1:10 THE LORD’S DAY
“I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and heard behind me a loud voice, as of a trumpet” (Revelation 1:10). John was “in the Spirit.” The general biblical meaning of this expression is to be filled with the Holy Spirit—“You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Romans 8:9). It can refer to the everyday, moment by moment experience of the born again Christian (“walk in the Spirit” Galatians 5:16) but when this expression is used in Revelation it refers to John’s being carried off in vision, for example, “And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain and showed me the great city, the holy Jerusalem” (Revelation. 21:10, see also Revelation 4:2, 17:3).
John said, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.” In every other instance of its use in Revelation, the passsage specifies where John was carried to “in the Spirit.” In this passage the specification is that in vision he was carried to “the Lord’s day” (i kyriaki imera). This particular Greek phrase is unique in the Bible, and although later in the second century[1] it was applied to Sunday,[2] there is no Biblical evidence to support this usage. In fact, the day that Jesus refers to as His day is the day of His coming: “For as the lightning that flashes out of one part under heaven shines to the other part under heaven, so also the Son of Man will be in His day” (Luke 17:24).[3] Thus “The Lord’s Day” may simply be another way of saying “the Day of the Lord,”[4] which is clearly the day when Jesus comes to rescue His people who have been waiting for Him amidst the persecution and the death decree that will take place during the final crisis.[5]
This interpretation is supported by the fact that John, “in the Spirit on the Lord’s day,” heard “a loud voice, as of a trumpet.” The trumpet was used in ancient Israel to call God’s people to attention when a great event or threat was at hand, and it is particularly associated with the Day of the Lord: “Blow the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in My holy mountain! For the Day of the Lord is coming, for it is at hand” (Joel 2:1, see also Zephaniah 1:14-16, 1 Thessalonians 4:16). The primary focus of Revelation is The Lord's day—the "Day of the Lord"—when God steps in to take the reins of human history.
Continue to next section: 1:10,11 MESSAGES TO THE SEVEN CHURCHES
[1] The first clear application of the Greek word kuriaki to Sunday is in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, written in the second half of the second century.
[2] In the New Testament, Sunday is consistently referred to as the first day of the week, even in the Gospel of John, which was written by the same author at about the same time (eg. John 20:1).
[3] Some commentators have suggested that the Lord’s Day is the Sabbath. This view has valid scriptural support. Jesus said, “the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8). Likewise Isaiah 58:13 says “Call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord.” At any rate, there is no Biblical support for the idea that the Lord’s day is Sunday. This theory finds its support in church tradition, which was heavily influenced by the second century Christians’ need to distance themselves from the Jews and “their” Sabbath because of persecution of the Jews by the Romans. For a thorough discussion of this subject see “From Sabbath to Sunday” by Samuele Bacchiocchi, Pontifical Gregorian University Press (available from Biblical Perspectives, Berrien Springs, MI.
[4] “I will pour out My Spirit in those days. And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth: Blood and fire and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord and it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Joel 2:29-32). “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat…(2 Peter 2:10. See also Isaiah 2:10-21, Joel 2:1, 10,11, Zephaniah 1:14-17, Malachi 4:5, 1 Thessalonians5:2-4).
[5] See Chapters 13 and 14 for an explanation of the persecutions and death decree.
