continuing as they were

... knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires.  They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the forefathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.”
  - 2 Peter 3

"... let us not be put off by the sneer that if these meanings were what God had intended us to have they would not have been forgotten for two thousand years."
  - N.T. Wright  

I think it is only natural that modern believers in Jesus wonder where the last two thousand years have gone.  Is there a more central tenet of Christianity than that the death and resurrection of Jesus the Nazarene was a game-changer for human history?  Perhaps the biggest disappointment has been the centuries of the reinvention of the Jesus' ἐκκλησία [ekklesia] as an oppressive political regime.  The ἐκκλησία is a spiritual body in which all the body parts are connected directly to Jesus who is the head of Body of the Anointed.  The Church™ supplanted the ἐκκλησία, in which popes became chief cornerstones.  Where Peter (considered the first Pope by the Catholic believers) himself said Jesus rather than he is the cornerstone on which the ἐκκλησία is built.  Of the popes, I can only say what Paul said about Peter, James and John: "They may have seemed to be pillars of the ἐκκλησία, but I don't care either way; God does not respect some as greater than others."

http://www.evidenceforchristianity.org/did-jesus-use-the-word-synagogue-or-church-in-matthew-1618/
Some Catholic believers have since encountered the baptism of the Holy Spirit in the charismatic sense that Protestant seekers were reintroduced to the experience as it described in Acts and 1 Corinthians in 1906 on Azusa Street.  The popes have mostly had the good sense to not speak against this, even though it has taken a century for most Protestants to warm to it.  But it isn't through the Church of Rome that the charisma.

The epilogue to the Marcan Gospel (which is supposedly not in the oldest manuscripts) describes the signs that follow those that believe.  This version of the Great Commission seems to be in accord with the Acts of the Apostles.  The Johannine Gospel reports Jesus telling his disciples "greater works shall you do."  That's been a heavy prediction from the man that fed five thousand people from one meal, who resurrected a man 4 days dead, who brought a storm to a sudden halt, who made a boatful of people arrive instantly at land, who walked on water, who made a fig tree wither in a day.  Greater works, he says, because he will go to the Father and replace tabernacling with us physically with the indwelling presence of the Ruach ha-Qodesh.

They shall all know Yahweh from the least to the greatest, so that no one will have to teach his neighbor how to know him.   This is the covenant the Father will make with them in those days.  The same days that the Spirit will fall upon all flesh so that men and women will prophesy as was once common only with a prophet.

I think we are still waiting for the fulfullment of that promise.  It began at Pentecost, but in subsequent generations, the baptism of Jesus lost way to the baptism of John.  Prophesying and speaking in tongues diminished.  Healings and resurrections became less reported.  (Papias writes wistfully of one of Philip the Evanglist's daughters reminiscing to him about a resurrection.)  The only exhibition of dunamis was in withstanding torture and death for one's belief in Jesus the Anointed.  The charisma of the Spirit was practically lost, as described by Paul as necessary for the building up of Christ's tabernacle on the earth, as necessary for paraklesis.

The writer of the 2nd Epistle attributed to Peter was worried that a fearful vigilance for the Second Coming was necessary to keep people from sinful living.  Personally, my experience is that people get burned out with the hypervigilance and preoccupation with the End Times.  They either live in fear and dig a trench or they walk around acting superior to those who are "living for today," or they give up on yet another burden "that was too great for our fathers to bear" and consider religion burdensome. 

Peter exhorts us in 1 Peter 4 that the "the end is near".   The epistle of 1st John notifies that the antichrist spirit in the world showed that the "last hour" was upon the church.  2nd Peter warns us that in determining when the end of days would come, it was important to understand that with the Lord, "a thousand years is as a day."  Apparently the last hour is as a few thousand years.  The "perilous times" described in 1 Timothy 3 have been going on for a long time.  But just as the disciples ask Jesus about the coming of a Messianic Age, he says, "Don't worry about that. Just focus on the outpuring of the Holy Spirit."

Does the ἐκκλησία of Jesus keep itself pure by fearfully expecting the Master to burst upon the scene and catch us being ungodly?  Those born of the Spirit, unpredictable as the wind, keep from fulfilling the lusts of the flesh, not by looking at the skies, but by walking in the Spirit and making their selves into tabernacles of the abiding Presence of God on earth.  Look not here or there.  The kingdom of God is here in your midst.  Look for the Spirit poured out on all flesh. 

Does the ἐκκλησία of Jesus keep itself pure through a healthy fear of hellfire and brimstone?  Those born of the Spirit instead keep themselves pure through an expectation to eventually be overtaken by a revelation of God's Son that he or she takes on the likeness of a Child of God.  One day we will fully take on the character and splendor and grace of the Anointed Jesus, because we will no longer see through a glass darkly but will perceive him in all his beauty, and take on his glory.