Throughout the Bible God has attempted to warn, teach, and prepare His people. He used prophecy as a means to instruct His followers about how to prepare and be ready. The prophecy deniers have always tried to thwart that effort. God used prophecy consistently throughout history to allow those faithful to His word to prepare for coming judgment. Noah, Lot, and Joseph are examples of those who listened and understood. God has never left His faithful without knowledge of what was coming and how to prepare. Each of those believers was mocked and ridiculed but were proven correct and saved from God’s wrath.
Today we have those who would have us believe that sometime in the past God stopped giving us information of what to prepare for. Somehow they would have us believe that He did not instruct us about what was coming and how to prepare. They use the same mocking tone as Joseph’s brothers and people in Noah’s day. Peter and other’s warned us to “be mindful of the words which were spoken before” and that there would be “scoffers”.
2 Peter 3:2 That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour: 3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, 4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
There is a force in this world that would have us not believe or be prepared for coming judgment on this world. Just as with Noah, Joseph, and Lot, I believe the prophets have given us information of what is coming. We were told it would not be easy to understand.
2 Peter 3:16 As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.
I believe that God HAS given us information about what the future holds and has told us how to prepare. He used the prophets to inform the people of what was coming throughout history and He has not abandoned us to guess about what the future holds. Just as in Noah’s day we have been information about what is coming and the same force that caused people to scoff at Noah is at work today to keep people from being prepared for what is coming.
I, for one, would rather ere on the side of being over prepared then to suffer like those who scoffed at Noah, Lot, and Joseph or those who will suffer for scoffing at us who would be prepared today.
Well said ...
Ditto.
I, for one, would rather ere on the side of being over prepared then to suffer like those who scoffed at Noah, Lot, and Joseph or those who will suffer for scoffing at us who would be prepared today.
This claim is so hollow as to be laughable. You have no clue what you are preparing for. Is it next week or in a hundred years? Will the US be involved or no? Will it be a microchip under the skin, a credit card with 666 imprinted, or a tattoo on one’s backside? Will it involve the Arabs or the Russians? What about the EU? Or the Chinese? Or the North Koreans? How many Israelis will be slaughtered while the Church hangs out on their cloud somewhere? The story changes every time a new edition of the newspaper gets printed. Truly the stuff of prophecy pimps.
And to shamefully hide behind a verse like 2 Peter 3:3 is a true indication of desperation. You confuse the scoffing against biblical truth (Peter’s subject) with folks who simple question the laughable exegesis of modern literalist futurists. The real scoffers of God’s truth are the modernists who need to reinvent their interpretation every time events change.
Dispensationalism and the literal reading of the Bible is a huge threat to the spiritually dead churches of the old religious establishments. For so long, they have convinced themselves that huge portions of Scripture, and entire books, are optional, and if a person's personal opinions about a Biblical matter make one feel better than what is in the Bible, then the personal opinion becomes inerrant truth, with the Bible still optional. And its just not fashionable, if one fancies oneself an intellectual, to believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible. That's for simpletons and, besides that, it simply doesn't make one look good at the golf club.
It is enormously comforting to "rest" in the belief that the Bible is a collection of allegories, maybe a half step up from Grimm's Fairy Tales. It is comforting to know that the Scriptures can be whatever you want them to be and if you're not completely sure that you're ready to meet Christ, well, all of that Revelation stuff already happened in 70AD so there's nothing to worry about.
There is a reason why people will obsessively stalk prophecy threads for the purpose of denying the fact that the stage is rapidly being set for the events that God told us would precede His return. If they can deny it often enough and loudly enough, the delusion that the prophetic Scriptures will never actually come to pass can survive another day.