God's Patience
Taken from Early Christian Letters for Everyone
Description
God’s Patience
2 Peter 3.11-18
Early Christian Letters for Everyone
We were looking through an old photograph album one evening, identifying family members as they were fifty years ago. Can he really have had a moustache like that? Was she really wearing that kind of dress? Yes: he did, and she was. It’s fascinating, especially when you pick out resemblances with the next generation and the one after that.
But in one picture there was a different sort of surprise. There was someone we all recognized – but he wasn’t part of the family at all! He didn’t live anywhere near them. We knew of him because, by a much later marriage, he had come into the family as a kind of honorary uncle. But what was he doing there back then?
The answer was quite mundane; he was staying with a friend nearby, and together they had come over for a quick visit. Just a coincidence. But I thought of this sudden surprising appearance as I was pondering Peter’s sudden reference to someone we haven’t been thinking about at all: St Paul! What is he doing here in verse 15, making as it were a guest appearance on someone else’s show?...
Taken from Early Christian Letters For Everyone by Tom Wright