Church for the Throwaways — Breaking It Down (2 Peter 3:11–13)
These are my insights, personal beliefs, and discernment — take from it what feels true to you. Let’s dig in.
2 Peter 3:11–13 (ESV):
11 Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness,
12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn!
13 But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
Verse 11 sets the tone of today’s teaching, and we will rephrase it for modern understanding.
Forgive us if the modernity offends — truly.
If all that we see, touch, sense, feel — all that is physically present, even our own selves — is to be dissolved, as in total erasure of matter, beyond what physics says is possible, then what type of people do we need to be?
What is even the point of doing anything if it’s all going to get nuked anyway?
Verse 12 gives us further definition. For modernity’s sake, we break it down:
What does it mean to hasten the coming of the Day of God?
Is it synchronizing our present reality with His through radical manifestation of heaven on earth?
(As in living the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.)
Verse 13 gives us all the clues we need and the why of the Coming One and the Becoming.
Why is He coming?
Why must He come?
And why must we desire His coming?
Why live well if everything dissolves?
This is one I have wrestled with my entire incarnational existence — and friend, if that term spooked you, bounce. I put it there intentionally as a gatekeeper. This is not meant for any slithering, half-hearted spirit.
So we dig back in after exiling the tempter and divider from our subconscious, as we actively fight the spiritual battle long before we even see the war begin.
The reason we must be the ones who LIVE FULLY when all is ash and tastes like dung on our tongues is because we must BLAZE with our very last breaths —
that we might create an echoing aroma of Christ so transcendent that the Father Himself smiles and sends His recompense even swifter.
We must carry this torch.
We know what we must do — instinct urging us, or restraint pulling us back.
These steps are the shape of the path as we each pursue the same Source from different angles and distances.
We must endure, as Scripture says, always adding to endurance perseverance, to perseverance patience, to patience brotherly love, and to love a sincere heart.
Why?
So we can model for those around us what it looks like to live truthfully while others still hide behind masks, cowering inwardly as shadows.
We must be the example — even if we never utter a retort or hateful rejoinder.
In that silent act, the wind of grace may blow upon the unkindled and stir up, by heaven’s reminder, the Holy Spirit within them.
This work ages the soul prematurely.
It shaves us thin.
We barely recognize ourselves.
So we cling to the Rock — Yeshua — and not to the false dissolutions that mimic the Flood.
The dissolution is the work of the evil one, as spoken in Revelation:
the dragon spews a river to consume the woman who birthed the male child.
But she is given the wings of a great eagle.
And the earth swallows the flood.
I do not claim this as fact, but I posit this:
That water is the flood of information —
everything, anything, everywhere, all at once —
to bury truth beneath an avalanche so deep it becomes nearly impossible to discern true from false.
What does it mean to hasten His coming?
I posit this:
Hastening the Day of God is synchronizing our frequencies with His.
(Using science jargon I barely understand, so be kind.)
What if when Christ said,
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,”
He was saying:
Go be living versions of LOVE.
Go be queer in a right-wing home and get destroyed — and STILL LOVE them.
Go be trans like us in a house of toxic masculinity and get brainwashed into thinking you are worthless — and STILL LOVE.
Go and show the Golden Rule not by identity, nor by situation, but because love is your inward nature — and pressure reveals the anchor.
That is the frequency.
That is the flare.
What if all this loving — instinctive or painful —
sends a flare into the night
not so the Father notices us,
but so the darkness hiding the lambs gets exposed?
So those shadowed might come to the Light?
Why is He coming, and why must He?
Hear me like a whisper in a silent room:
We cannot live Perfect Love if we are not made perfectly of Love.
Scripture gives two images: wheat and tares.
Not two ontological types of souls —
but two responses, two growths, side by side.
He must come with perfect manifested Love, first to gather the wheat —
the children of God, past and present, dead and living —
and then the angels bind the tares for burning
to prepare the ground for the kingdom promised since Eden.
The new heaven and new earth —
where righteousness dwells,
where justice reigns,
where sin no longer contaminates the body like infection.
Why must He come?
To eliminate contamination.
To restore what was stolen.
To close the old and ignite the new.
Why must we desire His coming?
This is the heaviest part.
We must desire His return because if we do not cry out for it,
we are saying:
“The mud is better than the Elysian fields.”
We were meant for more.
We are belittled here among the dead.
We are not merely dust —
we are dust breathed upon by God.
We are more than conquerors.
Kings. Queens.
Meant to reign in love, not cower in darkness.
We were meant to cry out in bridal longing so pure
it pierces the veil.
Only in the last three months have I learned
the why of the wail,
the origin of the ache,
the purpose of the Bride.
Our task is to perform, with all our corporeal selves,
the perfected love we have received.
Even in the small:
the wrapper we don’t want to bend down and pick up.
Only the Father can remove the barrier
between impulse and pure-hearted action.
We must desire sanctification that feels like self-erasure —
not annihilation, but His appearing within our lives.
Then, from that posture, we raise the widow’s song
to pierce the veil.
We must not ask for His coming as escapism —
not to flee depression, loneliness, marital collapse, wrath, vengeance.
We ask only from Mary’s posture:
nard poured on His feet,
a cry of mercy eclipsing longing,
a response to His call.
When delaying would cause more harm than immediacy.
Closing
We must desire Him.
We must recreate glimpses of His kingdom on earth
as evidence laid bare in the autopsy of a people’s spirit.
We must live, love, and long —
braided beyond gender, beyond role.
Thank you for sitting with me in this meditation.
I do not present this as fact.
Humility is the woman who, after pouring out her wealth at His feet,
washes them with her tears.
So too do I offer this writing —
my nard, my fragrance —
poured lavishly on you, beloved Souls of Light.
Amen and Amen.
—Dust
If this truly resonated with you, and do not say this lightly, see the link below.
Eiri Waters