“Who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth?” This parallel couplet contains a significant question. Who will be able to survive that day when the harvest will have been gathered and the field will be burned? In that day all telestial people and things will be removed from this planet, and the earth will shift up to a terrestrial or paradisiacal condition. There will be a great cleansing. The Lord and his tens of thousands of holy ones will be like “a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap.” Fire and soap are two well-known cleansing agents. Those who are clean will abide the day of cleansing.
For explanation of the refiner’s fire, see commentary at 1 Nephi 20:10. A fuller, who usually had his workshop near a spring or some other water source, worked with his soap to clean cloth, ridding it of all stains to make it white.