Week 51 2 Peter 3
Closing out his letter Peter talks about people who lampoon the return of Christ: scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing…They will say, “Where is the promise of (Christ’s) coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation”. So whatever-all other ideas that scoffers will scoff about they will definitely mock the idea that the Lord will be returning to earth.
There are three building blocks in the Scoffer Argument. First: Jesus said he would come back. Second: but he hasn’t come back. Third: therefore he won’t be coming back.
The Scoffer Argument would be rock-solid if it just had the first two ideas. The nagging little problem is the third idea where scoffers dip into prediction.
I agree that there’s a kind of homespun intelligibility to the Scoffer Argument. I look back at a bunch of historical repetitiveness and – using that known information – project a best guess. It’s a simplified probability approach. It’s like I see the sun came up every day for the last 10,000 years so I’m willing to bet that it’ll come up tomorrow.
The rule works pretty well for repetitive occurrences. Not so well for unique one-off events. Saying that the Lord will not return because he hasn’t returned yet is skating-on-pretty-thin-ice.
Note: quote from 2 Peter 3:3-4 (ESV). In 3:5-7 Peter makes a different argument. But a person has to believe the OT. Which might be a hard-sell for a scoffer.