Burn Baby Burn
The Day of the Lord Is Coming (Peter 2: 3:3-13)
3 Most importantly, I want to remind you that in the last days scoffers will come, mocking the truth and following their own desires. 4 They will say, “What happened to the promise that Jesus is coming again? From before the times of our ancestors, everything has remained the same since the world was first created.”
5 They deliberately forget that God made the heavens long ago by the word of his command, and he brought the earth out from the water and surrounded it with water. 6 Then he used the water to destroy the ancient world with a mighty flood. 7 And by the same word, the present heavens and earth have been stored up for fire. They are being kept for the day of judgment, when ungodly people will be destroyed.
8 But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day. 9 The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent. 10 But the day of the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief. Then the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise, and the very elements themselves will disappear in fire, and the earth and everything on it will be found to deserve judgment.
11 Since everything around us is going to be destroyed like this, what holy and godly lives you should live, 12 looking forward to the day of God and hurrying it along. On that day, he will set the heavens on fire, and the elements will melt away in the flames. 13 But we are looking forward to he new heavens and new earth he has promised, a world filled with God’s righteousness.
Out with the old, in with the new
When do you fix and when you do you replace? In this day and age, we are very much into the concept of “planned obsolescence” - things are no longer designed to be “buy it for life” and we change out our clothes, our gadgets, when they break or even just when we want something new.
Is this what God is doing when Jesus comes again? Is this world so much of a lost cause that when Jesus comes again everything needs to be destroyed and replaced? Honestly a lot of the time I look around at humanity and yes there is beauty but there is also so much evil and so much pain. Maybe we are a lost cause. But the thing is, if it were to be Noah’s ark all over again, would the same fate beget humans with greed, pride, wrath, sorrow, lust, gluttony, glory and sloth?
Many people when asked whether they want the world to end would say no, but why? Are we as humans really making the world better place? If not, then what’s so bad about the world ending?
A World Without Consequences
If you were to take the Bible literally, when Jesus comes again, the world will be destroyed - so what’s the point of trying to make the world beautiful and worth keeping? This leads me to think about what would happen if there were no consequences to our actions.
Sure I would like to believe that I’m a good person, even when no one’s watching. But how pure are our intentions? When we do things out of kindness or goodness of our hearts - are we doing it because God is watching and we don’t want to go to Hell? Are we doing it because our peers are watching and we want to be like and accepted? Are we doing because we want something in return in the future? I think much more than we would like to admit, a lot of what we do or what motivates us are consequences.
Take for example working at a job. If you do poorly, you get fired. If you do well, you get promoted. But what if you work at a job where nothing changes if you do poorly or if you do well - you would keep the job, you would keep the same pay. Would you really put in the same amount of effort into being good at this job? Interesting, eh?
Interpretation is Context-Dependent
“A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day.” People lament that Jesus has taken His sweet time in coming again, but maybe to Him, it’s only been a few days.
Another take on the fire that’s supposed to happen when Jesus comes again is that this fire, instead of destroying the world, destroys the wall between Heaven and Earth, and we will be one with God and Jesus. This suddenly makes our world feel worth preserving and building up, right?
Interpretation is really very context-dependent, and having a different perspective can really change how you feel about something. So the next time you feel strong emotions about something, I challenge you to come up with a different perspective (even if it feels like an implausible one), and maybe you’ll get to see the world differently and feel how that change in perspective shifts those emotions
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