_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._
(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.