From yesterday’s first reading centered on “to share in the divine nature: (2 Peter 1:4), we continue to read from 2 Peter, moving ahead to Chapter 3 where we encounter “the coming of the day of the Lord” (2 Peter 3:12).  The language of the text has all the hallmarks of the apocalyptic and it indeed is speaking of “the end times” an expression best suited to the modern Western imagination. For something a little different today, let us examine the expression “day of the Lord.”

When we associate “the day of the Lord”  only with the end times, we miss the fullness of the Old Testament (OT) tradition of the expression. I mention all of this, because that focus on the end of time, perhaps the capital “D” of the days of the Lord, misses the importance and meaning of the “day of the Lord” for the covenant people of God. The Day of the Lord is a biblical theme that runs all throughout the story of the Bible. Biblical authors use it to describe when and how God intervenes in human history to rescue people from oppression. In the Hebrew Bible, the meaning of the phrases refers to temporal events such as the invasion of a foreign army, the capture of a city and the suffering that befalls the inhabitants.

While coming before the exact expression “day of the Lord” is used (first appearing in Isaiah 2), scholars hold that the development of the idea of the “day of the Lord” is as old as the Book of Genesis. From the start of Creation the world was one of goodness according to the divine dictates of “good and evil” symbolized by the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” (Gen 2:9). In eating from the fruit of that one tree, humanity was seen to put aside God’s judgment of “good and evil” and substitute their own. It was the first human attempt to “elevate themselves” – a theme which arises again and again in the OT narrative. The story of the human choice of good and evil according to our own designs follows an ever widening and cascading flow of evil in the world: the murder of Abel, the first cities where evil thrived, the rise of Lamech (the personification of evil humanity), the earth washed clean of evil in the Flood, and yet evil continued to thrive.  By Genesis 11 the story has come to the City of Babel (note: all other places in Scripture called Babylon. taking advantage of a play on similar sounding words to show the very name of the city was consistent with “babble” or “confusion.”) It is there in Babylon/Babel that humanity literary attempts to elevate themselves, to reach the heavens by their own actions. And so God intervenes in history – a day of the Lord.

How are the people of God “freed” from Babel? That is the region from which came Abraham and Sarah, free from the “babble” of the nations to form a people particularly God’s own. Following the biblical narrative: Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph, we find the People of God enslaved in Egypt. What is interesting about the enslavement in Egypt, if one follows the “breadcrumbs” of language there are many parallels in which the biblical authors want you to see Egypt as the new Babylon. In this way, the whole story of Exodus becomes a day of the Lord, as God intervenes in human history to rescue his people from oppression.

The biblical timeline moves from Pentateuch (wilderness narratives) to life in the “promised land” as described in Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. It is in this later time period we see Isaiah and Amos begin to use the phrase “day of the Lord,” but it is directed against the ruler power/class/kings who would attempt to elevate themselves above the people. In this way Israel and Judah became the new “Babylon” oppressing her own people. Warnings arose from the prophets that the day of the Lord would come against the nations of Israel and Judah. And so it came to pass. The Assyrian Empire conquered the Northern Tribes (Israel) in 722 BC. The Babylonian Empire conquered Judah in 587 BC.

The idea of the “day of the Lord” and the symbol of “Babylon” are the personification of human power and evil became a fixture in the later prophets, Daniel, the gospel accounts from Holy Week in which Jesus speaks of the “day” when Jerusalem and the Temple would again be destroyed. The same imagery is continued in 2 Peter and Revelation.

It is fair to say that the NT use of “the day of Lord” often is used to describe the “end times.” But it should always be remembered God intervenes in human history to rescue people from oppression. The descendants of Abraham were often the one oppressed and God intervened to rescue them. But in time, they became the oppressors and the day of the Lord came upon them because they again decided to use their own standards of right and wrong, good and evil, rather than that commanded by the Lord.

As a nation, a church, a community of believers – we are always called to be aware of what the Lord asks of us, lest the “day of the Lord” come upon us.