Isaiah 5:19
19. work—vengeance (Isa 5:12). Language of defiance to God. So Lamech's boast of impunity (Ge 4:23, 24; compare Jer 17:15; 2Pe 3:3, 4).
counsel—God's threatened purpose to punish.Amos 5:18
18. Woe unto you who do not scruple to say in irony, "We desire that the day of the Lord would come," that is, "Woe to you who treat it as if it were a mere dream of the prophets" (Isa 5:19; Jer 17:15; Eze 12:22).
to what end is it for you!—Amos taking their ironical words in earnest: for God often takes the blasphemer at his own word, in righteous retribution making the scoffer's jest a terrible reality against himself. Ye have but little reason to desire the day of the Lord; for it will be to you calamity, and not joy.2 Peter 3:3-4
3. Knowing this first—from the word of the apostles.
shall come—Their very scoffing shall confirm the truth of the prediction. scoffers—The oldest manuscripts and Vulgate add, "(scoffers) in (that is, 'with') scoffing." As Re 14:2, "harping with harps." walking after their own lusts— (2Pe 2:10; Jude 16, 18). Their own pleasure is their sole law, unrestrained by reverence for God.4. (Compare Ps 10:11; 73:11.) Presumptuous skepticism and lawless lust, setting nature and its so-called laws above the God of nature and revelation, and arguing from the past continuity of nature's phenomena that there can be no future interruption to them, was the sin of the antediluvians, and shall be that of the scoffers in the last days.
Where—implying that it ought to 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 the fulfilment of (2Pe 3:13). What becomes of the promise which you talk so much of? his—Christ's; the subject of prophecy from the earliest days. the fathers—to whom the promise was made, and who rested all their hopes on it. all things—in the natural world; skeptics look not beyond this. as they were—continue as they do; as we see them to continue. From the time of the promise of Christ's coming as Saviour and King being given to the fathers, down to the present time, all things continue, and have continued, as they now are, from "the beginning of creation." The "scoffers" here are not necessarily atheists, nor do they maintain that the world existed from eternity. They are willing to recognize a God, but not the God of revelation. They reason from seeming delay against the fulfilment of God's word at all.