What is the Day of the Lord?

Question 10072.

The Day of the Lord is the Bible’s name for that extended period when God steps out of the shadows and deals directly with human sin, rescues His people, and establishes His King. It appears more than twenty times in the Old Testament and several more in the New, and it is one of those phrases that unlocks whole prophetic books once you have grasped it.

The first thing to say is that it is not a twenty-four hour day. Hebrew uses the word for a period characterised by something, rather in the way we speak of the day of the horse and cart. This is a season with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Darkness before dawn

Amos delivers the shock. His hearers evidently looked forward to this day as a national triumph, so he asks, “Why would you have the day of the Lord? It is darkness, and not light” (Amos 5:18). He then pictures a man fleeing a lion only to meet a bear, and leaning on the wall of his house only to be bitten by a serpent.

Zephaniah piles up the adjectives: a day of wrath, of distress and anguish, of ruin and devastation, of darkness and gloom, of clouds and thick darkness. Joel calls it great and very awesome, and asks who can endure it.

The consistent note is that the Day of the Lord falls on the complacent, and especially on the religiously complacent who assumed their nationality or their attendance record would shelter them. That is a word for every generation, including this one.

But judgement is never the whole of it. The same prophets who describe the darkness go straight on to describe restoration, a returning remnant, a fruitful land and God dwelling among His people. The day ends in light.

The Hebrew word for day here is the ordinary one, yom, which covers everything from daylight hours to an age characterised by something. Context decides, and here the context is enormous.

Near fulfilments and the far horizon

The prophets often apply the phrase to an event in their own lifetime. Isaiah 13 announces the Day of the Lord against Babylon, and Babylon duly fell. Joel describes a locust plague in those terms. Ezekiel uses it of the fall of Egypt.

Yet in each case the language runs far beyond anything the local event could carry. Isaiah 13 speaks of the stars not giving their light and the heavens trembling. Joel speaks of the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and awesome day comes.

This is the prophetic pattern of near and far peaks seen along one line of sight. A historical judgement becomes a small model of the final one, and the two are described in the same words because they belong to the same kind of divine action.

So when I read a Day of the Lord passage I ask two questions. What did this mean for the generation that first heard it, and what does its excess language point towards? Ignoring either question distorts the text.

What the New Testament adds

Paul writes that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them as labour pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:2-3).

Two details matter. The thief image is about unexpectedness for those in darkness, and Paul immediately tells believers that they are not in darkness for that day to surprise them. Then he states the reason: “For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

In 2 Thessalonians 2 the church had been rattled by a report that the Day of the Lord had already come. Paul calms them by pointing out that the man of lawlessness has not yet been revealed. Their alarm is itself evidence that they had been taught to expect deliverance beforehand.

Peter carries the phrase to the very end: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar” (2 Peter 3:10). That is well beyond the tribulation. Peter is describing the dissolution that gives way to new heavens and a new earth.

How long is the Day of the Lord?

Putting those passages together, I understand the Day of the Lord to begin with the tribulation period, to include the Second Coming and the judgements attached to it, to run through the thousand year reign of Jesus, and to close with the final judgement and the making of all things new.

That may sound like a long day. Remember, though, that Peter has just reminded his readers that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day, and he does so in the very passage where he discusses this subject. The connection is unlikely to be accidental.

What holds the whole season together is not its length but its character. Throughout it, God acts openly and directly. The long stretch of history in which He appears to be silent, in which the wicked prosper and the righteous are puzzled, comes to an end.

That is why the phrase is so often paired with the expression “in that day.” It is the day when everything hidden is dealt with, and every account settled.

The Day of the Lord and the day of Christ

Paul uses a different expression when writing to churches about their own prospects. He speaks of “the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6), of being pure and blameless for the day of Christ, and of having something to boast about on that day.

Every occurrence of that phrase concerns blessing, reward and completion for believers. Every occurrence of the Day of the Lord concerns judgement falling on a rebellious world, with deliverance for the faithful. Same God, different focus.

I take the day of Christ to centre on the Rapture and the judgement seat that follows for the Church, and the Day of the Lord to centre on what happens to a world the Church has left. My answers on the rapture and rewards fill that out.

Keeping the two expressions distinct removes a good deal of unnecessary anxiety from the study of prophecy. Believers are not waiting for wrath. We are waiting for a Person.

Where the Church is

This is where the doctrine becomes pastoral. If the Day of the Lord is a period of wrath poured out on a Christ-rejecting world, and if God has not destined His people for wrath, then the Church is removed before it begins. That is the position I hold, and I set it out in my answer on pretribulationism.

Paul makes the contrast explicit in 1 Thessalonians 5:4-5: “But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day.” The unbelieving world is caught out. Believers are not.

Revelation 3:10 adds the promise to keep the faithful church “from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world, to try those who dwell on the earth.” Kept from the hour, not preserved through it.

I would rather say too little here than too much, since godly Christians differ. But I cannot make Paul’s comfort in 1 Thessalonians work if the Church is scheduled to endure the very wrath he says we are not destined for.

Living in the light of that day

Peter draws the practical conclusion himself. “Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness” (2 Peter 3:11). The doctrine is given for the shaping of character, not for the drawing of charts.

It also fuels evangelism. If a day of reckoning is fixed, then the kindest thing I can do for my neighbour is tell them about the One who bore judgement in their place. Warning people is not unkindness; silence is.

And it steadies the believer who is watching wickedness flourish. Asaph nearly lost his footing over that until he went into the sanctuary and understood their end. The Day of the Lord is the answer to the oldest complaint in the Psalms.

Meanwhile Peter tells us we are “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God.” I take that to mean our praying and our witness are woven into God’s timing, which is a remarkable dignity to be given.

So, now what?

Read Joel, Zephaniah and 1 Thessalonians 5 together this week. The prophets will sober you and Paul will settle you, and the combination is exactly what the doctrine is meant to produce.

Then ask the question Amos asked. Are you looking forward to the Day of the Lord because you assume you will be on the right side of it, or because you know the One who will keep you? Those are not the same confidence at all.

“But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness.”

1 Thessalonians 5:4-5, ESV