Gary DeMar answers the question: Why hasn’t the Lord come yet?”

That’s the question being asked on the Christian Post website. Here’s the first paragraph:

Many believers are anxious for Jesus’ return and, in the natural, some feel God is postponing His return despite knowing that the scriptures, such as 2 Peter 3, teach that God is not slow, but is patient, not wanting anyone to perish, said Jeff Kinley and Todd Hampson of the “Prophecy Pros Podcast.” Kinley and Hampson emphasized that Jesus hasn’t yet returned because the Lord is giving “humanity a chance to repent before He returns.”

Why keep history going if it’s all about continued repentance? It seems to me that if this is the argument, why didn’t Jesus return to wrap up everything in the first century? That way, fewer people — by the billions — would never have to repent of anything since they never would have been born.

Like so much of Bible prophecy speculation, many who traverse the topic miss the timing factor built into most prophetic texts.

What is going on in 2 Peter 3? Peter, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, describes what was taking place before their generation passed away (Matt. 24:34). There were scoffers who were ridiculing the prophecy made by Jesus as recorded in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21.

Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues as it was from the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3:3–4).

Peter and those to whom he wrote were living in the last days, that is, the last days of the old covenant order that began with Adam and ended with the finished work of Jesus on the cross, His resurrection, and ascension. For a generation a warning went out to the Jews to repent. Those who denied that Jesus was the promised Messiah and placed their faith in the stone temple and its planned obsolescence sacrificial system would be caught in the threatened conflagration because they believed God would rescue them from the war machine of the Romans. The rescue came 40 years earlier, and those who believed did not die when the Roman armies march on the city of Jerusalem and dismantled the temple stone-by-stone.

Some believers were impatient and left the faith as James Jordan’s point out in his comments from his commentary on Matthew 23–25 to be published by American Vision:

Indeed, Peter says that these men would “follow their own lusts,” language similar to “eat and drink with drunkards” in Matthew 24:48. As the epistle of Jude, 2 Peter 2, and the later letters of Paul make clear, some of the Christian teachers and disciples also fell away and began to mock and live wantonly.

The temple was still standing. In fact, it was more glorious than ever with the rebuilding process started by King Herod I (the Great) in 19 BC and completed in AD 63, seven years before it was destroyed as Jesus predicted it would be (Matt. 23:38, 24:1–2). Jesus was its ultimate and lasting incarnation (John 2:13–22).

In 1 Peter 4:7, we read: “The end of all things is at hand.” Whatever “things” Peter had in mind, notice their end was “at hand,” that is, near for him and his readers (James 5:8). Jay Adams writes the following:

In six or seven years from the time of writing, the overthrow of Jerusalem, with all its tragic stories, as foretold in the book of Revelation and in the Olivet Discourse upon which that part is based, would take place. Titus and Vespasian would wipe out the old order once and for all. All those forces that led to the persecution and exile of these Christians in Asia Minor—the temple ceremonies (outdated by Christ’s death), Pharisaism (with its distortion of the O.T. law into a system of works-righteousness) and the political stance of Palestinian Jewry toward Rome—would be erased. The Roman armies would wipe Jewish opposition from the face of the land. Those who survived the holocaust of A.D. 70 would themselves be dispersed around the Mediterranean world. “So,” says Peter, “hold on; the end is near.” The full end of the O.T. order (already made defunct by the cross and the empty tomb) was about to occur.[1]

Peter defines the time parameters of the last days after the people witnessed a series of manifestations of the Holy Spirit and their effect on the disciples: “For these men are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only the third hour of the day; but this”— the events you saw with your own eyes and heard with your ears—“is what was spoken of through the prophet Joel: ‘And it shall be in the last days,’ God says, ‘That I will pour forth of My Spirit upon all flesh’”[2] (Acts 2:15–17a).

The “last days” were a present reality for the New Testament church made up of Jews who embraced Jesus as the Messiah and believing Gentiles. The gifts of the Spirit were hard evidence that the last days had arrived.

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