You have your Bible this afternoon. Let's turn to the Old Testament, to the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah and the 13th chapter. And we're going to be looking at a portion of this chapter that is given the heading in verse 1 of the burden of Babylon, which Isaiah, the son of Amos did see. And we're going to look at verses 6-13. Let me invite you, as you're able, let's stand in honor of the reading and hearing of God's Word. And I'm reading from Isaiah 13, verses 6-13. The prophet writes, How ye, for the day of the Lord is at hand. It shall come as a destruction from the Almighty. Therefore, shall all hands be faint and every man's heart shall melt, and they shall be afraid. Pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them. They shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth. They shall be amazed one at another. Their faces shall be as flames. Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel, both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate, and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it. For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light. The sun shall be darkened in his goings forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine. And I will punish the world for their evil and the wicked for their iniquity. And I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. I will make a man more precious than fine gold, even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir. Therefore, I will shake the heavens and the earth shall remove out of her place in the wrath of the Lord of hosts and in the day of his fierce anger. May God bless today the reading and the hearing of his word. And let us join again in prayer. Gracious and loving God, as we meditate upon this prophecy of Isaiah, and his words about a day of the Lord. Help us understand this in the context in which Isaiah wrote it, and also help us understand what it points toward, even the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Give us eyes to see, give us ears to hear. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen. And you may be seated. Well, if you've been worshiping with us, you know that on these Sunday afternoons this year thus far, we've been in a series on eschatology, the doctrine of last things. And we set out to look at what I call personal eschatology. It's the question of, what happens to me when I die? What happens to my spirit? What happens to my body? But there's also an aspect of eschatology that is called cosmic eschatology. And this is the question of what happens to the world at the end of the ages? How will things come together in the end? What will be the consummation of all things? So there's personal eschatology, what happens to the individual. Cosmic eschatology, what happens to the world and to history. And so far in the series, believe it or not, we've primarily focused on personal eschatology. We've talked a lot in this series about what happens when we die. And we have come to some conclusions based on scriptural evidences. We believe that at death, the souls of believers do immediately enter into the eternal rest. They enter into glory. As Paul says, to be absent from the bodies, be present with the Lord, while the bodies of believers, as our confession says, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection. Whereas at death, the unbeliever, their souls and all persons are a combination of bodies and spirits. But for unbelievers, their souls immediately enter into unspeakable torment. We saw this with the rich man who dies and goes into Hades, while their bodies remain in their graves until the resurrection. And we noted in this series, when we looked at John 5, verses 28 and 29, that Christ said that there's coming an hour when those who are in the grave will hear a voice and they will They will be raised, some to the resurrection of life and some to the resurrection of damnation. And we've noted in our study of personal eschatology that the point of the initiation of the consummation of all things will be the return of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is what Paul talked about in 1 Thessalonians 4. when he comforted believers who had lost loved ones before the second coming of Christ. He said those, the spirits of those who have departed, they will accompany Christ when he returns in glory. And they will experience the resurrection first. And then those who are alive at Christ's coming, they will be caught up in the air to meet him. And they will also experience the resurrection. So there's been an overlap along the way. As we talked about personal eschatology, what happens to me when I die? Because the big point of the final point of human destiny is the second coming of Christ, where we experience the resurrection. But what we've probably talked less about is what accompanies that also is a final judgment, a final evaluation, and the assignment to heaven and hell. So really, from this point in our series, we're going to begin thinking more about cosmic eschatology. What does the Bible teach about the end of all things, the end of history, the end of the world, and so forth? And we're going to begin our study by looking at the Old Testament. We're going to look at some Old Testament passages that anticipate a time when the world will be brought under judgment. There will be a day of reckoning, a day of judgment. And one of the terms that's used in the Old Testament is the day of the Lord, the day of the Lord. And this is a term that was initiated among the prophets. And I've mentioned several times a famous statement from Augustine of Hippo. He said, What was in the Old Testament concealed is in the New Testament revealed. So there are things that the Old Testament talks about, and sometimes it's clear, sometimes it seems shadowy. And it's the New Testament that sort of gives us light and helps us understand what sometimes the prophets were talking about. A lot of times in the Old Testament, we see teaching that is what we call seed form. We see the seed, and the New Testament, we see the full flower of it. We see the fullness of the teaching. So today, we're going to begin this study looking at, again, cosmic eschatology. And we're going to start that by looking at this term, the day of the Lord, the day of the Lord. And we're going to look at the teaching here in Isaiah, in Isaiah chapter 13, 6 through 13. And even before you get to Isaiah 13, the first use of this term, the day of the Lord, is in Isaiah chapter two, verse 12, which says, For the day of the Lord of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty and upon everyone that is lifted up and he shall be brought low. And one of the themes of this mention of the day of the Lord in the Old Testament is that it's a day of judgment, a day when the haughty, the proud are brought low. And in Isaiah 13, it picks up on this. It's interesting. If you look at Isaiah 13, I read the first verse before I read the scriptures today. And the heading for the whole chapter is the burden of Babylon which Isaiah, the son of Amoz, did see. The Babylonians were a great empire in the ancient world. They're the ones who would eventually destroy Jerusalem and destroy the temple. And in this part of the book of Isaiah, Isaiah has a lot of prophecies against various nations. Like if you if you just kind of look over in your Bibles, you can see a couple of chapters that have similar types of headings, like Isaiah 17, one, the burden of Damascus is the title for that. Chapter 19, verse one, the burden of Egypt. So there are a lot of prophecies that are against nations, about nations. It's the bird, the prophet had a message, a bird he wanted to give concerning this nation. And chapter 13 is about Babylon. And so here is Isaiah prophesying about Babylon. And there's a question about how to interpret some of the things that are said here. Is he prophesying that mighty Babylon will be destroyed, that they will be punished by God, that they will have the day of the Lord? And or is he talking about how God is going to raise up Babylon to be an instrument in his hands to punish Israel? And so they will suffer the day of the Lord in judgment at the hand of the Babylonians. So it says in verse 5, they come from a far country from the end of heaven, even the Lord and the weapons of his indignation to destroy the whole land. Is he talking about the final destruction of Babylon? He's talking about how Babylon will be used like an instrument in God's hand to inflict punishment upon Israel. And indeed, this is what happened historically. 586 BC, they were destroyed by the Babylonians. The temple was destroyed. They were carried off into exile. The Book of Daniel, for example, has Daniel and the three young men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and others who were carried away into exile in Babylon. And it may be talking about both things at one time, the destruction of Israel at the hand of the Babylonians, but eventually the Babylonians will be destroyed by the Persians and so forth. So but it's setting up also just this idea of a time when God executes judgment, a time when God sets things right. And in the Old Testament, sometimes the prophecies that are in the Old Testament have more than one fulfillment. Take, for example, in the Psalms, there will be there will be songs that talk about King David. And those Psalms were fulfilled in the life of David. But sometimes those prophecies have a double edge. It's about David, King David, but it's also pointing off into the future to the Messiah, the son of David. And so there could be a prophecy that has kind of a near term fulfillment and it has it has a far term fulfillment, something that is a greater fulfillment that is yet to come. And to a certain degree, we can see that a little bit in Isaiah 13. It can both be talking about the judgment that's going to come on Israel as a nation and upon Babylon and all the nations, but also about what's going to happen at the end of the ages. There will be a day of reckoning. There will be a day of judgment. There was an old fundamentalist evangelists of past generations who had a famous sermon called Payday Someday. And as far as I can tell, most of the sermon consists of him repeating that over and over again. There's going to be a payday someday. There's going to be a payday someday. There's going to be a day of judging. There's going to be the day of the Lord. And in some sense, Isaiah is sort of tapping into that here. So let's look at some of what he says. Look at verse 6. He says, Howl ye, for the day of the Lord is at hand. The day of the Lord is close. It shall come as a destruction from the Almighty. So Isaiah is prophesying this day of judgment, this time when people are going to howl in despair. It will be a day of fainting and fear, verse 7, therefore shall all hands be faint and every man's heart shall melt. And then he compares the sorrows of that day to being like the pain of a woman giving birth. Look at verse 8. And they shall be afraid, pangs and sorrow shall take hold of them. They shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth. They shall be amazed one at another. Their faces shall be as flames. And this becomes one of the biblical metaphors, inspired or proved metaphors for what the day of judgment will be like, a day that will be like a woman travailing in birth. The Apostle Paul picks up on both of these themes that are from Isaiah, again in seed form, when he talks about the second coming of Christ. In 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, For example, he talks about the day of the Lord and about this day being also a time when it will be like a woman in travail. Let me look up that passage. Let's turn over and look at 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. 1 Thessalonians 5 and verse 2. For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night." It will come suddenly. For when they shall say, verse 3, peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall not escape. So here is the Apostle Paul using this image of the second coming of Christ being the day of the Lord, and it being a day like a woman giving birth. And going back to Isaiah chapter 13, verse 9, it says, it will be a day of destruction for sinners. Behold, the day of the Lord cometh cruel, both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate, and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it. So it's a day of destruction for sinners. It will be accompanied, according to Isaiah, by heavenly disruptions, cosmic disruptions. Look at verse 10 of Isaiah 13. For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light. The sun shall be darkened and is going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine. And so the sun and the moon The stars cease to give light. It will be a day of darkness and again, destruction. And in the New Testament, our Lord Himself picks up on this imagery in Matthew 24, when Christ is teaching on the Mount of Olives. Matthew 24, verse 29, Christ says, Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light. And the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. And then, he says, shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And then he adds in verse 31, and he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet And they shall gather together his elect from the four winds from one end of heaven to the other. So he talks positively about the gathering up of the elect of God at the second coming of Christ. And we also know from some of Christ's parables in Matthew 13, like the parable of the wheat and the tares, the parable of the dragnet, that not only will be the elect gathered together, but also the wicked will be gathered together and they will be cast into a fire, as it says in those parables. So it will be a day of cosmic destruction and so forth. Then look at Isaiah chapter 13, verse 11. And I will punish the world for their evil and the wicked for their iniquity. And I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. And so this is a judgment notice that is universal. It doesn't just involve the Babylonians or the Israelites. It says in verse 11, I will punish the world for their evil. It will be a universal punishment. So much so, I think verse 12 is meant to be taken sort of figuratively. So, so many people will be taken in destruction that there will be few men who might escape such, and so that a man would be more precious than fine gold, it says in verse 12. And then finally in verse 13, our first blush at this description of the day of the Lord, it says, therefore, I will shake the heavens and the earth shall remove out of her place in the wrath of the Lord of hosts and in the day of his fierce anger. And so this describes, again, something that is of cosmic significance. It's as if all the realms of heaven and earth are moved out of their places. There is a disruption. And this is an anticipation of what will be taught later when it speaks about the new heavens and the new earth. Even in the end of Isaiah, Isaiah 66, is one of the first mentions of the new heaven and the new earth. For our purposes today, we just want to focus on the fact that in the Old Testament, there was an anticipation of a time when God would bring judgment. And it was called the day of the Lord. And this theme didn't just show up in Isaiah, although we see it there in Isaiah. We also see it in Jeremiah. We see it in Ezekiel. We see it scattered throughout the so-called minor prophets. Just one example would be in Joel 1, verse 15. It says, Alas for the day, for the day of the Lord is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty, it shall come. So there was an anticipation. Again, sometimes it looks hazy. It's fuzzy, but it becomes clearer when you move into the New Testament that this day of the Lord is referring to the time of Christ's return. And for unbelievers, it will be a day of trouble, and it will be a day of judgment. It's also interesting that when you move into the New Testament, although the term the day of the Lord does appear, and we read one of those occasions in 1 Thessalonians 5, 2, it also appears in 2 Peter 3, 10, where Peter says, the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night. But one of the interesting things we see in the New Testament is that sometimes Paul refers to this day of judgment, the day of Christ's second coming, not as the day of the Lord. And in the Hebrew, in the Old Testament, it would be Lord with all capitals, the day of Jehovah, the day of the one true God. But when Paul refers to this day, he calls it the day of Christ. or the day of the Lord Jesus Christ, or the day of the Lord Jesus. And that's interesting in and of itself, because you can just focus on that for the sake of Christology. What does it mean when in the Old Testament there's this term, the day of Jehovah, and Christian apostles start referring to it as the day of Christ? Who is Christ? He is the Lord. Jesus's Lord was the early creedal statement. But I just want to look at a couple of places where Paul talks about this day, and often he does refer to it with respect to it being a day of judgment. It's almost used as a kind of a warning, even when addressing Christians, that this day of Christ is coming. And so I just want to look at a couple of places where Paul talks about this. You can look at these, you can just listen to me read them. And we're going to start off in 1 Corinthians chapter one, 1 Corinthians one. And I'm going to just give the context. I'm going to read starting in verse 4. This is the Thanksgiving in 1 Corinthians. I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ, that in everything ye are enriched by Him in all utterance and in all knowledge, even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, so that ye come behind in no gift, waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, verse 8, who shall also confirm you unto the end that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. That you might be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. And see how Paul, guided by the Spirit, is taking the day of the Lord and making it the day of the Lord Jesus Christ. Likewise, look at the opening of 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians 1 and verse 13. 2 Corinthians 1 and verse 13, where Paul says, For we write none other things unto you than that which ye read or acknowledge, and I trust ye shall acknowledge even to the end. as also ye have acknowledged us in part, that we are rejoicing even as ye also are ours in the day of the Lord Jesus. The day of the Lord is the day of the Lord Jesus. But he also talks about it as it is something that he prays and hopes that he will be rejoicing in that day, not that they would come under condemnation and punishment. but that they would be found to be in Christ and they would be found to be faithful in Him. And let's look at just a couple places in Philippians where Paul makes reference to the day of the Lord as the day of Christ. One of those is in Philippians 1. And this is also in the Thanksgiving. It's interesting it comes in that part of 1st and 2nd Corinthians and also in that part of Philippians. Philippians 1, verse 3. I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making requests with joy for your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. That's it. Verse six is a really famous verse. It brings a lot of comfort to a lot of people. The idea that, you know, if I'm struggling in the faith right now and I'm not making much progress, it's a verse of assurance. He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it. So if there's, you know, there's the smallest spark of spiritual life in you, Christ can fan that into flame. The one who began a good work in you, no matter how down the light may have died, it can be refurbished. And here, notice the emphasis is that can be done until the day of Jesus Christ, until the day of the Lord, until Christ returns in glory. And then there is judgment, and there's no second chance beyond that. Likewise, look at Philippians 1. Verse 9, Paul says, And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge, and in judgment, and in all judgment, that ye may approve things that are excellent, that ye may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ. Again, the day of the Lord in Isaiah 13 is the day of Christ. And he's praying for them that they would be filled with excellence and sincerity, and they would have no offense in them at the day of Christ. And then, let's look at just one more in Philippians. Look at Philippians 2, and beginning in verse 14. Philippians 2 verse 14. Paul says, Do all things without murmurings and disputings, that ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world, holding forth the word of life, that I may rejoice in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither labored in vain." And Paul's saying, as an apostle, I'm praying that you, the ones I have brought to the faith and discipled, that you will be holding forth the word of life so that I may rejoice when, verse 16, in the day of Christ, in the day of Christ. The Apostle Paul was preaching at Mars Hill in Acts 17 in Athens, we're told. And as he was preaching to that pagan audience, he told them in Acts 17, verse 31, that God hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained." God has appointed a day in which he will judge the world by Christ. And he also says in Acts 17.31 that God has given assurance that he will do this by raising that man from the dead. If you look at the very last chapter of our Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, chapter 32, on the last judgment, the opening words to that part of the confession start with a reference to Acts 1731. God hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world in righteousness by Jesus Christ. So the point is we're continuing to think about what does the Bible teach about eschatology? What does the Bible teach about the doctrine of last things? How will this world and all of its history come to an end? Well, for Paul, for the early believers who had read the Old Testament and were guided by the Spirit to interpret it, they saw in the Old Testament the prophets talk about the day of the Lord. And they saw that the day of the Lord was going to be the day of Christ's second coming. And for unbelievers, it would indeed be a day of terrible judgment in the way it's described in Isaiah 13, as it fell upon, in temporal terms, Babylon and Israel. This would be a much more terrible experience of this judgment, because it would be a spiritual judgment. But for the saints of God, this day of the Lord, this day of Christ will not be a day of judgment, but it will be a day of hope and a day in which our life is hid in Christ. And so maybe in a upcoming message in this series, we'll talk about how Christians think about the day of Christ's second coming, what will happen at the judgment, And we'll also try to ask some questions about what does the Bible teach about what will happen to this present creation? What about the new heavens and the new earth? What will heaven be like? So we will, God willing, approach some of those questions as we continue in this study in days to come. For now, let me invite you to stand as you are able, and let's join in prayer together. Gracious and loving God, we give thee thanks for the scriptures and for the prophets, those men of old who were moved along by the Holy Spirit to speak of the day of Jehovah, the day of the Lord, a day of judgment, a day of terror for those who are haughty. And also, we give thee thanks for the promise and the hope held by believers that Christ, who had ascended and who is seated now at thy right hand will one day return with power and great glory. And the day of Christ will come. And for those who are apart from Christ, it will indeed be a resurrection to judgment, to damnation. But for those whose lives are hid in Christ, it will be a resurrection unto life. And so help us to live our lives in a way that is faithful unto thee, so that as Paul said, we might not be taken unawares, or we might not be ashamed at the day of Christ's coming. But help us to understand that what matters the most is our standing with thee, and whether or not we have committed ourselves unto thee. And so we do commend our lives, everything that we do, everything that we are, unto Christ. We pray this in Christ's name and for his sake, amen.