AP

2 Peter 3:15-16   Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him.  He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters.  His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

This is a timely word for us today.  The apostle Peter had spent three years in close friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ during his earthly ministry and so had come to appreciate Christ’s own total commitment to the older Scriptures as the inspired and infallible Word of God.  He had also been given the promise by the Lord Jesus that he and his fellow-disciples would receive the Spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit/Helper/Comforter, who would “guide [them] into all the truth” (John 16:13); and the fulfilment of this promise was initiated in a quite spectacular way on the Day of Pentecost, 7 weeks later (Acts 2 :1-3).

So, it would be quite wrong, and fairly arrogant, for us to under-value the significance of what Peter wrote here!  He was writing to discouraged and persecuted believers who were starting to doubt what Jesus had said about his future return in power.  Not only had it not happened, but the enemies of the Gospel were clearly getting the upper hand in the world.

In this statement, the ‘inspired’ Peter is not only giving his imprimatur to the Old Testament Scriptures as the Word of God, he is saying the same authority belongs to the letters of the apostle Paul.  The Early Church soon recognised this principle in their establishment of the Canon of Scripture.  The various Reformed Creeds that form the doctrinal basis of Evangelical Churches since the 16^th Century Reformation take this same position on the Canon of Scripture as their ‘Supreme Standard’ (cf, eg, Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1).

The reason we need to obey Peter’s injunction to ‘bear in mind’ these things today is that our own culture is firmly committed to convincing us that there cannot be ‘absolute truth’ and that we must all allow one another to develop our own ‘truth’ to suit ourselves!  We are already witnessing the many disasters this ‘you-do-you’ approach causes, and we therefore need to renew our own commitment very strongly to the truth and perspicacity of Scripture in all things.  Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than ignoring Scripture altogether is when professing ‘christians’ distort Scripture to be more ‘acceptable’ to the prevailing culture so they feel more ‘comfortable’ in adopting its dictates.

–  Bruce Christian