Joel 2:28-32

2. THE OUTPOURING OF THE SPIRIT

Joel 2:28

Upon these promises of physical blessing there follows another of the pouring forth of the Spirit: the prophecy by which Joel became the Prophet of Pentecost, and through which his book is best known among Christians.

When fertility has been restored to the land, the seasons again run their normal courses, and the people eat their food and be full-"It shall come to pass after these things, I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh". The order of events makes us pause to question: does Joel mean to imply that physical prosperity must precede spiritual fullness? It would be unfair to assert that he does, without remembering what he understands by the physical blessings. To Joel these are the token that God has returned to His people. The drought and the famine produced by the locusts were signs of His anger and of His divorce of the land. The proofs that He has relented, and taken Israel back into a spiritual relation to Himself, can, therefore, from Joel's point of view, only be given by the healing of the people's wounds. In plenteous rains and full harvests God sets His seal to man's penitence. Rain and harvest are not merely physical benefits, but religious sacraments: signs that God has returned to His people, and that His zeal is again stirred on their behalf. Joel 1:18 This has to be made clear before there can be talk of any higher blessing. God has to return to His people and to show His love for them before He pours forth His Spirit upon them. That is what Joel intends by the order he pursues, and not that a certain stage of physical comfort is indispensable to a high degree of spiritual feeling and experience. The early and latter rains, the fullness of corn, wine, and oil, are as purely religious to Joel, though not so highly religious, as the phenomena of the Spirit in men.

But though that be an adequate answer to our question so far as Joel himself is concerned, it does not exhaust the question with regard to history in general. From Joel's own standpoint physical blessings may have been as religious as spiritual; but we must go further, and assert that for Joel's anticipation of the baptism of the Spirit by a return of prosperity there is an ethical reason and one which is permanently valid in history. A certain degree of prosperity, and even of comfort, is an indispensable condition of that universal and lavish exercise of the religious faculties, which Joel pictures under the pouring forth of God's Spirit.

The history of prophecy itself furnishes us with proofs of this. When did prophecy most flourish in Israel? When had the Spirit of God most freedom in developing the intellectual and moral nature of Israel? Not when the nation was struggling with the conquest and settlement of the land, not when it was engaged with the embarrassments and privations of the Syrian wars; but an Amos, a Hosea, an Isaiah came forth at the end of the long, peaceful, and prosperous reigns of Jeroboam II and Uzziah. The intellectual strength and liberty of the great Prophet of the Exile, his deep insight into God's purposes and his large view of the future, had not been possible without the security and comparative prosperity of the Jews in Babylon, from among whom he wrote. In Haggai and Zechariah, on the other hand, who worked in the hunger-bitten colony of returned exiles, there was no such fullness of the Spirit. Prophecy, we saw, was then starved by the poverty and meanness of the national life from which it rose. All this is very explicable. When men are stunned by such a calamity as Joel describes, or when they are engrossed by the daily struggle with bitter enemies and a succession of bad seasons, they may feel the need of penitence and be able to speak with decision upon the practical duty of the moment, to a degree not attainable in better days, but they lack the leisure, the freedom, and the resources amid which their various faculties of mind and soul can alone respond to the Spirit influence.

Has it been otherwise in the history of Christianity? Our Lord Himself found His first disciples, not in a hungry and ragged community, but amid the prosperity and opulence of Galilee. They left all to follow Him and achieved their ministry, in poverty and persecution, but they brought to that ministry the force of minds and bodies trained in a very fertile land and by a prosperous commerce. Paul, in his apostolate, sustained himself by the labor of his hands, but he was the child of a rich civilization and the citizen of a great empire. The Reformation was preceded by the Renaissance, and on the Continent of Europe drew its forces, not from the enslaved and impoverished populations of Italy and Southern Austria, but from the large civic and commercial centers of Germany. An acute historian, in his recent lectures on the "Economic Interpretation of History," observes that every religious revival in England has happened upon a basis of comparative prosperity. He has proved "the opulence of Norfolk during the epoch of Lollardy," and pointed out that "the Puritan movement was essentially and originally one of the middle classes, of the traders in towns and of the farmers in the country"; that the religious state of the Church of England was never so low as among the servile and beggarly clergy of the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth centuries; that the Nonconformist bodies who kept religion alive during this period were closely identified with the leading movements of trade and finance; and that even Wesley's great revival of religion among the laboring classes of England took place at a time when prices were far lower than in the previous century, wages had slightly risen and "most laborers were small occupiers; there was therefore in the comparative plenty of the time an opening for a religious movement among the poor, and Wesley was equal to the occasion." He might have added that the great missionary movement of the nineteenth century is contemporaneous with the enormous advance of our commerce and our empire.

On the whole, then, the witness of history is uniform. Poverty and persecution, "famine, nakedness, peril, and sword," put a keenness upon the spirit of religion, while luxury rots its very fibers; but a stable basis of prosperity is indispensable to every social and religious reform, and God's Spirit finds fullest course in communities of a certain degree of civilization and of freedom from sordidness.

We may draw from this an impressive lesson for our own day. Joel predicts that, upon the new prosperity of his land, the lowest classes of society shall be permeated by the spirit of prophecy. Is it not part of the secret of the failure of Christianity to enlist large portions of our population, that the basis of their life is so sordid and insecure? Have we not yet to learn from the Hebrew prophets that some amount of freedom in a people and some amount of health are indispensable to a revival of religion? Lives which are strained and starved, lives which are passed in rank discomfort and under grinding poverty, without the possibility of the independence of the individual or of the sacredness of the home, cannot be religious except in the most rudimentary sense of the word. For the revival of energetic religion among such lives we must wait for a better distribution, not of wealth, but of the bare means of comfort, leisure, and security. When, to our penitence and our striving, God restores the years which the locust has eaten, when the social plagues of rich men's selfishness and the poverty of the very poor are lifted from us, then may we look for the fulfillment of Joel's prediction-"even upon all the slaves and upon the handmaidens will I pour out My Spirit in those days."

The economic problem, therefore, has also its place in the warfare for the kingdom of God.

"And it shall be that after such things, I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your old men shall dream dreams, Your young men shall see visions: And even upon all the slaves and the handmaidens in those days will I pour out My Spirit. And I will set signs in heaven and on earth, Blood and fire and pillars of smoke. The sun shall he turned to darkness, And the moon to blood, Before the coming of the Day of Jehovah, the great and the awful. And it shall be that every one who calls on the name of Jehovah shall be saved: For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be a remnant, as Jehovah hath spoken, And among the fugitives those whom Jehovah calleth."

This prophecy divides into two parts-the outpouring of the Spirit, and the appearance of the terrible Day of the Lord.

The Spirit of God is to be poured "on all flesh," says the prophet. By this term, which is sometimes applied to all things that breathe, and sometimes to mankind as a whole, Joel means Israel only: the heathen are to be destroyed, Nor did Peter, when he quoted the passage at the Day of Pentecost, mean anything more. He spoke to Jews and proselytes: "for the promise is to you and your children, and to them that are afar off": it was not till afterwards that he discovered that the Holy Ghost was granted to the Gentiles, and then he was unready for the revelation and surprised by it. Acts 10:45 But within Joel's Israel the operation of the Spirit was to be at once thorough and universal. All classes would be affected, and affected so that the simplest and rudest would become prophets.

The limitation was therefore not without its advantages. In the earlier stages of all religions it is impossible to be both extensive and intensive. With a few exceptions, the Israel of Joel's time was a narrow and exclusive body, hating and hated by other peoples. Behind the Law it kept itself strictly aloof. But without doing so, Israel could hardly have survived or prepared itself at that time for its influence on the world. Heathenism threatened it from all sides with the most insidious of infections; and there awaited it in the near future a still more subtle and powerful means of disintegration. In the wake of Alexander's expeditions, Hellenism poured across all the East; There was not a community nor a religion, save Israel's, which was not Hellenised. That Israel remained Israel, in spite of Greek arms and the Greek mind, was due to the legalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, and to what we call the narrow enthusiasm of Joel. The hearts which kept their passion so confined felt all the deeper for its limits. They would be satisfied with nothing less than the inspiration of every Israelite, the fulfillment of the prayer of Moses: "Would to God that all Jehovah's people were prophets!" And of itself this carries Joel's prediction to a wider fulfillment. A nation of prophets is meant for the world. But even the best of men do not see the full force of the truth God gives to them, nor follow it even to its immediate consequences. Few of the prophets did so, and at first none of the apostles. Joel does not hesitate to say that the heathen shall be destroyed. He does not think of Israel's mission as foretold by the Second Isaiah; nor of "Malachi's" vision of the heathen waiting upon Jehovah. But in the near future of Israel there was waiting another prophet to carry Joel's doctrine to its full effect upon the world, to rescue the gospel of God's grace from the narrowness of legalism and the awful pressure of Apocalypse, and by the parable of Jonah, the type of the prophet nation, to show to Israel that God had granted to the Gentiles also repentance unto life.

That it was the lurid clouds of Apocalypse which thus hemmed in our prophet's view, is clear from the next verses. They bring the terrible manifestations of God's wrath in nature very closely upon the lavish outpouring of the Spirit: "the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood, the great and terrible Day of the Lord." Apocalypse must always paralyze the missionary energies of religion. Who can think of converting the world when the world is about to be convulsed? There is only time for a remnant to be saved.

But when we get rid of Apocalypse, as the Book of Jonah does, then we have time and space opened up again, and the essential forces of such a prophecy of the Spirit as Joel has given us burst their national and temporary confines, and are seen to be applicable to all mankind.