Word of Salvation – Vol. 28 No. 10 – May 1983
Investing Wisely?
Sermon by Rev. A. I. deGraaf, v.d.m. on 2Peter 3:10-13
Scripture Reading: Isa.65:13-66:2; 1Cor.7:29-31; 2Peter 3:1-13
Songs: Ps.H 204:1,4,5; BoW Ps.32:1,2,5;
BoW H.102:1,2,6; BoW Ps.72:1,2; Ps.72:3,4
Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Are you one of the people who follow the STOCK MARKET news in the paper or on the radio?
Most of us aren’t that rich and so I think it is true of most of us: We don’t know a thing about it.
But even laymen in this field, like we are, must have spotted that often something very funny is going on there.
Shares (that is: papers telling you what factories and industry are worth) are SHOOTING UP like rockets; but at the same time industries are closing down and sacking thousands of workers.
And everybody tells you that the economy is in a slump.
Can you make sense of this? I can’t.
Interest rates are going up and down like yo-yo’s. People with money to invest run from pillar to post.
I know people who have taken all the money they had out of stocks and bonds and put them into houses and that while – if you’re trying to sell your house, you’ve to do it at a loss. Nobody can afford the loan money nowadays. Now, what does ALL THIS contradictory stuff tell you? Don’t you think all these things really are…
S I G N S O F U N C E R T A I N T Y ?
Everything shoves and shifts.
Where to invest, has become anybody’s gamble. Your money is unsafe everywhere and inflation keeps on eating away at it.
And then, there are the young people of the world, in Brixton, England, or in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, (we saw them on TV) running amock again.
Also here in our country we see the rise of this lawless fury: kids burning up schools, breaking up cars, spraying paint on other people’s lounge room walls after breaking in.
Why are they doing these things?
ARE NOT THESE ALSO SIGNS OF UNCERTAINTY?
And can you blame them all that much for that uncertainty (apart from the vandalism)?
They can study their heads off, but what good will that university degree be to them once they have finished? They lose the motivation to learn a trade or go to those dratted lessons at College if still they do not know whether there’ll be a job for them at the end of it all.
They may not have M O N E Y to invest, but they do have L I V E S to invest and it seems they too are running from pillar to post.
* * * * * * * *
So how DOES one invest these days, be it money OR lives? That’s what Peter talks about in our text.
TWO points:
1 – FUEL FOR THE FIRE and
2 – THE FUEL A HOLY LIFE RUNS ON.
* * * * * * * *
Yes, that was quite a bunch of DOOMSDAY passages this morning wasn’t it? 1Thess.5 and 1Cor.7; and especially here in 2Peter 3 you would say at first glance that this is awfully pessimistic stuff.
THE WORLD WILL END; IT WILL ALL BURN UP.
WHAT YOU HAVE GOT IS ONLY TEMPORARY.
Be married as if you aren’t married…
Own houses as if you don’t.
NO FUTURE IN ANY INVESTMENT HERE.
THE PLACE MAY BLOW UP ANY DAY.
In fact, that’s what Peter says literally:
Just as once God judged the world through water (and yes,
IT SURVIVED THE WATER,
NO WATER WILL DESTROY IT AGAIN;
God says so every time He paints the rainbow colours in the clouds;
HE is FAITHFUL)
so the day will come that this world – kept from the water –
WILL BURN UP IN THE FIRE.
And not just by any fire but by the frightening holocaust in which even the elements will burn up.
Well, you may ask: what’s the big deal?
In fact, wouldn’t you prefer the water?
Isn’t drowning much, much better than burning to death?
Some burning!
THE ELEMENTS DESTROYED BY FIRE…!
When we were kids the scientific world laughed about that kind of language. Old fuddy-duddy Peter! Didn’t know any better! Elements cannot burn, can they?
Their atoms are indestructible, aren’t they?
But then came men like Professor Bohr, professor Rutherford and Professor Fermi, and they taught us differently.
Then came the glimmer of the early morning of 16 July 1945 when over the arid plains of Alamagorde, New Mexico, USA, the blinding light shone of a new fire; the fire that since has burned up elements and cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It has hung as a threat over the world ever since.
We thought for a while: this is too terrible.
The nations that hold the fuse to that kind of fire will so be in terror of each other,
they will never use it.
The sorcerer’s apprentices of our age
will not be so stupid
as to use that magic – Deplorable Word.
But now we hear supposedly responsible statesmen talk about atomic wars being WINNABLE.
We shudder and aren’t so sure any more.
The whole world on fire;
elements burning up in fervent heat.
So it IS even HUMANLY possible!
Peter saw things like this coming;
and how does he now REACT to it?
Well, it is right there in verse 11:
SINCE EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE DESTROYED IN THIS WAY
WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE OUGHT YOU TO BE?
YOU OUGHT TO BE LIVING HOLY AND GODLY LIVES!
Ah yes, I hear you say: holy living, eh?
We’ve seen that before; in the Middle Ages.
Christians running away from it all,
forming a holy club of no-sayers
somewhere in a monastery or some such commune; WRONG!
THAT’S NOT WHAT GOD UNDERSTANDS BY HOLINESS!
But that gets me to point two:
2. FUEL THAT A HOLY LIFE RUNS ON.
God is not a run-away God.
HE K E P T the world after the water.
YES, says Peter, HE EVEN KEPT IT
BY, T H R O U G H, the water.
The flood had to cleanse the world;
and you don’t clean up something you want to throw away.
No housewife would be that crazy;
and God is wiser than any housewife.
God is no run-away God and so He, the Faithful One, does not want His people to be a run-away people.
HOLINESS DOES NOT RUN ON FEAR.
A holy life cannot RUN on the fuel of being scared. Peter also lived in a time of cultural PESSIMISM. The Roman Empire was rotten to the core.
Its emperors were no longer men of vision…
but greedy self-seeking no-hopers:
Literally NO-HOPERS.
And Peter looked beyond the Fall of the Roman Empire to the fire that would, at God’s time, rage through all the world. And, yet it is not in PESSIMISM that he calls Jesus’ followers to HOLY LIVING.
Just to the contrary:
He was writing these lines thrilled with hope and joy
and unshakable OPTIMISM:
He had seen His Lord Jesus showing the signs
of healing and plenty and life abundant.
He had seen his Lord die to take away
not the WORLD, but the SINS OF the world.
And he had seen Jesus rise again.
He had seen Him ascend to heaven;
and the last he saw of this Mighty King
were His pierced hands stretched out over this world,
not in CURSE but in BLESSING!
And so he does not say:
We expect according to God’s anger and threat
THE END OF IT ALL;
No he says: we expect according to God’s promise
NEW heavens and a NEW earth,
where at last justice and righteousness will dwell.
A NEW earth;
a new EARTH.
After the Flood God started again because being faithful He still thought it was a GOOD earth. He LOVED His creation.
God still loves it and so He is going to CLEANSE it.
WE EXPECT, says Peter in the words later on taken up in the Nicene Creed, We expect the resurrection of the dead and the LIFE of the WORLD TO COME!
Whoever looks at, and reads, and listens to the news, will agree that things had better not stay the way they are.
Boy! Does the place need a massive spring cleaning!
Well, God has news for you:
His Spring has already started and the final clean-up will certainly come.
Jesus came to make it all new,
and that renewal STARTS WITH PEOPLE.
THAT is holy living.
Holy living is: being different from the pessimistic people around you who grab money and grab fun and grab sex because they only see gloom ahead, like kids that burn schools because they see no longer sense in learning.
But holy living is the optimism of people who know that spring has started and God started the clean-up, and so there is
JOYFUL and HOPEFUL building,
joyful loving and joyful sexuality;
caring, and loving; and praising God.
Starting the song that one day will be sung by all of God’s creation.
It will be worth it: that kind of investment will yield plenty of interest and fruit.
God kept the world through the flood and His rainbow tells the story of God LOVING His creation.
When He keeps it for the fire (not man-made fire of wanton destruction but God-controlled fire for the final Spring- cleaning!) He does it because He has great plans. God loves His creation and wants you and me to do so, too.
That’s holy living.
That’s godly life. Godly life is not following some tyrant who will throw it all away;
godly living is looking at things GOD’s way,
and God is a good God, a positive God,
a cleansing and life-renewing God.
Peter had found out what a God, God is when he was redeemed by God’s Son Jesus; and Jesus showed him God’s love so much that it made him cry for joy:
Yes Lord, you know that I love you!
That’s holy living.
And so full of joy he preached that GOOD NEWS.
When he and his fellow-Christians were tortured, imprisoned and killed because of that hope and faith and that confession
– that not the self-seeking Emperor but this
wonderful Jesus was LORD of the world –
they gladly took it and went to their death knowing that a Better Lord, a more Loving God and a more caring Lord is on the throne. Their blood did not seal a confession which was a SAD DIRGE: POOR WORLD, IT WILL ALL END;
but a happy bridal song:
we EXPECT ACCORDING TO GOD’s PROMISE…!
The fuel for holy living is never fear, but JOY. JOY is what it runs on!
A holy life is no run-away-life; just the opposite:
a HANG-ON life.
A song.
A holy life is agreeing with the God of the rainbow;
and so you invest – not in the things that will burn up:
which is sin, the idolatry of THINGS
the idolatry of LUST,
and the idolatry of MONEY.
God will burn up the idols and so our hearts will not hang on THOSE.
Instead, we invest in God’s FUTURE.
Now THERE’ S a ‘futures’ market for you.
We invest not in what will rot away.
That is stupid.
But we invest in what will forever remain.
The Christian need not be full of the unrest of the person who one day sticks his money in shares and the next day pulls it out in panic and invests it into bonds (because the interest rates are up a bit); and then – oops! – down they go… so out it comes and now into houses and land.
No, that is not our life.
Your life and your strength,
your work and your love
and – yes – also your money
are invested first of all in things that remain.
Things that will prove FIRE-PROOF
when God’s spring-cleaning comes;
when JESUS comes.
Therefore the church that preaches THIS Christ – incidentally –
cannot have a shortage of money.
If the treasurer of the church complains of not being able to make ends meet either the people in that church do not really believe in God’s future, or worse, such a church does not preach Christ, the complete Redeemer of God’s child…
and God’s world.
But much more than money is at stake.
What do you do with your life?
That’s the question.
Where do you invest IT?
I may tell you that you CAN invest it in a future that will never perish. That is possible today. GOD’s world has survived the water; God’s world will also SURVIVE the fire.
There are already people who will survive that fire
and there are things such people do now already,
WORKING FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS,
which also will survive that fire.
Things done out of love for Jesus will prove to be of such strength that even that last fire cannot destroy them.
Over a fallen world stands the
multi-coloured
many-splendored sign of the rainbow.
God is faithful.
You are called to believe that with repentance and joy.
You are called to RENOUNCE THE WORKS OF DARKNESS,
and to pull the resources of your lives
out of that which will burn up;
and to invest wisely: in the future of the Lord Jesus.”
That is holy living.
It is a song to the King.
A glad song sung by the Bride of Jesus
to the One she loves above all:
The Lord’s Anointed.
Amen.