The Day of the Lord

In short

If you are thinking of Armageddon, CALM DOWN. This topic is more complicated than you think. Most often, the phrase refers not to epic end-time events, but to epic events in what is now the past. But it can mean the end of the world, too.

Why it is important

In its context, it means judgment on a group of people and how they need to get right.

What is important about THIS study is to understand that a lot of the doctrine that churches teach about the second coming of Christ is very wrong and due to a grave misunderstanding of this term. (And basically, it’s because Christians typically only read the parts of the Old Testament that are interesting to them and take things out of context and assume everything is about them. It’s not.)

Examples in the Old Testament

Malachi 4:5, “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes.” End of the world? Nope. It’s John the Baptist. Jesus explains in Matt 17:10-13.

Isaiah 13:9-11, “Behold, the day of the LORD comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it. For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light. I will punish the world for its evil….” That has GOT to be the end of the world, right? Nope. Babylon’s conquest at the hands of the Medes (read vs. 1, 17 and 19 in the same chapter).

Ezekiel 30:3 – Judgment on Egypt, at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar (see vs. 4 and 10 in that same chapter)

Amos 5:18 – The tables turn on Israel. They rejoiced at the day of the LORD, but now it’s their turn to be captured and exiled (Amos 5:27).

Joel 2:28,31, “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. …The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes.” You may recognize this from Acts 2 (there is more to the quote); Peter is implying that Jesus and the day of Pentecost (that very day) are the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy – and not the end of the world.

Examples in the New Testament

These examples I am about to share are all about the future (end of time) Day of the Lord. But that’s not to say that ALL New Testament references are about the end of the world.

1Co 5:5, “you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.” This is interesting because it ties salvation to what is clearly a future event. And that’s a whole other discussion.

1Th 4:16-5:2, “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. …For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.”

2Th 2:1-2, “we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.” This is important because it is saying that this Day of the Lord is something that we do not want to miss!

2Pe 3:10, “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.” Now that seems like the end of the world!

Theology and doctrine

Where the day of the Lord really gets confusing is in Matthew 24*.

What I believe is that BOTH kinds of “the day of the Lord” are happening in that chapter.

So, read this passage, and you would be sure that it was talking about the Second Coming.

“For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. …Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”

Matt 24:27-31

And yet Jesus explains right after that, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matt 24:34). So that is definitely NOT the end of the world, unless all of those people are still alive today!

Jesus promises that those events will be easily predicted (Matt 24:33).

But in Matt 24:36, He says, “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” And He goes on to describe other things that will happen.

So, there is a day of the Lord that people will recognize, and then another day that even Jesus Himself did not know to an exact date. What many believe (including myself) is that the first “day” is the destruction of Jerusalem a few decades after that, and the other “day” is the Second Coming, which has not yet happened.

But many will try to take the descriptions from the first day and apply to the end times. And that’s where we get a lot of inaccurate doctrine from about the day of the Lord.

Footnote

* Matthew 24 does not have the exact phrase “day of the Lord,” but it’s there in spirit. For example, Matt 24:42 says, “Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”