_PROSPERITY AND THE SPIRIT_
JOEL ii. 18-32 (Eng.; ii. 18—iii. Heb.)
_Then did Jehovah become jealous for His land, and took pity upon His
people_—with these words Joel opens the second half of his book. Our
Authorised Version renders them in the future tense, as the
continuation of the prophet’s discourse, which had threatened the Day
of the Lord, urged the people to penitence, and now promises that their
penitence shall be followed by the Lord’s mercy. But such a rendering
forces the grammar;[1221] and the Revised English Version is right in
taking the verbs, as the vast majority of critics do, in the past.
Joel’s call to repentance has closed, and has been successful. The fast
has been hallowed, the prayers are heard. Probably an interval has
elapsed between vv. 17 and 18, but in any case, the people having
repented, nothing more is said of their need of doing so, and instead
we have from God Himself a series of promises, vv. 19-27, in answer to
their cry for mercy. These promises relate to the physical calamity
which has been suffered. God will destroy the locusts, still impending
on the land, and restore the years which His great army has eaten.
There follows in vv. 28-32 (Eng.; Heb. chap, iii.) the promise of a
great outpouring of the Spirit on all Israel, amid terrible
manifestations in heaven and earth.
1. THE RETURN OF PROSPERITY (ii. 19-27).
_And Jehovah answered and said to His people:
Lo, I will send you corn and wine and oil,
And your fill shall ye have of them;
And I will not again make you a reproach among the heathen.
And the Northern_ Foe[1222] _will I remove far from you;
And I will push him into a land barren and waste,
His van to the eastern sea and his rear to the western,[1223]
Till the stench of him rises,[1224]
Because he hath done greatly._
Locusts disappear with the same suddenness as they arrive. A wind
springs up and they are gone.[1225] Dead Sea and Mediterranean are at
the extremes of the compass, but there is no reason to suppose that
the prophet has abandoned the realism which has hitherto distinguished
his treatment of the locusts. The plague covered the whole land, on
whose high watershed the winds suddenly veer and change. The dispersion
of the locusts upon the deserts and the opposite seas was therefore
possible at one and the same time. Jerome vouches for an instance in
his own day. The other detail is also true to life. Jerome says that
the beaches of the two seas were strewn with putrifying locusts, and
Augustine[1226] quotes heathen writers in evidence of large masses
of locusts, driven from Africa upon the sea, and then cast up on the
shore, which gave rise to a pestilence. “The south and east winds,”
says Volney of Syria, “drive the clouds of locusts with violence
into the Mediterranean, and drown them in such quantities, that when
their dead are cast on the shore they infect the air to a great
distance.”[1227] The prophet continues, celebrating this destruction
of the locusts as if it were already realised—_the Lord hath done
greatly_, ver. 21. That among the blessings he mentions a full supply
of rain proves that we were right in interpreting him to have spoken of
drought as accompanying the locusts.[1228]
_Fear not, O Land! Rejoice and be glad,
For Jehovah hath done greatly.[1229]
Fear not, O beasts of the field!
For the pastures of the steppes are springing with new grass,
The trees bear their fruit,
Fig-tree and vine yield their substance.
O sons of Zion, be glad,
And rejoice in Jehovah your God:
For He hath given you the early rain in normal measure,[1230]
And poured[1231] on you winter rain[1232] and latter rain as
before.[1233]
And the threshing-floors shall be full of wheat,
And the vats stream over with new wine and oil.
And I will restore to you the years which the Swarmer has eaten,
The Lapper, the Devourer and the Shearer,
My great army whom I sent among you.
And ye shall eat your food and be full,
And praise the Name of Jehovah your God,
Who hath dealt so wondrously with you;
And My people shall be abashed nevermore.
Ye shall know I am in the midst of Israel,
That I am Jehovah your God and none else;
And nevermore shall My people be abashed._
2. THE OUTPOURING OF THE SPIRIT
(ii. 28-32 Eng.; iii. Heb.).
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 fulness?
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.[1234] 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 fulness 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 fulness of the Spirit.
Prophecy, we saw,[1235] 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’s 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.[1236] Paul, in his
apostolate, sustained himself by the labour of his hands, but he was
the child of a rich civilisation 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 centres of Germany. An acute historian, in his recent
lectures on the _Economic Interpretation of History_,[1237] 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;[1238] and that even Wesley’s great revival of religion
among the labouring classes of England took place at a time when prices
were far lower than in the previous century, wages had slightly risen
and “most labourers 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 fibres; 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 civilisation 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 fulfilment 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 be 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,[1239] Joel means Israel only:
the heathen are to be destroyed.[1240] 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.[1241] 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 fulfilment 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 fulfilment. 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 paralyse 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1221] A.V., adhering to the Massoretic text, in which the verbs are
pointed for the past, has evidently understood them as instances of the
prophetic perfect. But “this is grammatically indefensible”: Driver,
_in loco_; see his _Heb. Tenses_, § 82, _Obs._ Calvin and others, who
take the verbs of ver. 18 as future, accept those of the next verse
as past and with it begin the narrative. But if God’s answer to His
people’s prayer be in the past, so must His jealousy and pity. All
these verbs are in the same sequence of time. Merx proposes to change
the vowel-points of the verbs and turn them into futures. But see
above, p. 395. Ver. 21 shows that Jehovah’s action is past, and Nowack
points out the very unusual character of the construction that would
follow from Merx’s emendation. Ewald, Hitzig, Kuenen, Robertson Smith,
Davidson, Robertson, Steiner, Wellhausen, Driver, Nowack, etc., all
take the verbs in the past.
[1222] This is scarcely a name for the locusts, who, though they
might reach Palestine from the N.E. under certain circumstances,
came generally from E. and S.E. But see above, p. 397: so Kuenen,
Wellhausen, Nowack. W. R. Smith suggests the whole verse as an
allegorising gloss. Hitzig thought of the locusts only, and rendered
הצפוני ὁ τυφωνικός, Acts xxvii. 14; but this is not proved.
[1223] _I.e._ the Dead Sea (Ezek. xlvii. 18; Zech. xiv. 8) and the
Mediterranean.
[1224] The construction shows that the clause preceding this, ועלה
באשו, is a gloss. So Driver. But Nowack gives the other clause as the
gloss.
[1225] Nah. iii. 17; Exod. x. 19.
[1226] _De Civitate Dei_, III. 31.
[1227] I. 278, quoted by Pusey.
[1228] i. 17-20: see above, p. 403.
[1229] Prophetic past: Driver.
[1230] Opinion is divided as to the meaning of this phrase: לצדקה
= _for righteousness_. A. There are those who take it as having a
_moral_ reference; and (1) this is so emphatic to some that they
render the word for _early rain_, מורה, which also means _teacher_ or
_revealer_, in the latter significance. So (some of them applying it
to the Messiah) Targum, Symmachus, the Vulgate, _doctorem justitiæ_,
some Jews, _e.g._ Rashi and Abarbanel, and some moderns, _e.g._ (at
opposite extremes) Pusey and Merx. But, as Calvin points out (this
is another instance of his sanity as an exegete, and refusal to be
led by theological presuppositions: he says, “I do not love strained
expositions”), this does not agree with the context, which speaks not
of spiritual but wholly of physical blessings. (2) Some, who take
מורה as _early rain_, give לצדקה the meaning _for righteousness_,
_ad justitiam_, either in the sense that God will give the rain as a
token of His own righteousness, or in order to restore or vindicate
the people’s righteousness (so Davidson, _Expositor_, 1888, I., p. 203
n.), in the frequent sense in which צדקה is employed in Isa. xl. ff.
(see _Isaiah xl.—lxvi._, Expositor’s Bible, pp. 219 ff.). Cf. Hosea
x. 13, צדק; above, Vol. I., p. 289, n. 2. This of course is possible,
especially in view of Israel having been made by their plagues a
reproach among the heathen. Still, if Joel had intended this meaning,
he would have applied the phrase, not to the _early rain_ only, but
to the whole series of blessings by which the people were restored to
their standing before God. B. It seems, therefore, right to take לצדקה
in a purely physical sense, of the measure or quality of the _early
rain_. So even Calvin, _rain according to what is just_ or _fit_;
A.V. _moderately_ (inexact); R.V. _in just measure_; Siegfried-Stade
_sufficient_. The root-meaning of צדק is probably _according to norm_
(cf. _Isaiah xl.—lxvi._, p. 215), and in that case the meaning would
be _rain of normal quantity_. This too suits the parallel in the next
clause: _as formerly_. In Himyaritic the word is applied to good
harvests. A man prays to God for אפקל ואתֹמר צדקם, _full_ or _good
harvests and fruits_: _Corp. Inscr. Sem._, Pars Quarta, Tomus I., No.
2, lin. 1-5; cf. the note.
[1231] Driver, _in loco_.
[1232] Heb. also repeats here _early rain_, but redundantly.
[1233] בראשון, _in the first_. A.V. adds _month_. But LXX. and Syr.
read כראשננה, which is probably the correct reading, _as before_ or
_formerly_.
[1234] i. 18.
[1235] Above, p. 189.
[1236] Cf. _Hist. Geog._, Chap. XXI., especially p. 463.
[1237] By Thorold Rogers, pp. 80 ff.
[1238] _E.g._ the Quakers and the Independents. The Independents of the
seventeenth century “were the founders of the Bank of England.”
[1239] All living things, Gen. vi. 17, 19, etc.; mankind, Isa. xl. 5,
xlix. 26. See Driver’s note.
[1240] Next chapter.
[1241] Acts x. 45.