Well, I know, I know, I know, I know that we're making very slow progress in this chapter, and there are certain areas that have gone a way out into all kinds of scientific things, and maybe you're thinking I'm becoming more of a scientist than a preacher, but I assure you tonight that with the six principles that we're looking at, that we're gonna be looking at them pretty much down the line of these verses. And so we have some things to say, though, about the creation and about the fall and the results of that upon the earth, as well as Noah's flood as well. So we're going to do a little recap and go right up to verse 1, and I'll just draw your attention to a few things. Firstly, Peter is stirring up the minds of his hearers. That's the preacher's job. We're to stir up people's minds. My job is not to put you to sleep. My job is not to make you think all is well. No, we're to ring the alarm, and we're to warn you that in the last days scoffers will come. Now, Peter lays out six principles in the first half of this chapter that God's people need. and that they need to keep their minds thinking straight to answer the lies of false teachers. And very often, the battle in the Christian life is the battle for the mind. And of course, the false teacher, the devil himself, would cause us to think wrongly and to get us off the solid foundation of the Lord. Now, we've already discovered and looked at the big lie in particular of these scoffers, and that's in verse 4. All things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. And we learn that the modern way of putting that is that the key to the past is the present. As you observe things in our present-day circumstances, well, you just take a period of time, and you see what happens and what builds up, and you just extrapolate that backwards, and that's how people end up with millions of years in evolutionary thinking. And where they get their numbers a little bit screwed up, they just add a few more million or billion years, and they keep adding time. And they think by adding more time, that that will bring about the result of a chance and evolution. Now, they do this very deliberately to deny judgment. That's what it's all about. These people are not stupid. They are thinkers. And so, they work backwards, and they try to deny that God is going to intervene in the world today, by saying the key to the past is the present. We don't see judgment around us today. God's not intervening today in some dramatic fashion, causing a catastrophe. Therefore, he hasn't done that in the past either. And then when they think that and establish those things, they say, now where is the promise of the Lord's coming? Now, it's not the promise they're fighting, it's the fulfillment of the promise. Where is the fulfillment of the promise that the Lord would come? And so, tonight, we have six principles, and they're really Peter's principles that are in these chapters, and we're going to be looking at verse 3 right down to verse 10. And the first one is verse 3. Before the end of the world, there's going to be a terrible apostasy. Now, I've already preached that one. And if you were here last Sunday evening, that was our closing number of minutes dealing with the terrible apostasy that's going to come upon this world. Some people deny that. They think that it's normal to be having immorality. and all the vices that are paraded today, that this lust and uncleanness, this throwing out the Bible and the Ten Commandments, that all of that's just normal. No, these are abnormal times. These are times of falling away, There were times when governments and nations were building on those foundations, and now they're dismantling them and tearing them apart and ripping up the solid foundation. And the psalmist in Psalm 11 asked, if the foundation be destroyed, what can the righteous do? And in that chapter, you will learn we can pray, we can call upon God that He will come and help us. In verse 5, the principle here is you cannot ignore the facts of Bible history. You just can't ignore them. It says, "...for they willingly are ignorant." And that's what they're trying to do, to ignore the facts that by the Word of God the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of the water and in the water that the world was then and perished. They just want to ignore that. And then in verse 7, The next principle, God's righteousness cannot be set aside. Judgment is reserved. It is real. And then verse 8, God's position over time. And the question is that, you know, a day is as a thousand years. And God lives in the eternal now. He is not controlled by time. In verse 9, you have God's long-suffering, and that has to be factored in in how God governs the world. Some people say that, well, God is long-suffering. He doesn't judge. He doesn't mind. Do not misinterpret God's long-suffering as that He doesn't judge. He will judge, even though right now He has been long-suffering. And then verse 10, what God has promised, He will perform. The promise of His coming. It says here in verse 10, the day of the Lord will come. The day of the Lord will come. What He has promised, He will perform. And this is the basis on which we ought to live the Christian life. Now, I won't go back to the fact of a falling away and of an apostasy, when the scoffers will deny these things walking after their own lusts. We'll move to verse 5, to the fact that you cannot ignore the facts of Bible history. We do that at our peril. And people who say the Old Testament has no relevancy in the New, the people who say that we shouldn't be concerned about those things, just preach the gospel. Preach about the Lord Jesus. Preach the cross. Do not worry about things prior to the book of Matthew and the Gospels. Then we deprive ourselves of very important facts. and these things must not be thrown away." Now you'll notice that such is the prejudice of the scoffer that he will not put these facts on the table. He will not even acknowledge them. He will not factor them into the whole process of trying to understand the God whom we serve and the days in which we live. He won't even acknowledge that this worldwide flood in Noah's day is a possibility. They're so prejudiced against it, they are willingly ignorant. They have just chosen to not even think about it. Throw it out. Don't even bring it into a part of the discussion. And for this, they are willingly ignorant. Now, let me give you a short list of the things that obviously are left off the table for discussion by the scoffer. He doesn't want to hear about the apparent age in creation. These are people that are trying to tell us that the world is millions and even billions of years old. But we as creationists follow the Bible and say, no, we believe in a young earth. We believe in a world that's no older than 10,000 and more likely 6,000 years old. How do you get that? Well, they are willingly ignorant of the fact that when God created the world, it had what we call apparent age. Think of Adam. When God created Adam, and if you talk to him the next day, what age do you think he looked? Did he look like a newborn baby? An infant? No. He was more likely a fully developed man. Maybe looked 30. A fully developed man. But he's only a day old. God just made him. And he has instant apparent age. Same with the trees, same with the rocks. And the geologists, they get their timing from studying the rocks. But a rock, when they were made, had apparent age. And it could be that when God created those rocks, they looked as they look perhaps today, with apparent age. And you would say, boy, they're old! But they're just fresh from the Creator's hand, who spoke them into existence, and the Holy Spirit who moved upon the face of the earth. They're also ignorant of the fact that God cursed the ground in Adam's fall, which brought death into the world. Now, that's very important to Bible believers, because with that fact, that death, or Adam, the result of his sin was death. Sin, death, is no older than Adam. So when you find a fossil fossilized in rocks, and it might be a fish, it might be an elephant, it might be a woolly mammoth up on the tundra of the ice poles, and when they find these animals solidified or fossilized in rocks, None of them are older than Adam, because there was no death prior to Adam. There is nothing ever died prior to Adam. And I don't believe the gap theory. I don't believe that there is anything between verse 1 and verse 2 in Genesis 1. In fact, there is a Hebrew grammar issue there that gives us absolute certainty that there is no gap between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, that there were no civilizations prior to Adam. Adam's the first man, and he's the first living person on the earth, and through him, death came into the world when he sinned. But evolution does not look at these things. They will not acknowledge these things. They will not put them on the table for discussion. They are willingly ignorant of them and set them aside. Now, because of the Fall, evolution is not scientifically observable in the present world, because things are not getting better. Things are decaying. Due to God cursing the ground, instead of things evolving, things are diseased, decaying, and decline. Everything ages. Seeds die out. Species of animals and all kinds of creatures die out. And they find sometimes fossils of species that are not on the earth today. And there's the modern complaint, species are dying off. Well, that's always been the case in the history of the world. Genetics decline. And the longer the line of genes and genetic material in the human race, the more mutations, the more problems it brings. And mutations are never helpful. Mutations never increase your health. You probably read the health magazines about free radicals that are running around your body, your bloodstream, and you need to eat this and eat that and drink the other thing to kill the free radicals. Why? Because they cause mutations, and mutations usually end up as cancers in the body. And so genetically, The human body is not improving, and as the line goes on down through the generations, there's more problems, more diseases, more genetic issues develop, and nobody gets healthier by mutations. And because of decay in the world and decline in the world, there is no evolution. There are two laws of science called the first and second laws of thermodynamics. And the first one is that energy in the world does not increase. The second law of thermodynamics is that the usefulness of that energy declines. It cannot be reused and used over again. And in my little non-scientific mind, when you burn something, the ashes are never as good as the first thing that you burned, and the energy cannot be retrieved from that. And so the result is what we call entropy. Everywhere in the world, things rust. They decline. they don't improve when left to themselves. So while the evolutionists, the modernists, the scoffer will say, The key to the present, or the present is the key to the past, in reality, where is the evolution? Has anyone observed species that have increased and improved? Now, they try this with flies, little tiny mosquitoes, or even midgets, or the smallest of flies. Why? Because they procreate so rapidly. And they try and put them into an observatory, and they will try and observe, you know, generation after generation, if there are variations. And there are some. There are some variations. But variations are always harmful. Variations never improve the species. They always cause disease and weaknesses and problems. And, of course, God has put a limit between the procreation of species. When God recorded His creating of animals and various species, they procreate after their kind. You do not have offspring from dogs and cats. It doesn't work. You cannot produce across species. And with all the modern attempts, they just don't work. Then, of course, the catastrophic flood is denied. And when geologists look at the rocks and look at the face of the earth, they don't even think flood. They don't even think Noah. They jettison the whole idea of a worldwide flood, and they try and come up with other explanations for all these dead things among rocks, and they go off on all kinds of tangents because they deny the flood. Another fact that is denied is the Tower of Babel. that the histories of the world and the civilizations of the world, they all connect at the Tower of Babel. Now, you know the story that they were trying to build this tower, supposedly to reach heaven, to make a name for themselves. And God came down and caused confusion. That's what Babel means, confusion. And the nations, they were scattered because God gave them different languages. And you ended up with people groups, and you have them going off in all different directions according to their language, if they could understand each other. And that is the history of Chinese civilization. That's the history of European civilization, African civilization. And all the nations go back to the Tower of Babel. when God came down and caused confusion with the languages. Now you read any history book of civilizations and you will find that when you start with the chart, and usually they work backwards, the chart ends somewhere at 4000 BC. Why? Why? Why? Because the history of man is no longer that, no further back than that. No further back. And so we see that what is in the Bible is certainly very clear. Now, I'm going to take one minute to read you this ancient note concerning the Tower of Babel. Not only is it recorded in the Bible, but it is recorded by nations down through the years. Nebuchadnezzar wrote about it in an inscription, and here's the wording, "'A former king built it.'" That's the tower. They reckon 42 ages, that'll be 42 years. But he did not complete its head. And you understand that the Tower of Babel did not get completed. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it without order, expressing their words. Now, this is an old inscription by Nebuchadnezzar, and it's a testimony, a tribute to the Tower of Babel. But these are the facts. These are the events that the scoffer, the modernist, the evolutionist of today, that is the popular thinking and education circles, they deny them. and they are not even accepted. And so, we are to take the stand as Christians. You cannot ignore the facts of Bible history or true secular history, for that matter. Now, number three, we're going to verse 7, and it is that God's righteousness cannot be set aside. We're told here that the heavens and the earth, which are now by the same word, are kept in store reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. God's righteousness, or the fact that he as judge will do the right, shall not the judge of all the earth do right? Yes, he will, and he will gather all the nations to his great white throne, and he will judge every man according to his deeds. Is judgment of sin in God's nature? Yes it is, because he's righteous, his law is inflexible, and justice cannot be set aside. God can set aside his mercy, but he can never set aside his judgment. We read that God spared not the angels. That's right here in chapter 2, we've learned that. God spared not the old world in Noah's day, when they became corrupt and violent and turned their back on God. God judged that world in Noah's day. God does judge sin. And in our day, God is reserving this world toward judgment. And God's justice is such that he would slay his son before he would save a sinner without fulfilling his own justice. That's the righteous character of God. And it is that fact that the scoffer attacks, but the Christian must hold on to with all our hearts. God is righteous, and God will judge the world. And these people want to deny it because they don't want to face the reality of judgment. don't want to face that they're accountable according to their words and their deeds. That would spoil their fun, they would say. That would spoil their freedom to sin and have the pleasure of this world. And so they deny that God is a God of judgment. But that becomes our important message to the world. Verse 8 then, God's position over time. But beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years. Now, Peter said that these scoffers would find ammunition for their scoffing in the length of the time that the world rolls on. And no doubt, the longer the world goes on, the more they will say, hey, look at all the time that has gone by. Jesus said, way back before he was crucified and before he rose from the dead, he talked about the Son of Man would appear. But where is he? Where is that return of the Lord? And so they mock it. And just as the men in Noah's day mocked Noah for building an ark in dry land where there was no rain, Men today mock the idea of God judging this world, and these latter-day scoffers will take their cue from the normality of each day, shrug their shoulders, and say, so what? Where is the promise or the fulfillment of His promise of His coming? And Peter's answer is that with God, one day is a thousand years. God's not controlled by time. God's not controlled by the clock. God is controlled by events. Events is what God programs and plans. When the fullness of time is come, That's when he sent his son. In the fullness of time, he sent his son made of a woman made under the law. God works by events. And also the iniquity of the people in Moses' time. We read that God did not open up the promised land until the iniquity of the Amorites was full. So God has his time. God has his event planned. And God has his hour when this world will end. It's not measured by calendar days, months, years. It's measured by times and seasons. Remember how the Lord said to his disciples, it's not for you to know the times or the seasons. Those things are kept secret in the Lord's mind, and he works by those events. Now, when we see the day getting darker and more wicked, the scoffers increasing, and we see nations that were built on the truths of the Bible crumbling—United States of America crumbling. One of the laments of the brethren last week at the week of prayer And Derek Bowman, he lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and he cannot believe the debate that's going on about transgender bathrooms. And he explained that the city of Charlotte, they made their own ordinance about opening up for transgender bathrooms. The North Carolina state government, they then reacted to that, and they said, we cannot tolerate this. And then the feds weigh in. And they say, yes, every state must follow this, and so the battle goes on. And Derek said, if you told me six months ago that in North Carolina we would be debating the who uses what bathroom, I would have said it's a joke. And that's the speed, the rapid decline of moral values, and it's going to lead to violence. It's going to lead to horrific, horrific things. You're going to see parents who will go into schools irate that their child, their son or daughter, has to use bathrooms with people who are on the very edge of being pedophiles. using the same bathroom. And those young people can't say no. Parents will be up on arms. And it's creating instability. It's creating a breakdown of law and order in the United States of America. When we look at the leadership that they have for forthcoming elections, we tremble. We tremble. And Britain's not doing a whole lot better with the first ever Muslim as mayor of London. These are fearful times. Who could have thought that nations that were founded on at least moral principles and liberty are now being changed into places where the liberties are being denied? But God reigns over time. He's not controlled by time. And when events are right, God will come. Christ will come. Number five, long-suffering. verse 9 is mentioned, the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men can slackness. And you'll see how Peter answers, here's the reason why God is not coming to this point. He's long-suffering to us-ward. not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." And when you see how God is governing the world, you must realize that God is acting in long-suffering. He is gracious to the wicked, and He gives space for men to repent, and He's calling out a people, even in the midst of this evil day. You remember when Noah was building the ark? It took how long? A hundred and twenty years. Those were days of God's long-suffering with a wicked nation. They were already corrupt, they were already turning to violence, they were already rebellious to God, and it took 120 years to build the ark, and God was long-suffering all of that time. But there came a day when God said, The time is right, Noah, go into the ark. And after seven days, God shut the door. There was a time And so do not be fooled by God's long-suffering, and because he is merciful to the wicked, do not think that God will not judge the wicked. And then number six. This is principle number six tonight, and it's verses 9 and 10. We read here that the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, and then verse 10, but the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night. The Lord will perform what he promises. We need to remember that. Never lose sight of that. The Lord is going to perform what He has promised, and He will come as a thief in the night when no man is thinking. Unexpectedly, suddenly, the Lord shall come, and these events shall unfold. And you can see how the earth is going to burn up. In these various verses, in verse 10, the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. The earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. And that's your house and my house. And that's this church building as well. It's going to be burned up. Every material thing, whether it's secular or sacred, everything's going to burn up. And everything that man has made, tainted by sin and by his iniquity, God will burn it up. And this world is going to end in a fire. He ended the world before in a flood. He will do so again by a fire. And then he's going to establish new heavens and a new earth. And verse 13, Nevertheless, we according to his promise... Now here again, we're holding on to his promise. He will perform it. We look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. There's going to be no sin in that eternal state. There's going to be no rebellion. There's going to be no devil. He'll be cast into the lake of fire. And all those that have set themselves against God, these scoffers who follow their own lusts, who are known by their iniquity and their lawlessness, there'll be none of that in the new state. They won't be fit for the kingdom of God. But in that new state, all will hate sin. All will love righteousness. That's what makes the Christian look forward to heaven, because this world grieves us. This world is a vexing place, just like Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah, how that righteous man, his soul was vexed with the things that he saw and heard. And we're living in a world today where we're vexed. Beulah and I were sitting in a parking spot yesterday evening, and this couple of young fellows got into a truck beside us. We just pulled in beside the truck for a while, and these young fellows got into the truck, and their language—I had to close the car door. I was tired of their filthy words. This is a generation of unclean lips. But there's a wonderful, wonderful future for the Christian in a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwells righteousness. And we've got to lay hold on that hope and live for that day of reward, because this world is not our home. And we get sick and tired of things in this world. We get weary of it. We wonder, will it ever improve? How will these things turn out? Well, in the ultimate sense, Here's how things will unfold. There will be a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwells righteousness. And everything will be a mirror likeness of God himself, including you and me. We're going to be so changed. We're going to be so holy. We're going to be so Christ-like that we will be a mirror image of God himself. What a beautiful thought to end a Sunday evening service. I trust that we will be filled with that hope and comforted by that expectation, and that we will not lose heart tonight while we're grieved by things around us, that we will take heart in these things that are assured.