Put You in Remembrance

“Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth” (2 Peter 1:12).

People sometimes ask why a church would spend its Sunday afternoons on Bible prophecy. It is a fair question. Future prophecy does not govern most of what a Christian does on a Monday morning. Ephesians has far more to say about that, and so does the book of Acts, and so will Romans. But what a Christian believes about prophecy shows the condition of everything he believes before he gets there. If a man is confused about the gospel, about Israel and the church, or about how the Bible is to be read, the confusion does not stay hidden. It comes out when he reaches the prophets, and it takes him in strange directions.

But, strange directions draw a crowd. The stranger the teaching about the last days, the more people will come to hear it. That is not a new appetite. Luke records it of Athens: “For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21). The trouble with following a teacher of that kind is that a man does not receive only the odd teaching. He receives the spirit behind it and the confusion that produced it.

Nobody needs to be a scholar on these things. But a member of a Bible-believing church ought to be able to open his Bible when someone walks in and says the church is going to go through the tribulation, and show him from the text that it is not. The pamphlet answered in this series on 3 October made that very claim. Being able to answer it does not come from hearing a thing once or twice. It comes from study, which, of course, is a weariness of the flesh.

These Saturday articles follow the series on Fundamental Bible Prophecy that we are preaching on Sunday afternoons at Victory Baptist Church in Coden, Alabama. The series is beginning with foundational concepts, the things that must be settled before anyone begins a deep dive into Daniel’s kingdoms or the order of the Lord’s coming. Last week’s article took up 2 Peter 1:16-21 and the more sure word of prophecy. The four verses just before that paragraph are where Peter states his reason for writing at all, and his reason is the word remembrance.

Though Ye Know Them

Peter uses remembrance four times in this short letter: “to put you always in remembrance” (2 Peter 1:12), “to stir you up by putting you in remembrance” (2 Peter 1:13), “to have these things always in remembrance” (2 Peter 1:15), and “I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance” (2 Peter 3:1). Three of the four come in four consecutive verses, written by a man who says in the middle of them that his death is near. He is pressing one thing on his readers.

He begins, I will not be negligent. The word negligent occurs twice in the Bible. The other place is Hezekiah’s charge to the Levites when he opened the house of the LORD again: “My sons, be not now negligent: for the LORD hath chosen you to stand before him, to serve him, and that ye should minister unto him, and burn incense” (2 Chronicles 29:11). Hezekiah says the word to the Levites, and Peter says it of himself, but in both places it concerns men who had been given a service. Hezekiah had already told the Levites what the neglect looked like in their fathers’ day: “Also they have shut up the doors of the porch, and put out the lamps, and have not burned incense nor offered burnt offerings in the holy place unto the God of Israel” (2 Chronicles 29:7). Every clause in that verse is a duty left undone: doors shut, lamps out, incense not burned, offerings not offered. The Levites’ service and Peter’s are not the same, and neither is the believer’s today. But the neglect is the same kind in every case. Negligence is not always doing the wrong thing. Often it is failing to do the required thing. Peter’s required thing was to keep God’s truth before God’s people, and he would not neglect this ministry.

Then he answers an objection before it is raised: “though ye know them, and be established in the present truth.” They already knew these things, and they were already established in them. Peter does not write because they are ignorant. He writes to people who know.

The most common reason a Christian gives for not listening is that he has heard it before. I already know that. So did Peter’s readers, and he told them again anyway.

What did they already know? The verse calls it the present truth, and the word Wherefore at its head points back to what Peter has just written. In verse 3 God’s divine power “hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness.” In verse 5 comes the charge: “And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge.” The list runs on through temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness, and charity, and then Peter warns that the man who lacks these things “is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins” (2 Peter 1:9). The word there is forgotten. Three verses later Peter promises to put them in remembrance. These things in verse 12 and the present truth are not two subjects. They are the truth the readers had in hand at that moment, the things written in verses 3 through 11, and Peter means to keep them there.

The Bible itself works this way. On the night He was betrayed the Lord told His disciples, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34). Years later John wrote, “Brethren, I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which ye have heard from the beginning” (1 John 2:7). Paul told the Thessalonians, “But as touching brotherly love ye need not that I write unto you: for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another” (1 Thessalonians 4:9). In the next verse he wrote to them about it anyway: “And indeed ye do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia: but we beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and more” (1 Thessalonians 4:10). They were doing it, and he told them to do more of it. Few duties are repeated as often in the New Testament as the duty of Christians to love one another. God repeats it because people who already know it still need to hear it.

As Long As I Am in This Tabernacle

“Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance” (2 Peter 1:13).

Peter names two things in that verse, the means and the effect. The means is remembrance; the effect is that they are stirred up. Paul put the same two together when he wrote to Timothy: “Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands” (2 Timothy 1:6). A truth can be believed and never denied and still lie unused. Peter is not asking for agreement. He is trying to move people who already agree.

The writer of Hebrews names the danger plainly: “Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip” (Hebrews 2:1). The danger is not mainly that a believer will reject what he was taught. It is that he will let it slip. Nobody argues with a truth he already believes. He simply stops hearing it. He gets busy, other things crowd it out, and a year later he cannot say what it was God wanted him to remember.

Some who are stirred up by a reminder are stirred the wrong way, and they get angry. Some are stirred to obey. Most, I am afraid, sit and do nothing at all. That does not change what the preacher owes them. A preacher who stops telling people a truth because they do not want to hear it again is negligent in exactly Peter’s sense. He is to say it again, and again after that, not to annoy anyone and not to run anyone off, but in the hope that the next time a hearer will say, the Bible is right, and I am going to do something about it this time.

Peter will do this as long as I am in this tabernacle, and in verse 14 he says how long that will be: “Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed me.” The Lord had told him years before how his life would end: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God. And when he had spoken this, he saith unto him, Follow me” (John 21:18-19). John records that the Lord told Peter the manner of his death, but John records no date. Whether hath shewed me in verse 14 also covers shortly, so that the Lord had shown Peter his death was near, the verse does not say. Either way Peter knew it was near.

Peter had also been given a charge by name. “And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren” (Luke 22:31-32). The Lord prayed for the man Satan wanted to sift, and then sent him back to strengthen his brethren. Luke 22 and 2 Peter 1 are not the same commission stated twice, and Peter does not quote the one in the other. But it is the same man. The disciple who was told to strengthen his brethren is the old apostle who now writes that he will not be negligent, and he spends the last of his time on truths his readers already know.

After My Decease

“Moreover I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance” (2 Peter 1:15).

To endeavour is to set oneself to a work and keep at it. Peter is not describing something he will do when it is convenient. He means to provide for their remembrance after he is dead, which raises the obvious question of how a dead man can keep a church in remembrance.

Verse 15 does not list every means he had in mind. But near the end of the same letter Peter states what both of his letters were for: “This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance: That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour” (2 Peter 3:1-2). Whatever else Peter did, he wrote. His voice would stop when he died. What he wrote would not.

He was not the only apostle who worked this way. Paul told the Philippians, “Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe” (Philippians 3:1). Paul knew he was repeating himself, and he called the repetition their safety. Jude wrote, “I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not” (Jude 5). Peter says though ye know them. Jude says though ye once knew this. And Paul told Timothy what kind of minister does it: “If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished up in the words of faith and of good doctrine, whereunto thou hast attained” (1 Timothy 4:6).

The Bible does not record Peter’s death. But the letter he wrote so that people who already knew these things would still have them after he was gone has outlived him and every person who first read it. It is in your hands now. That is the answer to the question of verse 15. A dead apostle keeps a church in remembrance through what he wrote, and the church keeps it by reading it.

The Same Duty in the Pew

It would be easy to read these verses as a description of the preacher’s job and nothing more. Peter’s charge was an apostle’s, and my charge as a pastor is to see that I am not negligent in teaching this church what God has said. But the duty of putting others in remembrance does not belong only to the man in the pulpit.

Peter told the same churches, in his first letter, “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5). John wrote that Christ “hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen” (Revelation 1:6). Peter states in the same chapter what that priesthood is for: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9). The believer who claims the title has been given a work, and part of it is to shew forth what God has done in calling him. The service is not a Levite’s service, but neglecting it is the same kind of failure.

Paul states part of that work in plain terms: “And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:18-20). The Lord’s word to the eleven after His resurrection was “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). That commission was spoken to the apostles, and not everything given with it belongs to us. But the duty at its center, to carry the gospel to every creature, extends to every believer today, because Paul says we are ambassadors for Christ. It is not a work for a missionary on the other side of the world only. It belongs to the husband and the wife, the father and the mother, and every member who sits in the pew.

Most good Christians are not negligent by doing wrong. They do not drink, they do not run with the world, they come to church fairly faithfully, and their character is good. Their negligence is in what is left undone. Ask one of them when he last told a lost man the gospel, and he looks surprised that the question was meant for him.

Nobody can put another person in remembrance of what he does not know himself. The Lord promised the apostles, “But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26). The promise was made to men who had heard the Lord speak, and it is a promise to bring back what had been said to them. That promise was the apostles’, but the principle holds for any reader. Nothing can be brought back to mind that was never put there. The Psalmist said, “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee” (Psalms 119:11). A believer who never reads, never studies, and never memorizes has nothing laid up to remember and nothing to hand to anyone else.

When church members meet, they talk about politics, football, and their hobbies. There is nothing wrong with any of that. But that is not the remembrance Peter is after. Christians ought to be able to say to each other, I read what the Lord said in 2 Peter 1, and it has been a blessing to me, and to remind one another what God has done for them and what God has said in His word.

The usual reason given for neglecting all of this is that a man is too busy. I am busy too, and I would not trade the many wonderful responsibilities I have daily. But everything I am busy with exists to serve my family and the church, and anything that pushed either of them aside would have to go. No church should accept a pastor who stood up on Sunday and said he had been too busy that week to study. The pastor’s responsibility to teach may be heavier than the member’s, but the member’s responsibility to get his own head into the Bible and then do something with it is still his.

Theodore Dalrymple, who worked for years as a prison doctor in England, wrote an essay titled The Knife Went In, published in his collection Life at the Bottom (2001). The title is how the men he treated described their own violence. The knife went in, as though it had got up by itself and the man holding it had only been standing nearby. Christians talk the same way about the work God gave them. Life got busy. I just don’t think the Lord is leading me to tell people the gospel. But Paul has already said who the ambassadors are: we are ambassadors for Christ. James puts it in one sentence: “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” (James 1:22). The busyness of life is not an excuse to abandon the Lord and Christian duty. It is an opportunity to faithfully exercise that duty.

Till He Come

Peter does not mention the Lord’s table, and nothing in 2 Peter 1 should be read as though he did. But the word he used four times is the word the Lord used when He gave His church the one remembrance He appointed Himself. Paul writes, “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:23-25).

Twice the Lord says it: in remembrance of me. What the church remembers at the table is not a doctrine in the abstract or an experience it once had. It is a Person, His body broken and His blood shed.

Then Paul adds, “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26). The table looks in two directions: back to a death already suffered, the Lord’s death, and forward to His return, till he come. Paul does not say how long that will be, and no one else has the right to say it either. But every time a church takes the bread and the cup, it declares that the Lord who died is coming again.

That is where all prophecy leads. John, having been told of the marriage supper of the Lamb, wrote, “And I fell at his feet to worship him. And he said unto me, See thou do it not: I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus: worship God: for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10). The man who had just been shown what is coming was turned back to worship God and to the testimony of Jesus. Prophecy is the testimony of a Person, and what the church waits for is not an event but the Lord Himself.

Seeing Ye Know These Things Before

Peter closes the letter where he began it. “Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness. But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen” (2 Peter 3:17-18).

In chapter 1 they know them and are established. In chapter 3 they know these things before and are warned not to fall from your own stedfastness. Between those two verses Peter has warned of false teachers who “privily shall bring in damnable heresies” (2 Peter 2:1), and of scoffers who ask, “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Peter 3:4). Knowing the truth did not make these believers safe from being led away. Peter’s answer was to keep the truth in front of them. That is what this series means to do. The foundations come first, and they are repeated, because Peter warned people who knew the truth that they could still be led away.

Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com

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