As minor prophets go, Joel seems particularly minor. He prophesies during a national crisis; a horde of locusts have been destroying the crops of Judah. In this situation, Joel calls the people back to repentance. But, that was a very long time ago and far away. What can we expect to learn from paying attention to it today?
The first answer, one demanding our reflection, is that there are times when God speaks through national calamities. We should not assume that misfortune is the sign of God’s judgment: we may recall the disciples’ question to Jesus in John 9 as to whether the blind man’s misfortunes were due to his own sins or his parents’, and Jesus’ simple reply, `Neither’! But on the other hand, calamity does challenge us to ask whether perhaps there may be something God is seeking to tell us. Is there, possibly, some reason in us why our prayers are not being answered, why God’s loving power seems not to be operating in our situation? It may or may not be so (Job’s misfortunes, for instance, had nothing to do with sin). But the disaster in Joel’s time was of sufficient magnitude – something unheard of for generations (1:2) – as at least to raise that question. And, having described the situation at length, Joel reveals that it is indeed a `day of the Lord’, a judgment in which God is revealing Himself, calling His people, `Return to me with all your heart’. It is not an accident; the Lord has actually inaugurated the judgment, the horde of locusts is one He has sent: `The Lord thunders at the head of His army'(2:11).
A second lesson for us comes in the response God requires of His people (2:12-17). `Returning with all your hearts’ is not something superficial. This time of judgment is when the Lord says, STOP! If we have neglected God, it is not to be repaired with a single, momentary, snatched prayer of repentance. God is not a God to be trifled with; in Joel’s comment in 2:14, `Who knows? He may turn and have pity’, there is a reminder that God’s pardon is not to be presumed upon automatically, that indeed it is a `dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God’ (Heb 10:31). God’s wrath is not something just to be lightly and casually deflected before we return to more important matters.
God calls for our real attention. `”Even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.”‘ We may not be able to call up tears at will, but the fasting can be entered into as a sign of our seriousness with God. It is collective, deliberate, and takes precedence over everything else: `Gather the people… bring together the elders, gather the children, those nursing at the breast’, and `Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her chamber.’ This is serious; this is deliberately setting aside everything else to come before the living God. `Let the priests… weep between the temple porch and the altar. Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord.”‘
To worship like this is to recognise the presence of God in the everyday; God present in holiness, in judgment, in mercy. And, in a further though strange way, Joel helps us to grasp this reality, to understand that every deep encounter with God actually partakes of the ultimate, and of the most fundamental issues of human history that will be laid bare in its End. In Joel we seem to see a phenomenon that may help us in understanding a number of paradoxical Scripture passages. We might call it the `spiral’ nature of the biblical view of history: that, while history moves forward, certain patterns recur within it, which prefigure the apocalyptic events recapitulated and made manifest in its climax, when everything will be black and white without shades of grey. It is not, as ancient Greek or Indian thinkers might say, that history is bound into repeating itself in circles; God’s drama is going somewhere – the biblical revelation of history has a clear beginning, centre, and end. But within that, there are patterns for us to recognise; the ultimate drama is in some manner re-enacted in our different generations.
Is this not implicit in the puzzling way that Joel switches from the immediate `day of the Lord’ (1:15), the invasion of the locusts, to (as it would seem) the `day of the Lord’ (3:1-2,12-17) at the end of history, when (as Zechariah 14 and parts of Revelation set out more clearly) `all the nations’ will be united in assault against God’s people? And we also have 2:28-32 in between, which partake of a further crucial ‘day of the Lord’, the events of Pentecost: `This’, explained Peter to the wondering crowds on that occasion, `is what was spoken by the prophet Joel…’ It seems as if, in God’s prophetic eternity, individual times and places are not cut off from each other in the manner we – trapped empirically within time – might take them to be. Rather, every act of faithfulness, and every act of sin, are intimately bound up with the ultimate clash of good and evil; the confrontations and forces that the `apocalypse’ of Revelation is given us to `reveal’ clearly.
We sense this spiral occurring in other parts of Scripture too. `The secret power of lawlessness is already at work, but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so until he is taken out of the way’, says Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2:7 of the final anti-christ figure; `and then shall that lawless one be revealed…’ And one of the problems dogging interpretation of such passages is the sense that anti-God figures like Antiochus Epiphanes, or the persecuting Caesars, almost fulfil the prophecies of Daniel or Revelation, and yet clearly there is something more to come, another turn of the spiral; the `secret power’ is at work, but Satan has been held back from bringing it into open revelation. (Perhaps this is why Christians have repeatedly slipped into the mistake of thinking their time was the End; some major anti-God figure, a Hitler, say, seemed so much like what we were warned to expect – but `the End was still to come.’) Again with Matthew 24 and its parallel passages; commentators debate where the prophecy’s focus shifts from the AD 70 sack of Jerusalem to the terrible time of the End – because, in the spirals of prophetic history, the two shade into each other.
Joel seems deliberately to choose wording that accomplishes this shading. `It is close at hand – a day of darkness and gloom… a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old’ (2:2) is actually about the locusts (see 2:3,9), but sounds like the end-time invasion described in ch.3. So, still more, does 2:20: `I will drive the northern army far from you, pushing it into a parched and barren land’ is reminiscent of the end-time northern invasion of Israel described in Ezekiel 38 and 39 – but again in context (see 2:22-25) is actually about locusts. (We might notice that Revelation in its turn will pick up and consummate some of the imagery of Joel: when it presents the judgment of the armies arrayed against God’s people as the harvesting of the vineyard (Joel 3:12-13, cf Rev 14:18-20), or when the horrific `first woe’ of Rev 9 is presented in terms of locusts – except that this time their prey is human beings, not vegetation, and they and the angel whose power stands behind them come directly from the bottomless pit.) By his own unusual means, Joel accomplishes the vital task (as any prophetic preaching must) of enabling his readers to see their contemporary challenges, and need for repentance, in the light of the fundamental issues of the End. God’s judgment in the everyday and in the end-time are, through the prophetic perception, intimately united.
But if God’s judgment is a reality in the contemporary situation, so is the promise of His presence. And a further vital lesson in Joel emerges when we look at the end-point of his prophecy. `Then you will know that I, the Lord your God, dwell in Zion, my holy hill’, says God in 3:17. The question of 2:17 – `Why should they say among the peoples, “Where is their God?”‘ – is to be answered irrefutably; and the book’s triumphant closing verse announces, `”Their blood-guilt, which I have not pardoned, I will pardon”. The Lord dwells in Zion!’ On the basis of divine forgiveness (where surely the new testament gospel hovers on the horizon), God’s genuine presence is promised to His people. And this is the end-point of other prophetic books too: the restoration of the glory, the tangible presence of God, among His people. It is the theme of the closing quarter of Ezekiel, for example, leading up to its triumphant final verse: `And the name of the city from that time on will be: The Lord is there.’ It is the movement of thought back in Exodus too: that God redeemed His people so that He may dwell among them; and that book closes with the tabernacle completed, and the glory of the Lord coming down to fill it. This is what Joel too promises; this is the dream he longs to see fulfilled.
And the glory of the New Testament church is that we have that dream fulfilled! We together are the `temple of the Holy Spirit’, proclaims Paul, a `holy temple… a dwelling in which God lives by His Spirit.’ And when we ask the question (always important for grasping old testament passages), What in Joel does the new testament indicate is crucially important?- we are pointed directly towards this fulfilment. For indeed there is the section of Joel that comes back into prominence at one of the crucial moments of history, the day of Pentecost – when the apostle Peter turned to Joel 2:28-32 and said, `This is what was spoken by the prophet.’
`And afterwards’, declares the Lord through Joel 2 and then through Peter, `I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days…. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ We can see why this was such a staggering prophecy; and why, indeed, the apostle Paul could on at least one occasion present its fulfilment as the aim of the whole drama of salvation: `He redeemed us in order that… by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit’ (Gal 3:14). Throughout the thousands or tens of thousands of years of human history, God’s Spirit had occasionally, in grace, lighted on a prophet here, a seer there, a king there. It was an incredible privilege (`Do not take your Holy Spirit from me’, pleads David in Psalm 51). But now the incredible occurs. God’s Spirit will be poured out on all people; and young men and women will be indwelt by the Spirit as if they were the most senior of high priests. And instead of the presence of God being limited to that holiest of places in the heart of the temple, approachable only through an extended ritual of atonement just once a year, now, astonishingly, our `blood-guilt will be pardoned’, and the glory of the Lord will come in power to anyone who calls upon His Name. It is an unbelievable vision: the miracle of the Spirit fulfils, more than they probably dreamed, the longing of the Old Testament prophets that God’s glory should dwell among His people…
And, as Pentecost showed, it was a promise for all nations. Perhaps this too is hinted at in the close of Joel, in 3:18: `A fountain will flow out of the Lord’s house and will water the valley of acacias.’ Joel’s fellow-prophet Ezekiel has a comparable and glorious vision in Ezk 47 of a river of water flowing out from the house of the Lord into the dead lands, `deep enough to swim in’, and everywhere it comes `the water there becomes fresh. Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows.’ Surely this ties in with Jesus’ promise: `Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him’ (John 7:38). (`By this’, added John, `he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were later to receive.’) The incredible happens: God comes to live, by His Spirit, among His people; living water flows out from each and every believer, from His House, His Church, and wherever the water of the Spirit comes, death turns to life, renewal replaces barrenness, swarms of living creatures will flourish…
It is a wonderful picture; it is, we might say, `Emmanuel, God with us.’ And Peter, taking up Joel, says to us, It’s happened; He is here. Just as the judgment of God finds its way into our everyday life, and repentance before God is called for in our everyday life, so in turn the promise of the Spirit is fulfilled in our everyday lives. `I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth… And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’
