The Day of the Lord, Part 1

It is coming like a thief in the night.

What does that mean? Unexpectedly, suddenly, unwelcomed, and harmfully. It's going to bring harm. It's not going to be welcomed. It's going to be quick. And it's not going to be expected. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Perhaps you can remember your early days as a Christian and running across a word like grace or holiness, and you didn't understand what it meant. And then, when you grasped the depths of those concepts, it changed the way you lived. Well, there is an event in Scripture that even many mature Christians don't fully comprehend. But if you spend some time studying it, you're going to read the Bible in a new way. I'm talking about the day of the Lord. So why is this day so significant, and is it something Christians should fear, or should we hope for it? John MacArthur tackles those issues as he continues his series called The Rapture and the Day of the Lord.

And now here's John with a lesson. We return to our study of 1 Thessalonians, and I would encourage you to open your Bible, if you would, to chapter 5, 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, the first three verses. Now as to the times and the epochs, brethren, you have no need of anything to be written to you, for you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night. While they are saying, peace and safety, then destruction will come upon them suddenly like birth pangs upon a woman with child, and they shall not escape. One of the most frightening truths in all of Scripture surrounds the event that is identified in verse 2 as the day of the Lord. That term is a technical term in the Scripture to describe the day when Jesus comes back to bring the flaming fury and anger of God on all the sinners of the world. It is a day of devastation. It is a day of destruction. It is a day of doom. It is a day of damnation. Paul here reminds us of this significant, important, climactic, cataclysmic day to come in human history. But what specifically is it?

Now I want you to follow this along. This is going to give you a foundational understanding of a very important concept that you'll bump into again and again in your study of the Bible. Four times in the New Testament the day of the Lord is mentioned.

A number of other times it is referred to. Four times the phrase, day of the Lord, is used. Acts 2, 20 here, 2 Thessalonians 2, 2, and 2 Peter 3, 10. But whatever the New Testament writer understood about the day of the Lord, he got from the Old Testament prophet. So if we're going to understand what the day of the Lord is, we have to understand what it meant to the prophet of the Old Testament who prophesied it. Let me give you a very simple little list of verses that will describe to you the character of the day of the Lord.

Listen to this. This is what the prophet said about the day of the Lord. Isaiah 2, 12 For the day of the Lord of hosts shall come upon everything proud and lofty, upon everything lifted up, and it shall be brought low. Isaiah 13, 6 Wail, for the day of the Lord is at hand. Isaiah 13, 9 Behold, the day of the Lord comes cruel with both wrath and fierce anger to lay the land desolate. Joel 1, 15 For the day of the Lord is at hand, it shall come as destruction from the Almighty. Joel 2, 11 The day of the Lord is great and very terrible. Joel 2, 31 The sun shall be turned into darkness, the moon into blood, before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. Amos 5, 18 Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord, for what good is the day of the Lord to you? Amos 5, 20 Is not the day of the Lord darkness and not light?

Malachi 4, 5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. Zephaniah 1, 14 The great day of the Lord is near, it is near and hastens quickly. The noise of the day of the Lord is bitter. And then this, Zephaniah 1, 15 That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of devastation and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness.

It's all negative. All the prophetic word of the day of the Lord is about judgment. It is about bringing people low. It is wrath and anger and desolation and vengeance and destruction and terrible. It is said that it is a time of gloominess and darkness and distress and trouble always. Six times it is referred to as a day of doom. Four times it is called a day of vengeance. Now always the day of the Lord refers to the most cataclysmic final judgment of God on the wicked. It is a culmination of God's fury in a final blast that consumes the wicked.

It is climactic. Now it is true that in the Old Testament there were times when God brought wrath on people and He used providentially controlled human means like one nation destroying another nation, or He used famines or earthquakes or whatever in the natural course of things to act as instruments of His judgment. But those are only preludes to the final almighty supernatural cataclysm that ends the great judgment against the wicked.

It is so in the end. There will be wars. There will be famines.

There will be diseases, probably the plague of AIDS and things like that and other ones. Those are natural means by which God will begin to effect the working of His wrath on the ungodly. But those are only preliminary to the full blast of the fury of the Son of God who comes in supernatural power and just consumes all of the ungodly.

So you have throughout the Old Testament illustrations of this where God uses natural and human means to effect His wrath against some people. But then finally in some climactic way, there is a major cataclysm that wraps up the judgment that is a picture historically of the final supernatural cataclysm called the ultimate day of the Lord. And so even in the Old Testament, there were a number of days of the Lord in a historical sense when God came and finally just swept His people away.

The northern kingdom was swept away, as you remember, into captivity. The southern kingdom Judah swept away in a holocaust, dispossessed right out of their land and removed in the judgment of God. Those the prophets called a day of the Lord.

And they were preceded by certain judgments that were like preliminary or precursor and then, vroom, they were swept away. Those were historical pictures of the ultimate end when there will be wars and famines and things like that and earthquakes and then, woof, God will just sweep everybody away in a final cataclysm. As you look at the unfolding of the seal judgments in Revelation, the trumpet judgments, the bowl judgments, you see at the beginning, those judgments begin to unfold and there are wars and earthquakes and famines and then all of a sudden they move from the natural to the supernatural. When you hit the sixth seal, all of a sudden supernatural holocausts start to take place because the wrath of God has reached the culmination of the day of the Lord.

You need to understand that. The New Testament calls that day His day. It calls it the day of wrath. It calls it the day of wrath and revelation. It calls it the great day of God Almighty. It calls it, Peter calls it, 1 Peter 2, 12, the day of visitation. But always, now listen carefully, it is the time when God unleashes His final fury on the sinners of the earth and sweeps them away. Now just a footnote, it must be distinguished from the day of Christ or the day of the Lord Jesus or the day of the Lord Jesus Christ or the day of Jesus Christ. Those phrases are all used. The day of Christ is used in Philippians, the day of the Lord Jesus in 1 and 2 Corinthians and the day of the Lord Jesus Christ in 1 Corinthians 1.8.

Now listen very carefully. The day of Christ or the Lord Jesus Christ or the Lord Jesus always has to do with, watch this, believers. It always has to do with a time of being rewarded by Christ, a time when believers enter into their redemption and their reward and their eternal glory. The day of Christ then associates with the rapture and the redemption and reward of saints. The day of the Lord associates with judgment on the ungodly.

There is one other phrase, the day of God, used in 2 Peter 3, 12, and that refers to eternity. That's God's day. Christ's day, He takes His church. The Lord's day, the sovereign Lord comes in judgment. God's day, the eternal state.

So you need to make those distinctions. The day of the Lord then must uniquely be seen as a period of judgment, judgment on the wicked, judgment in a final cataclysm that comes at the culmination of some other preliminary judgments. And that's why you open Revelation and the first five seals are the preliminaries and the sixth seal, bang, everything goes black, the sun goes out, the moon turns dark, the skies go out, the stars begin to fall, people scream for the rocks and the mountains to fall on them, and that's the beginning of the day of the Lord.

But it follows those precursors that are outlined before that, and we'll go into detail on those in our next lesson. Now when Jesus said, this day of the Lord's judgment will come like a thief in the night, He meant it will come unexpectedly. Even though there are precursors and things happening, the world won't believe it. They won't believe it. In fact, look at verse 3, they will be saying what? What will they be saying?

Peace and safety. I'll explain that next time. How could they say that? I'll tell you how they could say it, and I'll tell you why they say it. But that's what they say. Oh, peace, everything's going to be fine.

How can you believe that? When all of these things are going on, earthquakes, wars, rumors of wars, famines, but that's what they say. They're not going to expect it.

And so there's always the sense of imminency. It's going to come like a thief. It's going to come like a thief. It's going to come when you don't expect it.

It's going to come suddenly. Always imminency, nearness, expectation is projected into passages which deal with the day of the Lord. Listen to Ezekiel 30 verse 3, the day is near, even the day of the Lord is near. Joel 2, 1, the day of the Lord is coming, it is at hand. Joel 3, 14, the day of the Lord is near. Obadiah 15, the day of the Lord upon all nations is near. Zephaniah 1, 7, the day of the Lord is at hand. Zechariah 14, 1, the day of the Lord is coming.

They were saying that then and we're not there yet. But there was always that sense that it could come at any moment. The prophets also were looking at a historical day of the Lord that was near.

That would be a preview of what the final one would be. And so I need to just mention this to you, a very important interpretive thought. Whenever the prophets write about the day of the Lord, they're looking at two things. They're looking at a historical day of the Lord that's going to happen soon and they're looking at the ultimate culmination in the final day of the Lord. So we call that a near-far prophecy. It has a near slash far interpretation.

You shouldn't be surprised by that. Many of the Psalms that David wrote about himself were messianic, right? He was really talking about the Messiah. When David said in Psalm 69, the reproaches have fallen on thee or fallen on me, zeal for your house has eaten me up. He's saying, God, I love you so much.

I'm so zealous for your house that when you're reproached, I feel the pain. And he was talking about his own heart. And when Jesus came and cleansed the temple, David was talking about him. So you see on the horizon in many of the messianic Psalms, the Messiah, even though it's speaking about an individual in the past, read Isaiah 7 14, a virgin shall conceive and bring forth the Son. As you read that, you think it must be talking about the lifetime of Isaiah. But as you get to the New Testament and look back, it was talking about the Messiah. So you have a near and far significance many times. When it comes to day of the Lord prophecies, that's pretty typical.

Let me give you an illustration. Look at Obadiah. Obadiah 1 to 14 is talking about judgment on Edom. God is going to judge Edom, this neighboring nation that had rejected the true God. He said, I'm going to send my judgment on you, Edom, and it is a day of the Lord kind of judgment. But when you get to verse 15, then he says, the day of the Lord draws near on all the nations.

And he jumps clear to the end of time and starts describing the end time and how all of the nations are going to be brought into judgment. And before the whole thing is done, the end of verse 21, the kingdom will be the Lord's and the Lord will reign after that final judgment. Look at Zephaniah.

Zephaniah is a few more books to the right. And Zephaniah chapter 1 looks at a day of the Lord. Verse 7, Zephaniah 1, 7, be silent before the Lord God, for the day of the Lord is near. And he goes on to describe the day of the Lord through verse 14, near is the great day of the Lord, near and coming very quickly, listen the day of the Lord. He says, listen, listen, listen, you can hear it.

You can hear it. By the way, he's only about 15 years away from the Babylonian exile of Judah in 605. So he says, it's coming soon. He's talking about a historical day of the Lord that's coming as they're hauled away into captivity, taken out of their land. But when you go to chapter 3 of his little prophecy, all of a sudden he jumps across all the millennia of time. And another day in chapter 3 verse 8, all the way to verse 20, I won't take the time to read it, he's looking at the very final day of the Lord, the establishment of the kingdom of Christ after the day of the Lord's judgment has come upon all the world.

Isaiah does the same thing, and I won't even take you there. And he's talking about that culminating final day of the Lord when the southern kingdom of Judah was all swept into captivity. And then he moves to the final eschatological day of the Lord, does Isaiah, and jumps from the historical to the eschatological or the final event in terms of judgment, that great day of reckoning of all nations. And so it was a typical prophetic pattern. So as you study the Old Testament and you come to a day of the Lord passage, you may find that the prophets of the Old Testament so co-mingled history and eschatology and so blended them together that sometimes you can't draw the line finally through which is historical and which is eschatological. Don't be discouraged by that.

That's a very difficult thing to do. But they saw preliminary indications that God's judgment was coming, followed by God coming in what's the day of the Lord kind of judgment, sweeping the people away as a preview of the final day when God will have some preliminary human providentially orchestrated judgments culminating in a final sweeping away of the ungodly by God supernaturally. And so, as one writer says, the eschatological day stands in the background on the distant horizon. And he writes, the day of the Lord was near because God was about to act, and the historical event was in a real sense in anticipation of the final eschatological deed. The historical imminence of the day of the Lord did not include all that the day of the Lord meant. History and eschatology were held in dynamic tension, for both were the day of the Lord, end quote.

So says George Ladd. Now as you look at the character in the coming of the day of the Lord, Joel gives us probably as direct a statement as to its nature when listen to what he says. Joel 2.30, And I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth, blood, fire, and columns of smoke. The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. But whoever calls on the name of the Lord, he says, will be delivered. Those who know the Lord will be delivered from that, but it'll come. The sky goes dark, blood, fire, smoke, blackness, and then horrific judgment.

If you think that's graphic, the New Testament is far more graphic than that, and we're going to have to come back for that graphic description that the New Testament gives. It's frightening. The day of the Lord, he says, is coming. It is coming like a thief in the night.

What does that mean? Unexpectedly, suddenly, unwelcomed, and harmfully. It's going to bring harm. It's not going to be welcomed. It's going to be quick, and it's not going to be expected.

It's coming. Paul certainly felt the rapture could come in his lifetime, as all Christians have felt. He believed that the day of the Lord would follow the rapture, but no believer would be in the day of the Lord. And the timing of all of that, we don't know. We don't know when the Lord's coming for his church. We don't know the moment, the day, or the hour, when he's coming in terrible judgment on the ungodly. You say, well, now wait a minute. When those events start, won't the people alive at that time know?

They'll have all that information, but they still won't know the day or the hour, and they'll be making exactly the wrong evaluation. They'll be saying, peace and what? Safety. For your encouragement, beloved, and for theirs, Paul says, verse 4, brethren, you're not in the darkness. The thief is coming in the night. You're not in the night.

The day's not going to overtake you. We're in chapter 4, aren't you glad? We're not in chapter 5. Somebody's going to be in chapter 5, lots of people in chapter 5. You say, well, does chapter 5 have any implications for us? Yes.

Yes. Since verse 5, he says, we are sons of light and sons of day, and we're not of night and not of darkness, then let's not us sleep as others, but let's be alert and sober. And verse 8, he says, let's be characterized by faith and love and hope. In other words, let's live our life consistent with those who are to be called children of the day. Let's be alert. Let's not be like the sleeping, drowsy, drunken, dark world. Let's be always alert, always ready for the Lord's coming.

It should have tremendous impact on our life because we should live as children of the day should live and not as children of the night. Father, thank You for our time that covered so much and yet in some ways so little. We thank You for the great hope that we have that we shall someday, in a day we don't know, be caught up to meet Jesus in the air and to be gathered together with all those who've died in Christ, to be taken to the place You've been preparing for us to ever be with You. And then we know that all divine judgment will begin to break loose in this world. Father, we just pray that we might be, on the one hand, comforted in the knowledge that all believers alive or dead shall be gathered together to Christ and that also we might be exhorted, on the other hand, that since we are not to participate in the night, we do not belong to the darkness.

We will not be there when the thief comes. Help us not to live as children of darkness but as children of light. Help us not to worry about time because spiritual preparedness has nothing to do with clock watching, date setting.

It has nothing to do with sign seeking. It has to do with holy living in light of the fact that Jesus could come at any moment. So Father, help us to live in expectancy, anticipation, and consequent obedience and comfort, even as we look forward to those things which You've prepared for us, which are too wonderful to be mentioned. We thank You that we shall escape the day of the Lord, for we're not destined for wrath, not temporal, not eternal, but we're destined for fellowship with each other and with You. It's in that hope that we pray in Christ's name.

Amen. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, on Grace to You, the title of his current study, The Rapture and the Day of the Lord. Well, as intriguing as this topic is, it also tends to raise a lot of questions, questions that are most likely answered in the final book of the Bible, the book of Revelation. John, many people sort of drop the subject right there. They figure that the book of Revelation is over their heads, too complex to really grasp.

What encouragement would you offer? I was watching a television program with some Christian scholars talking about the book of Revelation, and they really didn't know what they believed about it. They weren't sure whether it was talking about the future or the past. They weren't sure whether it really was talking about the return of Christ in the future or the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and it was fascinating, really, to watch them meander all over the place and try to make sense out of the book. They couldn't deal with the details, they couldn't deal with chapter by chapter, verse by verse, phrase by phrase, word by word, but all they could do is talk about this in big generalities.

Well, this is a book to give comfort that everything's going to turn out in the end. This kind of vague conversation went on for about a half an hour, and I'm thinking to myself, you don't have to reduce the book of Revelation to a bunch of vague concepts. These words mean something. Every word is precious, every word is true, and they are the words that the Lord has revealed to us to communicate a very carefully crafted revelation of immense detail. But the first way to grasp Revelation is to get an overview of it, and that means grasping some of those words. You might not even know that the book of Revelation has an amazing flow.

Let me tell you about a gift I want to give you. It's a jet tour through Revelation. Very small little booklet. I preached the book of Revelation in one message. The whole book, called a jet tour, we've turned it into a booklet. It's free.

All you have to do is call, write, send us your name, your mailing address. We'll send you a free copy of a jet tour through Revelation. You'll be on your way to understanding the whole book of Revelation. You can read that thing in about half an hour. That's where to start. Then you can dig into the details.

That's right. Go online or call and request this booklet. It will take the mystery out of the Bible's most misunderstood book. To get a free copy of A Jet Tour Through Revelation, get in touch with us today. Just call us at 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. A Jet Tour Through Revelation explains the key themes of the Bible's finale. If you're not sure what the future holds and you want to find out what the Bible says about divine judgment, the great tribulation, or the millennium, you don't want to miss this offer. Just call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org and ask for your free copy of A Jet Tour Through Revelation. And while you're at gty.org, I'd encourage you to download the Grace To You app for your smartphone or your tablet. It gives you access to all of John's radio series, including popular studies like The Believer's Armor or If God's Will is So Important, Why Can't I Find It?, and all seven messages from this current series, The Rapture and the Day of the Lord. Again, to get the free app, go to gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson inviting you back tomorrow as we take a 4th of July break from our regular schedule for a time of Bible questions and answers. It's a practical 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.