Grace Bible Church Gillette, Wyoming

2. The motive for mocking God is that he desires to be independent of God’s authority in his life. In order to remove God’s authority, man attempts to remove God through ridicule.

a. I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever. (Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means)

3. One of the chief targets for ridicule is the Second Coming of Christ, through which God will not only deliver His people, but will bring judgment against those who reject Him. This includes false teachers who reject biblical doctrine.

B. Second Coming

1. Modern false teachers have not wanted to throw away their faith all together, but they did not want to denounce the world’s opinions either. So, they demythologized many if not all of the doctrines of the Bible, turning them into myths, analogies, and spiritual lessons rather than literal truths. In their minds, they eliminated the answer to the question, “where is the promise of His coming?,” by removing the subject of the question altogether.

a. Adolf Von Harnack, wrote in his book, What is Christianity?, “The kingdom of God comes by coming to the individual, by entering into his soul and laying hold of it. True, the kingdom of God is the rule of God; but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals; it is God himself in his power. From this point of view everything that was dramatic in the external and historical sense has vanished; and gone, too, are all the hopes for the future

b. C.H. Dodd, who wrote one particular book called Parables of the kingdom.“That since the Lord did not in literal truth return on the clouds of heaven during the ‘30s of the first century, to expect Him thus to return in the twentieth century is to go contrary to primitive Christianity which is true Christianity.”

c. Again, “The least inadequate myth of the goal of history is that which molds itself upon the great divine event of the past known in its concrete actuality and depicts its final issue in a form which brings time to an end and places man in eternity. The least significant myth is the Second Coming of the Lord and the Last Judgment.”

d. Rudolf Bultmann, set out to make a life effort to “demythologize the New Testament.” He concluded, “Among the mythological elements in the New Testament which must be reinterpreted and, therefore, no longer taken literally are the following: heaven, hell, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Second Coming of Christ, and the future day of judgment.” … “This is mythical eschatology. And so Paul must be demythologized.”

2. However, the difficulty for false teachers and unbelievers is that the Second Coming has been literally prophesied and promised in Scripture.

a. The Second Coming is the greatest theme of all prophecy. (Chafer, Major Bible Themes).

b. It was the first prediction by man (Jud 1:14-15).

c. It is the last message of the Bible (Rev 22:20).

d. It is a dominant feature of Old Testament prophecy concerning the day of the Lord (Isa 13:6; Ezek 30:3; Joe 2:31; Oba 1:15; Zep 1:14; Mal 4:5).

1) The day of the Lord is not a particular day or event, but associated with the end time program of events such as the Rapture (1Co 1:8; 5:5; Phil 1:10), Second Coming (1Th 5:2), and Judgment (2 Pet 3:10).

e. It is a major theme of New Testament prophecy as taught by:

1) Christ (Mat 24:30; 26:64; Mar 13:26; Luk 21:27).

2) Luke (Act 1:11)

3) Paul (Rom 11:26; 1Th 3:13; 1Th 5:1-4; 2Th 1:7; 2Ti 4:1)

4) James (Jam 5:8)

5) Peter (2Pe 3:4)

6) Jude (Jud 1:14-15)

7) John throughout the Revelation (Rev 1:7; 19:11, 14).

C. Sarcastic Argument

1. Their argument is that that the Second Coming has not taken place anytime since the beginning of creation or since the fathers fell asleep, therefore, it will not happen in the future.

2. They maintain that all continues (diamenō - remain unchanged, continue to exist (Gal 2:5; Luk 22:28) just as it was from the beginning, therefore, this is the way it will always be. This basic philosophy is called Uniformitarianism. It is also associated with Evolution (geological and biological).

a. Uniformitarianism, a geological theory propagated and popularized in the 1800's by geologist Sir Charles Lyell and directly refuting the geological doctrine of Catastrophism(the doctrine that at intervals in the earth’s history all living things have been destroyed by cataclysms, e.g., floods & earthquakes, and replaced by an entirely different population.)

b. Uniformitarianism is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. (Gordon, B. L. (2013). "In Defense of Uniformitarianism". Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith. 65: 79-86.).

c. Stephen Meyer argument used Charles Lyell code to prove that DNA information comes form and Intelligent Designer (God)

1) Information in biology is best understood as analogous to software code. Recall Bill Gates’s comment: “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”… Here is the key question: How did the requisite information get into the DNA in the first place? …Just as useful computer code comes from programmers, so functional information comes from intelligence. It comes from mind…Charles Lyell, said that in trying to understand events in the remote past, we should look for causes now in operation. Mind fits that bill. Intelligence, or mind, or conscious activity, is the only known cause of the kind of sequence-specific, information-rich code that we see in biology.

3. These false teachers were claiming that everything continues as it has from the beginning of creation and that nothing supernatural has taken place.

a. Peter will remind the false teachers that something supernatural has already taken place and that was creation itself by the word of God (2Pe 3:5).

b. They should have been aware of supernatural events because of Christ’s First Advent some 23-24 years earlier. If Christ fulfilled the prophecies from 7-800 years earlier, what was a measly 24 years?

c. What was before Uniformitarianism? Peter’s writings. Peter told us Uniformitarianism would come in this passage, and that was about 2,000 years earlier.

III. OBSERVATIONS AND APPLICATIONS

A. The Second Coming is a motivator for Service

1. That hope, according to the Word of God, is a motivator. In fact, it may well be the greatest or among the greatest of all motivators for our joy, for our service, for our holiness. We live anticipating that Jesus will return, that with Him He will bring His reward to give to those who are faithful, that with Him will come eternal joy to some degree and in some way based upon the level of commitment and faithfulness we have exhibited in our lives. (Mac Sermon)

B. The Second Coming is a motivator for Conduct

1. If many who deny the Second Coming, do so in order to liberate their licentious lifestyle, then what does the Second Coming do for those who love the Lord and are waiting for His appearing?

2. Peter tells us the obvious in 2Peter 3:11. If we know the Lord is coming, and maybe in our day, bringing reward for the believer and judgment for the unbeliever, then we should live accordingly as those who are believers. Especially when we meditate on God’s retribution against sin. Therefore, our lives ought to be holy.

C. The Second Coming is a motivator for Belief.

Grace Bible Church · 4000 E. Collins Rd · PO Box #3762 · Gillette, WY · (307) 686-1516