Day of the LORD
Men who mistake God’s exercise of long-suffering and patience as slackness, tardiness, slowness on His part and who are themselves slow in taking action for salvation will be suddenly overtaken by destruction from God. The apostle Peter warned against such a mistaken, careless, unwise course of action by saying: “Yet YHWH(Jehovah's) day [
he·meʹra Ky·rıʹou, Greek; day of the Lord] will come as a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a hissing noise, but the elements being intensely hot will be dissolved, and earth and the works in it will be discovered.”(
2 Peter 3:10)
The day for the end of the “heavens and the earth that are now” will come without fail, for it is part of God’s declared purpose. His time for its arrival is fixed in his own timetable. Clergymen of Christendom who continue to use religion as a means to exploit credulous people will find that they are the ones slumbering and asleep to the order of events, and not God himself. “Also, with covetousness they will exploit you with counterfeit words. But as for them, the judgment from of old is not moving slowly, and the destruction of them is not slumbering.”(
2 Peter 2:3)
The coming of YHWH day as a thief in the night is commented on also by the apostle Paul, when he writes to the Christians in Thessalonica, Macedonia: “Now as for the times and the seasons, brothers, you need nothing to be written to you. For you yourselves know quite well that YHWH day is coming exactly as a thief in the night. Whenever it is that they are saying: ‘Peace and security!’ then sudden destruction is to be instantly upon them just as the pang of distress upon a pregnant woman; and they will by no means escape.” (
1 Thessalonians 5:1-3) YHWH God Only Begotten Son Jesus Christ will be used by YHWH God as an executional agent on YHWH day, he warned his disciples of the thieflike approach of the day for execution of judgment to begin, saying: “But know one thing, that if the householder had known in what watch the thief was coming, he would have kept awake and not allowed his house to be broken into. On this account you too prove yourselves ready, because at an hour that you do not think to be it, the Son of man is coming.”(
Matthew 24:43, 44; Luke 12:39, 40)
On YHWH day mankind will find itself enveloped in a fiery situation for this ungodly system of things. The “heavens,” “elements,” and “earth” that mankind has known for thousands of years will be affected ruinously. The “heavens” that will pass away are the political governments that have served as “the superior authorities” by God’s permission and that have prolonged their operation in spite of the end of the Gentile Times in 1914 C.E. They have loomed high like mountains on earth’s scene and have overshadowed the affairs of human society. The priests, prophets and clergymen of religion have meddled with the governments and have tried to involve themselves as an integral part of governments, in many lands producing a marriage of State and Church. In marriages of Church and State that still continue in this “time of the end,” the religious partner is the lesser, the subordinate one and is merely tolerated.
Those governmental “heavens” will pass away “with a hissing noise,” like the prolonged sounding of the letter “s.” This whizzing sound could be like that caused by the rapid passing of an object through the air. This hissing noise could, accordingly, denote a rapid passing away of these governmental “heavens.” This rapid passing of the governmental heavens will not come about by the action of radical, revolutionary parties among men, for they themselves would only substitute the overthrown government with one of their own. Rather, the passing of political “heavens” will be by the act of YHWH God. Since they have overlived the “appointed times of the Gentile nations,” it would only be fitting for them to be rushed off the scene as in an action that is long overdue. The “hissing noise,” regardless of whatever sound sensation it produces, will be heard by the inhabitants of the earth.
The “elements” that will become “intensely hot” and then “be dissolved” are not the so-called “four elements” of the alchemists of the Middle Ages, namely, fire, water, earth and air. “Elements” mean the basic parts of which something, as an organism, is composed. “Elements” suggest certain things lined up in a certain order, like the letters of the alphabet of a language. The “elements” are mentioned as being distinct from the “heavens” and the “earth,” and as not being primary component parts of such. Between our literal heavens and earth there is the atmosphere, in which mankind lives, breathing it for sustenance of life. This atmosphere is composed of a mixture of gases and so has elemental parts. Similarly, there is a spirit that pervades the earthly realm of mankind, which mankind breathes and which animates them, moving them as by an invisible force to act, think, speak and plan the way that they do. This is the spirit of the world. It has nothing to do with the spirit of God but is at enmity with it. Hence, God is against that worldly spirit in all its elemental parts. On His day he must dissolve it, destroy it in the heat of his anger. All the doctrines, arrangements and schemes that express this worldly spirit and result from it must be dissolved, reduced to nothing, with it.
Not only the “heavens” and the “elements” come in for divine attention, but “earth and the works in it” must also. These “will be discovered.” (
2 Peter 3:10) They will be found out. “Earth” in this case symbolizes human society that is separate and distinct from the anointed remnant of spiritual Israelites and from the “great crowd” who are in the spiritual paradise and who are worshiping YHWH God in his spiritual temple. (
Revelation 7:15) The expression “the works in it” refers, not to the deeds or acts of conduct of the earthly human society, but to their works of construction, the things that human society builds and produces in the way of structures. Such “works” show the materialistic viewpoint, the earthly tendencies, of this human society, this symbolic “earth.”
Why is it said, “and earth and the works in it will be discovered [literally, will be found]”? Why “be discovered,” “be found,” instead of “be burned up,” as in the old King James
Authorized Version reading of
2 Peter 3:10? Their being “discovered” or “found” does not mean that on YHWH day they will merely be laid bare to view and be left lying thus exposed. In
2 Peter 3:7 it is stated that, by God’s word, “the heavens and the earth that are now are stored up for fire.” Accordingly, the “earth and the works in it” will not escape the “fire” of destruction any more than the “heavens” and the “elements” will do so. They will be “discovered” or “found” by the fire. The fire will overtake the “earth and the works in it” also. They will be “discovered” or “found” to be combustible, just as the symbolic “heavens” and the symbolic “elements” are combustible. The destructive “fire” of YHWH day will prove that. So the sense of the discovery or finding is like that in
1 Corinthians 3:13-15, where the apostle Paul writes:
"Each one’s work will become manifest, for the day will show it up, because it will be revealed by means of fire; and the fire itself will prove what sort of work each one’s is. If anyone’s work that he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward; if anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss...”
YHWH God “day of judgment and of destruction of the ungodly men” will come as a thief upon the symbolic “earth and the works in it,” and the “fire” of that day for executing divine judgment will prove them to be inflammable, subject to incineration. They will go up in flames. They will not withstand, survive the fiery day of the Lord God YHW. The prophetic words of
Zephaniah 1:14-18 have solemn significance for our day: “The great day of YHWH is near. It is near, and there is a hurrying of it very much. The sound of the day of YHWH is bitter. There a mighty man is letting out a cry. . . . Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to deliver them in the day of YHWH God fury; but by the fire of his zeal the whole earth will be devoured, because he will make an extermination, indeed a terrible one, of all the inhabitants of the earth.”