To What Does It Refer?

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 24, 1895

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 21, No. 42.

To What Does It Refer?

No. 244. The Lord’s Day.

A CORRESPONDENT wishes to know what the Lord’s day is not, as well as what it is.

Space in this column is limited, but perhaps an extended reply is not needed. What shall determine its meaning?—Surely to Bible Christians the usage of Scripture.

1. It is not the great day of the Lord, including the 1,000 years of the millennium. (a) The expression is different both in the English and Greek. See Acts 2:20, “day of the Lord” (Greek, tēn hēmeran kuriou), to which is prefixed the adjectives “great and notable;” 1 Thess. 5:2 (Greek hē hēmera kuriou); 2 Peter 3:10, the same. The same period is referred to in other places as “the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:8); “the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Cor. 5:5); “the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6); “the day of Christ” (Phil. 1:10; 2:16; 2 Thess. 2:2); “the day of God” (2 Peter 3:12); “the day of wrath,” “the day of judgment,” “the day of perdition,” “the day of God’s wrath,” “that day,” etc. (see Acts 17:31; Rom. 13:12; 1 Peter 2:12; 2 Peter 2:9; 3:7, 12; 1 John 4:17; Rev. 6:17; 16:14); “the Lord’s day,” Rev. 1:10 (Greek, tē kuriakē hēmera). The word “day” is the same in all. The word kurios is the genitive singular of kurios, meaning a lord, master, potentate, sovereign, and may be used as a mere term of respect, or applied to God or Christ. Kuriakē, of Rev. 1:10, is the dative singular feminine of kuriakos, defined as belonging to the Lord (Jehovah or Jesus) always rendered by the word “Lord’s.” It occurs in 1 Cor. 11:20 and Rev. 1:10. So much for the expressions.

(b) The use of the terms, “the great day of the Lord,” and other kindred terms, as the contexts and similar expressions show, have reference to that period of time when God will be manifested in all his glory—life and salvation to his people; condemnation and perdition to the wicked. The Lord’s day, however, of Rev. 1:10, seems in its obvious sense to be used to denote a period of time in which John actually was.

(c) The great day of God is definitely located in Scripture as beginning when probation ends, shortly before Christ comes and the thousand years of Revelation 20 begin, and ending when sin is destroyed and the eternal kingdom of God begins. (For proof of this see Bible Students Library, No. 65, entitled “The Great Day of the Lord,” price five cents.) But John’s visions, while they included this period, pertained to much more, even the entire Christian dispensation and the giving of the blessed Gospel of truth.

2. That the term “Lord’s day” does not refer to the first day of the week is evident from the fact that that day is never elsewhere known in Scripture save as a common secular day. John’s Gospel, written about the same time as the Revelation (by some said to be later), calls the first day of the week by no other term than “first day of the week.” It is not even in the early church called “Lord’s day” until the apostasy was well under way, a century after John’s time.

To What Does It Refer?

3. Compare Ex. 20:8–11 with Col. 1:16; Mark 2:27; Isa. 58:13; 1 Peter 1:11. Do not these texts unmistakably show that the seventh-day Sabbath is “the Lord’s day”? The book is “the Revelation of Jesus Christ,” “the Alpha and the Omega,” “the first and the last.” The Sabbath is that which reveals him in this twofold character; the Creator and Redeemer of men, mighty in power and love. The Alpha is the Omega; the Beginner is the Finisher; the Creator is the Recreator; and of his mighty power, manifest in these mighty works, the Sabbath is a sign, a remembrance of power which is in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Sabbath is the Lord’s day.