The People Who Deliberately Forget

2 Peter 3:3-6
Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

Uniformitarianism is a big word to describe the prevailing scientific philosophy of the world. It is the idea that everything in nature has proceeded in a regular and smooth fashion since the start of the Universe.

Of course, modern scientists do not accept a smooth uniformitarianism. They accept for example, a number of catastrophes and major events shaping the world we live in. But these are still considered to be part of the overall onward progress of unguided evolutionary change.

The apostle Peter refers to such people as “scoffers”. This is because they refuse to believe that God created, and prefer to believe in gradual uniform progress – as we read in 2 Peter 3:4, they say that “all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation”. Peter goes on to show that these scoffers are deliberately overlooking two facts. Peter says their actions are deliberate. It is not a mistake that they overlook these things. It is because, as another apostle, Paul, says “although they knew God, they did not honor him as God.” So Peter tells us that the scoffers deliberately forget that God made the world and that God flooded the world. Once we take these two events, recorded in Genesis, into account, the rest of our understanding of how God has shaped the world becomes so much clearer.

Prayer:
Father in heaven, thank You that You have explained to us everything we need to know about how You made this world, and You have given us this explanation in your Bible. Amen.

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