No one knows for sure the exact dating of the prophet Joel. The estimates by scholars can vary by 500 years. When I read any of the books of the prophets....I'm looking for something that God wants to tell us here in the last of the last days....just as much as He wanted to tell Israel or Judah or Edom or anyone back then. In other words....these books are not just historical....they are every bit as important to us today as they were to whomever they were written to at the time!
"What the chewing locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left the crawling locust has eaten. And what the crawling locust has left, the consuming locust has eaten." (Joel 1:4) Just for the sake of argument....suppose that along with the then contemporary description of what had happened....suppose that the chewing locust would signify Assyria....and the swarming locust would point to a different time down the road....Babylon for instance....and the crawling locust to a time even much further down the road? I'm convinced that God speaks to us like this often through the prophets.
When a verse says...."Let your children tell their children, and their children another generation"....(Joel 1:3)....it is addressing Israel or Judah right at that time....but looking forward also....and we are that last generation.
"Alas for the day! For the day of the LORD is at hand; It shall come as destruction from the Almighty." (Joel 1:15) This is an end-times verse...that appears again in the first verse of chapter two...."Blow the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the LORD is coming, for it is at hand." That phrase....The day of the LORD....is in many places through all of God's Word....in both Testaments....in Obadiah and Joel and Amos and Isaiah and Zephaniah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Zechariah and Malachi in the Old Testament....and in 1 Corinthians and Acts and 2 Peter and 2 Thessalonians....and Revelation describes it throughout.
Another verse in Joel says...."So, I will restore to you the years"....while yet another shortly after that...."and it shall come to pass afterwards that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh"....and then...."And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth."
This switching goes on and on....not only for time periods....and not only for judgment....but for glory! God through Amos said of Israel....that they were..."at ease in Zion"....(Amos 6:1)....this before the Assyrian captivity....and later through Jeremiah He warns Judah before the Babylonian captivity....and He speaks to you and I today. We need not try to place every verse in the right place....rather....take the message to heart....the Day of the LORD is indeed coming.
"And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your old men shall dream dreams. Your young men shall see visions. And also on My Menservants and maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days." (Joel 2:28, 29)
Surely this is speaking to the day of Pentecost....but also to the Second Advent. I think about and even struggle with this verse at times....Luke 12:11...."Now when they bring you to the synagogues and magistrates and authorities, do not worry about how or what you should answer, or what you should say, "For the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say." I struggle with it for it demands faith....faith that God would do for us what He did for the early Christians....when they had to depend wholly and solely upon Him!
What I hope to do in this post is to encourage the reader to read regularly not only in the Old Testament prophets....but to keep an eye out for and to discern when the New Testament speaks directly to or refers to the Second Coming of our Lord and Savior and King!
"But the end of all things is at hand; therefore, be serious and watchful in your prayer's." 1 Peter 4:7
Note: I wonder....when you read the title of the post....did you wince....or even frown that the Second Coming was again the topic? Brothers and sisters....this was the norm in the early church. It should again be the norm when all the signs point to the nearness of the return of Jesus.
