5. In these passages, day and time mean the Lord’s Coming. A day or time of darkness, gloom, thick darkness, no light, devastation, the iniquity of the end, or destruction means the Lord’s Coming, when he is no longer recognized and therefore when there is nothing left of the church.

A day that is cruel or terrifying, a day of blazing anger, wrath, panic, visitation, sacrifice, retribution, distress, war, or shouting means a coming of the Lord for judgment.

A day when Jehovah alone will be exalted, when he will be one and his name one, when the branch of Jehovah will be beautiful and glorious, when the righteous will flourish, when he will bring [a young cow and two sheep] to life, when he will search for his flock, when he will make a new covenant, when the mountains will drip with new wine, when living waters will go forth from Jerusalem, and when people will look back to the God of Israel (and many similar expressions) mean the Coming of the Lord to set up a new church that will recognize him as Redeemer and Savior.

Time is an aspect of the physical world, but it is not an aspect of the spiritual world. The same is true of space: There is no space in heaven. This is hard for us to grasp or even visualize, because we live in physical bodies with physical senses that are filled with physical elements existing in time and space. Our minds are schooled and patterned in terms of time and space, and have no reference point to imagine a reality without them. Consider how you think for a second. In your mind you can immediately be in your past or in some speculative future; in your mind you can circle the globe seeing other lands and faraway friends, or even zoom instantly to the most distant stars. Such imaginings are insubstantial, of course, but if we could make them real we would be getting close to what spiritual reality is like. Indeed, the mind is like a spiritual organ, which may be why physicians and philosophers have had such a hard time juxtaposing its functions to those of the brain. What this means in the Bible is that descriptions of time -- hours, days, weeks, months, years and even simply the word "time" itself -- represent spiritual states, and the passing of time represents the change of spiritual states. Again, we can see this a little bit within our minds. If we imagine talking to one friend then talking to another, it feels like going from one place to another, even though we're not moving. The same is true if we picture a moment from childhood and then imagine something in the future; it feels like a movement through time even though it's instantaneous. Changing our state of mind feels like a physical change in space and time. The Bible simply reverses that, with marking points in space and time representing particular states of mind.