth once before, and started over again with only Noah and his family. And He knew that He was going to have to do that from the beginning, because He is all-knowing!! Does that not take patience on His part? Then one day, the time was right for Jesus. God always knew when that time would come about. And then….the time was right for His church to be established. God knew when those moments would take place from the beginning. And now, He is patiently waiting for each of us….waiting on us, Sisters…..to do all we can for His purpose….to help save as many as we can. 

Peter poses a question to us in 2 Peter 3:11-12, Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat?

When I paraphrase this to speak to myself, here is what I say. “What manner of person ought you to be, Greta Hoover? Since all this is only temporary, how should you act while you are here?” We know the answer. Sisters, let’s recognize and be thankful for God’s patience with us, all the while staying prepared for the day of His return by “growing in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 3:18)

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! Love you all!!  

Are you in Christ? Are you a branch connected to the true vine, which is Jesus Christ? (John 15:1-8) Below I have added God’s plan of salvation with scripture references. If you need help understanding how to be saved, please reach out. I can help you or put you in contact with someone who can help you.

God’s Plan of Salvation

Below is the plan that God has set forth in His word, for mankind to receive His grace that leads to salvation and an eternity with God in heaven. 

We have to hear His word. (Romans 10:17) 

Upon hearing the message of Jesus, we believe it. (Mark 16:16) 

Then, we confess Jesus’ name before men. (Matthew 10:32) 

Next, we repent of our sins. (Acts 2:38, Acts 3:19) 

Finally, we are baptized into Christ for the remission of our sins. (Acts 2:38, Matthew 28:18-20, Mark 16:16, Romans 6:3-4, Acts 22:16, 1 Corinthians 12:13, Galatians 3:26-27) After baptism, God adds us to His church. (Acts 2:47)

Then, we remain faithful in our commitment to Christ until death. (Revelation 2:10, 2 Peter 2:20-22)