This chapter is about the last times and so central to Advent; and it contains one of my half-dozen favourite verses in all of Scripture: 2 Peter 3:8 - “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day”. I can never drop my guard; the Lord scrutinises the tiniest detail of how I spend each day and misses nothing - every thought or attitude, every action, every word, every omission, every duty either faithfully executed or casually neglected - and yet, at the scale of my entire lifespan, He sees the end from the beginning and the beginning from the end, and knows the effect every external influence has had on me down the years, both great and small and regardless of whether or not I was aware of it. Taking a further step back, many of Jesus’ followers seem to have thought the last times would come within a few decades of His Ascension; but two millennia are nothing to Him and, as the psalm-writer puts it (Ps. 130:6) “My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning...”. So I take this as an encouragement to live each day faithfully as if it were my last, with my eye firmly on the Goal (“I press towards the mark”, as St Paul puts it), while at the same time knowing that there could still be a long wait as measured by clock and calendar. And finally Peter’s exhortation sets one thinking about Eternity, the great Beyond, not measurable in time at all as we comprehend it from our short lifespan, but rather in new dimensions which are as yet unimaginable..... Amen!
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