I am responding to Eric Douma’s sermon on April 3rd 2011, “The Day of The LORD: A Look at the Imminent Day of Salvation and Judgment.” We continue.
In this part, I will respond to Douma as he posits a distinction between, what he calls, the “Broad Day of the Lord” and the “Narrow Day of the Lord.” Consequently, it results in two future days of the Lord.
But does Scripture actually divide the day of the Lord into a “broad and narrow” schema?
He asserts that the Broad day of the Lord starts at the beginning of the 7 year period, and the Narrow day of the Lord at the end of the seven year period. He also claims that there are precursors before the narrow day, but not before the broad day, thereby, maintaining that the broad day is imminent. Sound familiar? It should because the same phenomenon is when pretribulationists assert a coming/parousia of Christ at the beginning of the 7-year period and a coming/parousia of Christ at the end of the 7-year period. Or, as is sometimes stated, first phase and second phase. Any passages which describe events occurring before the coming of Christ they relegate to the second phase, thereby maintaining their presupposition of an “any-moment” rapture.
Douma claims that the pre-exilic prophets understood the day of the Lord to refer to an epoch (broad day), and the post-exilic prophets understood the day of the Lord as a “twenty-four” hour day (narrow day). There is absolutely no basis for this. And he provides no argumentation for his claim. Not to mention, he does not explain what pre- and post-exilic era have anything to do with it. In contrast, I have provided exegetical reasons why the day of the Lord is not conceived as a mere 24-hour day, here.
Incidentally, in the audio, Douma admits that he received strange looks from the audience after his claim. I don’t blame them because this interpretation is not derived from Scripture, but contrived to fit a preconceived idea. He then tried to explain his odd division by—not using Scriptural evidence—but using an example from his “grandpa’s day.”
I would have liked to interact with his argumentation for his claim, but he provides none. One would think that such bold assertions would have explicit biblical support. At least one argument from a passage should be given to support this conclusion. Where are the arguments that support these conclusions? No where to be found!
What Douma fails to understand is that frequently the prophets, Jesus, and other NT writers when they spoke of Christ’s coming/day of the Lord they often emphasized the glorious inception to the epochal event; that is, the first day when he comes in the clouds and delivers his people and begins to pour out his wrath. But Douma takes that emphasis on the first day and assumes it must only be a single day. Instead, the coming/day of the Lord is an epochal event, not limited by a mere 24 hour day in some “narrow” schema.
In conclusion, Douma has failed to:
(1) Demonstrate that there is a second “[narrow] day of the Lord” at the end of the 7 year period. The biblical evidence, instead, shows that there is a single future day of the Lord’s judgment that begins with the trumpet judgments and increasingly intensifies in the bowls and culminates in Armageddon. It will be a coherent-whole event.
(2) Demonstrate that the post-exilic prophets Joel and Malachi thought of the day of the Lord as a 24-hour day.
The motivation for Douma to create a bifurcation of the day of the Lord is to preserve his preconceived theological system of imminence. Joel and Malachi are two prophets in the Old Testament who explicitly place an event before the day of the Lord: Cosmic Disturbances (Joel 2:29-31); Elijah must return (Malachi 4:5). So Douma’s erroneous presupposition of imminence has forced him to posit a whole new day of the Lord so as to avoid the necessary implication that key events will occur before the rapture.
Similarly, someone told me that pretribulationism is like those who followed Ptolemy’s earth-centered cosmos. When the theory did not portray the observed motions of the planets, epicycles were introduced, and when the epicycles failed to correspond to reality, epicycles within epicycles were the “answer.”
As an aside, as I have listened to Douma speak on this subject, I have noticed that he speaks fast and makes many huge assumptions on the way, without slowing down and giving any basis for his assertions. In my opinion, this manner is not beneficial for God’s people, for the goal is to help people understand a biblical line of reasoning, instead of asserting a string of assumptions.
In the next part, I will respond to his assumption about the birth pangs that is used by Paul and Jesus.