Patiently Waiting

             Today is the first Sunday in Advent. And the term Advent comes from the Latin word Adventus meaning coming or arrival. Basically, Advent is a period of waiting and preparation for the coming of God. Though nowadays Advent is primarily thought of as waiting in anticipation of Christmas where we celebrate Christ’s first coming into the world as a baby, Advent initially began, historically, as a period of waiting and preparation for the second coming of Christ when Jesus would return as judge and usher in the fullness of his kingdom. Still today in the lectionary selections for Advent, you can see that the first couple of weeks of advent always contain some texts about the second coming of Jesus. Our text for today from 2 Peter 3 is one such advent text that focuses on the second coming of Jesus.

And I think that it is fitting indeed to still talk about the second coming of Jesus during Advent, because as we think about what it must have been like to have been living over two thousand years ago and to have been waiting for the birth of the Messiah, I think it is helpful to draw upon what it is still like today for us to live where we are having to wait upon the return of Christ for the consummation of our salvation. Yes, waiting is a major theme of Advent.

And 2 Peter 3 helps us think more deeply about our wait for Jesus’ return. It seems that Peter, in his own day and age, is already having to deal with scoffers who think it is ridiculous to think that one day Jesus will return and the world as we know it will end and judgment day will come. Now, most scholars think that Peter wrote this letter sometime in the 60s AD. So, already, only 30 or so years after Jesus’ death, people are already thinking it’s preposterous that Jesus is going to return. I mean, they’re probably thinking that for 30 years the world has gone on as it always has. The world is just gonna keep on turning. Well, if people were already scoffing way back then, how much more is it likely that people might be scoffing nowadays? For we’ve been waiting two thousand years since Christ ascended to heaven, and he has still not yet returned. It can seem incredulous to some that we might still believe that Jesus really is going to come back some day. 

What reasons do we have to wait patiently and really trust that God is in fact going to come back? For one, we have history to draw upon. Peter references the days of Noah. In that age, none of Noah’s peers thought it was credible that a great flood would come and cover the earth, and yet it did indeed come. Is it not possible that God could do something similar again, something we need to be ready for? Another piece of history that I draw upon is thinking about how the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, which predicted the coming of John the Baptist and the Messiah, was written over 400 years before either Jesus or John the Baptist showed up. 400 years must have been an awful long time to wait, and many likely began to scoff at Malachi’s prophesies. And yet, in God’s timing, they did come true. Knowing the history of God’s interactions in the world should help us to faithfully trust that God will once again be true to His word and His promises. Jesus will one day come again, in His proper timing.

But one might wonder why God would want to wait so long before returning. Why is he being so slow? What is he waiting on? Well, Peter reminds us that we are often thinking about things only from our limited perspective. From our perspective, God seems slow, and we can think of lots of good reasons why Jesus would be better off returning sooner than later. But God has a far greater perspective than we do. And Peter says that a thousand years might feel like a long time to us, but to God it passes as quickly as a day. He’s drawing on Psalm 90 verse 4 here that says, “a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past.” Now, Peter had no idea when Jesus might return, only the Father knows the day and the hour of such an event. But, interestingly, he is able to hint way back then, even in AD 60, that he wouldn’t be shocked if Jesus didn’t return for thousands of years. I don’t think Peter would be too surprised that we are all still here today.

In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf has a famous quote. He says, “A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to." God, similarly, will arrive precisely when He means to, even if it feels too late or too early to us. He will arrive right when He means to and right when He needs to.

But we are left in uncertainty about when exactly Jesus might come back. He could come back today or tomorrow, or it could be another several thousand years or longer. All we know is that Jesus will return. As incredulous as the end of the world seems to some, even some Christians, I think of it this way: at the heart of our faith we believe that a man rose again from the dead. If you can believe that, why wouldn’t you believe all the other miracles of the Bible? It has always struck me as odd that for some talking snakes and donkeys seem to them more absurd or harder to believe than the miracle of resurrection. And in terms of the end of the world, if Jesus can rise from the dead, can Jesus not make the whole world new? Indeed, the resurrection is just the first fruits of things to come, it is doing on a small scale what God will soon do on a big scale, make everything new. Can this truly happen? Yes. Does the God who had the power to make all of creation not have the power to remake all of creation? He Does. And in fact, I think that God even has the responsibility to remake creation and fix all that has gone wrong in His world. It will happen. But we must wait upon God.

But let’s be honest… waiting is difficult. Waiting is really hard, and so a lot of us are really bad at it. There’s a famous psychology experiment performed at Stanford University that helps illustrate this. Children ages 4 to 6 were given a marshmallow and told they had two options: option 1: they could eat the marshmallow now, or option 2: they could wait for the adult to return, and if they hadn’t eaten the first marshmallow yet, they would be given a second marshmallow. Though the child had no idea when the adult would return, the adult in the experiment was instructed to wait 15 minutes before they returned. The results of the experiment showed that very, very few would eat the first marshmallow immediately. Almost everyone was willing to try to wait it out for at least some amount of time. Nevertheless, less than a third of all the children were able to wait the entire 15 minutes before eating it, and thus did not get rewarded with the second marshmallow.

As adults, I think most of us have developed more patience than young children have, and yet I wonder how often we too miss out on future benefits because we are impatient in the moment. How many times do we let the temptation of short-term benefits prevent us from making decisions that are far wiser long-term? In our spiritual lives, we cannot afford to fail in the way that so many failed the Stanford marshmallow experiment… not when the stakes here are so much higher. We must wait patiently for Jesus to return and not give into all types of temptations and lusts that would make us ill prepared should Christ return suddenly.

But yes, waiting is difficult. Waiting is almost never something someone chooses to do if they have any other option. Waiting is something we only do when we have to. Think for a second of some scenarios you have in your head when you think about waiting. One that pops into my head is having to wait at the DMV. Ugh. That’s one of my least favorite things to do in the whole world. We only wait when we have to. The Advent truth that we must wait on God for our salvation is perhaps a way for God to remind us that salvation is not something we could possibly accomplish on our own. Otherwise we’d go ahead and do what we need to do and get it out of the way and make it so we don’t have to wait any longer. But we can’t. That we have to wait on God is a stark reminder that we are utterly unable to save ourselves and fully in need of the mercy of God.

We must wait upon God. But then Peter tells us something really cool: he says that, in some ways, more than we are waiting on God, God is waiting on us. You see, when Peter explains why God might be slow in coming back he says it is because God is going to be very patient with us. He’s going to be patient with us because God wants to give us every chance to repent and find salvation before he returns and ushers in the final judgment. God is waiting on us to get our act together and throw ourselves on the mercy of God and to be prepared for his return such that we are not caught unaware when Jesus returns like a thief in the night.

When we think about waiting in this way, that God also waits on us, perhaps that helps us to start to think about waiting in more positive terms. For example, what if waiting helps make us more like God, because patience is an attribute of God. God is so patient with us. And patience is a fruit of the Spirit. In learning patience, we are learning to be more like God. And if we know that God is patiently waiting on us, can we not wait patiently on Him?

And I want to note something else. Just because we have to wait upon God. That doesn’t mean we have to wait passively upon God. Peter hints at this when he tells us to be waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God. How do we hasten the return of Jesus? Well, if God is delaying in hopes that as many as possible might be saved, then perhaps we can hasten his coming by helping to spread the gospel and evangelize. When there are more and more upon the earth who are prepared for salvation, when there are fewer and fewer people who haven’t heard of God’s mercy and truth, then God has fewer reasons left to keep delaying. We cannot bring about the last days by our own efforts. But together we can do what little things we can to help hasten that day.

So, the good news today is that God is patient with us. God is patient with us, even when we’re impatient with him. God is patient with us even though there’s no good reason why we’re being so slow towards Him, why we’re not wholeheartedly returning to God with our hearts and lives.

          So, let us be patient with God, for God has many good reasons for being slow, foremost the salvation of our souls. Let us not scoff at his delay, but let us wait expectantly for the new heaven and the new earth, and let us hasten that day by praying “Come Lord Jesus, come! Maranatha! Come and save us.”