191208 Sermon on Luke 21:25-36 (Advent 2) December 8, 2019 The day of the Lord is an important thing you hear about in the Scriptures in many different places. At its most basic meaning, the day of the Lord is the day when the Lord intervenes and acts. He has held his peace until that day. Now waiting is over. Now he is going to do something. So let’s consider a couple examples of God intervening and altering the normal course of events.First, think of God’s redemption of Israel from Egypt. God had been tolerant of the enslavement of his people. Their cries of lament finally moved him to put a stop to it. God gave Pharaoh the opportunity to repent, but soon God hardened his heart in judgment. Although Pharaoh was asked to change his mind, God made it so that Pharaoh couldn’t. God was going to make an example out of Pharaoh’s hard head. He slammed his hammer upon this anvil and the news of it flew like sparks into all the surrounding countries. People learned of the mighty deeds that God did to the most powerful nation on earth at that time.We won’t go into the details of all of God’s actions against Pharaoh and Egypt. You are familiar with the ten plagues, the redemption of Passover, the rescuing of the people of Israel when God held back the walls of water. These were good days for the Israelites.  That’s an understatement. This is the high point of Israel’s history. What more could they ask for than that they should dwell together with God, seeing his glory at Mt. Sinai, or Mt. Horeb, and knowing that all was well. God loved them and would fight for them. The day of the Lord is always a good thing for God’s people. It is when they see him act with power and glory.But note that this same day is not good for those who are not God’s people. The plagues tortured the Egyptians until they were finally glad to see the Israelites go. The waters of the Red Sea did not harm the Israelites, but those same waters crushed and killed Pharaoh and all his soldiers. God is good to his people and takes vengeance upon his enemies.With this first example of a day of the Lord, a day of God’s acting, we see God saving all the descendants of Israel because he loved them and had made a covenant with their ancestor Abraham. With my second example of the day of the Lord we will see that the matter wasn’t so black and white. After God’s people entered the Promised Land they grew fat and rich. For their standing before God they relied upon the fact that they were blood-descendants of Abraham. Although they honored God with their lips, their hearts were far from him. They did not fear love and trust in the Lord their God. They did not call upon him in every trouble, pray, praise and give thanks. They did not gladly hear and learn preaching and his Word. Instead they lived like all their neighbors. Their hearts went after other sources for blessing and success.God was patient with these shenanigans for a long time. But finally he had had enough. He destroyed the northern kingdom and largely took away his Word from them. He also destroyed the southern Kingdom. Jerusalem with her temple was razed to the ground. But God did not entirely take away his Word from the survivors. The Jewish leaders would eventually come back from Babylon and do the tremendously hard work of rebuilding what had been torn down.With this second example of the day of the Lord, the day of God’s action, you see that he even discarded those who had once been his people. They lost their faith even though they went to Church every week. God is not a respecter of persons. He would have liked to have gathered them under his wings like a hen does with her chicks, but they would not. Therefore he said those awful words: “Depart from me you workers of lawlessness. I do not know you.”With this second example of the day of the Lord things aren’t as black and white as they were in the first example. God takes vengeance upon his enemies, and the people of God can’t rejoice with all their hea