Joel 2
In the second chapter, we have again a detail of national miseries, but with a near approach to that great, final, judicial day, which is to close, in righteous, wrathful visitation, the story of Israel in apostacy. The call to repentance is repeated with the hope of a turning of God’s anger away. And however suitable to the calamity of that day these calls of the prophet may have been, we know that there will be this spirit of humbling and confession in the coming days of his nation, and on the eve of their deliverance. A spirit of grace is then to be poured out, and every one is to mourn apart. The punishment of the people’s sin is then to be accepted. If the trumpet has blown “an alarm,” to tell of the enemy at hand (Joel 2:1), it will be blown, but not as an alarm, to call the people in assembly to the mourning (Joel 2:15).
So that in this feature of the prophet’s day, we may trace again the moral circumstances of the closing day. Calamity comes as the judgment of the Lord in righteousness; repentance comes as the fruit of the Spirit in grace. And then, as the fruit of this repentance, the whole system in Israel is revivified; all fruitfulness is pledged to the land now wasted (Joel 2:21-24); times of refreshing and the restitution of all things are anticipated; and “My people,” says the Lord again and again, “shall never be ashamed” (Joel 2:26). The gift of the Spirit is promised, and the times of “the day of the Lord” are seen to end in the destruction of the enemies, and the deliverance of the Israel of God (Joel 2:31-32). In all this we have Matthew 24 and Acts 2 Combined: the one giving us a sample of the promised gift; the other detailing the terrors of that day which is to make an end of the confederated enemies of Israel, to deliver God’s remnant who have called on the name of the Lord, and to bring in the elect for whose sake those days of terror are to be shortened (Matt. 24:22).
Indeed, all the great characteristics of this coming day are clustered here. The pouring out of the Spirit (Joel 2:28)—the deliverance of the elect brought to call on the name of the Lord (Joel 2:32)—the judgment of the apostate nation by the hand of their great enemy, as in “the great tribulation” (Joel 2:1-11)—the destruction of that enemy, the confederated Gentiles, by the Lord Himself, when sun, moon, and stars shall be disturbed (Joel 2:30-32)—the peaceful reign and glory of the King in Zion (Joel 2:19-29), following all this; these things are together here, as we find them scattered through all the prophets. I say, we see them here clustered together. We may not be competent to settle them in their order, or to put them in the presence of each other, and in their relations, as they will, by and by, be the living materials of the scene around; yet do they contain rich principles of truth, which we can be edified in knowing, and in which we can justify the ways of that wisdom that has ordered them, which is now revealing them, and will in due season accomplish them.