Thoughts From 2 Peter - Day 17

 3 Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.   2 Peter 3:3

       When I think of scoffing, I think of rolling your eyes at something someone is saying. The world rolls its' eyes at the mention of Jesus coming back to catch believers up with Him or come down to judge unbelievers and set up rule on Earth. Why do they mock or scoff at that idea - we will see as we move on, but the underlying reason is they don't want to believe it. They are following their own evil desires so they have ruled it out.

      When we were leading the youth group and kids would start distancing themselves from the group and studying the Bible, we knew something was up and it was usually related to them letting sin, quite often sexual sin, into their lives. Suddenly, the Bible was outdated, not to be trusted, and they became skeptics, scoffers not because of scholarly refute of the validity of scripture but because they wanted to sin.

     I see this in Christian celebrities or famous Christians who "deconvert" or majorly deconstruct. What precedes a lot of it is they get a divorce. Now they know that the Bible forbids most reasons for divorce and "God hates divorce", but in order to "be happy" they divorce anyway. Soon, what follows is a lesser view of the Bible to justify their behavior. Becoming gay affirming usually follows because if the Bible isn't to be trusted on marriage it isn't to be trusted on LGBTQ and other relevant issues like judgement, hell, blood atonement, wrath of God or anything else unsavory.

   Paul discusses this in Romans 1 when he says,

   " The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened..."

     I highlighted in blue all the times they know the truth but they suppress it because they want to sin and over time, to them, the truth of God becomes less and less and their behavior and what they accept becomes more and more wicked.

     So when people roll their eyes at you when you share Christ, don't back down, be ashamed, be offended, or take it personally. Realize that for them to accept the Truth they would have to admit that they are sinful and that the way they are headed is wrong so therefore they choose to scoff and mock the Truth. Their only hope for salvation is that God would break down the walls of sin in their heart and that requires the Holy Spirit so pray that God would release "The hound of Heaven" on them.