Mennonite Weekly Review

When we lived in Alabama, I visited a civil rights museum in Montgomery and was struck anew by the inspiration people found in Martin Luther King Jr. He not only confronted America with the wrongness of segregation, discrimination and racism, but also presented a profound vision of what the future could be like — where “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” His vision changed people’s way of thinking and moved communities toward wholeness and rightness.

Andres

As believers, our vision of the future also affects how we think and act here and now — and that impacts the world around us. This is something Peter gets at as he closes his second letter.

The best is yet to come

He’s finishing up a letter to a community of believers plagued by those questioning whether Jesus will return. He’s already urged his “dear friends” to continue building their lives on their relationship with God and rebuked those trying to distract them.

So, Peter concludes, “hold your minds in a state of undistracted attention” on “what the prophets said and the command of our Master and Savior that was passed on by your apostles” (3:1-2, Message). In The NIV Application Commentary, Douglas Moo suggests that “command” is to “conform to the image of Christ, becoming holy even as the God who called them is holy.” Or, as Peter writes in his first letter, “let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness” (1 Peter 1:15).

Those mocking the idea of Jesus’ return, says Peter, are forgetting something: “How foolish to think that God cannot judge and even destroy the world when he himself created it and destroyed it once already,” Moo writes, summarizing 2 Peter 3:5-7.

“Don’t overlook the obvious here,” writes Peter. God’s timing is his own — in fact, he’s restraining himself and “holding back the End because he doesn’t want anyone lost” but “everyone to come to repentance” (8-9, Message and NIV).

Live in daily expectation of the Day of God, says Peter, “ready for the promised new heavens and the promised new earth, all landscaped with righteousness” (13). So, grow in your relationship with Jesus (18), living “in purity and peace” (14).

Living that vision

Our vision of the future powerfully impacts the present. Envisioning our lives in light of how the Story ends gives us confidence to build on our relationship with God and blaze with holiness and love in a broken world. God created everything — and he’s been working all along to redeem it all. We can trust it ends the way he says: a home “landscaped with righteousness.”

As we live in the light of this Story, we must maintain a vision of who God calls and enables us to be within it. God “doesn’t want anyone lost,” and central to his plans is his covenant community. It is, notes Scot McKnight in The Blue Parakeet, the context in which our redemption takes place. And as we’ve seen, that community spills over with those drinking deep of God and living together as sacrificial stones in a living, breathing temple filled with compassion, holiness and — above all — love. That’s living as we are created to: reconnecting to God, each other and the world.

As we live like this, God and his work are revealed, inviting still more to change the way they think and embrace new life. Indeed, we are called and enabled to be his covenanted people through whom, as Dallas Willard says, he “is tangibly manifest to everyone on Earth who wants to find him.”

Carmen Andres, of Woodbridge, Va., is a former editor of Chris­tian Leader, the magazine of the U.S. Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches.