5:2a

For you are fully aware: Paul had undoubtedly told the Thessalonians about these things when he was with them, but here he reminded them they could not know the exact day and time when Jesus would return.

5:2b

the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night: This whole sentence is a simile. Paul was not comparing Jesus to a thief who steals something. The point of the comparison is that Jesus will return unexpectedly, at a time when people are not prepared, in the same way that a thief comes during the night when people are asleep and not expecting him. Jesus himself taught similarly in Matthew 24:43. One way to express this would be:

the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief who comes at night (UBS Handbook handbook, p106).

the Day of the Lord: The phrase the Day of the Lord was a well-known phrase in the OT (for example, see Joel 2:31; Amos 5:18; Malachi 4:5). When this phrase occurred in the OT, “Lord” always referred to God the Father. The whole phrase therefore referred to the time when God would judge the people of the world and punish those who had sinned against him. However, in the NT, the Lord almost always refers to the Lord Jesus. So the Day of the Lord here means “the day when the Lord Jesus will return to earth.”

will come: In some languages it may not be possible to say that a day/time will come. If this is the case in your language, you may need to talk about Jesus himself coming.

© 2002 by SIL International®

Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible. BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.