Let’s Try This Again

I keep hearing the same defense whenever I bring up Bo Polny and Carolyn Dennis's teaching on the great and terrible day. They never named a date. No "June 30th." No "July 1st." Just a window, a countdown, a season to watch. On the surface that sounds like it satisfies Jesus's words in Matthew 24:36 - "of that day and hour no one knows." If no single day or hour was ever spoken, the reasoning goes, no line was crossed. I want to settle that here, using their own words and the full breadth of what Scripture says about knowing the timing of the Day of the Lord, not just the one verse that defense leans on. I also want to settle a second question: what kind of day the great and terrible day of the Lord actually is. Both questions get a clear answer below.

A Mea Culpa From Me

Fairness requires a correction before I go any further. In the last podcast I framed this loosely as date-setting for "the Rapture." That overstates what the broadcast actually claims. It doesn't describe the church being caught up to meet Christ in the air in the sense 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 describes. It describes something else - a sudden removal of people said to carry "the Nephilim spirit," alongside a death-angel event and a Pentecost-style outpouring, with the Tribulation still said to be "down the line" afterward. Whatever else is wrong with that picture, it isn't, by its own description, a claim about the timing of the Rapture of the Church. I'd rather name exactly what was claimed than credit a Rapture date that wasn't actually set. The critique stands on firmer ground that way and hopefully this clears that criticism up.

What Scripture Actually Establishes

Scripture uses several phrases for the time surrounding Christ's return - the Day of the Lord, the Day of Christ, the Day of Wrath, the Time of Trouble, the End of the Age, the Day of Indignation. Compare how each one is actually used across the Minor Prophets, Daniel, Matthew, and the Epistles, and they all land on the same seven-year Tribulation - not seven separate events stacked on a timeline. The great and terrible day of the Lord isn't an eighth category sitting outside that. It's the same Day of the Lord, named twice in the Old Testament - Malachi 4:5 and Joel 2:31 - with the focus narrowed to the darkening of the sun and moon at the Tribulation's midpoint. It sits inside the seven years, in the second half, not as a stand-alone day positioned in front of them. This teaching relocates it twice over. First, it places the great and terrible day as an imminent, near-term event - a death angel, a Red Sea-style deliverance, and Pentecost - occurring before the Tribulation even begins, stating plainly that "the great tribulation will be down the line" afterward. Second, as I'll show further down, it also shrinks the day itself - from a period the text never bounds to a literal twenty-four hours with a sunset start and a morning end. I've already addressed the first problem at length. What follows addresses the second, along with the deeper problem of how anyone could claim to know when any of it happens.

The Verse This Defense Leans On - And The Two It Ignores

Matthew 24:36 says no one knows "the day or hour." That's true, and I'm not disputing it. But Jesus didn't leave that as His only word on the subject. When the apostles asked Him directly about timing after the resurrection, He answered with broader language:

"It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority." (Acts 1:7, NKJV)

The Greek pairs two distinct words on purpose. "Times" translates chronos - an indeterminate duration. "Seasons" translates kairos - a fixed, bounded, appointed period with a beginning and an end. A countdown window is, by definition, a kairos claim. Acts 1:7 doesn't carve out an exception for windows the way some might assume - it places the surrounding season under the same restriction as the day and hour itself. It places both categories - the point and the period - under the Father's authority alone. Paul uses the identical pair of words writing to the Thessalonians, and he places it in the very sentence that introduces the Day of the Lord by name:

"But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need that I write to you. For you yourselves know perfectly that the Day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night." (1 Thessalonians 5:1-2, NKJV)

This isn't a separate principle being borrowed and applied by analogy. Paul states the denial of times and seasons as the reason the Day of the Lord behaves the way it does - unpredictable, sudden, like a thief. The very day this teaching narrows to a window is the day Scripture names as the one example of a kairos no believer is given to calculate. Deuteronomy 13:1-3 adds one more layer worth holding alongside this: even a sign that comes to pass isn't, by itself, proof a message is from God. The deeper question is always whether a teaching leads people toward settled trust in what God has already revealed, or toward a private timetable that has to be updated whenever the window closes without incident.

What Was Actually Said

Set the "no date was named" defense beside the actual broadcast. It announced a window opening at sunset on March 19th, running through a stated target of Pentecost, May 24th, 2026. Within that window, it laid out a sixteen-day countdown to a specific date, Nisan 16, and said plainly the event was "expected to trigger potentially tonight, the 19th or 20th, or this weekend." Both boundaries were named. The specific number of days inside the window was named. Viewers were told what to do with their bodies and their schedules - stay put, gather peace scriptures, remain in a "war room" - for the duration of that window, attached explicitly to the great and terrible day by name. That's a kairos claim in every respect Scripture uses the word. The absence of a single calendar date doesn't place it outside Acts 1:7 or 1 Thessalonians 5:1 - it places it squarely inside the category those verses name on purpose, separately from "day or hour," so that narrowing the focus to a season couldn't be used as an escape hatch. The defense doesn't refute the charge. It restates the charge.

The Pattern Has Already Shown Itself

Deuteronomy 18:21-22 sets the baseline: a word presented as from the Lord that doesn't come to pass was not spoken by Him. In this very broadcast, a prior window from the previous year is admitted to have failed, explained away by saying the celestial signs simply "happened in the wrong order." A teaching that already required one retroactive reinterpretation to survive its own missed window isn't a neutral case. It's the pattern Deuteronomy 18 was written to help believers recognize before a second or third window comes and goes.

Why The Great And Terrible Day Isn't A Single Day

This teaching treats the great and terrible day of the Lord as a literal twenty-four-hour event - beginning at a specific sunset, finished by morning. The Hebrew word translated "day" - yom - is used throughout the Minor Prophets the same way the broader phrase "Day of the Lord" is used: as an idiom for an extended period of God's dealing with the earth, not strictly one rotation of the sun. The Day of the Lord itself is not a literal day but the entire seven-year Tribulation, and the great and terrible day of the Lord, built from the identical Hebrew word inside the identical phrase, can't be read by a different rule. Joel 2:10-11 names this stretch the great and terrible day of the LORD, surrounded by language describing an advancing army and a darkened sky - an unfolding campaign of judgment, not a tidy overnight event. That stretch parallels Daniel's description of the Great Tribulation covering the entire second half of the seventieth week - roughly three and a half years, not a day.

Peter's Better Description

Peter addresses those who doubt the Lord's promise will ever be kept: "But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." (2 Peter 3:8, NKJV). Two verses later he uses "day" again for this same event - "the Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night" (2 Peter 3:10, NKJV) - then describes the heavens passing away and a new heavens and earth following. That's not a twenty-four-hour clock. A teaching that gives viewers a sunset to watch for and a morning to expect relief by has built its framework on a word it hasn't let Scripture define.

What These Failures Cost The Church's Witness

Every time a window like this opens and closes without anything happening, it doesn't just embarrass the teacher who set it. It hands ammunition to exactly the people 2 Peter 3:3-4 warned the church about: "scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, 'Where is the promise of His coming?'" A failed countdown doesn't read to a watching world as one teacher's miscalculation. It reads as evidence that the whole subject - the actual, certain promise of Christ's return - isn't to be taken seriously. The unbeliever rarely distinguishes between a fringe broadcast and the historic Christian hope; the embarrassment lands on both.

This isn't a new problem. The Millerite movement set October 22, 1844, as the date of Christ's return and watched it pass in what history still calls the Great Disappointment, scattering thousands of sincere believers into disillusionment. Edgar Whisenant's 1988 booklet gave eighty-eight reasons the Rapture would happen that September, and printed a million copies before the date came and went. Harold Camping set a date in 1994, watched it fail, and set another for May 21, 2011, then a third for that October - each failure rebroadcast nationally as proof that Christians who talk about the Lord's return can't be trusted to know what they're talking about. None of those teachers intended that outcome. None of them avoided it either. A pattern of confident, specific, and wrong is what trains a watching world to stop listening before the day that actually matters arrives.

How I'd Want This Used

None of this is offered to win an argument for its own sake. People who have built their schedules, their finances, or their family's sense of safety around a window like this one deserve a clearer reason to let it go than simple disagreement. The reason given here is textual: the very passages this teaching quotes - Joel, Matthew 24, the Day of the Lord itself - don't support either the narrow window drawn or the twenty-four-hour shape given to it. Anyone holding to this material in good faith can be shown exactly where the text and the teaching part ways, verse by verse, without needing their sincerity questioned to do it. It's worth saying plainly what this isn't claiming, too. It isn't claiming the Lord's return is distant, uncertain, or unworthy of urgent attention. It isn't claiming watchfulness is unspiritual. It's claiming that watchfulness and date-calculation are two different things, that Scripture commends the first and withholds the means for the second, and that a teaching which collapses that distinction - however sincerely - isn't building on firmer ground just because it avoided saying one specific calendar date out loud.

The Best Answer

Was a date set? By the narrowest definition - a single named calendar day - no, and that distinction is worth holding onto rather than blurring. By the Bible's definition, which explicitly includes bounded windows and appointed seasons as their own forbidden category, separate from and alongside "day or hour" - yes, repeatedly, and by name, attached directly to the great and terrible day of the Lord. That defense doesn't survive contact with Acts 1:7 or 1 Thessalonians 5:1. It survives only as long as the conversation stays confined to Matthew 24:36 alone. And the great and terrible day of the Lord itself is not, and cannot be, a twenty-four-hour event. It is a period - tied to the second half of the seven-year Tribulation, described in Joel alongside an advancing army and a darkened sky, and described by Peter in terms that explicitly resist a human clock. That's the same mistake this whole study began by warning against, and on this point, the text leaves no real room for a different verdict.

Scripture isn't silent about the great and terrible day of the Lord. It's real, it's future, and it's certain. What Scripture withholds is the calendar, and what it never grants is a twenty-four-hour shape. 1 Thessalonians 5:6 gives the alternative to a countdown: "let us watch and be sober." Not a window. Not a sunset deadline. A posture - one that doesn't need updating when a previous prediction quietly fails and a new one takes its place.