2 Peter 3:15–16

We should count that the apparent delay is only the Lord's grace, working for the salvation of souls. We may well wait, if God uses this time to rescue souls from judgment, bringing them to know Himself, and saving them with an everlasting salvation.

We understand God's gracious slowness. There is only one thing God is always slow about, and that is judgment. He never judges until He has warned and given space for repentance. How swift He is to save! How quick to bring peace to the troubled conscience! He is only slow to judge. He has not come because He wants souls to be saved! His long-suffering is salvation.

Further, we shall account that the present longsuffering of our Lord is salvation. So we shall not chafe under the waiting time it imposes on us. We shall know that every day of waiting, and perhaps of suffering, laid on us means the salvation of multitudes. And not only this. The "accounting" will not stop at a mere mental recognition of the fact; it will express itself in action. We shall bend our energies to setting before people what is ordained for their salvation, until the Lord comes.

The proper cry of an affectionate heart is, "Come, Lord Jesus." But it is our privilege to have fellowship with Him in His longsuffering toward this poor world… A loving wife may mourn her husband's absence and long for his return. But he is away preaching the gospel. She may have such full fellowship with him in his work that she is quite willing for him to stay away longer, if it brings even one soul to Jesus.

The longsuffering of the Lord is salvation. That is His meaning in it. It is not tolerance of evil in any way, and we must not use it as an argument for any tolerance on our part of what is contrary to Him. The fruit of this longsuffering we are, every one of us; therefore we may well rejoice in it.

Notice how Peter writes of Paul — the man who once had to stand up to him and rebuke him at Antioch (Galatians 2:11). There is not a trace of bitterness, nor a trace of that Judaizing spirit which Paul had to resist. Martyrdom was drawing near for both of them, and it is "our beloved brother Paul." Delightful, is it not? The freest flow of Christian affection, and the fullest acknowledgement of the grace and gift given to someone other than himself.

This is perhaps the only passage in the New Testament where one inspired apostle commends another. There had been, for a moment, an apparent breach between them, and men have worked it into a strife between two contradictory systems, both of them Christian. Peter's words here are surely intended in divine wisdom to meet any such thought.

How interesting, in more ways than one, is the reference to "our beloved brother Paul." He explained the prophets with power, but he went far beyond them as to God's counsels. Those counsels were hard for Jews especially, and the ignorant and unstable distorted them to their ruin. It is clear that the inspired Peter calls Paul's epistles "scriptures." People misused them all in this way. And more than that: he speaks of Paul having written to the Christian Jews, as Peter also did in both his Epistles. What can this be but the Epistle to the Hebrews?

It is striking that Peter, whom Paul had once rebuked in front of everyone, speaks of him here with complete affection. He notes that Paul's letters contained a lofty teaching, which those who were unstable, and not taught by God, twisted. Peter himself does not go into the field Paul had entered. Even so, that does not stop him from speaking of Paul's writings as part of the Scriptures. He says, "as they do the other Scriptures." This is an important testimony. It also gives the same standing to the writings of the man who is able to give that title to the writings of another.

This may be the only passage in the New Testament where we find one inspired apostle commending another. How fitting it is here. For a moment there had been an apparent breach between them, as we know. Men have worked that up, in their usual way, into a clash between two contradictory systems — both of them Christian. On that theory, some compromise finally had to bring the two together and weld them into one. Peter's words here are meant, in divine wisdom, to answer any such idea.

All the truth about the church — its place in God's purposes, its privileges, its makeup as a people chosen out of Gentiles as well as Jews, everything Paul sums up as "the mystery of Christ" (Eph. 3:4) — was bound to be "hard" for a Jew. It cut across every fibre of the national feeling they had nursed for centuries. Intellectually the truth was simple enough. But the eyes of their hearts needed opening to see it.

Difficulties there will be, and "things hard to be understood;" but it is only the unlearned and unstable who wrest them to their own destruction.

People twist or distort Scripture too, and so bring destruction on themselves. Those who do it are "unlearned and unstable." "Unlearned," or "untaught," means untaught not in the wisdom of the world, but in the things of God… Still, even if Peter especially had a Gentile danger in mind here, his words apply much more widely. Let us all beware of twisting the Word of God!

There are those who twist the Scriptures to their own destruction. But they have to twist them first in order to reach it. The ones who do so are the untaught and ill established — people who have not really bent their hearts to the truth that establishes them, and have not submitted their souls to its discipline.

Here then we have a God-given description of those who think themselves learned enough to criticize and twist the Scriptures. Whether they attack the writings of Paul or anyone else, they are "unlearned and unstable," and blind and foolish too. They do no harm to the Scriptures they try to destroy. Instead they destroy themselves, for salvation is found only in God and in the word of His grace, which they refuse.

If we are not spiritual, we will not gain much from the guidance the Scriptures give. Unless we are humble and broken in spirit, we will go badly wrong in our interpretations. We understand Scripture only as far as we are spiritual, and only by the Holy Spirit's teaching… We may be learned and stable in the things of this world, but that will not help us unless God teaches us and establishes us. Our present spiritual state is the measure of how much we understand the mind of God.

All Scripture is the word of truth. Yet think what disaster we can cause by giving Scripture a private interpretation, or by using texts out of their context, and so, as Peter says, twisting Scripture to our own destruction.