2 Peter 3 - Where's Jesus?

Recently, I was sharing with one of my elderly hospice patients the passages about Christ returning to earth on a cloud. She anticipated where I was going with the devotional and beat me to the punch line. When she was a little girl, she would look at a cloud and wonder, "Is that the cloud that will bring Jesus back?"

This lady has waited for decades--her whole life--and Jesus hasn't returned yet. For that matter, Christians for over two millennia have held on to this hope. Have all these believers been deluded by some religious myth?

A few years after Jesus went back to heaven. Peter wrote,
“3... in the last days scoffers will come, mocking the truth and following their own desires. 4 They will say, 'What happened to the promise that Jesus is coming again? From before the times of our ancestors, everything has remained the same since the world was first created.'” (2 Peter 3:3–4, New Living Translation)

Here's Peter's answer to the question, "Where's Jesus?"
1. God judged the world once before and sent a flood in the time of Noah. When Jesus comes to judge the world a second time, it will be with a fire that will melt the planets, including the earth. (vv.5-7,10)
2. From God's perspective, a day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is a day. What we measure in centuries and millennia--time itself--is irrelevant to God.
3. So if Jesus seems "slow" in returning, it's because He "is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent." (vv.9, 15)
4. "To repent" simply means to turn to God, not just to escape hell fire, but so as to be a part of the "new heaven and new earth." (v.13)

Lord, If you weren't coming back, if heaven is just a dream, then there's no sense in living pure and righteous lives. But given the promise of Your return, regardless of how many years we think we have or don't have, give us diligence to “abide in You, so that when You appear we may have confidence and not shrink from You in shame at Your coming.” Amen. (1 John 2:28, English Standard Version)