Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1125
“But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in all holy con versation and godliness?” 2 Peter 3:10,11.
MEN have frequently inferred liberty to sin from the apparent absence of God from the world. Because the Lord, in His infinite long-suffering, has suffered transgression to go for awhile unpunished, therefore they have wickedly said, “How does God know? The Almighty does not regard us. He will neither interfere to punish men nor to reward them, whether they break or keep His Commandments.” When for a long time no great changes have occurred in the world, no remarkable judgments, no visitations of famine, pestilence, or war, men are very apt to grow carnally secure and to take license to sin from the merciful respite which ought to halve led them to gratitude, and through gratitude to obedience. At certain periods it has seemed to the Most High to be imperatively necessary to send great calamities upon mankind lest pride, oppression and profanity should cause society utterly to rot.
The fall of dynasties, the overthrow of empires, devastating wars and dire famines have been necessities of God’s moral government, bits in men’s mouths, bridles for their arrogance, checks to their licentiousness. The Lord is slow to smite the wicked, for His tender mercy is great and He delights not in the sufferings of men. And therefore He keeps His arrows in His quiver and hangs up His bow. But, alas, men take advantage of His love to grow grossly sinful and to blaspheme His name! Against this spirit the Apostle is arguing in this chapter. The profanely secure had said, “Since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were; where, then, is the evidence of God’s existence? The world goes on like a clock, needing no hand to move its wheels or guide its action. There is no God,” they say, “to interfere, and we may live as we like.”
“No,” says the Apostle, “but God has interfered.” And though he might have quoted a thousand lesser instances which I have already hinted at, he preferred to forego them for the present, and to put his finger upon the great event of the flood, and say, “Here, at least, God did interfere.” He could no longer bear the transgressions of mankind and therefore He pulled up the sluices of the great deep and opened the floodgates of Heaven. He bade the angry floods leap forth from their lairs and they swallowed up the earth right speedily. Thus it is plain that all things have not continued in one course—there have been interpositions of Divine Justice. The Apostle then tells the scoffer that there will be another interposition before long. But instead of water, fire shall be the instrument of destruction.
God’s mill grinds slowly, but it grinds to powder. Justice loiters to commune with Mercy, but it speedily makes up for its lingering. Long is the blow withheld, but when it falls it cuts to the soul. God’s wrath is long in kindling, but in the end it shall burn as an oven. We shall speak this morning upon the general conflagration foretold in our text. “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”
Then, secondly, we shall discourse upon the practical inferences which the Apostle draws from it—“What manner of persons ought you to be in all holy conversation and godliness?”
I. Let us turn our thoughts to THE LAST GENERAL CONFLAGRATION. Information as to the future in Scripture is generally very indistinct in arrangement and though many attempts have been made to form a consistent scheme of prophecy, not one has been even moderately successful. There are, in the Word of God, many clear testimonies as to distinct events in the future, but these cannot easily be arranged in order so as to harmonize with other events.
Neither will the most accurate observer, as I believe, ever make a consistent series of them, so as to map them down. They are perfectly consistent and their order is Divine—but we shall need the actual fulfillment to make the plan clear.
So intricate is the architecture of future history that only the Architect Himself knows where this stone and that and the other are ordained to stand. It is not for us to fling any one of the stones away, or censure it as ill-fashioned. We are but children and our little plans of house-building, like children with their toy bricks, are very simple and elementary, indeed. But God’s architecture is of a high class and we cannot, therefore, conjecture where this event will come in, or where that marvel will find its place. But we may rest quite assured that each one will follow in an orderly manner upon the other and, instead of puzzling our brains over projects of interpretation, we may be quite satisfied to take each of the facts separately as we find them, believingly expect them and, above all, deduce from them their legitimate practical conclusions.