II Peter 3:3-4
“Knowing this first; that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”
Life is not going to continue the way it is: It will get worse before it gets better. So Peter is reminding us.
By the time Peter wrote this (scholars date II Peter in 64 AD), the world is in real turmoil. The world seems to be falling apart. Jerusalem, especially, is a powder keg. Christians are being blamed for the trouble being incited in Rome.
However, the New Testament writers reveal to us that they saw the church going to sleep. We can imagine such a thing because many of us have experienced this in our own time. At the most critical juncture of history for the church, the Parable of the Ten Virgins in Matthew 25 shows the church asleep—all ten were asleep, not just five of them. The parable specifically spotlights the virgins slumbering and sleeping at the time of the end, and it happened in the first century too, just before the destruction of the Temple, which was “an end.”
It is an inconsistency that seems almost impossible to believe. With all this excitement going on, instead of being stirred up to press on toward the Kingdom of God, the church instead—much of it, anyway—was doing what the Thessalonians were doing, just waiting it out. Not everybody did that, and it is a good thing or Christianity would have died out.
The apostles were certainly stirred up. There is no doubt about it because they wrote about it. These people were doing exactly what the apostles were warning them of: They were walking after their own lusts or desires.
