10/7/2015
2 Peter 3:10
2Pe 3:10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
Many take this passage and try to imply that the earth, this planet, and all that goes with it will be destroyed. That it will be dissolved by fire. And then God will create a new planet that is perfect, without sin. There are several things wrong with this thinking, and I wonder how they reconcile several things written in this passage. But I will only deal with this one verse, for in this verse there are still several issues that seem to be over looked.
First the issue of the day of the Lord. What is the day of the Lord? I have in my life heard several teachings on the meaning of the day of the Lord. The first one is the teaching that the day of the Lord is the rapture. A term I might add that is not found in scripture, nor with careful study is only found in the imagination of the minds that teach this.
But let us not just leave this idea with regards to my way of thinking. According to these teachers Christ is going to return to earth, and resurrect all the dead in Christ and rapture all those that are living and take them to a place they perceive as heaven. Now here is the problem with this thinking. In regards to the rapture, they take the part of this passage in verse 10, “the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night” and apply it to the rapture. There is a big problem with this for the day of the Lord is a coming in judgment. They try to get around this by splitting the coming of the Lord into at least two comings, with a period of tribulation in between. Of course this poses another problem, they cannot agree if the supposed rapture happens before this tribulation, in the middle or at the end. Yet the biggest problem with all of this is that they teach that at the end of this tribulation, Christ returns and set up a 1000 year reign on the earth, and still the earth is not destroyed until after the 1000 years.
All of this in the face of Peter writing that the day of the Lord comes as a thief in the night, and the heavens and earth pass away with a fervent heat. How can all this happen in the short period of time implied by Peter in this passage? It cannot.
Instead of defending a theology that has so many holes in it, why not go back to scripture and rethink your theology?