Joel 2:1-32

Night and Day In Zion

Joel 2:0

The whole chapter is one of the most picturesque description to be found in all the record even of ancient prophecy. It is full of judgment, and it is full of gospel. The whole morning is darkened with locusts, yet at eventide there is light. Merely as an exercise in the pictorial art, were it nothing more, this chapter ought to stand amongst the masterpieces of literature. No man who had any regard to his own literary reputation could have written this could have written thus in such broad, startling, tragic contrast; he would have said, The rules of art require different treatment, so as to secure something like proportion; some respect must be paid even in fiction to the genius of probability. Here you have thunders, lightnings, tempests, all the winds of heaven let loose upon the shaking earth; and presently, apparently without sufficient cause, there is a great lull, the dark sky breaks out here and there into translucent blue, and presently the whole firmament glitters with light, gleams with tender beauty, and the earth seems to be lifted up to celestial altitudes, and, without the process of learning, to be able to sing with the angels. It will be worth while, from a merely literary point of view, to study this wondrous narrative mayhap we may find it to be more than literature; but the Lord will allow us to enter his sanctuary by many doors, even by the great public door above whose massive portals are written words of tender welcome and boundless hospitality, or by a little postern gate which we may be called upon to stoop before if we would enter with safety. The great thing to be done is to enter the sanctuary: no matter whether by the one door or by the other; to be in God's temple, to be seated at God's table, is the one thing needful.

The trumpet is lifted up this time in warning. Sometimes it is lifted up in festival. The trumpet will do one of two things; the performer must tell it what to do. So with every ministry, and every instrumentality of life and nature; it is the intelligent, responsive, directing man that must say what is to be done with the silver lute of spring, or the golden instrument of summer, or the cornucopia of autumn, or the great wind of winter that makes the earth cold and bleak. The trumpet will foretell a coming battle, or it will call to an infinite feast; the man behind it must use it according to the occasion. It is even so with the Bible. There is no trumpet like the Bible for warning, alarm, excitement, a great blare at midnight shaking the whole air with tones of alarm; nor is there any instrument like the Bible for sweetness, gentleness, tenderness, an instrument that talks music to the heart, and that assures human fear that the time of apprehension has passed away. Warning has always been given by the Almighty before his judgments have taken effect. Yet there has always been some measure of suddenness about divine judgments. The reason is that we cannot sufficiently prepare for them. We may know they are coming, we may tell even to a day when the judgment thunder will lift up its voice; yet when it does sound its appeal it startles and shocks and paralyses the world. Is the Lord going to sow the Cities of the Plain with the awful seed of fire and brimstone? Will he plough the land with lightning, and fill its furrows with this fatal seed? Will he hide from Abraham the thing which he doeth? Will he not call away the righteous from among the wicked, that they be burned not by the impartial and indiscriminating fire? Is the Lord about to make all heaven one water-cloud, and pour it down upon the earth in an avenging deluge? Is there not a prophet of the Lord in the midst of the people to tell that the rain is gathering, that a fountain is being fashioned that shall open its mouth in infinite torrents, and destroy the sinful world?

Yet, though the warning has always been given, it has always been despised. How few people heed the voice of warning! They call that voice sensational. Were the old preachers to return with their old hell they would have but scant welcome to-day. They were men of the iron mouth; they were no Chrysostoms, golden-throated and golden-lipped; they were men who, knowing the terrors of the law, withheld them not from the knowledge of the people, but thundered right mightily even beside the altar of the Cross. Now all this is in many instances ruled out as theologically behind the time, as from a literary point of view vulgar and odious, and as from a spiritual point of view detestable, and not likely to work in man mightily in the direction of persuasion. We become familiar with warning. No man really believes in the day of judgment. Many a man will assert it, probably few within the Church would care to deny it; many are delighted to hear it proclaimed; but who really, inmostly, with his heart's heart, with his soul's soul, believes that he shall have to give an account for every deed and word done and spoken in the flesh? There are some burdens we could not carry and do life's daily business. The Lord is very merciful herein, that he does not require us to carry all this weight of warning, all this thunder of doom; it is enough, if properly used now and then, to know that God has in his possession a glittering sword, and that he will judge the earth in righteousness; then the burden is lifted from us, and we go about the day's business with a little time to attend to the little day's comparative trifles. We have time for music and for innocent mirth, and for the reciprocation of offices that perish in the using; forasmuch as man, flesh and blood, created out of the dust, a wind, a creature that finds his metaphor in the flying shuttle, could not carry this burden of judgment day by day, night by night; his brain would reel under the weight, and in insanity he would find his only release

But the warnings given us by men are often partial, and are not unfrequently falsely directed. There is not a preacher in the world who could not make a great reputation by thundering against heterodoxy. The world loves such vacant thunder; the Church is willing to subscribe liberally to any man who will denounce the heterodoxy of other people. Men who are fattening themselves at the table of wickedness like the devil of heterodoxy to be tethered to the deepest hell; it does not disturb them, they are willing to pay tribute if by so doing they may pass another gate that opens into some wider liberty and finer licentiousness of action. We do not need such warning. There is nothing easier than to sit beside a glowing fire, with our feet plunged into carpets of velvet pile, and to dictate by the hour maledictions against earnest men who somehow have lost the sight of one eye, or momentarily the sight of both, and are groping as only blind men can grope after things essential and eternal. We have had enough of such warning in all ages; it is empty, blatant, pointless, often unjust and cruel, because based upon misunderstandings and misapprehensions. What we do want is, not to thunder warningly against mistaken speculation, but thunders sevenfold in loudness to be delivered against the current iniquities of the day. Let a man speak against wickedness, and he will be killed! Let any prophet, even fiery and fearless as Joel the prophet of the oven of the Lord, stand up and speak against drunkenness, gluttony, sharp practice, malfeasance, and that man will be invited to no smoking tables; he will be a death's-head at any feast to which he may have found unexpected and unwelcome access. Yet that is the warning which the age requires; and no man can give it and live. Speak against a false conception of the constitution of the Godhead, and there are rich men who will subscribe to your funds hundreds and thousands of pounds; stand up and declare that never will you permit a false theory regarding the inspiration of the Scriptures, and there are fat debauchees that will clap their gluttonous hands, and look out of their evil eyes all manner of approval; but assail iniquity, measure the wand and see if in its yard there be six-and-thirty inches, lift up the scales to know whether they are equal, search the candle of life with the fire of the Lord, and you will soon be crucified; no man will subscribe to your funds; you will be legalists, you will be moralists, you will be persons who do not understand the evangelical religion. Better be without the patronage of such men; it makes all work easy now, it takes the rust out of every hinge for the passing moment, but by-and-by the gain will burn the hand that takes it, and the man who has taken it will discover that though he has sat at the table of the Lord, his name is Judas Iscariot.

Warning is needed, but let it be of the right kind; warning is a needful element in every ministry, but deliver it at the right door. To hear some men stand up and claim to be the guardians of truth and orthodoxy and sound doctrine would distress the heart if it did not amuse the imagination. That men who are never troubled with an idea, brains that never saw heavens and creations and universes proceeding moment by moment fast as the seconds can fall from the fountain of eternity that such men should have patronised the Lord is an intolerable and inexplicable irony. We do not then deprecate warning, blowing of the trumpet in Zion; we simply ask that it be directed to the right end. Lycurgus was the noblest of Spartans; he was a rigorous disciplinarian; in some aspects he was the admired and all but idolised of his country; but when he denounced the misuse of its wealth, when he levelled his guns against the corruption of his day, he was stoned in the city that was proud of him, and had to seek refuge from common ruffianism behind the altar of the temple; his flesh was cut by the ruffians' cane, and whilst the blood ran down his noble face no word of reproach escaped him. Let any an reprove the iniquities of his day, thunder against the malpractices of corporations and all other institutions, and he will be struck in the face, he will be stoned on the streets, he will be hated in conversation, and the rich thieves that live to old age on their plunder will never subscribe to his funds. God be thanked! there is a redeeming point in their awful reputation.

The imagery of Joel is of the most vivid, exciting, and alarming kind. He still bases his vaticinations upon the desolating action of the fourfold and four-named locusts. The locust was a fact, and not a metaphor; yet though the locust was the direst fact in the history of the country, it was but a poor symbol of the corruption which had brought upon that country avenging hosts. If the chapter ended with the eleventh verse, it would be the volcano of the Bible; but from the twelfth verse another tone comes in and rules the wild turbulence into domestic music:

"Therefore also now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning: And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil." [John never wrote tenderer words; Paul never welcomed the people to the heart of Christ with larger and tenderer liberality of hopefulness and love.] "Who knoweth if he will return and repent, and leave a blessing behind him; even a meat offering and a drink offering unto the Lord your God?" (Joel 2:12-14 .)

That is the Gospel before the Christian era in the narrow historical sense. These words can never be displaced from the religious literature of the world until their spirit has been fulfilled. Men sing them, ministers preach from them, prodigals have their attention called to them, if haply their hearts may be subdued into penitential softness. "Rend your heart, and not your garments"; let your repentance be moral, not ceremonial; imagine not that God cares for torn robes, except they be torn in consequence of an inner agitation, yea, the very agony of self-reproach and self-distrust. Many would be prepared to rend a garment that would be a cheap sacrifice, withal it would be dramatic and pictorial; but the Lord will not have it so. The word of the Lord is quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the dividing asunder of the joints and marrow. "Rend your heart" that is the offender: "Rend your heart" that is the liar. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Repent in your souls; do not use words of repentance apart from the feeling of contrition. It is an evil thing that the lips should give hospitality to eloquent penitence when the heart does not feel the agony of contrition. By such familiarity we come to ruin; by such custom do we take the wonder out of God's miracles; yea, by such monotony do we destroy the infinite pathos of the Cross of Christ. "Rend your heart"; be sorry for your sin, not for its consequences. He cannot repent who says in the morning after his debauch he would he had been better last night, for his head to-day burns like a furnace. That is false reasoning and false morality, if the soul seek to avail itself of it as an appeal to God, instead of that profound vital conviction as to the sinfulness of sin, which alone can lead the heart to the Cross of the Son of God. There must be no church-going where the spirit is absent from the sanctuary; then church-going is a rending of the garment; there must be no lavish subscription to fill up the pit dug by the iniquity of men. "Rend your heart, and not your garments"; by broken-heartedness, and not by rags ceremonially manufactured, is the Lord of heaven to be appeased. This is the Old Testament. Verily it might be the New.

This gospel in the Old Testament, as well as in the New, is divinely offered, it is not humanly conceived: "Therefore also now, saith the Lord." All gospels come from heaven. All the flowers come from the sun. We grow nothing, as of the earth earthy, alone and exclusively. Every wee modest daisy in the sod was born really in the sun; it does but accept the sod as a cradle until its eyes are opened to look upon its true nativity. Every Christian word is a tone of supernal music; every great proposition that charms the imagination and creates new hope in the heart is a revelation from above. Nor must we read without emphasis properly directed and apportioned the words "thus saith the Lord." In English they amount to a mere statement; that is to say, a mere point in a passing incident. It is not so the word "saith" is used in the Hebrew tongue; as used originally, it signifies that it is the divine word, part of the divine essence, a symbol of the divine quality. "Thus saith" that is a token of authority; virtue has gone out of God and gone to redeem the world. There are those who say they must have a "thus saith the Lord" for everything; let them be careful lest they regard that form as a mere sign. There is nothing merely signal about it; when the honest man utters a word he utters his heart; when the sincere soul prays every syllable is as a drop of blood. When we have a "thus saith the Lord," the emphasis is to be thrown into the word "saith," for it indicates that the Lord's heart has moved out towards the children of men, and that the Lord's pity is announcing a gospel to prodigals.

In the fifteenth verse the trumpet is blown again:

"Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly: Gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children, and those that suck the breasts: let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber, and the bride out of her closet." [And so the Lord is pleased to direct the people to pray and seek himself, and desire that their reproach may be taken away.] "Spare thy people, O Lord, and give not thine heritage to reproach, that the heathen should rule over them: wherefore should they say among the people, Where is their God?" (Joel 2:15-17 .)

Now we shall have a change of expression. From the moment that earnest prayers go up to heaven all the clouds will begin to disperse, and the rich blue sky will shine above the penitent returning earth. So we read, "Then will the Lord be jealous for his land, and pity his people." Not "the" land, as if it were a mere geographical district; not "the" people, as if they were any people; but "his" land and "his" people, touching the deepest, tenderest chord in the mystery of the divine nature.

"Yea, the Lord will answer and say unto his people, Behold, I will send you corn, and wine, and oil, and ye shall be satisfied therewith: and I will no more make you a reproach among the heathen" ( Joe 2:19 ).

But what has become of the land that the locust has desolated? All the green things have been eaten, Eden has been turned into a wilderness, the fig tree has been barked, the forest yesterday green with beauty is to-day like an army stripped naked, whose shivering shoulders are turned to the bleak wind.

"Fear not, O land; be glad and rejoice: for the Lord will do great things. Be not afraid, ye beasts of the field: for the pastures of the wilderness do springy for the tree beareth her fruit, the fig tree and the vine do yield their strength. Be glad then, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month. And the floors shall be full of wheat, and the fats shall overflow with wine and oil. And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you. And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed" ( Joe 2:21-26 ).

What a declaration is this! We thought the land was given over to night, and lo, the day-spring from on high hath visited it. We said, Summer is dead, and lo, in the very midst of the snows of winter the green things break through the earth, and birds begin to sing in the quiet air. "And my people shall never be ashamed." Twice are these words spoken, in Joe 2:26 and in Joel 2:27 ; and the words are spoken every day to every honest soul "my people shall never be ashamed." That is a word which the Apostle Paul himself used: I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ; I am not ashamed to call the Saviour Lord. "If any man be ashamed of me and of my name, of him will I be ashamed when I come in my glory."

My people may be despised, misunderstood, reviled, put to all sorts of tests; but even this process shall end in their strengthening and in their purification. We cannot yet know how the awards will go personally and nationally, but we do know the great principles upon which divine issues will be determined; the sheep shall be set on the right hand and the goats on the left; good and faithful servants shall go up into many rulerships and into secure sanctuaries; unprofitable servants shall go into outer darkness. Lift up your heads, rejoice in the Lord; for his hand has been heavy upon you, and that pressure hath brought you to prayer; out of your prayer shall come God's great answer, and ye who have seen sevenfold night should rejoice with unspeakable joy in the dawn of eternal day. This is the miracle of the Cross; this is the triumph of God the Son. All this is the Gospel historically before Bethlehem, but not essentially. Essentially the Gospel is in Genesis essentially the Gospel is in first verse, first chapter of Genesis; essentially the Bible owes its existence to the Gospel. If there had been no Cross before the foundation of the world, and no Cross in the after eternity of heaven, there could have been no Bible. Christ is Alpha and Omega; First, Last, Midst; Ancient of Days; Child of yesterday.

Prayer

Almighty God, thine eye is upon all men. There is nothing hidden from thy vision. The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth. All things are naked and open unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. Our downsitting and our uprising, our going out and our coming in, are not these all known in heaven? The very hairs of our head are all numbered. What we have; what we have not; what use we make of our opportunity; how we carry ourselves in life; what is our innermost motive and thought and purpose are not all these known to him who is our Father and our Judge? If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; if we confess our sins, thou art faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Hear us when, with bent heads and humble hearts and contrite spirits, each for himself says, God be merciful unto me a sinner. May thy Holy Spirit dwell in each of us; may we know the mystery of the name and of the work of Christ; may we enter into the sorrow of his passion, that we may afterward enter into the triumph of his resurrection; may we really be in Christ, and show that Christ is really in us; may we stand at his point of view, may we drink in his spirit, may we look upon the times as he looked upon his own day; may nothing escape us that is for the good and the welfare and the progress of ourselves and of society. Fill us with the spirit of Christ's own charity; make us pure, true, gentle, chivalrous; may we be known for our good-doing, for our heroism in darkness, for our nobleness in the midst of degeneracy; may we be faithful servants, honest stewards, doing our day's work not as hirelings, but as men who love the labour. Amen.