Meditation for Monday
Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts. 2 Peter 3:3
We are getting perilously close to a time of terrible judgment in our nation. How do we know this? Because when God judges nations, He follows a specific pattern. And we in our land have entered into the final stage of God’s pattern for judgment. Our text identifies it as the last days, or the day of the scoffers.
The first stage of judgment is God recognizing that a nation has given itself over totally to sinfulness. We see this pattern in God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 15 that his descendants would inhabit the land that he was living in as a stranger and wanderer. Those descendants would be used by God to punish the Amorites for their sinfulness. But it would take awhile, because the sinfulness of the Amorites had not reached God’s breaking point: ‘But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full’ (Genesis 15:16). The word translated ‘full’ carries the meaning of friendliness or friendship. This refers to the open embracing of sinfulness by a nation. This goes beyond merely allowing or condoning sinfulness, but accepting it as the common and acceptable form of behaviour. Do you see how this can apply to our nation today? We saw what happened in Genesis 19, when Sodom and Gomorrah were entirely given over to their abominable lifestyles; God’s judgment was swift and total. Their cup of iniquity was full and overflowing, just as we can see around us today.
God’s pattern of judgment also identifies the rising up of scoffers, those who deny God and mock His Word. Those scoffers are all around us today. They mock God by rejecting the Biblical record of creation, substituting for it the nonsense of evolution. They mock God by rejecting His declaration of the sanctity of life by endorsing the wholesale slaughter of unborn children. They mock God by passing laws that not only allow but encourage and embrace the open practice of homosexuality, which God has declared as an abomination. They mock God by promoting satanic New Age doctrines and practices that make a mockery of the Word of God. And these are just the most prominent of the scoffers. There is an entire society out there today that rejects any notion of God as being relevant to them and their lives.
Before executing judgment, God always sends messengers to warn of destruction, as He did with Sodom, with the Amorites, and with the Israelites down through their history of idolatry and departure as recorded in the Old Testament. It is when the scoffers reject the messengers that God moves in judgment. Watch for them, the messengers are coming. Will it be before the Rapture? Maybe. – Jim MacIntosh