_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.