By Dan Ellsworth
It is difficult to look at the world around us without wondering where all of this is going. War, political division, cultural upheaval, economic uncertainty, and changes arriving faster than many of us can absorb have renewed conversations among more than just Christians about prophecy, the return of Christ, and whether we may be watching the last days unfold. Those questions are understandable. Scripture gives us every reason to expect Christ’s return and to live with our eyes fixed upon what lies beyond this present world. Still, there is a difference between longing for Christ and looking for escape, between living expectantly and becoming so occupied with when He will return, we lose sight of how He has called us to live until He does. Nearly two thousand years ago, Peter wrote to people approaching the same promise from the opposite direction. They looked at a world appearing remarkably unchanged and asked, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised?” Everything seemed to continue as it always had. Why should anyone believe something different was coming?
Peter’s answer in 2 Peter 3 is striking because he does not begin by giving them a timeline. He reminds them of what they have forgotten. Long before anyone could look around and conclude the world simply continues on its own, God spoke and the heavens came into being. The earth was formed out of water and by water, and through those same waters the ancient world was overwhelmed. Peter reaches backward to creation and judgment before pointing forward to what God has promised, dismantling the assumption of permanence by reminding his readers the world has never existed independently of the God who made it. What appears stable exists because He wills it, and what appears delayed remains subject to His timing. The scoffers mistook God’s patience for inactivity. We may be tempted toward a different mistake, interpreting the instability around us as a puzzle we need to solve. Peter directs both concerns toward something far more personal: “What kind of people ought you to be?”
His argument reaches beyond a reminder of what happened at creation or what will happen at the end. The Word challenges our assumption of self-creation, the Water our illusion of self-sufficiency, and the Way our insistence upon self-direction. Each confronts something deeply rooted in the way we understand ourselves, while each also points toward the security found when our lives are placed beneath the authority of the One who created, sustains, and calls us.
Scripture begins with four words carrying more weight than we sometimes allow them to hold: “In the beginning God.” Before our plans, accomplishments, ambitions, identities, opinions, and carefully constructed versions of ourselves, there was God. Genesis does not introduce humanity as self-created beings searching for meaning and eventually discovering a Creator. God speaks, creation responds, and human life begins because He gives it. John later takes us deeper, telling us the Word was already there in the beginning, and all things came into being through Him. The Jesus we encounter in the Gospels did not enter the story at Bethlehem. He entered the world He had already made.
This confronts the modern instinct to define ourselves, construct ourselves, discover our own truth, and determine what our lives should mean. Scripture begins somewhere entirely different. We are created before we create, known before we know, and given life before we decide what to do with it. At first this can feel restrictive because we have grown accustomed to treating autonomy as freedom, but there is comfort hidden within the surrender. If my life did not originate with me, its meaning does not have to rest entirely upon me either. I do not have to carry the impossible burden of creating a purpose large enough to justify my existence. The One who spoke life into being already knows why I am here.
Then there is water, one of the most ordinary substances in our lives and one of the most difficult to control. We drink it because we cannot live without it. We build around it, store it, divert it, irrigate with it, travel across it, predict it, and spend enormous resources trying to manage where it goes. Still, enough water in the wrong place can remind us very quickly how limited our control really is. Water nourishes and destroys, cleanses and overwhelms, sustains life and takes it. Scripture repeatedly places water at moments where human strength reaches its limits: creation, the Flood, the Red Sea, the Jordan, baptism, storms, shipwrecks, and finally the river of life flowing through the restored creation God has promised.
Israel standing at the Red Sea could not engineer a path through it. Noah did not control the floodwater surrounding the ark. The disciples caught in a storm on Galilee understood exactly what the water beneath them could do, which helps explain their terror when the wind rose and waves began breaking over the boat. These were not men unfamiliar with water imagining a danger which did not exist. Some had spent their lives around it. They understood its power and their own limitations, and then Jesus stood and spoke, the wind quieted, the waves settled, and the water capable of taking their lives answered to Him.
There is something deeply human and unmistakably divine in the way Jesus encounters water throughout His earthly life. The eternal Word through whom creation came into being entered His own creation through the same physical vulnerability accompanying every human birth. Before angels announced good news and shepherds heard words we remember each Christmas, there were the cries and labor of childbirth. Before “Joy to the World,” there were cries of birth pains. The One who had authority over the waters came through water as we did. He later stepped into the Jordan and submitted to baptism, became thirsty, sat beside wells, traveled in boats, experienced storms, and lived within the same physical world we inhabit. Yet He also walked upon what can drown us and commanded what can overwhelm us. What has power over us has no power over Him.
We spend much of our lives trying to soften this reality. We plan, save, insure, prepare, build, protect, and make responsible decisions because wisdom requires us to steward what God has placed in our hands. The problem begins when stewardship quietly becomes confidence in our ability to secure tomorrow. A diagnosis, accident, storm, phone call, market collapse, or loss can expose how quickly circumstances move beyond our control. Water gives Scripture a vivid picture of something life eventually teaches every one of us: we are dependent creatures. Jesus never promised His followers a life where threatening waters would disappear, and the disciples discovered this while He was physically sitting in their boat. His presence did not prevent the storm, but the storm never placed Him beyond His authority. Faith therefore becomes something more substantial than confidence circumstances will unfold as we prefer. It becomes confidence in the One who remains Lord when they do not.
Recognizing we did not create ourselves and cannot ultimately sustain ourselves leads naturally toward another question: why would we assume we are best qualified to direct ourselves? We spend enormous energy deciding where we want to go, what we want to accomplish, and what kind of life we want to build. Jesus enters those questions with an invitation both simpler and more demanding: follow Me. He does not merely offer assistance for the direction we have already chosen. He calls us toward His. The earliest Christians understood this so clearly they became known as followers of “the Way.” Their faith was more than a collection of beliefs about Jesus; it was a life increasingly reordered around Him. The One who created us and remains Lord over what we cannot control also claims the right to lead us.
This brings us back to Peter and the question beneath our renewed fascination with the last days. He expects the return of Christ, speaks plainly about judgment, and tells believers to look toward the new heavens and new earth God has promised. He never treats expectancy as something Christians should outgrow. But neither does he allow it to become speculation detached from discipleship. God’s apparent delay is patience, and His patience is mercy. More time is therefore not permission to drift. It is opportunity to become the kind of person we should have been becoming all along.
We can study prophecy, watch events unfolding around us, debate timing, and wonder whether the turmoil of our age signals something larger approaching. Scripture gives us reason to long for Christ’s return, and Christians should never lose sight of the hope awaiting us. But none of us needs to know where our generation sits on a prophetic timeline before deciding whether following Jesus deserves urgency. The Word has already told us where our lives came from. The Water has reminded us how little control we possess over them. The Way has shown us what to do with whatever time we have been given.
In a moment we arrive, and in a moment, we are gone. I do not know whether I am living in the world’s last days, but I am in mine. Peter’s scoffers looked at an apparently unchanged world and assumed they had time. Perhaps our greater danger is believing we do too.
About the Author
Dan Ellsworth has spent more than 30 years serving as a lay leader in small-group Bible studies, studying Scripture alongside other believers and seeing firsthand both the challenges and possibilities of biblical discipleship. His professional career has included decades in animal health and agriculture, and he remains connected to agriculture as a small cattle producer in eastern Colorado. In recent years, he began putting into writing many of the questions and convictions shaped through decades of studying Scripture with others. His Scripture-centered studies focus on biblical literacy, discipleship, and helping Christians see Jesus more clearly through God’s Word. His books and small-group resources are available at getbacktothebible.com.
