And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
(Compare Psalms 10:11; Psalms 73:11.) Presumptuous scepticism and lawless lust, setting nature and its laws above the God of nature and revelation, and arguing from the continuity of nature's phenomena that there can be no interruption to them, was the sin of the antediluvians, and shall be that of the scoffers in the last days. Where - implying it would have taken place before this, if ever it was to take place, but that it never will. The promise - which you, believers, are so continually looking for (2 Peter 3:13).
His - Christ's: the subject of prophecy from the earliest days. The fathers - to whom the promise was made, who rested all their hopes on it. All things - in the natural world: sceptics look not beyond this. As they were - continues as we see them to continue. From the time of the promise of Christ's coming as King being given to the fathers, down to the present, all things have continued, as now, from "the beginning of creation." The "scoffers" are not atheists, nor do they maintain that the world existed from eternity. They recognize a God, but not the God of revelation. They reason from seaming delay against the fulfillment of God's word.