Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2533
“You therefore, Beloved, seeing you know these things before, beware lest you, also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own steadfastness.” 2 Peter 3:17.
The Apostle has told us that there will come, in the last days, scoffers. We, therefore, know this is to be the case, for we have been informed concerning it. Forewarned is forearmed and now that we see the scoffers and cannot help seeing them, we perceive another proof of the truth of Scripture. Every time a blasphemer opens his mouth to deny the truth of Revelation, he will help to confirm us in our conviction of the very Truth of God which he denies! The Holy Spirit told us, by the pen of Peter, that it would be so, and now we see how truly he wrote.
I do not think it is of any use to sit down and fret about the badness of the times. Ever since I first understood anything, I have always heard that there has been “a crisis.” Somebody or other has continually assured me that we were just on the brink of something perfectly horrible. I have never been quite able to see that the times at any particular period have been very much worse than they used to be. Thirty years ago they seemed to me to be about as bad as they could be—and I could not see any room for their getting much worse! I used to, then, constantly hear laments about “the good old times,” and I remember saying that the times, then, were the good old times, for time was never so old before. And, taking all things into account, I thought that, perhaps, the evils of that time were not so very much greater than the evils of the ages that had gone before. Still, I do incline a little to the belief that the times have become worse of late. At any rate, in this matter of scoffers!
The scoffers who used to be in holes and corners have now come out into the open and, worse still, they have climbed into the pulpits! And if not there, actually to scoff, they insinuate doubts and undermine the faith of many who formerly believed. The times are certainly now very perilous, whatever they may have been in the past, and, as we look into the Scriptures, we see that the New Testament, even where it does not take the exact shape of prophecy, nevertheless does give us many indications of what we may expect in human history—and those indications are being verified continually all around us! Seeing we know these things before, we are bound to pay the more earnest heed to the lesson of Peter in the text before us which seems to me to be most suitable to the times in which we live!
There is another matter that ought not to be passed over without much searching of heart and much lamentation— and that is that in all our churches of every sort there is a very dreadful leakage continually going on. It is so with ourselves. We receive large numbers into fellowship, but there are continually large numbers going out from us, not always by sin, but many, of course, by death and emigration and removal. And there is a large proportion of members who drop out of sight, although, at the time of their admission, they gave credible evidence of conversion, according to the judgment of those who watch over men’s souls. Look in any of the lists that are published by any religious body—at the column recording the numbers of those who are dropped for non-attendance and so disappear from the church roll—and you must be saddened to see how many are thus lost to us who, at one time, appeared to become good soldiers of Jesus Christ.
Because of that sad fact, I thought it all the more necessary that I should speak at this time upon the words in our text—“You therefore, Beloved, seeing you know these things before, beware lest you, also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own steadfastness.”
I. First, dear Friends, there is a TITLE here given to all Believers which is well worthy of our careful consideration for a little while. The Apostle says, “You therefore, Beloved.”
Peter is not the Apostle of Love. We do not expect to find him speaking in such terms as we have in John’s Epistles. Yet it is very amazing that the greatest praise of love was written, not by John, but by Paul. And here, Peter, without seeming to go at all out of his way, speaks just as affectionately as John might have spoken. I suppose he felt that when he was administering a rebuke, and when he was warning against a great peril, it was right that he should speak in the most affectionate terms. I do not think that we shall ever do people much good by bullying them. I question whether any receive rebukes at all if they are not administered in love. They only resent them if they are spoken in anger. But when the tone of the reprover is that of affection, then even stripes will be accepted, even as it was with David when he said, “Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness: and let him reprove me; it shall be an excellent oil, which shall not break my head.”