The Lord’s Day, Resurrection Day

Easter has a way of sneaking up on you. Because Passover, the Jewish holy day which undergirds Easter, runs on a lunar calendar rather than a solar one, it wanders around our solar calendar year to year, showing up when you least expect it. But here is the thing about Easter Sunday that matters far more than the date: every Sunday is Easter. Every Sunday is Resurrection Day. Christians have been gathering on the first day of the week since the tomb was found empty, and the reason for that goes deeper than tradition. It goes all the way to the heart of what the Christian faith is about.

Identifying the Day

The Apostle John, writing from exile on the island of Patmos, gives us a tantalizing phrase in Revelation 1:10: I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. Three short words — the Lord’s Day — and yet they open up a significant question. What day is he talking about?

Some commentators have argued that John is not referring to a day of the week at all. They point out that the Old Testament is full of references to the Day of the Lord as a prophetic and fearsome term. Isaiah speaks of a day of reckoning against everyone who is proud and lifted up. (Isa 2.12) Joel warns that the Day of the Lord will come as destruction from the Almighty. (Joel 1.15) Amos cautions those who are eagerly longing for it: that day will be darkness, not light. (Amos 5.18) Zephaniah, Zechariah, Paul, and Peter all strike the same ominous note. (Zeph 1.7-8, Zech 14.1, 1 Thess 5.2, 2 Pt 3.10) Whatever else the Day of the Lord is, it is not a pleasant prospect. It is a time of judgment, of trouble such as the world has never seen, a time of bringing things to a final and terrible close.

So, is that what John means? Is he saying that in a kind of prophetic ecstasy he was transported forward in time, seeing the great Day of the Lord in vision? Some careful and conservative Bible scholars have taken exactly that position. One 19th-century commentator described John as soaring on the wings of prophetic ecstasy, traversing ages, moving among the most stupendous administrations of the last day.¹ It is a vivid picture, and it is not without its merit, since John does have experiences in the book of Revelation where he is, in effect, lifted out of his own time and shown things to come.

But there is a problem with that reading, and it is a grammatical one.

The Greek Makes the Case

In the Greek of the New Testament, the familiar prophetic phrase is haemera kuriou, the Day of the Lord. This is a construction of two nouns with the descriptive “of the Lord” in the genitive case. This is the prophetic term as described above, it is especially that day that comes from the Lord in a display of his wrath and judgement on the earth. But what John writes in Revelation 1:10 is quite different: kuriake haemera. Here the word kuriake is an adjective, not a noun. It emphasizes ownership in a particular way. (In the empire, the same word described the monthly “Lord’s day” — or, “emperor’s day” — a regular day in the imperial calendar honoring the Emperor.)

This same adjective appears in only one other place in the entire New Testament: 1 Corinthians 11:20, where Paul writes about gathering to eat the Lord’s Supper. Not the Supper of the Lord in a prophetic or judicial sense, but the supper that belongs to Him, that is His. The parallel is striking. Just as the supper belongs to Christ, this day belongs to Christ. The Lord’s Day is simply His day.

And which day does He own? Sunday. He died on the eve of the Sabbath. He rose on the first day of the week. From that morning forward, Sunday has been His.

How the Day Became His Day

It is worth thinking of the resurrection accounts for a moment, because there is something remarkable about the way the first day of the week repeats itself in those stories. On that first Easter morning, the disciples were in disarray. They watched their Lord die. They watched Him buried. And then, on the Sabbath, they have nothing to do but wait, wait, wait. The waiting must have been nearly unbearable. Suddenly, on the morning of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene arrives, breathless, with news that defies understanding: the tomb is empty. Some run to look. Some refuse to believe. Two disciples walk five miles with a stranger who turns out to be the risen Christ, and they do not recognize Him until the breaking of bread. When He disappears, they rush back to Jerusalem. And then He appears in a locked room and speaks peace to His stunned and weeping friends.

We are told that Thomas is not there for any of this. And Thomas, being the honest soul that he is, refuses to believe without evidence. Unless he can see the wounds with his own eyes, he will not believe. So the Lord makes him wait a week. Eight days later, on the next first day of the week, Christ appears again.² Thomas sees Him and says the only sensible thing a person can say in that moment: My Lord and my God.

He kept appearing to them on Sunday. It is His day. He owns it.

The New Testament does not give us an overwhelming volume of references to Sunday worship, but what evidence there is points in one direction. Paul preaches on the first day of the week in Troas — the occasion made memorable by a young man named Eutychus, who fell out of an upper-story window during the sermon. (Ac 20.7) Paul instructs the Corinthians to set aside their collections on the first day of the week. (1 Cor 16.2) And from that generation forward, Christians have worshipped on Sunday. Broadly speaking, across nearly every tradition and every century, the church has gathered on Resurrection Day. Not on the Sabbath.

Two Days, Two Faiths, Two Hopes

That difference between Saturday and Sunday is easy to overlook, but it is not a small thing. It reflects something fundamental about the difference between the Old Testament faith and the New.

The Sabbath points backward. God created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh, and so the people of God were to rest on the seventh day as well. The Sabbath commemorates the completion of creation. It says: look back at what God has made. It is a day of rest rooted in a finished work.

Sunday also points to a finished work, but a different one. It points to the cross, and beyond the cross to an empty tomb. But it does not merely look backward. It looks forward. Paul writes in Romans 8 that the whole creation groans together, and not only creation but believers themselves, waiting eagerly for the redemption of the body, the day when the New Creation is complete. Sunday is a weekly reminder that the story is not over, that there is a day coming when everything that has been groaning and waiting will be resolved. Every act of Sunday worship is a kind of rehearsal for that day, a foretaste of what it will mean to worship God when every evil impulse has been done away with, when we are fully and finally what we were made to be.

We Are Not Yet What We Will Be

The Lord’s Day anticipates the day of our complete salvation. That is a proposition worth our meditation. We are not yet what we will be. Paul tells the Corinthians that there is a mystery at the heart of Christian hope: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. The dead will be raised imperishable. The perishable will put on the imperishable. The mortal will put on immortality.

Every Sunday is a token of that coming day. We come aside to worship, and in doing so we are practicing, however imperfectly, what it will one day mean to be in the presence of God without the weight of sin and death pulling at us. Whatever it is like to be in the presence of God, one thing is certain: it will not be boring.

The resurrection of Christ guarantees this. His resurrection is not just a remarkable historical event. It is a down payment, a promise, a proof that the power of death has been broken and that those who trust in Him will share in what He has. Resurrection Day is coming. Sunday is meant to remind us of that, week after week, until the day itself arrives.

The question worth asking, then, is a personal one. When that great day comes, will it be resurrection day for you? It is not enough to attend services and feel a general sense of religious warmth. What is needed is something more specific: a personal reckoning with the fact of sin, a genuine cry for mercy, and a trust placed in Jesus Christ and no one else. Those who do that have a share in the hope that Sunday represents. They are waiting, as John was waiting on Patmos, not merely for another week to pass, but for the Lord’s Day that is still to come.

---

Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.

This article reproduces a sermon preached on April 5, 2026, which you can watch it here. We used Claude.AI to turn the transcript into the article. Pastor Johnson has reviewed and approved the final form of this article.

1. J. A. Seiss, The Apocalypse: A Series of Special Lectures on the Revelation of Jesus Christ (Philadelphia School of the Bible, 1865), 1:69–70. [↩]
2. In the Jewish manner of counting days, the count would begin on Sunday and end on Sunday — eight days. [↩]