Page 204 - The Rapture Question by John F. Walvoord

The Rapture in 1 Thessalonians 5
third question is the meaning of specific statements relating to
the time of the Rapture.
The Meaning of the Day of the Lord
References to the day of the Lord abound in the Old
Testament and occur occasionally in the New. Virtually
everyone agrees that the judgments related to the Second
Coming arc in some sense a part of the day of the Lord.
Definitions of the word day vary from a specific event, such as
a twenty-four-hour day, to an extended period of time
stretching all the way from the Rapture to the end of the
thousand-year reign of Christ. Generally speaking, pre-
tribulationists have identified the day of the Lord as the mil­
lennial kingdom including the judgments that introduce the
kingdom. This view was popularized by the 1917 edition of the
Scofield Reference Bible.3 In this interpretation, for all practi­
cal purposes, the day of the Lord begins at the end of or after
the Great Tribulation.
Pretribulationists who see the day of the Lord beginning
at the end of the Tribulation have difficulty harmonizing this
with the pretribulational Rapture. Posttribulationists point
out that 1 Thessalonians 5, referring to the day of the Lord,
immediately follows chapter 4, which reveals the Rapture. As
chapter 5 is dealing with the beginning of the day of the Lord,
the implication is that the Rapture and the beginning of the
day of the Lord occur at the same time. Capitalizing on the
confusion among pretribulationists in defining the day of the
Lord, Alexander Reese spent a chapter of his classic work on
posttribulationism making the most of this argument.4
Reese holds that the use of the expression “the day” indi­
cates that end-time events all occur in rapid succession, in­
cluding the translation of the church and the various judg­
ments of the saints and the wicked. He identified the day of the
Lord in 1 Thessalonians 5 with other references to “the day”
as found in Romans 13:11-12 and 1 Corinthians 3:13. He
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