_THE DAY OF THE LORD._
"But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need
that aught be written unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that
the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. When they are
saying, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them,
as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall in no wise escape.
But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake
you as a thief: for ye are all sons of light, and sons of the day: we
are not of the night, nor of darkness; so then let us not sleep, as
do the rest, but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep sleep
in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night. But
let us, since we are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate
of faith and love; and for a helmet, the hope of salvation. For God
appointed us not unto wrath, but unto the obtaining of salvation
through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that, whether we wake
or sleep, we should live together with Him. Wherefore exhort one
another, and build each other up, even as also ye do."--1 THESS. v.
1-11 (R.V.).
The last verses of the fourth chapter perfect that which is lacking,
on one side, in the faith of the Thessalonians. The Apostle addresses
himself to the ignorance of his readers: he instructs them more fully
on the circumstances of Christ's second coming; and he bids them
comfort one another with the sure hope that they and their departed
friends shall meet, never to part, in the kingdom of the Saviour. In
the passage before us he perfects what is lacking to their faith on
another side. He addresses himself, not to their ignorance, but to
their knowledge; and he instructs them how to improve, instead of
abusing, both what they knew and what they were ignorant of, in regard
to the last Advent. It had led, in some, to curious inquiries; in
others, to a moral restlessness which could not bind itself patiently
to duty; yet its true fruit, the Apostle tells them, ought to be hope,
watchfulness, and sobriety.
"The day of the Lord" is a famous expression in the
Old Testament; it runs through all prophecy, and is one of its most
characteristic ideas. It means a day which belongs in a peculiar sense
to God: a day which He has chosen for the perfect manifestation of
Himself, for the thorough working out of His work among men. It is
impossible to combine in one picture all the traits which prophets of
different ages, from Amos downward, embody in their representations of
this great day. It is heralded, as a rule, by terrific phenomena in
nature: the sun is turned into darkness and the moon into blood, and
the stars withdraw their light; we read of earthquake and tempest, of
blood and fire and pillars of smoke. The great day ushers in the
deliverance of God's people from all their enemies; and it is
accompanied by a terrible sifting process, which separates the sinners
and hypocrites among the holy people from those who are truly the
Lord's. Wherever it appears, the day of the Lord has the character of
finality. It is a supreme manifestation of judgment, in which the
wicked perish for ever; it is a supreme manifestation of grace, in
which a new and unchangeable life of blessedness is opened to the
righteous. Sometimes it seemed near to the prophet, and sometimes far
off; but near or far, it bounded his horizon; he saw nothing beyond.
It was the end of one era, and the beginning of another which should
have no end.
This great conception is carried over by the Apostle from the Old
Testament to the New. The day of the Lord is identified with the
Return of Christ. All the contents of that old conception are carried
over along with it. Christ's return bounds the Apostle's horizon; it
is the final revelation of the mercy and judgment of God. There is
sudden destruction in it for some, a darkness in which there is no
light at all; and for others, eternal salvation, a light in which
there is no darkness at all. It is the end of the present order of
things, and the beginning of a new and eternal order. All this the
Thessalonians knew; they had been carefully taught it by the Apostle.
He did not need to write such elementary truths, nor did he need to
say anything about the times and seasons[18] which the Father had kept
in His own power. They knew perfectly all that had been revealed on
this matter, viz., that the day of the Lord comes exactly as a thief
in the night. Suddenly, unexpectedly, giving a shock of alarm and
terror to those whom it finds unprepared,--in such wise it breaks upon
the world. The telling image, so frequent with the Apostles, was
derived from the Master Himself; we can imagine the solemnity with
which Christ said, "Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that
watcheth and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see
his shame."[19] The New Testament tells us everywhere that men will be
taken at unawares by the final revelation of Christ as Judge and
Saviour; and in so doing, it enforces with all possible earnestness
the duty of watching. False security is so easy, so natural,--looking
to the general attitude, even of Christian men, to this truth, one is
tempted to say, so inevitable,--that it may well seem vain to urge the
duty of watchfulness more. As it was in the days of Noah, as it was in
the days of Lot, as it was when Jerusalem fell, as it is at this
moment, so shall it be at the day of the Lord. Men will say, Peace and
safety, though every sign of the times says, Judgment. They will eat
and drink, plant and build, marry and be given in marriage, with their
whole heart concentrated and absorbed in these transient interests,
till in a moment suddenly, like the lightning which flashes from east
to west, the sign of the Son of Man is seen in heaven. Instead of
peace and safety, sudden destruction surprises them; all that they
have lived for passes away; they awake, as from deep sleep, to
discover that their soul has no part with God. It is too late then to
think of preparing for the end: the end has come; and it is with
solemn emphasis the Apostle adds, "They shall in no wise escape."
A doom so awful, a life so evil, cannot be the destiny or the duty of
any Christian man. "Ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day
should overtake you as a thief." Darkness, in that saying of the
Apostle, has a double weight of meaning. The Christian is not in
ignorance of what is impending, and forewarned is forearmed. Neither
is he any longer in moral darkness, plunged in vice, living a life the
first necessity of which is to keep out of God's sight. Once the
Thessalonians had been in such darkness; their souls had had their
part in a world sunk in sin, on which the day-spring from on high had
not risen; but now that time was past. God had shined into their
hearts; He who is Himself light had poured the radiance of His own
love and truth into them till ignorance, vice, and wickedness had
passed away, and they had become light in the Lord. How intimate is
the relation between the Christian and God, how complete the
regeneration, expressed in the words, "Ye are all _sons_ of light,
and _sons_ of the day; we are not of the night, nor of darkness"!
There _are_ shady things in the world, and shady persons, but they
are not in Christianity, nor among Christians. The true Christian
takes his nature, all that characterises and distinguishes him, from
light. There is no darkness in him, nothing to hide, no guilty secret,
no corner of his being into which the light of God has not penetrated,
nothing that makes him dread exposure. His whole nature is full of
light, transparently luminous, so that it is impossible to surprise
him or take him at a disadvantage. This, at least, is his ideal
character; to this he is called, and this he makes his aim. There are
those, the Apostle implies, who take their character from night and
darkness,--men with souls that hide from God, that love secrecy, that
have much to remember they dare not speak of, that turn with
instinctive aversion from the light which the gospel brings, and the
sincerity and openness which it claims; men, in short, who have come
to love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil. The
day of the Lord will certainly be a surprise to them; it will smite
them with sudden terror, as the midnight thief, breaking unseen
through door or window, terrifies the defenceless householder; it will
overwhelm them with despair, because it will come as a great and
searching light,--a day on which God will bring every hidden thing to
view, and judge the secrets of men's hearts by Christ Jesus. For those
who have lived in darkness the surprise will be inevitable; but what
surprise can there be for the children of the light? They are
partakers of the Divine nature; there is nothing in their souls which
they would not have God know; the light that shines from the great
white throne will discover nothing in them to which its searching
brightness is unwelcome; Christ's coming is so far from disconcerting
them that it is really the crowning of their hopes.
The Apostle demands of his disciples conduct answering to this ideal.
Walk worthy, he says, of your privileges and of your calling. "Let us
not sleep, as do the rest, but let us watch and be sober." "Sleep" is
certainly a strange word to describe the life of the worldly man. He
probably thinks himself very wide awake, and as far as a certain
circle of interests is concerned, probably is so. The children of this
world, Jesus tells us, are wonderfully wise for their generation. They
are more shrewd and more enterprising than the children of light. But
what a stupor falls upon them, what a lethargy, what a deep
unconscious slumber, when the interests in view are spiritual. The
claims of God, the future of the soul, the coming of Christ, our
manifestation at His judgment seat, they are not awake to any concern
in these. They live on as if these were not realities at all; if they
pass through their minds on occasion, as they look at the Bible or
listen to a sermon, it is as dreams pass through the mind of one
asleep; they go out and shake themselves, and all is over; earth has
recovered its solidity, and the airy unrealities have passed away.
Philosophers have amused themselves with the difficulty of finding a
scientific criterion between the experiences of the sleeping and the
waking state, _i.e._, a means of distinguishing between the kind of
reality which belongs to each; it is at least one element of sanity to
be able to make the distinction. If we may enlarge the ideas of sleep
and waking, as they are enlarged by the Apostle in this passage, it is
a distinction which many fail to make. When they have the ideas which
make up the staple of revelation presented to them, they feel as if
they were in dreamland; there is no substance to them in a page of St.
Paul; they cannot grasp the realities that underlie his words, any
more than they can grasp the forms which swept before their minds in
last night's sleep. But when they go out to their work in the world,
to deal in commodities, to handle money, then they are in the sphere
of real things, and wide awake enough. Yet the sound mind will reverse
their decisions. It is the visible things that are unreal and that
ultimately pass away; the spiritual things--God, Christ, the human
soul, faith, love, hope--that abide. Let us not face our life in that
sleepy mood to which the spiritual is but a dream; on the contrary,
as we are of the day, let us be wide awake and sober. The world is
full of illusions, of shadows which impose themselves as substances
upon the heedless, of gilded trifles which the man whose eyes are
heavy with sleep accepts as gold; but the Christian ought not to be
thus deceived. Look to the coming of the Lord, Paul says, and do not
sleep through your days, like the heathen, making your life one long
delusion; taking the transitory for the eternal, and regarding the
eternal as a dream; that is the way to be surprised with sudden
destruction at the last; watch and be sober; and you will not be
ashamed before Him at His coming.
It may not be out of place to insist on the fact that "sober" in this
passage means sober as opposed to drunk. No one would wish to be
overtaken drunk by any great occasion; yet the day of the Lord is
associated in at least three passages of Scripture with a warning
against this gross sin. "Take heed to yourselves," the Master says,
"lest haply your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and
drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that day come on you suddenly
as a snare." "The night is far spent," says the Apostle, "the day is
at hand.... Let us walk honestly as in the day; not in revelling and
drunkenness." And in this passage: "Let us, since we are of the day,
be sober; they that be drunken are drunken in the night." The
conscience of men is awakening to the sin of excess, but it has much
to do before it comes to the New Testament standard. Does it not help
us to see it in its true light when it is thus confronted with the day
of the Lord? What horror could be more awful than to be overtaken in
this state? What death is more terrible to contemplate than one which
is not so very rare--death in drink?
Wakefulness and sobriety do not exhaust the demands made upon the
Christian. He is also to be on his guard. "Put on the breastplate of
faith and love; and for a helmet, the hope of salvation." While
waiting for the Lord's coming, the Christian waits in a hostile world.
He is exposed to assault from spiritual enemies who aim at nothing
less than his life, and he needs to be protected against them. In the
very beginning of this letter we came upon the three Christian graces;
the Thessalonians were commended for their work of faith, labour of
love, and patience of hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. There they were
represented as active powers in the Christian life, each manifesting
its presence by some appropriate work, or some notable fruit of
character; here they constitute a defensive armour by which the
Christian is shielded against any mortal assault. We cannot press the
figure further than this. If we keep our faith in Jesus Christ, if we
love one another, if our hearts are set with confident hope on that
salvation which is to be brought to us at Christ's appearing, we need
fear no evil; no foe can touch our life. It is remarkable, I think,
that both here and in the famous passage in Ephesians, as well as in
the original of both in Isaiah lix. 17, salvation, or, to be more
precise, the hope of salvation, is made the helmet. The Apostle is
very free in his comparisons; faith is now a shield, and now a
breastplate; the breastplate in one passage is faith and love, and in
another righteousness; but the helmet is always the same. Without
hope, he would say to us, no man can hold up his head in the battle;
and the Christian hope is always Christ's second coming. If He is not
to come again, the very word hope may be blotted out of the New
Testament. This assured grasp on the coming salvation--a salvation
ready to be revealed in the last times--is what gives the spirit of
victory to the Christian even in the darkest hour.
The mention of salvation brings the Apostle back to his principal
subject. It is as if he wrote, "for a helmet the hope of salvation;
salvation, I say; for God did not appoint us to wrath, but to the
obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ." The day of the
Lord is indeed a day of wrath,--a day when men will cry to the
mountains and to the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of
Him that sitteth upon the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for
the great day of their wrath is come. The Apostle cannot remember it
for any purpose without getting a glimpse of those terrors; but it is
not for these he recalls it at this time. God did not appoint
Christians to the wrath of that day, but to its salvation,--a
salvation the hope of which is to cover their heads in the day of
battle.
The next verse--the tenth--has the peculiar interest of containing the
only hint to be found in this early Epistle of Paul's teaching as to
the mode of salvation. We obtain it through Jesus Christ, who died for
us. It is not who died instead of us, nor even on our behalf
(ὑπέρ), but, according to the true reading, who died a death in
which we are concerned. It is the most vague expression that could
have been used to signify that Christ's death had something to do with
our salvation. Of course it does not follow that Paul had said no more
to the Thessalonians than he indicates here; judging from the account
he gives in 1st Corinthians of his preaching immediately after he left
Thessalonica, one would suppose he had been much more explicit;
certainly no church ever existed that was not based on the Atonement
and the Resurrection. In point of fact, however, what is here made
prominent is not the mode of salvation, but one special result of
salvation as accomplished by Christ's death, a result contemplated
by Christ, and pertinent to the purpose of this letter; He died for
us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should together live with Him.
The same conception precisely is found in Rom. xiv. 9: "To this end
Christ died, and lived again, that He might be Lord of both the dead
and the living." This was His aim in redeeming us by passing through
all modes of human existence, seen and unseen. It made Him Lord of
all. He filled all things. He claims all modes of existence as His
own. Nothing separates from Him. Whether we sleep or wake, whether we
live or die, we shall alike live with Him. The strong consolation, to
impart which was the Apostle's original motive in approaching this
subject, has thus come uppermost again; in the circumstances of the
church, it is this which lies nearest to his heart.
He ends, therefore, with the old exhortation: "Comfort one another,
and build each other up, as also ye do." The knowledge of the truth is
one thing; the Christian use of it is another: if we cannot help one
another very much with the first, there is more in our power with
regard to the last. We are not ignorant of Christ's second coming; of
its awful and consoling circumstances; of its final judgment and final
mercy; of its final separations and final unions. Why have these
things been revealed to us? What influence are they meant to have in
our lives? They ought to be consoling and strengthening. They ought
to banish hopeless sorrow. They ought to generate and sustain an
earnest, sober, watchful spirit; strong patience; a complete
independence of this world. It is left to us as Christian men to
assist each other in the appropriation and application of these great
truths. Let us fix our minds upon them. Our salvation is nearer than
when we believed. Christ is coming. There _will be_ a gathering
together of all His people unto Him. The living and the dead shall be
for ever with the Lord. Of the times and the seasons we can say no
more than could be said at the beginning; the Father has kept them in
His own power; it remains with us to watch and be sober; to arm
ourselves with faith, love, and hope; to set our mind on the things
that are above, where our true country is, whence also we look for the
Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.
[18] "_The times_ (χρόνοι) are, in Augustine's words, 'ipsa spatia
temporum,' and these contemplated merely under the aspect of their
duration, over which the Church's history should extend; but _the
seasons_ (καιροὶ) are the joints or articulations in these times,
the critical epoch-making periods foreordained of God (καιροὶ
προτεταγμένοι, Acts xvii. 26; cf. Augustine, _Conf._, xi., 13: 'Deus
operator temporum'); when all that has been slowly, and often without
observation, ripening through long ages is mature and comes to the
birth in grand decisive events, which constitute at once the close of
one period and the commencement of another."--Trench, _Synonyms_, p.
211.
[19] Rev. xvi. 15.