2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”
For the risen Christ, time is not an issue. To Him 1,000 years or 10,000 years pass like a vapor, while simultaneously, He can give 10,000 years worth of attention to a single fleeting moment of His people’s experience. All things—including time—exist by, through, and for Christ.
The conclusion Peter seems to draw from this reality is that the Lord does nothing slow OR fast (since both slow and fast are relative terms), rather, He does all things according to the perfect will of His Father (which, in the harmony of the Trinity is His own will as well). Thus, the distance between Christ’s ascension and His second advent is neither “long” nor “short,” rather, it Peter labels it “Patience.” The intentional purposes of God in Christ—and nothing else—determine the arc of human history.
One reason Peter gives for Christ’s patient delay of His return is that He desires all of those for whom He died to come to repentance and faith. Like a Shepherd refusing to close the gate until the final, straggling sheep comes home, so too Christ will not bring about the Day of Judgment until the last soul—chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, purchased by Him on Calvary, drawn to Him by the will of the Father and working of the Spirit—is gathered to His side. Every moment of history expands the ranks of the blood-bought people of God.
One of the implications of this teaching is that every moment of history also expands our perception of the beauty of who God is in Christ. How is that? Because every new soul gathered to Christ is another life’s worth of sin that our Lord in mercy stooped to bear and another hell’s worth of punishment that our God love embraced as His own….every new disciple, therefore, opens our eyes to new fathoms of what God has done—and so who God is—in Jesus Christ.
The full number of the Elect, the Perfected Bride of Christ, the Total Body of the Lord—you and me and all of our brothers and sisters, Christian—WE will be a measure of that immeasurable beauty that Paul calls us to comprehend in Ephesians 3:18-19…WE will be a tangible manifestation to all creation of the heights, depths, length, and breadth of the love of Christ—of the fullness of who God is. And one of the reasons history is still continuing is because there are still many, many more souls who must be folded in to the tapestry of God’s beauty woven on Calvary.
