'Day of' ticket

If you wanted a proper Pauline description for the Rapture it would be “our gathering together under him.”

People get bent out of shape over the use of the word rapture because “it’s not Bible,” but it is scriptural. I mean, what else would you want to call it? Rapture means to be caught up in joy. Surely being caught up to be with the Lord is the ultimate happy experience for a human.

Jordan argues, “We talk about the doctrine of the Trinity and yet the word trinity is not in the Bible. But the doctrine certainly is. It’s one of those unfathomable theological concepts that you really can understand in a sense.

“There are three individual, distinct people in the godhead, all who share equal deity. Just like we are equally human, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all one in essence and being. But we’re all separate people, aren’t we? It’s important to understand it that way because it isn’t  that God is manifesting Himself as Father and then manifesting Himself as Son and manifesting Himself as Spirit; that’s called modalism. It’s that there is a person called Father, a person called Son and a person called the Spirit, all of whom are as real and distinct in personality as you are from other people.”

*****

Paul uses the term “the day of Christ” in a different way than what you usually hear it described. In I Thessalonians 5, he calls it “the day of the Lord.” Then in I Corinthians 1 he calls it “the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  In I Corinthians 5, he calls it “the day of the Lord Jesus.” In Philippians, he’ll call it “the day of Christ.”

Jordan says, “If I talked about ‘the day of the Lord’ and ‘the day of the Lord Jesus Christ’ and ‘the day of Christ,’ would I be talking about the same person all of the time? Isn’t Jesus Christ the Lord Jesus Christ? Isn’t that the full title and His complete name?

“You go through the Old Testament and when you see the term ‘the day of Lord,’ it’s ‘the day of Jehovah.’ But the Jehovah that’s being talked about there, invariably, if you look at the context, will be the second person of the godhead, who is Jesus Christ.

“Now Jehovah is a name that can refer to God the Father. Isaiah 53 says, ‘he was smitten by Jehovah.’ So Jehovah smote Him. But who did Jehovah smite? Zechariah 12 says, ‘They’ll look upon me Jehovah whom they pierced.’ How can Jesus Christ be Jehovah? Well, you understand that in the context of the Trinity. They can have the same name because they’re all God. “

*****

Michigan preacher Tom Bruscha says the “the day of” is really talking about a time that a certain event takes place. “A ‘day of’ doesn’t necessarily mean a 24-hour period,” he says. “The first 35 chapters of Isaiah define 'the day of the Lord.' It means a time period in which a particular event takes place. And you know that just from other terms.

"The Bible talks about ‘the day of atonement’ and ‘the day of first fruits’ (that’s seven days long), for example. Those are certain days in which something is being done and accomplished. An event is taking place.

“There’s certain days of judgment that are expressed just by simply ‘the day of.’ The Bible talks about ‘the day of Midian,’ ‘the day of Egypt,’ ‘the day of Jezreel.’

“When you read a verse like in Zephaniah chapter 1 and it talks about ‘the day of the Lord,’ it says ‘the day of the Lord’ is a day of wrath, a day of trouble, a day of wantonness, a day of darkness, a day of clouds, a day of the trumpets.

“So, if you look at ‘the day of the Lord’ in relation to all those other days, you realize what it’s doing is describing certain events; certain activity in that time called ‘the day of the Lord.’ It’s different aspects of ‘the day of the Lord,’ whether it be ‘the day of wrath,’ or the fact it’s darkness or a time of trouble. ‘The day of the Lord’ is called all of those days, so you realize how you can bring that down.”