AP

2 Peter 3:14, 17-18  So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. … … Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position.  But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.  To him be glory both now and forever! Amen. 

Peter is vitally concerned about the spiritual health of his readers.  He reminds them about how God has acted in the past in dealing with man’s persistent rebellious attitude and sinful behaviour – as in the days of Noah, Lot, Balaam, etc (chapter 2).  He reminds them about how easy it is to let false teaching and worldly living go unchecked, and by interaction with each other surrounded by a God-denying culture, to make shipwreck of one’s faith.

These are timely warnings for us as we await the Lord’s Return.  Peter would be the first to recognise that as God’s elect we are justified by grace through faith alone and are kept safe by the Spirit’s power (1 Peter 1:1-5; 2:9-10; 2 Peter 1:1-4, 10-11), but he is also aware of how dangerous complacency can become.  We can rejoice in our security as believers, but if striving for godly living is not an integral part of this rejoicing we are skating on very thin ice.

Peter expresses this tension well: “Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position.”; and then gives the remedy for preventing this from happening: “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”  Unless a living organism grows it dies!

Those of us who are grounded firmly in the ‘Five Points of Calvinism’ might want to argue that it is logically impossible to ‘fall from a secure position’ (‘The Perseverence of the Saints’ which is the ‘P’ in ‘TULIP’), but we must not argue against, or minimise, these serious warnings in God’s revealed truth!  When the fifth of the ‘Five Points’ leads to complacency it is extremely dangerous, which is why the Apostle Peter makes the point of ‘growing in grace’.  When we take hold of the truths expressed in the first four points: ’T’, Total Depravity; ‘U’, Unconditional Election; ‘L’, Limited Atonement (or perhaps better expressed as Particular Redemption); and ‘I’, Irresistible Grace, it is very comforting to have the assurance that derives from them: Perseverence of the Saints, or ‘once-saved-always-saved’.  But the great danger here, that the Scriptures consistently recognise, is living out a smug, empty complacency that indicates we do not belong to the Elect in the first place.  As the apostle James puts it, “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.” (James 2:26)  In other words, I am not “mak[ing] every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him” so that I will go to heaven, but I am “mak[ing] every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him” because I am going to heaven, by grace alone!!

– Bruce Christian