Day (That)
Day (That) [1]
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’ ( Matthew 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 ( Luke 10:12). Here the parallel denunciation in the First Gospel gives ‘in the day of judgment’ ( Matthew 10:15). Thus ‘that day’ is a phrase to denote the terrible day which is ever imminent, the day of Christ’s 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 ( Luke 17:31; in Mk. and Mt. ‘those days’). But then the phrase has its usual significant euphemistic use for the day of Christ’s coming in judgment in all three Gospels where they recount the Lord’s solemn warnings to be ready ( Matthew 24:36, Mark 13:32, Luke 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 ( Luke 12:40), and it will be quick as lightning when it does come ( Matthew 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 ( Luke 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’ ( Mark 14:25, Matthew 26:29). On this pathetic promise of the Saviour on the eve of His crucifixion Irenaens comments: ‘promisit … ostendens, et hœreditatem terrœ in qua bibitur nova generatio vitis, et earnalem resurrectionem discipulorum Ejus’ (v. xxxiii. 1).
St. John’s references to ‘that day’ are to an era, however, rather than to an epoch ( John 14:20; John 16:23; John 16:26). ‘In that day’ the disciples shall recognize their Lord’s 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. ἡμέρα; Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible, art. ‘Eschatology of the Nt’; Beyschlag, Nt Theol . i. 190ff.
