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The Daily Word of Righteousness
The Vision of the Day of the Lord
Woe to you who long for the day of the LORD! Why do you long for the day of the LORD? That day will be darkness, not light. It will be as though a man fled from a lion only to meet a bear, as though he entered his house and rested his hand on the wall only to have a snake bite him. Will not the day of the LORD be darkness, not light—pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness? (Amos 5:18-20—NIV)
The vision of the Day of the Lord is one of the most important concepts of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Day of the Lord will begin when the Lord Jesus Christ descends from Heaven with His saints and holy angels for the purpose of judging sin. He will establish His Kingdom in the earth at that time.
There exists today a false vision of the Day of the Lord. Its falsity is easily exposed by a careful review of the Scriptures. This vision comes from doctrines that overemphasize grace, minimize God's call to righteousness, and lull the believers into a spiritually lazy, ignorant state in which Satan easily can achieve victory.
One such doctrine is the present-day teaching of the "rapture"—a disappearance and ascension of all who make a profession of Christ as Savior.
The "rapture" error appears to go back only to the middle of the last century but it has influenced the thinking of Christian Christians. The "rapture," as it currently is taught, is a false vision of the Day of the Lord, being found neither in the Old Testament nor the New Testament.
The vision of the "rapture," along with the erroneous doctrine that New Testament "grace" is a Divine covering of the disobedience of professing Christians, has produced a generation of "believers" who know little or nothing of what it means to be a saint of God. This false vision has destroyed the Lord's churches.
The true vision of the Day of the Lord can be found in many passages of the writings of the Prophets of Israel. One such description appears in the Book of Joel:
Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand; (Joel 2:1)
The subject of the first eleven verses of the second chapter of Joel is the Day of the Lord.
The trumpet must be blown among God's people today. They must learn to fear the Lord, for the coming of Christ is not as we have imagined. The Day of the Lord will be a dreadful hour. Even the righteous are saved with difficulty from destruction in that Day (I Peter 4:18).
No passage of the Old or New Testament suggests that the coming of Christ will be a period of lightness and gaiety for the lukewarm "believers" of our day.
The Day of the Lord always is at hand for the Lord's people. Time is not the consideration. Even after we die physically we still are awaiting the Day of the Lord. We always are to live in the consciousness of the imminent coming of the great and terrible Day of the Lord.
To be continued.