“For the great day of His wrath has come; and who shall be able to stand?”

(Revelation 6:17)

The prophetic doctrine of the Day of the Lord runs through the Bible like a bright scarlet thread. “The day of the Lord is at hand,” said the prophet Joel to the people of his generation. And Isaiah and Zephariah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Obidiah and Amos, all in their time, came proclaiming: “Behold, the day of the Lord cometh.” No matter how the prophets may have differed in their specific deliverances to their succeeding generations and the varied situations to which they addressed themselves — one and all they spoke of the coming Day of the Lord.

Do we understand the meaning of the prophet’s Day of the Lord? We cannot know what judgment means, nor salvation, nor heaven, nor hell, unless we understand the meaning of “The Day of the Lord.” We will never know the meaning of Jesus’ incessant preaching on the Kingdom of God, nor the significance of John the Baptist’s abrupt, huckstering cry, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” nor the real meat in the petition we pray so facilely: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” unless we grasp the meaning in the Biblical message of the prophet’s doctrine of the Day of the Lord.

The Day of the Lord — what is it? Do we know?

The Day of the Lord is not the same thing as the Lord’s day. It is not just another way of speaking of Sunday, or the Sabbath. The Fourth Commandment’s injunction: “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy — six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work — but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt do not work” — is not a command about the Day of the Lord.

The Lord’s Day and the Day of the Lord are not the same thing in Biblical thought. This may sound like splitting hairs to you, but there are niceties of distinction and important, though small, differences in Biblical terminology, which must be understood, or great follies may result from the misunderstanding. There is a vast difference, everyone knows, between “comic” and “cosmic”; between a “holiday” and a “holy day.”

So, we need to understand that when Amos and Obadiah and Micah and Nahum and Habakkuk and Zephaniah and Haggai and Zachariah and Malachi proclaimed: “Behold the day of the Lord cometh,” they did not mean: “Look out, Sunday, or the Sabbath, is almost here.”

The Day of the Lord in prophetic pronouncement is fundamentally a time of coming judgment. For a prophet to speak of the Day of the Lord was to profess his faith in the Sovereignty of God in human history. For all the prophets, the Day of the Lord is the time when the wicked are punished and the righteous rewarded; the Day when the evil is smashed and the good established; the Day when the arm of the Lord will no longer be stayed; when the times will no longer be out of joint, the wicked prospering and the righteous suffering; the Day when the devil and all who are subject to him will get their come-uppance.

1. T. Niles says that “The mystery of God’s judgment is not that it happens, but that it so often tarries so long.” This is what perplexes people of faith and tempts the sufferer under any iniquitous relationship or unjust situation to give up his faith. The prophets all appeared to sound a note of hope in a dark and evil day: “Hold on,” they cried. “Don’t give up. God is on the throne in the heavens. The Day of the Lord is coming — however, it may seem to be delayed — then His sovereign will shall burst through to adjudicate all mortal grievances.”

And since the Day of the Lord is fundamentally a day of judgment in human history, certain corollaries follow inevitably:

First, it is an appointed time. That’s one reason, undoubtedly, the prophets call it the Day of the Lord. Though it may not be pinpointed infallibly on man’s calendar of the future, nevertheless it is fixed and certain on God’s timetable. But men of moral and ethical character — that is, those who think honest thoughts and do honest deeds — these have something like the prophet’s discernment of the signs of the times. They see in the insanity of the militarists, the presumption of the privileged, the exploitation of the poor, the follies of the power-mad tyrants, the clear pointers of the coming Day of the Lord. It came when Assyria drove away into exile a rebellious and disobedient Israel. It came when Dissolute and corrupt Rome fell to the Barbarian hordes of the north. It came at the end of the Napoleonic wars, as Carlyle said, “Because Napoleon embarrassed God.” It came at the culmination of Hitlerian tyranny and cruelty. And always before the coming of any Day of the Lord there have been and ever shall be prophetic souls of moral insight who see unerringly the coming Day of the Lord.

Second, there is this corollary — the Day of the Lord is not only a fixed time; it is a fearsome time — a hard and terrible time — a time of desperate sorrow and upheaval. Evil does not give up easily. Wrongs are never righted without suffering and sacrifice in this world.

Joel described the Day of the Lord as “great and very terrible.” Zephaniah speaks of it as “a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom.” (Zephaniah 1:15) John, in the Revelation, describes the Day of the Lord as a time when the small and great of the earth, the rulers and their subjects, are leveled in a democracy of fear before the awful judgments of God.

John wrote in a time when men feared the Roman power. But he says there was a power far mightier than Rome, which ought to inspire real fear. It is the judgment of God rather than the misjudgment of Rome, which is the final, and for evil-minded men, the terrible fact of life.

The terrors of atomic warfare and the perils of a world dominated by cruel communistic commissars are nothing compared with incurring the wrath of God.

Third, there is this corollary: The Day of the Lord is the fixed and fearsome time of the impartial settlement of human affairs on a moral basis. There was no disagreement between the prophets and the people up to this point on the Biblical doctrine of the Day of the Lord. They believed that God was sovereign in history. They believed He was coming in judgment at fixed times in the fullness of His good time. They believed that fearsome indeed were the counsels of his righteous judgments when meted out on the evil ones. But, what the people could not see, as the prophets did, was that God would do anything but bless them and blast their enemies. Were they not His people, and He their God? Could they not depend upon Him to be their protector?

Therefore, they longed for the Day of the Lord to come, expecting that this was the time God would give the back of His hand to their enemies and lift them up high to prosperity, peace and power.

So, Amos walloped them with a harsh surprise when he thundered: “Woe unto you that desire the Day of the Lord. The Day of the Lord is darkness and not light. . . The eyes of the Lord are on the sinful Kingdom and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth. . . For you the Day of the Lord will be like a man running from a lion and meeting a bear; or dashing into his house to slam the door against all danger, only to lean against his wall and be bitten by a snake.”

The Day of the Lord is the time of God’s impartial righteous judgments, based on morality alone.

If this then is the Biblical teaching on the prophetic doctrine of the Day of the Lord, what should it mean for us?

First, it brings our religious practices now under sharp focus. Just what are we concerned about in our so-called religious acts and observances and why? Amos found his contemporaries going to church regularly, observing holy days, making their offerings and thinking that thereby they were obligating God to bless them on a quid pro quo basis. So long as they supported the church they held to the pagan conviction that they were manipulating God to favor and bless them.

But their common life was corrupt and evil. There was no justice in the land. There was wealth unheard of, every luxury that money could buy, and existing side by side with enormous wealth, bitter and hopeless poverty. So the word of God by Amos, His prophet, in view of the sure and certain coming of the Day of the Lord runs thus: “I hate, I despise, your feast days. I take no pleasure in your solemn assemblies. Though you offer me burnt offerings and meat offerings, I will not accept them. Take away from me the noise of your songs. But let justice roll down as waters and righteousness as a might stream.”

Yes, and every “society that cares more for gain than for honor, for its living standard than for God; is sick to the death; and a church which has no rebuke for society, which demands lavish support before righteous behavior, is no true church, but a sham church.” (John Bright — The Kingdom of God)

But the prophetic doctrine of the Day of the Lord not only judges our religious practices; it points up the superlative importance of correct, Biblical theology. Wrong, or just fuzzy ideas about God’s nature, can result in the wildest and most devastating decisions for a course of human action.

The Day of the Lord is the time when God’s will, His moral character, is to prevail implicitly, without deviation or diminution in human affairs, against all unrighteousness — not only Mr. Khruschev and Mr. Castro, not only Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, but against the unrighteousness of you and me.

We must never forget that Biblical picture in Revelation 6 where the One on the Judgment Throne of all history is the Lamb, who bears in His body the scar of the wound of His death — the Lamb, who died to save the world — yet the Lamb, who is judging the world in the day of the wrath of the Lamb.

Some speak of the great tragedy of unbelief in our time. What makes my heart sick is the misbelief of our time — the un-Biblical, wholly unwarranted belief, in the hearts and minds of people who call themselves Christian. Those who are building themselves up for a horrible let-down, and preparing their day and their generation for another great and terrible Day of the Lord which will not be light, but darkness — because of their misbelief — their wholly unscriptural belief in the nature and character of God. Blind to the inseparable nature of religious faith and ethical action, they do not make responsible decisions and take responsible action in the moral and ethical sphere.

Harry Emerson Fosdick says that, “a faith in a God of coddling love may be one of the most pernicious influences in human life. Religion based on such a faith becomes a selfish seeking for divine protection from life’s ills, a recipe for ease, an expectant trust that, as we believe in God, He will in turn nurse us, unharmed and happy, through our lives.

“When ills afflict the world which men could cure, such misbelievers merely trust in God. When tasks await men’s strength, they quietly retreat upon their faith that God is good and will solve all, until religion becomes a term of reproach on the lips of earnest men. Such misbelievers have not dimly seen the scriptures meaning. There, faith is not a pillow, but a shield, from behind which plays a sword, and where men do not sleep by faith, but rise up to fight the good fight instead.” (Harry Emerson Fosdick – The Meaning of Being a Christian)