1 Corinthians 1:8, 22-24 who will also confirm you to the end, blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Paul here writes to both Jews and Gentiles, telling both of their need of this Jesus in the Day of our Lord.

Joel who speaks extensively makes one point very clear. That point is that nations plural will be brought to Israel’s threshing floor on this day:

Joel 3:11-12, 14, “Hasten and come, all you surrounding nations, And gather yourselves there. Bring down, O LORD, Your mighty ones. Let the nations be aroused And come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat, for there I will sit to judge all the surrounding nations… Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision! For the day of the LORD is near …”

Malachi 4:5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:

The verses preceding this announcement concerning Elijah make clear what this day means for all wickedness and evil that resides on the earth.

Malachi 4:1-2 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.

This coming day requires time in order that the things recorded about it will be accomplished. Peter had told us that this day is as one thousand years.

Zechariah also speaks of this time in 14:1-6, 9 Behold, a day is coming for the Lord when the spoil taken from you will be divided among you. For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city will be captured, the houses plundered, the women ravished and half of the city exiled, but the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city. Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as when He fights on a day of battle. In that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which is in front of Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives will be split in its middle from east to west by a very large valley, so that half of the mountain will move toward the north and the other half toward the south. You will flee by the valley of My mountains, for the valley of the mountains will reach to Azel; yes, you will flee just as you fled before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Then the Lord, my God, will come, and all the holy ones with Him! In that day there will be no light; the luminaries will dwindle. And the Lord will be king over all the earth; in that day the Lord will be the only one, and His name the only one.

To think that this is the case or ever has been fulfilled even in a spiritual sense is a huge impossible undertaking. In yet another passage Amos is speaking to an evil unjust Israel and to them he says:

Amos 5:18, 20 Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light. Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?

For those who long for the coming Messiah in Israel there is no light.

Here we can see that this day will come in the midst of darkness, and it will mean darkness for certain ones — Why?

Isaiah 13:6-13 Howl 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 flame. 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 going 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.

Again we see the darkness of literal darkness and distressful punishment for the wicked for this day is for wrath, which accompanies its coming for the wicked.

In both these passages Isa 13 and Joel we had seen the sun and moon not shedding their light before the Day of The Lord. So what does this mean?

Matt24:29. This will happen after the Great Tribulation. As we have seen from these verses the great day of God the Almighty begins this day with Armageddons battle (with the gathering of the nations). Rev16:14.

Psalm 110:4-6 The Lord has sworn and will not change His mind, “You are a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek.” The Lord is at Your right hand; He will shatter kings in the day of His wrath. He will judge among the nations, He will fill them with corpses, He will shatter the chief men over a broad country.

The day of God’s wrath is obviously in the mind of many of the prophets.

Isaiah 2:2, 4, 10, 17, 19, 21 Now it will come about that In the last days The mountain of the house of the Lord Will be established as the chief of the mountains, And will be raised above the hills; And all the nations will stream to it. And He will judge between the nations, And will render decisions for many peoples; And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they learn war. Enter the rock and hide in the dust From the terror of the Lord and from the splendor of His majesty. The pride of man will be humbled And the loftiness of men will be abased; And the Lord alone will be exalted in that day, (this cannot be the Tribulation because Antichrist is exulted during Tribulation) Men will go into caves of the rocks And into holes of the ground Before the terror of the Lord And the splendor of His majesty, When He arises to make the earth tremble.

John is told these same things by Jesus in the Revelation:

Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains; and they * said to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb;

Revelation 6:15-16 NASB

Israel’s salvation is associated with this day:

Isaiah 10:20 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the remnant of Israel, and such as are escaped of the house of Jacob, shall no more again stay upon him that smote them; but shall stay upon the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth.

Satan’s downfall is part of that day:

Isaiah 27:1, 6, 9, 12-13 In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea. He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit. By this therefore shall the iniquity of Jacob be purged; and this is all the fruit to take away his sin; when he maketh all the stones of the altar as chalkstones that are beaten in sunder, the groves and images shall not stand up. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall beat off from the channel of the river unto the stream of Egypt, and ye shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel. And it shall come to pass in that day, that is the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem.

Nothing shall deliver the evil ones from God on that day:

Ezekiel 7:19 They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumblingblock of their iniquity.

If this were describing Tribulation men would be able to neither buy nor sell, but we know it is only God’s people who can neither buy nor sell during Tribulation.

Obadiah 1:15-17 For the day of the Lord is near upon all the heathen: as thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee: thy reward shall return upon thine own head. For as ye have drunk upon my holy mountain, so shall all the heathen drink continually, yea, they shall drink, and they shall swallow down, and they shall be as though they had not been. But upon mount Zion shall be deliverance, and there shall be holiness; and the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions.

Zephaniah 1:7-9, 14-18 Zephaniah 2:2-3, 5, 7 Before the decree bring forth, before the day pass as the chaff, before the fierce anger of the Lord come upon you, before the day of the Lord’s anger come upon you. Seek ye the Lord, all ye meek of the earth, which have wrought his judgment; seek righteousness, seek meekness: it may be ye shall be hid in the day of the Lord’s anger. Woe unto the inhabitants of the sea coast, the nation of the Cherethites! the word of the Lord is against you; O Canaan, the land of the Philistines, I will even destroy thee, that there shall be no inhabitant. Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord God: for the day of the Lord is at hand: for the Lord hath prepared a sacrifice, he hath bid his guests. And the coast shall be for the remnant of the house of Judah; they shall feed thereupon: in the houses of Ashkelon shall they lie down in the evening: for the Lord their God shall visit them, and turn away their captivity. And it shall come to pass in the day of the Lord’s sacrifice, that I will punish the princes, and the king’s children, and all such as are clothed with strange apparel. In the same day also will I punish all those that leap on the threshold, which fill their masters’ houses with violence and deceit. The great day of the Lord is near, it is near, and hasteth greatly, even the voice of the day of the Lord: the mighty man shall cry there bitterly. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, A day of the trumpet and alarm against the fenced cities, and against the high towers. And I will bring distress upon men, that they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the Lord: and their blood shall be poured out as dust, and their flesh as the dung. Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the Lord’s wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land.

What we see here does not exist during tribulation, but during the Millennium when Jesus returns to execute His judgment on the Nations who are alive at the time, but the day is not over with His coming it lasts for 1000 years. It ends with the condition spoken by Zephaniah above.

The Sun moon and stars are for signs, and for “Seasons” — the word is “Moed” in Hebrew it means “divine Appointments, it is used to mean “feast days” but better to mean Gods appointments. Each one of the Feasts points to an appointment with Messiah. His first coming and His second. The Tribulation is followed by these signs (darkening sun moon and stars, to announce His coming in the day of the Lord. In 1 Thess 5 Paul says it will be night over the earth when the Lord comes on the day of the Lord.)

Jesus says in Matthew 24: that the sun moon and stars will not shine on the day of His coming, and that this prophesied condition will occur following great Tribulation, thus setting for us it’s time in relation to the great Tribulation which proceeds this Day of the Lord.