As an Old Testament professor, I spend my days thinking about the religious lives of people 2,500 years ago. Sometimes I stop and wonder what people 2,500 years in the future will think of the church today.
My hunch is that they’ll say we lost sight of holiness. They’ll find very few sermons on this topic. They’ll see how run-down our churches are, or how new ones resemble gymnasiums, and they’ll conclude that our church buildings rarely communicated that God is actually worthy of worship. They’ll say that Christians took their priorities from political parties, not from the Bible. They’ll say that for our generation, holiness seemed like a rather abstract concept, nothing we tried to embody, hardly the first thing that came to our minds when we thought about God.
This week’s text from 2 Peter presents a very different perspective. Like many Advent texts, it describes the day of the Lord, a time when “the elements will melt away with the flames” and “everything will be destroyed.” The author then poses a question: “What sort of people ought you to be?” The answer makes no reference to being nice or loving: “You must live holy and godly lives” (CEB).
