Joel 1:15

"Alas for the day! for the day of Jehovah is at hand, and as destruction from the Almighty shall it come."

In this verse, Joel went a step beyond the terrible visitation of the locusts threatening starvation and death to the whole nation; and he prophesied that "the day of Jehovah is at hand!" The Biblical use of this expression is enlightening; and we shall devote some space to a discussion of it.

"The day of the Lord" has two meanings in the prophetic use of the expression:

(1) It means any time of severe visitation inflicted upon either nations or upon all mankind by the judgment of God upon human sin and unrighteousness. In his famed Olivet discourse, the Lord Jesus clearly referred to the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish temple as his "coming" in judgment upon Israel, a summary judgment which followed as the direct result of their terminal rebellion against God in the rejection and crucifixion of the Messiah. From this, it is clearly seen that other great historical judgments upon such wicked cities as Tyre, Sidon, Nineveh, Babylon, Sodom, and Gomorrah were exactly the same type of visitation that fell upon Jerusalem.

(2) The ultimate meaning of "day of the Lord" identifies it with the final and terminal destruction of the entire posterity of Adam and Eve upon the great occasion of the eternal Judgment Day, when the dead shall be raised, the righteous redeemed, and the wicked turned aside forever. These distinctively different meanings were not always clear to the prophets who used the phrase (which actually came from God); indeed, it is safe to assume that they might never have known the full meaning of what they prophesied, as detailed by the apostle Peter in 1 Peter 1:10-12. The holy prophets were not concerned with fully understanding what the message from God might have been, but with delivering it accurately to their fellow men.

The nature of the "day of the Lord," whatever the specific situation foretold, is clearly given in this verse. "As destruction from the Almighty shall it come."

From this it is plain that the "day of the Lord" never referred to a benign and peaceful event, but to "destruction." This is what it meant for the antediluvian world which was destroyed from the face of the earth because of their wickedness; and that is what it invariably meant in all the other instances of it which have been cited. Furthermore, this is what it will ultimately mean at the Final Judgment at the Second Coming of Christ. That will be the occasion when the primeval sentence imposed upon the progenitors of the human race for their rebellion in the Garden of Eden will be finally and irrevocably executed upon them in the person of their total posterity, the unique exceptions to the universal destruction of that Day being only those who have been redeemed through the blood of Christ.

Thus, when one of the ancient prophets referred to "the day of Jehovah," it always referred, not merely to the Final Arraignment and Punishment of mankind, but to any lesser judgment that might be imposed upon specific sectors of humanity (or even upon all of it) in the period intervening before that Final Day. "For Joel, as for the other prophets, 'the day of the Lord' is always at hand."[27] "Joel did not mean that the day of the Lord, in its full prophetic sense, of the revelation of Christ ... was really to occur in their times."[28] However, Joel did see in that terrible locust plague "a warning of 'the day of Jehovah' which was to come."[29] Furthermore, it was a warning that other occasions of 'the day of Jehovah' were in store for Israel. Historically, it was only a little while before the Assyrians and the Babylonians would come and execute "the day of Jehovah," not merely upon the northern kingdom, but upon the southern kingdom of Israel as well. Thus Joel very accurately foretold future judgments upon Israel, taking the locust disaster as an omen, or an earnest, of an even greater judgment (or judgments) yet to come. Deane correctly discerned this:

"The day of the Lord," first mentioned, it is said, by Joel, is the day when God inflicts punishment upon sinners, as in the present instances; it may be a presage of that judgment that brought ruin to their city, temple, and nation. It may be an emblem of that judgment that wound up their nation by the destruction of their capital, or even of the final judgment when God shall destroy the impenitent sinners and deliver his saints.[30]

It is totally wrong to allege that Joel himself understood all that was indicated by his prophecy here of "the day of the Lord"; nor is it possible to suppose that even today students of the Holy Scriptures have any complete knowledge of all that is meant.

In view of the unmistakable overtones associated with "the day of Jehovah," full agreement is felt with Jamieson who noted that, "Here the transition begins from the plague of locusts to the worse calamities (Joel 2) from invading armies about to come on Judea, of which the locusts were the prelude."[31] As Barnes put it, "All judgment in time is an image of the judgment for eternity."[32]