The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord.

By David A. Green (Jer2329@juno.com)

     We wish to address an issue that has been so often been misunderstood by those of the futurist camp. The issue we speak of concerns the biblical teaching of the time of "the last days" and "the Day of the Lord." There are some questions which have not been answered with a careful enough eye on the biblical texts:

A) Do the Scriptures indicate that the "last days" and the eschatological "day of the Lord" are past?
B) Could such things as the Scriptures say are accomplished in those "days" have been fulfilled in history?

     These questions are very important. The answers we give dramatically affect the way we view the nature of the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Our answers will even have an affect on our understanding of the whole Bible! As we will see, the importance of our answers to the above questions cannot be minimized; every Christian must search diligently for the true, biblical answers to those questions. It is for this reason that we ask two things of you as you read this article: Please have your Bible in hand, verifying all that is taught you (Ac 17:11); and please give this matter fair and careful consideration.

     The Last Days

     The Scriptures call the days which lead up to "the Day of the Lord," "the last days." In answering the first of our questions, we can immediately settle upon the fact that "the last days" are at least partially past, for we know from the Scriptures that the "last days" had a starting point long ago in history. The biblical "last days" were already in progress during Christ's ministry in the flesh, as we are told in Heb. 1:1-2 that God spoke to His people through Jesus Christ in the "last days." The Scriptures also say that Jesus was manifested to make atonement for sin in "the end of the ages"/"the last times" (Heb. 9:26; I Peter 1:20).

     From these passages we can safely conclude that the "last days" did not begin with the beginning of the Christian age, i.e., at Pentecost. In fact, Acts 2:17 specifically says that the day of Pentecost took place "in," or during, "the last days" (cf. Isa. 2:2). Since "the last days" were definitely already in progress before the beginning of the Christian age, at Pentecost, it follows that the Christian age and "the last days" can not be synonymous. Also, since the last days began before the Christian age, "the last days" positively cannot mean the last days of the Christian age. These things should strongly suggest to us that we today are not living in the biblical "last days."

     But if "the last days" began around the time of Christ's ministry in the flesh, how long did the biblical "last days" continue on from that point? Let's look at the relevant biblical passages which will demonstrate how far in time the biblical "last days" were to extend. And in the process of answering that question, we will discover exactly what "age" it was of which the "last days" were to be the last days.

     First, in II Tim. 3:1, Paul warned of perilous times which were going to come "in the last days." Paul went on to command Timothy to turn away from the men of the "last days" (II Tim. 3:5). It is reasonable to conclude therefore that the "last days" included the days when Paul, Timothy and those men all were alive in the 1st century. Otherwise, why would Paul warn Timothy, if the last days didn't concern him, but us?

     In II Peter 3:3, Peter gave the same warning as Paul: "In the last days scoffers will come...." And Peter also put the existence of the last-days scoffers in his own (apostolic) era: "...they are willingly ignorant..." (II Peter 3:5).

     In Jude 17, Jude reiterated the warning of Paul and Peter: "But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ; how that they told you there should be scoffers in the last time...." And Jude, like Paul and Peter, also spoke of the scoffers of "the last time" as being present in the 1st century, in verses 4,8,10 and 12.

     So Jude, Peter and Paul, all teach us that the last-days scoffers were present in the apostolic era, decades after the day of Pentecost, circa A.D. 30. But were "the last days" to extend any further? When exactly were the "last days" to end? To answer that question, let's take a look at Heb 1:1,2:

     "God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son...."

     Or a more literal translation of the verse reads like this:

     "By many portions and in many ways of old, God spoke to the fathers in the prophets; in the last of these days He speaks to us in the Son...."

     The author of Hebrews spoke of the days in which God spoke in the prophets --days which stretched back to times of "old." Now the author of Hebrews and his readers were still living in such prophetic days, but as He said, they were living in the "last" of those days. "In the last of these [prophetic] days He speaks to us in the Son."

     Thus, this passage defines for us the "last days" as being the last days of the age in which God spoke through the prophets; in other words, the "last days" were the last days of the pre-Messianic (old testament) age. When did that age of prophets and prophecy come to a conclusion? When the city and the sanctuary were destroyed, according to the prophet Daniel in Dan. 9:24-26. The destruction of the sinful city of Jerusalem and of her temple in A.D. 70 signaled the full consummation of the prophetic ages, and so, the end of the "last days." The Day of the Lord had come!.

     James 5:1-9 confirms the teaching which we have derived from Heb. 1:1,2:

     "Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries which are coming upon you. Your riches have rotten and your garments have become moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver have rusted; and their rust will be a witness against you and will consume your flesh like fire. It is in the last days that you have stored up your treasure! Behold, the pay of the laborers who mowed your fields, and which has been withheld by you, cries out against you; and the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth [hosts]. You have lived luxuriously on the Land and led a life of wanton pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a Day of slaughter. You have condemned and put to death the righteous man; he does not resist you. ...The Coming of the Lord is at hand. ...Behold, the Judge is standing right at the doors."  (James. 5:1-6,8b,9b)

     The wicked, unbelieving Jews of the 1st century were about to lament and howl, for they were living in the last days of their glory. They were fattening themselves, only to be slaughtered like cattle. For the Lord was "at hand!" "At the doors!" And He came at the appointed time, at the end of the prophetic ages, at the destruction of their city and the sanctuary. At that time, the rich leaders of Israel who hated Christ and His Church wept and howled as their hoarded riches consumed their flesh like fire. History tells us that the wealth of the last-days Jews was consumed before their very eyes, in God's fierce wrath in A.D. 70:

     "And now the Romans ...burnt down the treasury chambers, in which was an immense quantity of money, and an immense number of garments, and other precious goods, there reposited; and to speak all in a few words, there it was that the entire riches of the Jews were heaped up together..."  (Josephus, "Jewish Wars," 6.5.2.281).

     What a sure fulfillment of the "last days" prophecy of James 5:1-6! And what a sure consummation of the "last days" this was! The great and terrible Day of the Lord had come!

     The end of the biblical "Last Days" came about 40 years after Israel murdered her Messiah --in the end of the prophetic, Jewish, pre-messianic, old-testament age in A.D. 70. We do not have the apostolic authority to extend the "last days" beyond that point in time.

     This answers our first question. The Last Days and their consummation, "the Day of the Lord," are past. Now to answer our second question: How could such things as the Scriptures say were accomplished in the Last Days and in the Day of the Lord have been fulfilled in history? Let us now let the Scriptures answer this question for us:

     Heaven and Earth

     "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit. And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible Day of the LORD come."  (Joel 2:28-31)

     We know that the first part of Joel's prophecy above began to be fulfilled at the day of Pentecost "in the last days." At Pentecost, God first poured out His Spirit, enabling believers to prophesy, dream prophetic dreams and to see visions.

     But what about the other part of Joel's prophecy? When did the earthly and heavenly wonders take place? When were there blood, fire and pillars of smoke? And when did the sun turn into darkness and the moon into blood?

     To solve this supposed difficulty, it is very important that we notice that there is no break in this passage that would indicate that there was to be a 2,000-year gap between the pouring out of the Spirit, and the earthly and heavenly wonders. Many in the futurist camp say that there is an approximately 2,000-year "gap" in Joel's prophecy, because "those things simply didn't happen" on the day of Pentecost, nor even afterward.  Is this argument biblical? Let's see:

     First, we have already demonstrated that the "last days" were the days in which the writers of the New Testament and the original readers were still alive. We have also determined that those "last days" ended when the old-covenant age came to an end. Now Peter said that the earthly and heavenly wonders were to be shown "in the Last Days," so it must follow therefore that those wonders were to be shown in the 1st century, until A.D. 70.

     Second, the heavenly "wonders" involving the sun and the moon are not to be taken literally, as some understand them. They are to be understood metaphorically, for this reason: The Old Testament usage of such language demands that we understand them that way. We see from the old testament that God used such expressions referring to His judgments on peoples. For instance, after the Lord delivered David from the hand of his enemies and from the hand of Saul, David praised God, saying,

     "...The earth shook and quaked; and the foundations of the mountains were trembling and were shaken. ...The channels of water appeared, and the foundations of the world were laid bare."  (Ps. 18:7,15)

     Those things did not literally happen when God delivered David. David was simply using the metaphorical style of the prophets. In Isa. 13:10,13a, we read about God's judgment on ancient Babylon:

     "For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine. ...I shall make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken from its place."  (Isa. 13:10,13a)

     That prophecy was non-literally fulfilled when Babylon fell to the Medes in 539 B.C. In Eze. 32:7,8, Ezekiel lamented over Pharaoh king of Egypt, saying:

     "I will cover the heavens, and darken their stars; I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not give its light. All the shining lights in the heavens I will darken over you and will set darkness on your land, declares the Lord God."

     That prophecy was also non-literally fulfilled, in c. 530 B.C., that is: the language used was figurative, "covering the heavens" and "darkening their stars", and was an indication of God's judgment upon Egypt.

     Whenever God sent a foreign army to invade a people, it could be said that the "heavens" of those people was being darkened above them, and that their "earth" was being shaken. Essentially, God "rocked their world."

     Now on the day of Pentecost, Peter said, "This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel." The meaning of Peter's words here is that ALL of Joel 2:28-32 was taking place on that very day of Pentecost, that on that very day God was beginning to darken Israel's sun and to turn her moon to blood. How was this so?

     I Cor. 14:21,22 reveals that tongues (the most notable sign on the day of Pentecost) was a sign, not that the Romans were going to invade Israel 40 years later in A.D. 70, but that a much greater foreign-tongued army was already invading Israel: The Church.

     Many Scriptures speak of this invasion. Matt. 11:12 says, "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven is taken by violence and the violent seize it"; and Lk. 16:16 says, "The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John; since then the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it." Jesus said in Matt. 21:43 that God was going to take the Kingdom away from the Jewish leaders and was going to give it to another "nation." II Cor. 10:4 says, "The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses." The gates of Hades were being besieged by the ever-conquering Church. The Romans did not capture God's Kingdom: the Church did (Dan. 7:18,22,27), through her faith, prayers and endurance. On Pentecost, the invasion began. We might say it was "D-day."

     Israel according to the flesh was experiencing her apocalyptic blood, fire, vapor of smoke, the darkening of her sun and bloodying of her moon before the first of Nero's armies had attacked her borders. She didn't recognize this invasion so as to repent, until it was too late (Heb. 6:4-6). Then God used the Romans to bring fleshly Israel's disinheritance and destruction to its completion, thus manifesting to all the tribes of the Land the utter curse which was upon their sinful nation.

     Now, with these things in mind --the metaphorical sayings of the prophets and their fulfillments in earthly judgments- read again this saying of Jesus on the Mount of Olives:

     "Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken...."  (Matt. 24:29)

     Jesus, like the prophets before Him, was prophesying of the fall of a nation, not the destruction of the universe. Of what nation was He speaking? Jesus' own words answer that question for us:

     "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, ...blind guides, ...fools and blind men, ...Fill up then the measure of the guilt of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how shall you escape the judgment of gehenna? I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city, that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth. ...Truly I say to you, all these things shall come upon this generation. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! ...Your house is being left to you desolate!"  (Matt. 23:13-17,23-27,29,32,33-37)

     "Do you not see all these things [the beautiful stones, great buildings and gifts of the Temple]? Truly I say to you, not one stone here shall be left upon another, which will not be torn down."  (Matt. 24:1,2; Mk. 13:1,2; Lk. 21:5,6)

     "They will deliver you [believers] to the Sanhedrin, and you will be flogged in the synagogues."  (Mk. 13:9; Lk. 21:12)

     "When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is at hand. Lk. 21:20 ...Let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are in the midst of [Jerusalem] depart, and let not those who are in the country enter [Jerusalem]; because these are days of vengeance...."  (Matt. 24:16; Mk. 13:14; Lk. 21:21,22)

     "There will be great distress upon the land, and wrath to this people, and they will fall by the edge of the sword, and will be led captive into all the nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled under foot...." (Lk. 21:14b)

     "...He saw the city [of Jerusalem] and wept over it, saying, 'If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you when your enemies will throw up a bank before you, and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.'"  (Lk. 19:41-44)

     "...All the tribes of the Land will mourn."  (Matt. 24:30)

     "Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.  (Matt. 24:34; Mk. 13:30; Lk. 21:32)

     How could our Lord have possibly been any more clear? According to the word of Jesus, a time of great tribulation was soon coming upon the people of 1st-century Jerusalem, and that time of tribulation was going to be "immediately" followed by Jerusalem's calamitous destruction, in the Day of the Lord. This took place in A.D. 70.

     In that great and terrible Day, the sun was darkened, the moon did not give her light, the stars fell from heaven. The powers of the heavens were shaken. And then appeared the sign of the Son of man in heaven. And all the tribes of the land mourned, and they saw the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He sent his messengers with a great sound of a trumpet, and they gathered together His chosen ones from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other (Matt. 24:29-31).

     The Day of the Lord

     In the Scriptures, a "day of the Lord" is a time in which God judges a people, punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous. It is the consummation of an historical time of crisis, a time of wrath, destruction, deliverance and inheritance. There were many such days in the Old Testament: See Joel 1:15; 2:1,11; Isa. 2:12; 13:6,9; Jer. 46:10; Eze. 13:5; 30:3; Oba. 1:15; Zeph. 1:7,14. All of those "days" were fulfilled when God sent one nation against another nation, to work out His terrible judgments.

     But the prophets looked forward to the final "great and terrible Day of the Lord," and their prophecies of that "Day" invariably lead us to realize that it came in the apostolic generation. For instance, as we have seen, Joel prophesied of the time in which God would pour out His Spirit "before" the great and terrible Day of the Lord, in Joel 2:28-31.  

     And according to the apostolic interpretation of Malachi, we know that after John the Baptist came, "then suddenly" (Mal. 3:1) came the great and terrible Day of the Lord (Mal. 4:1-6).

     Joel and Malachi both intimate that the Day of the Lord was to take place not very long after the appearance of Elijah (John the Baptist) and after the pouring out of God's Spirit (Pentecost). It is therefore not at all surprising that in the New Testament, the Day of the Lord is everywhere spoken of in the context of real imminence. Observe:

     In I Thess. 5:2ff, Paul exhorted his brethren to be watchful for that Day, and he prayed that their "whole spirit and soul and body" would "be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (I Thess. 5:23,24).

     In Philip. 1:6,10, the Day is called "the Day of Christ." And there it is so near that Paul said that he was confident that God was going to perform the work which He had begun in his brethren "until the Day of Jesus Christ." Paul's prayer was that they would remain "sincere and without offense till the Day of Christ."

     Likewise, In 1 Corinthians 1:8, Paul promised his readers that God would confirm them blameless "unto the end," i.e., unto the Day of the Lord Jesus Christ.

     How strongly did the 1st-century Church believe in the imminence of the "Day of the Lord" as a result of the Apostles' teachings? Well, in II Thessalonians 2:2, the Day was acknowledge by all to be so near, that some were even "shaken in mind," and "troubled," "as that the day of Christ" had already come! See [FOOTNOTE]

     The Day of the Lord is now history. It came "like a thief" upon that wicked generation which crucified Christ and murdered His servants. It came at the end of the ages in which God spoke through the prophets. It came at the end of the sinful old-covenant nation, its city and its temple. "The great and terrible Day of the Lord" came in A.D. 70.

     Conclusion

     After Adam sinned, age after age passed with mankind existing in bondage to sin and spiritual death. It was during those ages that God spoke to His people through the mediation of the prophets. Then in the last of those days, the Messiah appeared and put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. The fleshly covenant-nation then came under the curse of God after its rejection of the blood of Christ and its persecution of Christ's Church. In the decades that followed the Cross of Christ, fleshly Israel became increasingly enveloped in the tribulations of wars and various other disasters, until at the last she was consumed in the fire of God's wrath in the great and terrible Day of the Lord, when her temple and her capital city were razed to the ground in A.D. 70.

     We realize that this Preterist understanding of Bible prophecy is not the popular view of "end times" that we are used to hearing on virtually every prophecy program on television and on the radio, and even from behind the pulpit, but "pop eschatology" is not the determining factor where doctrine is concerned. The Bible is the determining factor.

     Some would even have us believe that when reading the OT prophecies concerning physical Israel, one has but to search out the daily newspaper headlines to find the fufilment of said prophecies, in our times. Alas for those who believe so, they very quickly forget one of the great principals of Biblical hermeneutics, to wit: the Bible interprets the Bible. Sad to say, but our Dispensational brethren are most often the guilty parties when it comes to what has popularly been termed "newspaper exegesis".

     To teach that the eschatological Day of the Lord will take place in a generation that was not to come into being until about 2,000 years after the biblical Last Days, is not only twisting Scriptures but it is just plain unbelief in the face of clear Scriptural declarations.

     The 2000-year gap theory is the product of those who do not acknowledge the Scriptures as God has given them. It flies in the face of sound Biblical hermeneutics and even in the face of reality itself. We are not taught to escape reality in the Scriptures, but rather to face it in the world (Jn. 17:15,20) knowing that God works out all things (even great tribulation) for our good (Rom 8:28-30).

     Many of us Christians in North America today long to escape the troubles of this world, because so many of our teachers have told us that the we will be "raptured" out of the world just before the "Great Tribulation" that will supposedly begin any day. But there is no Scripture-support for that theory, and Christians should reject that dream outright. Many of our teachers have said that the fulfillment of all things written couldn't have happened in A.D. 70 when the Lord came to destroy Jerusalem, because the "rapture" and the resurrection didn't happen then, as everybody knows. Well actually, not everybody "knows" that, because Paul "knew" something entirely different.

     In I Thess. 4:17-5:2, Paul taught that the Church was to be "caught up to be with the Lord in the air" ON THE DAY OF THE LORD. And in II Thess. 2:2 he again taught his brethren that they would be gathered together to be with the Lord "ON THE DAY OF THE LORD" (or in "the Day of Christ" -KJV).

     As has been faithfully demonstrated above, all of the prophecies of the eschatological DAY OF THE LORD referred to the time of the destruction of that great and wicked city, Jerusalem, in A.D. 70. At that time, Christ's elect were spiritually gathered into the purified Kingdom which had previously belonged to the wicked Scribes and Pharisees. Then was fulfilled Rev. 11:15: "The Kingdom of this world is become the Kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ; and He shall reign forever and ever."

     And then it was that the persecuted Church was glorified with Christ, when He came to make His Church His true Tabernacle forever (Eph.. 2:22). Now we are with the Lord in spirit and in truth. Christ in the heart is "the Tabernacle of God among men" (Rev. 21:3). Now we may say with all of our hearts and minds: To God be "glory in the Church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen!" (Eph. 3:21).

     [FOOTNOTE]

     A word about the KJV's translation of II Thess. 2:2. Paul was trying to tell the Thessalonians that they should not believe those who told them that they had somehow missed the coming of the Lord. The expression "at hand" in the KJV is an erroneous translation of the Greek word "enistemi." The word means, "present" everywhere in the New Testament. (In II Tim. 3:1, it is in the future tense --"shall be present" or "shall come")

     "At hand" cannot be a correct translation of "enistemi" in II Thess. 2:2, unless we want to contend that Paul flatly contradicted John the Baptist, the Lord Jesus, the twelve apostles and even himself. For here is what they all said:

Matthew 3:2	The kingdom of heaven is at hand
Matthew 4:17; Mk. 1:15	The kingdom of heaven is at hand
Matthew 10:7	The kingdom of heaven is at hand
Romans 13:12	The day is at hand
Philippians 4:5	The Lord is at hand
1 Peter 4:7	The end of all things is at hand
Revelation 1:3; 22:10	The time is at hand

     The time of the Day of the Lord WAS indeed "at hand" when Paul wrote his epistle to the Thessalonians. The only thing that troubled the Thessalonians was a report that the Day had already come.

     With that established, consider this: If the Thessalonians had heard someone say that they had missed "the end of the planet as we know it," it is obvious that they would not have believed this, if the 1st-century Church understood "the Day of the Lord" to refer to a planet-burning cataclysm. The fact that they were around after the event had already taken place, would have manifestly indicated that the event hadn't yet happened. This indicates to us that the "Day of Christ" was surely not believed by the apostolic Church to be a planet-burning event. It was rather the historical Day that Christ judged the old-testament sons of the Kingdom (Matt. 8:12) and gathered His elect into the New-Covenant Cosmos (Matt 25:31ff).

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What do YOU think ?

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Be sure to include the article name.  They will be posted shortly upon receipt
 

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Date: 07 Jan 2007
Time: 17:29:49

Comments:

Your arguments are interesting, but peole are still being born, getting married, and dying. Jesus said that it would not be so for the Sons of the Kingdom. Paul said that the dead in Christ would rise, then we which are alive and remain would be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air.

People are still marrying and giving in marriage. In short, if everything has already happenned, why has nothing changed? If Jesus was only speaking to the Jews, why do we still read the New Testament, if everything has already happenned?

Finally, why have we not all been changed?