The Day of the Lord

RV38-02

Paul says that for the Christian lifestyle, in view of the near return of Jesus Christ, "Owe no man anything but to love one another. For he that loves has fulfilled the law. For this, thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; thou shalt not covet; if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Love works no ill to its neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in reveling and drunkenness, not in immorality and wantonness, not in strife and ending. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts."

Positive Volition

So, stop kidding yourself. If you are one of the kind that feels that you have some kind of a human problem, and you can't resolve it, and you're looking to somebody to give you more help, and you're looking for more information, just put it right back on yourself and look yourself in the mirror, and say, "You're the trouble." Your negative refusal to be obedient to what God has said is the reason you've got the problem. So, you can either shape up, or you can eventually ship out into God's eternity with all the consequences of having failed to apply the truth that you know.

So, negative volition Christians are the kind that 2 Timothy 3:7 is talking about, who, by deliberate choice, have placed themselves in that position: "They are ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." How many Christians are ever learning, and they're never able to get it together. They are a certain weak type of temperament. They lack manliness, or they lack womanliness, and many of them are never going to make it. To have access to divine viewpoint, but to remain in human viewpoint conduct is a very dangerous game to be played.

The Return of Jesus Christ

This matter of the Lord's return is the major theme in the Bible. We found that this is to be visible; it is to be literal; and, it is to be physical. The return is to be accompanied by divine glory; it's to be accompanied by power; and, it's to be accompanied by a royal escort, not only of the church, but of the angels of heaven. This Second Coming is also inevitable; it is stealthy; it is unexpected; it is destructive; it is sudden; it is inescapable; and, it is going to be met with a lot of human viewpoint delusion when it happens.

We've been seeing that the Sardis believers, with all of their failings, have been promised a white robe. The white robe signifies ultimate sanctification when Jesus Christ returns to this earth. And with ultimate sanctification, of course, comes a salvation from the presence and the power of evil.

Prophecy

One of the wonderful promises to the disciples was that when God the Holy Spirit came, future things would be revealed to them. Revelation 1:1 says, "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto Him to show unto His servants things which must shortly come to pass, and He sent and signified it by his angels unto His servant John." God the Father informed the Son, and the Son informed John through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

His Return is in the Future

His Return is Unrevealed

So, Mark tells us that the time of the Lord's return is an event that is definite, but it's one which is going to be contaminated by false claims. Of course, through the history of the human race, there have been people who have risen and said, "I'm the messiah. I am the coming one." They have claimed to be the Christ. But Matthew says that you won't know when that person will arrive. The time is unexpected. Even Jesus Christ in His humanity does not know when He is going to return. He is seated now on His Father's throne, and at some point in the near future, the Father is going to turn to the Son and say, "Now it's time for the rapture, Son." Then Jesus Christ is going to stand up; move out into the outer space atmospheric areas; and, we are going to be caught up to meet Him then. The Lord does not know Himself when that's going to be.

We have this Acts 1:7: "And He said to them, it is not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father has put in His Own power." Just before Jesus left, He emphasized again that the Father is the one who knows. Another thing about the time of the return of the Lord is that it's the next event. I can tell you that: that it's the next event. That's why Revelation 1:1 states to us that this return is to take place shortly. "Shortly" there, means it's the next event: "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave up to Him to show His servants things which must shortly come to pass." "Shortly" means it's the next event. There is nothing that is waiting to be fulfilled before Jesus Christ can return for the church. That's why we say that His return is imminent.

His Return is Near

What all this means is that from the divine reckoning, the time of the Second Coming is just around the corner. This condition of nearness was true 1900 years ago, because God views time in a different perspective. 1,000 years is nothing but a day with God, in effect. Therefore, we have not had a very long time, from God's point of view, since Christ was here. The Bible constantly says that His return, therefore, is immediately near at hand. You should not press that and say, "Oh, when God says 1,000 years, He means one day." That isn't what it says. It says, just as a comparison, that a long span of time with us is nothing with Him. So, the principle to remember is that the return is near.

His Return is Imminent

So the Christian is told to look for the Lord. He is not to look for the so-called signs of the times. Philippians 3:20: "For our citizenship is in Heaven, from where also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ." That's where your eyes should be. Titus 2:13: "Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of our great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ." We do not look for signs. We are not scrounging around to find these various evidences. We are looking for Him. There are no signs to look for.

The Day of the Lord

The Day of the Lord is a period of time, and it has two sections to it. First is the period of seven years known as the tribulation. That's the first part of the Day of Lord. When the Day of the Lord is presented, as it often is in the Old Testament, it begins with a terrible darkness – with events that are horrible. It's a nightmare event. Then, there is the second part of the day of the Lord, which is the millennium. That is the 1,000-year reign of Christ on the earth. So, the day of the law takes in first a period of great human suffering and a period of darkness that then explodes just because Jesus Christ returns at this point into the millennial kingdom where Jesus Christ is ruling on the face of the earth. So, man enters the golden age of mankind. For that reason, we see that the return of Christ, in terms of time, is going to be a transitional event: from the day of man to the day of the Lord. It's a transition from human viewpoint values to divine viewpoint values.

Premillennial

Looking at it another way is that the return of Christ is long-delayed. 2 Peter 3:9 records for us that very challenge to the promised return of Jesus Christ. Peter says, "The Lord is not slack concerning His promise (that is, His promise of return) as some men count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." God is in no hurry to bring His final judgments upon this earth. That's why time is a different factor. 1,000 years is just a day with God. God is not in a hurry to bring judgment, because when the Lord returns, it is all over for everybody who's alive today who is outside of the family of God. There are no people who are going to be saved when they see Jesus Christ returning. They are doomed. It is over. That decision has to be made before. The Bible gives us only one action toward the people who see Him coming: they blaspheme Him. They try to get at Him to destroy Him. These armies of the world have gathered in rebellion against God, and they are ready to fight Him, even when they see Him coming. They don't fall to their knees and say, "My God, it's true. Here He is. There really is a Savior. There really is a Christ. All of the things we've read in the Bible, and everything that the fundamentalist Christians have been telling us is true. Here it is. I believe it." They're not going to believe it.

So, God says, "I'm not in any hurry to come back," because He is a God of mercy. He'd rather give people a chance to change their minds. The delay of God's wrath is simply to give people the opportunity to be saved.

Two Phases

The Rapture Phase

The Revelation Phase

Both of these phases of his return are found in 2 Thessalonians and in Titus 2:13. Titus 2:13 has both the First and the Second: "Looking for that blessed hope (that's the rapture) and the glorious appearing (that's the Second Coming) of our great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ."

Let's go back to Revelation 3:5 once more. What we have read is that, "He that overcomes, the same shall be clothed in white raiment." The white raiment stands for ultimate sanctification, connoting ultimate salvation – freedom from the power and the presence of sin. For all those who are overcomers (and we have seen that the overcomers are believers), this white garment is promised. But the verse has something more. John goes on with the word "and." This is the Greek word "kai." This is a conjunction which is introducing a factor in addition to the white robes. This is a very important, significant factor: "And I will not blot his name out of the book of life." The word "not" is a very emphatic word. As you know, that's one negative, "ou" in Greek. The Greek has another negative "me." "Me" is considered the weaker negative. "Ou" is considered the strong negative. But in the Greek language, you can put two negatives together, and this is exactly what happens right here in the Greek Bible. You've got "ou me." When he says that He will not blot out, He uses this absolutely most emphatic, strongest negative the Greek language is capable of.

We are treading on some very, very important and interesting ground. Are you ever worried about losing your white robe? Are you ever worried about staining your white robe so you won't make it into eternal glory? The Lord Jesus Christ has just said that those of you who are overcomers (which John identifies and defines as those who have trusted in Christ as Savior) are to be given a white robe when He returns. And the Lord wants you to understand something else. Once He gives you that robe, He's going to tell you something else about your possession of that robe. It is permanent. So, he uses this strong negative to tell you in another way that you cannot lose your salvation. He says that He will absolutely not (and what this "not" refers to is the erasing your name from the roster of the saved) blot out.

The word "blot out" is the Greek word "exaleipho." "Exaleipho" comes from a preposition "ek" which means "out from something." It also comes from a verb "aleipho." "Aleipho" means to anoint. When they would anoint a king, they would use this word "aleipho." They would anointed by rubbing the oil on him, or by wiping the oil on him. So, this word "exaleipho" (these two joined together) carries the idea of "wiping out;" "to rub out;" or, "to obliterate." The "ek" part gives intensity. This is the Holy Spirit using strong words. He just got through using the strongest negative to try to tell you something. You have to really be awfully slow-witted not to understand this passage and what it tells you about the security of our salvation. You really have to be a rebel not to catch onto a passage that's as clear as this one, especially in the original languages. It uses the strongest negative. Then He uses the word for rubbing out; for wiping up; or, for erasing, and He throws in a word that has this little preposition "ek" on it which intensifies the concept of erasing from the book. The word means "to obliterate."

Just to illustrate this, we have this same word used in Acts 3:19: "Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out" ("exaleipho"). There is the same word "blotted out:" "When the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord." That means to erase them. You know what the Bible says about how God deals with our sins. God does not say, "Well, I'm going to forgive you your sins, but I'm going to keep a record of it."

Those of you who have been in the military service know that on every soldier (every military man), there is a service record kept, and your service record book goes with you. If you're an officer, you have a file. When you are transferred to a new post, you take your service file with you. When you check in with your new commander, you hand him your file. On that file, he can look and see that, periodically, you have received an evaluation of your performance as an officer on your service record. As an enlisted man, everything that you have done is there. You may have done some bad things. You may have gone AWOL. That's in there. You may have had the thing taken care. You may pay the penalty for it, but it isn't taken off the service record book. Anybody, under whose command you come, will open that book and look, and say, "Well, I've got one that likes to fly the coop once in a while." He knows exactly what your past is. That's not the same as with God. Everything you have on your record is blotted out. That's what that word means. It means it's out, and that "ek" means it's really out. You couldn't reproduce it in any way whatsoever. God says, "I put it behind My back. I can't even reach back there and look at it. I remove it as far as the East is from the West. I buried it in the deepest sea. It is gone."

So, you're still hanging on with a little edge of concern that when you get to heaven and you stand at the Judgment Seat of Christ, they're going to put on a big screen and show all of your life. Forget it. Some of you have been looking forward to that on some of your friends, but you're going to be disappointed. You're not going to get it. God says, "I 'exaleipho' it. It's gone. It's out. I've rubbed it out. It's done with." That's exactly how He deals with sins.

That's what he's talking about dealing with here with what he calls, "Your name." The Greek word for "name" is "onoma." That is the term by which a human being is identified. "His name" – the word "his" refers, of course, to the person who has the white robe that He has just talked about. That is the one who possesses ultimate sanctification because you are born again. You are destined for ultimate sanctification. "His name" refers to all those individuals who have been born again.

Eternal Life

Holiness

In the fall of Adam, mankind became alienated from the life of God. That is what Ephesians 4:18 teaches us. Because we were born in Adam, we're alienated from the life of God. But then John 3:15 tells us that, through faith in Jesus Christ as Savior, a person is restored to God's life. You are restored to eternal life. Jesus Christ, to whom the believer is permanently united by the baptism of the Holy Spirit, is actually the believer's eternal life. Colossians 3:4 tells us that. This eternal life is actually a present possession of every believer. Your eternal life is not something that you're going to get in the future. Here, again, is a very serious mistake that a lot of people make. They're looking forward to an eternal life that they're somehow hoping they'll come into. But the Bible says you have it now. John 5:24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that hears My word and believes on Him that sent Me has eternal life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death unto life."

Someday this eternal life is going to be extended to your physical body. 2 Corinthians 5:4 tells us that. 2 Timothy 1:10 tells us that. So, you will live forever. This is very important to understand. Sooner or later, people are faced with funerals. People are faced with loved ones going on. It is important for us to understand just exactly the way God works in terms of the life of a believer. To have eternal existence (which everybody has), plus divine holiness (which only believers have), equals eternal life, which is, in time, applied to the physical body. So when a Christian dies, he is going to be raised to God's kind of eternal life. When an unbeliever dies, he is going to be raised to eternal death – to the life which is other than the kind that God has.

The Book of Life

One very interesting example of this kind of record-keeping on the part of God, which then expresses itself in this concept here in the New Testament in the book of life is relative to one of the very last kings (the next-to-the-last king) of the southern kingdom before they went into Babylonian captivity. This man's name is Coniah. He also is known by Jeconiah, and his other name is Jehoiachin. They're all the same person. He was king of Judah. He was in the line of King David, but he came under divine judgment. 2 Kings 24:8-9 tell us why. It says, "And Jehoiachin was 18 years old when he began to reign. Any he reigned in Jerusalem 3 months. And his mother's name was Nehushta, the daughter of Elnathan of Jerusalem. And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, according to all his father had done." His father had not been a good example. His father had been an example of an evil king. The son comes along, and he does the same as his daddy does. Coniah, therefore, was rejected by God from being in the royal line of the Messiah. He was placed in a position of a divine curse.

So, in Jeremiah 22:30, we read, "Thus says the Lord, "Write this man (he's talking about Coniah) childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days, for no man of his seed shall prosper sitting upon his throne, sitting upon the throne of David and ruling anymore in Judah." So, we had David the king. David the king had a great son, Solomon. He also had another son, Nathan.

When we were in Jerusalem this summer, we had a guide who was very knowledgeable. I was surprised that when I discussed Nathan with him, his first response to me was, "David had no son by the name of Nathan. Nathan was a prophet." I said, "Yes, there was Nathan the prophet, but David had a very important son named Nathan, because Solomon got in very bad trouble with God." God keeps records, and, therefore, Nathan came under a position of blessing that should have gone to Solomon.

But coming down the line here, over the centuries, you come to Coniah. This man followed the same evil that was characteristic of his father. So, God said, "The Messiah has to come through this line. Here's where Jesus Christ has to come from, but you're out. You will not be the man." God records this. He says here in Jeremiah, "Declare this man to be childless." Well, actually, he was not childless. 1 Chronicles 3:17-18 indicate the children that he had. Matthew 1:12 also indicates that. But as far as God's records were concerned, he didn't have any descendants to follow.

Jesus Christ (you remember) was announced to His mother as being the child who had come to fulfill the promise of things through the line of David. It's amazing how at Christmas time, this particular important truth is ignored. Luke 1:32-33: "He shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Highest. And the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David." The Bible calls a person a father if, someplace along the line, you are in his line of descent. It could be somebody toward the top of the genealogical tree. Solomon could be called the father of Jesus Christ. David was called the father of Jesus Christ. "And He shall reign over the house of Jacob forever, and over His kingdom there shall be no end." Of course, Jesus Christ is not reigning over the house of Jacob (that is, over the Jewish nation). That's what's coming in the millennium. And the kingdom of the Jews will go on forever. It will never come to an end.

So, here's the picture that you have of a God who keeps records. David is the line through Jesus Christ must come, and Coniah has been cut out of that line. Notice the amazing exactness and care of God in His dealing in accordance with His records. You know that the foster father of Jesus was the man Joseph that Mary was going to marry, and did marry. Joseph was the foster father. Joseph was descended from Coniah. The foster father of Jesus Christ came through the line of Coniah. You'll find this in Matthew 1:12-16. Again, he sometimes is referred to as Jeconiah, which is the same person.

So, Jesus could not be born through Joseph for this reason alone. There is another reason that He couldn't (in order to avoid the sin nature), but this is the cursed line. Joseph is descended from the line which is under God's curse, and God has made a record of that. Instead, Jesus Christ descends physically through his mother Mary. And Mary comes down through the line of Nathan.

Coniah is not only under a cursed line; so was Solomon. Did you realize that? Solomon was that splendid, splendid young man that God said, "What do you want? I'll give you anything in the world." Solomon said, "I want to be the man with the greatest amount of divine viewpoint wisdom that has ever walked the face of the earth." God said, "You've got it. Because you've asked for that, I'm going to make you rich; I'm going to make you famous; and, I'm going to give you everything else." This was the man.

But the Word of God tells us something very sad. Solomon didn't know how to deal with women, and he was the smartest man that ever lived. You can see what a problem is involved there to begin with. But Solomon made a very, very bad mistake. He was not satisfied to follow the order of monogamy that God had established for the human race. When he got out of fellowship, he ended up with 700 wives and 300 concubines: 1,000 women floating around his household. Imagine that. 1 Kings 11:1-8 describe for us the situation, which basically was that he kept marrying foreign heathen women. He kept getting associated with women who came from heathen cultures, and they brought their pagan gods with them. Would you believe it? This man, with all the divine viewpoint in the world, ended up worshiping these demon gods. He ended up creating places of worship for the gods of his wives so that they could feel at home in his household? And the result was that God said, "Solomon, you're out. You will not be the line of the Messiah." Instead, that honor went to David's other son, Nathan, and Mary was in the line of Nathan. Mary was the physical provider. Jesus Christ physically descended from Mary. Luke 3:31 tells us this, indicating that Nathan was the son of David.

So, Jesus Christ received the legal claim for the throne of David from his foster father, Joseph, who descended from Coniah, the line which was cursed. However, His physical claim to the line of David came through his mother, who descended from Nathan – the line which was under blessing.

So, God has a book. He keeps records. And all of this is in the Old Testament. This is just one example of it. It is a careful record that God keeps, and He acts according to the record. That's why you have a record at the Judgment Seat of Christ. Just count on it, folks. It's going to be there. We're not going to escape it. The record is there. It's not only those who are in the book of life relative to eternal life to salvation, but it is also your performance as a believer that's involved here.

Jesus says here, "I'm not going to remove your name from the book of life." That implies that a name can be removed from the book of life. Does that imply that a person can be lost? It sure sounds like it. If you'd like to find the answer to that, see the next session, and we'll tell you about it. The nature of the book of life is, a fascinating area of Scripture.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1977

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