Peter returns to the method that has run through this letter. He reminds, and he wants his readers to remember the prophets and the apostles. Then he names the coming challenge. 3"Scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires." The scoffers are predicted, and that matters. Their arrival confirms the prophetic word that foresaw them.
Their argument is simple and has lasted twenty centuries. 4"Where is the promise of his coming?" Nothing has happened in all these years, so nothing will. Peter's reply begins by naming the error as a choice. 5"They deliberately overlook this fact." The forgetting is willful.
The fact they overlook is the flood. The same word that formed the world once undid it, and continuity has been broken before. Peter says the present heavens and earth are 7"stored up for fire." The Greek for stored up is the word for treasure, *thesaurizo*. The present world is being treasured away, like valuables put in a safe, to be brought out on a day God has chosen.
Then Peter addresses the delay itself. 8"With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." He is drawing on Psalm 90:4. The sentence adjusts perspective, and readers do it an injustice if they turn it into arithmetic. God does not keep a calendar the way we keep one, and a long wait by human measure is not a long wait by his.
Then the center of the passage. 9"The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you." The Greek verb for patient, *makrothymeo*, describes a long temper, the capacity to hold back when one has every right to act. James used it of the farmer waiting for the harvest (James 5:7). Peter uses it of God. What looks to scoffers like failure is mercy, open door after open door, a time given for people to turn. Paul says much the same in Romans 2:4. The words toward you make it personal, so the patience extends to people in the church and to people beyond it.
10"The day of the Lord will come like a thief." The image comes from Jesus himself (Matthew 24:43), and it marks the day as sudden, without a schedule anyone can read in advance. The last phrase matters: 10"the works that are done on it will be exposed." What people built and did will be seen for what it was.
The passage tells the scoffers that the patience they mock has an end, and it tells the faithful that the delay they are tired of is an act of love. Those are the same fact, seen from two sides, and the waiting is the gift in both.
Ask where waiting has worn you down, and who in your life God's patience might still be running for today.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you are patient toward us and wish that all should reach repentance. Keep us from forgetting what you have done and what you have promised. Help us to wait without mockery and without despair, and make us ready for the day of the Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.