Peter introduces us to the problem. Some people don’t believe Jesus is coming again, and their false teaching was causing trouble for the people. Peter wrote this in order to comfort those who may have been led astray into believing that Jesus wasn’t really coming back.
As I said in my previous post, there is a spiritual congruity between Peter’s scoffers and anyone in our own day who would dare to assert that the Lord is not coming back. I argued that any full-preterist who specifically dares to affirm in our day that the Lord is not coming back is a scoffing apostate. (And I frankly don’t care how long he may have maintained a more orthodox profession of faith. Such things mean nothing, because mere professions mean nothing.)
I ultimately based my position on the fact that the Incarnate Person of God in Christ is supremely precious to any human soul who walks in the Spirit of Christ. A truly, experientially redeemed sinner will want to see Him as He is, i.e., to behold Him with his own eyes. A sovereignly elected and truly born-again believer will not utterly and finally forsake the orthodox understanding of the Scriptures concerning the fact that the Lord will return.
As I said in my earlier post, people believe what they want to believe. And the sinner who does not believe that the Lord is coming back for us manifestly doesn’t want to have anything to do with the Incarnate Christ! He doesn’t want Him to return in the flesh.
If this position on my part seems too severe, too scathing as a denunciation of full-preterists, consider this: IF a full-preterist is discovered in the membership of a discerning local church, he WILL be confronted over his denial of the Lord's future, Bodily return. And if he does not very quickly recant, he WILL be excommunicated by that discerning local church.
The sad truth is that he has to be excommunicated. He is just a weird, modern-day version of Hymenaeus and Philetus. His doctrine is gangrenous in the body of Christ. He is a member which must be cut off.
And having been cut off in formal excommunication by a discerning local church, he is damned if he never repents and applies to the congregation for restoration in orthodoxy. (Excommunication by the likes of the Pope means nothing. But excommunication by a discerning Protestant fellowship faithfully upholding the Truth of Scripture is deadly serious.)
In short, the excommunication scenario I outlined above amounts to a rather important spiritual thought-experiment. It shows that we cannot tolerate full-preterist scoffers. We cannot call them brethren if they deny the Hope of the Church and the future, literal Bodily return of Christ for His Church.
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The above comments were just intended to take a very, very clear stand against full-preterism. It really is one of the things which the apostle Peter would want us to do.
More later.
(I have known only two professing Christians who have jumped into full-preterism. And they were never dogmatic amills as I am. As best as I can tell, they were actually leaning toward premillennialism before they became full-preterists.)
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The second reason why I used the full-preterists to illustrate the seriousness of Peter’s warning is that the overall position of the full-preterists actually illustrates something else about Peter’s situation—something else which you did not bother to cover very well in your #2158.
I am referring to the fact that many people in the apostolic period believed that the Lord had promised to return soon. The full-preterists invariably key on this. It’s actually one of their main arguments.
In his 600-page book The Parousia, James Stuart Russell spends literally hundreds of pages arguing from text after text after text that this idea of soonness is so conspicuous in the Scriptures that God surely fulfilled His promise in 70 A.D. He said that God is a liar if He didn’t come back and fulfill all of His promises in 70 A.D.
The problem with this argument is that Peter immediately and completely crushes it. Peter says, in effect, that God’s idea of soon is not the same thing as man’s idea of soon (v.8).
So, Russell was a blaspheming idiot who wasted hundreds of pages.