Scoffers in 2026
The Bible predicted them. Ellen White described them. We live among them now. A look at the ancient pattern of scoffing — and what it means when it shows up inside the church.
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Peter did not write about scoffers as a distant threat.
He wrote about them as a certainty. “In the last days scoffers will come,” he said, “scoffing and following their own evil desires, saying, ‘Where is the promise of his coming?’” (2 Peter 3:3-4). The Greek word is empaiktai — those who play with sacred things. Those who treat what is holy as a joke.
I want to think carefully about what that looks like in 2026.
The Pattern Is Older Than Peter
Before Peter, there was Noah.
For more than a century, Noah built a boat in the middle of dry land. He preached. He warned. He pleaded. The text does not record anyone listening. What it implies is that they mocked.
Ellen White fills in what Scripture leaves sparse. In Patriarchs and Prophets, she describes what happened to people who were actually convicted by Noah’s preaching. Some of them felt it. The weight of the warning landed on them. But then they looked around. So many were laughing. So many were dismissing the old man and his boat. And the social pressure became unbearable.
“There were so many to jest and ridicule,” she writes, “that they partook of the same spirit, resisted the invitations of mercy, and were soon among the boldest and most defiant scoffers; for none are so reckless and go to such lengths in sin as do those who have once had light, but have resisted the convicting Spirit of God.” (PP 95-96)
This is important. The most dangerous scoffers were not the people who had never heard the message. They were the people who had heard it, felt it, and then chose the crowd instead.
That pattern has never stopped repeating.
What Scoffers Actually Sound Like
Scripture gives us a taxonomy, and it is more nuanced than we often recognize.
The Wisdom Literature — Proverbs, Psalms — presents the scoffer as a character type. He is unteachable. Divisive. Reprove him and he hates you. The seat of the scornful, Psalm 1 calls it, as though contempt for God is a place a person settles into over time.
The Prophets give us scoffers who sound almost reasonable. In Isaiah 5, they demand proof. “Hurry up and do something,” they say. “We want to see what you can do.” In Jeremiah 17, the challenge is sharper: “Where is the word of the LORD? Let it now be fulfilled.” This is not crude atheism. It is a calculated gamble — betting that the silence of heaven means heaven is empty.
The Apostolic Writings tie it all together. Peter and Jude both write about last-days scoffers, and both connect scoffing to moral autonomy. These are people who follow their own evil desires. The doctrinal error and the ethical disorder travel together. Denying the Second Coming is not just an intellectual position. It is a permission structure.
2026 Has More Varieties Than the Ancients Had Words For
The scoffers of Noah’s day were a crowd. The scoffers of 2026 are a taxonomy.
The Secular Scoffer follows what Pew has been tracking for years. Six in ten people who have left religion cite skepticism of religious teaching. Nearly half cite animosity toward religious institutions. They are not hostile to spirituality in the abstract. They are specifically done with the church. The language they use online is confident, often contemptuous, and algorithmically amplified.
The Scientific Scoffer appeals to uniformitarianism — the doctrine that natural laws have always operated exactly as they do today. Peter anticipated this precisely: “Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3:4). The argument sounds like reason. It is actually a theological claim dressed as science.
The Social Media Scoffer operates in volume. TikTok and Reddit have made mockery of Christianity into content. The format rewards brevity and contempt. A fifteen-second video dunking on a Bible verse gets more reach than a careful exegetical response. This is not a new dynamic. Ellen White noted that when scoffers could not refute truth with Scripture, they substituted ridicule for argument. The platform changed. The strategy did not.
The Cultural Scoffer lives in a post-Christian environment where faith is treated as a punchline by default. This is less aggressive than the others. It is ambient. A steady background assumption that serious people do not believe these things.
The AI and Algorithmic Scoffer is new to this century. Technology has not just created new platforms for scoffing. It has created new competitors for spiritual authority. When people reach for comfort or meaning, they reach for their phones. AI companions provide connection without covenant. The USC Dornsife trend report for 2026 puts it plainly: algorithmic authority is replacing institutional authority in religion. A generation is forming its theology from recommendation engines.
The Internal Scoffer Is the One I Lose Sleep Over
I want to spend more time here.
The most dangerous category in 2026 is not the secular scoffer or the social media troll. It is the Adventist who has quietly stopped believing the Second Coming is imminent.
Ted Wilson raised it directly in the Adventist Review in 2024. He noted that Adventists have been preaching the Second Coming for 180 years. He acknowledged that “disheartened, some Adventists have lost their sense of urgency.” Adventist Today went further that same month, raising the uncomfortable question of whether Adventists themselves may have become the scoffers of 2 Peter 3.
This is not a new problem. Ellen White saw it in her own generation. In the aftermath of the Great Disappointment, she described how people who had professed true faith crumbled when the time passed. “Some who had appeared to possess true faith seemed to have been influenced only by fear; and now their courage returned with the passing of the time, and they boldly united with the scoffers.” (1T 48-49)
Fear-based faith does not survive delay.
And this is the specific form of scoffing that Peter is writing about. He is not warning us about atheists. He is warning us about people in covenant community who look at the long silence of heaven and begin to treat the promise as a piety rather than a prediction.
Proverbs 3:34 says God scoffs at the scoffers. But the original promise to Israel was not that God would mock their enemies. It was that God would give grace to the afflicted. The scoffer is not ultimately triumphant. He is ultimately exposed.
The Noah Frame Holds
Jesus used it himself. “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:37). The comparison is not primarily about the behavior of the wicked. It is about the surprise.
They were eating and drinking. Marrying and giving in marriage. Normal life, fully absorbed. Right up until the rain started.
What Ellen White emphasizes is that the reasoners of Noah’s day were not stupid. They had a coherent worldview. “For centuries the laws of nature had been fixed,” she describes them arguing. “The same succession of seasons.” (PP 96-97). This was uniformitarianism before the word existed. The argument sounded sophisticated. It was catastrophically wrong.
Isaiah 28:22 has a word for where that argument leads: “Don’t start mocking, or your chains will become tighter.” The scoffing is not neutral. It is self-reinforcing. Every jest makes the next warning easier to dismiss. The chains tighten.
What Faithfulness Actually Looks Like Here
I do not think the answer is to become louder scoffers of the scoffers. Proverbs 9:7 is clear: rebuke a scorner and he will hate you. The goal is not to win arguments with people committed to contempt.
The answer is to be the kind of people who are not surprised when it rains.
It means taking the delay seriously without taking it as disproof. Peter addresses this directly: “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise… He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish” (2 Peter 3:8-9).
The delay is not evidence of absence. It is evidence of mercy.
It means refusing social pressure when conviction is present. The people who perished in the flood were not people who never felt the weight of Noah’s preaching. Some of them felt it and chose the crowd anyway. That choice is available to us every day.
It means watching for the internal scoffer in ourselves. Not the loud online voice we can dismiss, but the quiet drift toward treating eschatology as metaphor because the alternative requires too much of us.
Galatians 6:7 does not soften this: “Do not be deceived. God will not be made a fool.”
He has not been made a fool yet.
The rain is still coming.
Chukwuma Onyeije is a Maternal-Fetal Medicine physician and elder at Atlanta North Seventh-day Adventist Church. He writes at Chukwuma Theology on Scripture, Adventist faith, and the life of the mind.