“For this they willfully forget…” (2 Peter 3:5)
This was as true in Peter’s day as it is in our day: many questioned whether the day of judgment promised by God would ever come. They said, “Where is the promise of his coming? For since the Father fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of the creation.” But to doubt that God is going to destroy the world is to forget that He has already destroyed the world with water once before. And the promise made to us that God is coming in judgment of fire is no less certain than His promise in the days of Noah that a flood of water was coming. When God says something is going to happen, it is going to happen. Those who doubt this have forgotten their history.
But Peter made an interesting thing when he said, “This they willfully forget.” The skeptics of his day were not only missing the fulfillment of God’s promises in the past; His oblivion was deliberate. That is, they were forgetting because they wanted to forget. The proofs of the certainty of God’s promises were inconvenient obstacles in the way of the path they loved to follow, so they put this information out of their minds. But today we are not able to do anything better, is it so? Eric Hoffer was right: “What we don’t want to know is more important than what we do or don’t know.” By what we do not want to know, we decide our own destruction.
Yet the truth about God is independent of our attitude toward that truth. What is true about God is true whether we care to know it or not. What He has done, He has done whether we remember it or not. And let that sink in: What He will do, He will do whether we are ready for it or not. God is a great reality that dominates and encompasses all other realities. In fact, no other reality would exist if He had not created it and made it real. Then, it is very beneficial for us to think and act rightly in relation to God who is our Creator. Remembering rather than forgetting what God has done in the past is the key to treating God reverently in the present. And this is the key to clear thinking about His promises in the future. If we are ever tempted to doubt or wonder “Will He do it?”, what He has already done is all the answer we ever need.
“The truth does not change because people forget it or ignore it or falsify it” (Irwin Edman).
Gary Henry – WordPoints.com AreYouaChristian.com
