Day (That)
Day (That)
DAY (THAT).It was near the close of His ministry that the Lord began to speak especially of the Last Things. At an early stage we find a reference to that day (Mat 7:22). The hypocrites will plead in vain, in that day, how they had professed Christ. The day is the Day of Judgment, the day of the sealing of citizenship in the Kingdom of heaven. There is also a reference to that day in the Commission to the Apostles. It will be more tolerable for Sodom in that day than for a city that will not receive them (Luk 10:12). Here the parallel denunciation in the First Gospel gives in the day of judgment (Mat 10:15). Thus that day is a phrase to denote the terrible day which is ever imminent, the day of Christs coming to judge the world and inaugurate His universal reign. But among His last words the Lord included warnings of the fate of Jerusalem as well as of the doom of the world. These messages about the end of the city and the end of the world are intertwined in the Synoptic records of the close of His ministry. Reasonable care should not fail to disentangle the threads. The expression in that day is used, for instance, to refer quite plainly to the fall of Jerusalem (Luk 17:31; in Mk. and Mt. those days). But then the phrase has its usual significant euphemistic use for the day of Christs coming in judgment in all three Gospels where they recount the Lords solemn warnings to be ready (Mat 24:36, Mar 13:32, Luk 21:34). That day is in the foreknowledge of God alone; it will come on the whole world as a snare to the unready. It may be immediate in its coming (Luk 12:40), and it will be quick as lightning when it does come (Mat 24:27). Evidently that day is an epoch; not an era, but the beginning of one era and the end of another. That day of the revelation of the Son of Man will be as sudden and final as the experiences of Noah and Lot appeared to each (Luk 17:30). As the end of this present age is the beginning of the reign in glory of Christ and His redeemed, the allusion to that day at the Last Supper may be understood in the same sense as hitherto. In that day the Kingdom shall be established, and all things shall be new, and the King will drink the new wine first again in that day (Mar 14:25, Mat 26:29). On this pathetic promise of the Saviour on the eve of His crucifixion Irenaens comments: promisit ostendens, et hreditatem terr in qua bibitur nova generatio vitis, et earnalem resurrectionem discipulorum Ejus (v. xxxiii. 1).
St. Johns references to that day are to an era, however, rather than to an epoch (Joh 14:20; Joh 16:23; Joh 16:26). In that day the disciples shall recognize their Lords Divinity, and pray to the Father in His name. In the Fourth Gospel, therefore, the phrase describes the era which had its beginning at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was bestowed so fully upon the Church.
Literature.Cremer, Bibl.-Theol. Lex. s.v. ; Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible , art. Eschatology of the NT; Beyschlag, NT Theol. i. 190ff.
W. B. Frankland.