(This is not an accident. The various passages covering the topic of the Lord’s return are intended to be encouraging for God’s people. They are intended to keep us thoughtful about His return.)
Ah, but it turns out that God reserves the right to define “soon.” That’s one of Peter’s main points. That’s why he chose to quote from a Psalm which spells out the fact that God is not like us, that God’s very eternality should be a warning to the scoffers who were ULTIMATELY just scoffing about the fact of the Lord’s DELAY (and trying to use the DELAY as a basis for insinuating that He is NOT GOING TO COME BACK).
This is what the full-preterists have never faced squarely. They ignore 2 Peter 3 while pretending to interpret it.
So, in a peculiar way, the passage is ultmately a warning about today’s full-preterists. Like the scoffers in Peter’s day, they say the Lord is NOT COMING BACK. To be more specific, they say that if God never had any intentions of sending His Son back to earth in a way which was HUMANLY soon, then God is a LIAR.
So, don’t be fooled by the full-preterists’ smarmy arguments invoking a Bodily return by Christ in 70 A.D. They have to be disfellowshipped. They are scoffers who are just hiding behind the intepretive difficulties inherent in the Olivet Discourse. At the bottom-line, they really are calling God a liar while pretending to interpret His words. My goodness, they are DEFYING the ENTIRE POINT of 2 Peter 3.
(I would use basically the same argument in applying to them Paul’s condemnation of Hymenaeus and Philetus. As you know, the full-preterists say that the warnings against the doctrine of Hymenaeus and Philetus don’t apply to them in view of the events of 70 A.D [i.e., shortly after Peter’s epistle]. But we mustn’t be spiritually naive. We musn’t be fooled by the Satanic shell-game which the full-preterists are playing. We need to notice that their position renders Christianity essentially MEANINGLESS. We need to notice that they are trying to DESTROY the hope of the Church.
We don’t have to understand the Olivet Discourse to realize that. On the contrary, we ought to realize that the full-preterists’ interpretation of the Oiivet Discourse is the very first one which we can rule OUT!)
Getting back to 2 Peter 3, I would say that 2 Peter 3 is important in warning us that goofball eschatology is not to be coddled. Considering Peter’s scathing characterization of the scoffers as "walking after their own lusts," we need to notice that a sinner’s bad eschatology can amount to a revelation that he is just plain LOST.
(I will grant that we can’t always tell the difference between a lost person and a genuine Christian who has lapsed into carnal stupidity in matters such as eschatology. But this fact is automatically a warning that a lot of folks who get pronounced saved are not saved. And in movements where stupid eschatological positions are exalted at the expense of the gospel and the True Hope of the Church, a lot of folks will be discovered on Judgment Day as having been lost the whole time. They will be revealed as idolaters.)
In short, 2 Peter 3 is an extraordinarily serious text!
More later.