The Lord knows how to…keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge the flesh in its corrupt desires…
1 Peter 2
It wasn’t more than three days into an unplanned retreat that some of the darkest passages of scripture began to scream at me. It was at the end of this week that I realized that I deserved to die.
1 Peter 2 dissects the inner life of the false teacher/prophet. I recognized so many qualities within myself:
- Daring and Self-willed
- Reviling where they have no knowledge
- Carousing in the daytime
- Having eyes full of adultery
- Unable to cease from sin
- Enticing unstable souls
- A heart trained in greed
- Promising freedom yet slaves to corruption
- Arrogant words of vanity
- Sensuality
Many of these attitudes and dispositions operated subtly in my daily life. I wasn’t out on my donkey as Balaam going from place to place using spiritual power for money, but there were notable similarities. One could hardly detect them unless they were paying close attention.
And for such is “reserved the blackness of darkness forever”, and it would have been better that they never knew “the way of righteousness”
The passage ends with proverbs concerning pigs and dogs, at which point I began to question my youthly profession of faith. Perhaps it was a fiction all along. Yet, if that is the case – and I’ve been on the outside of the household of faith this entire time – then there is still hope for grace. It is a sliver of a hope, but a hope it remains.
Supplementing this passage were those of Paul and from Hebrews.
- Making shipwreck concerning the faith…being turned over to satan for the destruction of the flesh.
- Disqualification as reason for not sensing the Spirit of God.
- Taking care not to have an unbelieving and hardened heart (Israel: bodies fell in the wilderness because of it)
- No sacrifice remains for those who keep on sinning willfully (though this is controversial, and I felt enslaved to my sin)
- Trampling under the foot the blood of the Son of God…a fearful expectation of judgment.
- A conscience being seered with a hot iron.
- A hard and unrepentent heart storing up wrath.
As I have suggested earlier, I possessed all the necessary ingredients to fail, and thus have resigned myself (despite confessing and forsaking decades worth of sin) to the Lord’s judgment. If he has ordained me to life, blessed be the name of the Lord. If has ordained me to death and judgment, blessed be the name of the Lord. The Lord’s will be done. Amen.
SDA
Last Things 