Joel 3
Butler11. Then with striking beauty and force the prophet suddenly turns to the other party in the conflict: “Thither bring down Thy mighty ones, Jehovah!” How fearful is this great battle of earth now coming on! H. C.
12. The valley of Jehoshaphat. In the reign of Jehoshaphat the Moabites, Ammonites and Edomites gathered an immense army, “a great multitude,” and encamped near Engedi, to the west of the Dead Sea. A great terror fell upon Jerusalem. Jehoshaphat proclaimed a fast, and after his prayer Jahaziel promised that God would fight for Israel. The Israelites marched to the head of one of the valleys leading down to Engedi, in which the allied force was encamped, but before they had reached the battle-field the enemies had turned their arms against themselves; Moab and Ammon attacked and destroyed Edom, and then each other. Jehoshaphat and his army spent three days in spoiling the slain, and on the fourth day they held an assembly in the valley and solemnly named it the valley of Berakah, or Blessing (2 Chron. 20). This occurrence took place about a hundred years before the time that we have assigned to Joel, and it is not improbable that the imagery which he here uses is derived from the tradition of this great deliverance. “The great multitude” (2 Chron. 20: 2), “the great company” (2 Chron. 20: 12), “multitudes, multitudes” (verse 14) are again gathered in the valley, for the Lord there to sit in judgment upon them. It is no longer, however, called the valley of Berakah—i.e., of Blessing, but the valley of Jehoshaphat—i.e., the valley of the judgment of Jehovah. The name is coined by Joel on account of its meaning, and for the purpose of recalling the historical association. There is no place so named either in the valley of the Kidron or elsewhere. B. C.
The passage assumes that this dread array of armed nations, vast as numbers without number, and girded all for bloody war, results in no war at all. Their weapons amount to nothing; they are there only for judgment—culprits before the King and Judge of the universe! They suddenly find themselves on no battle-ground, but summoned to the valley where Jehovah judges; and He comes down to take His lofty judgment throne.
13. Here are symbols of terrific slaughter—the sickle laying low the ripened grain, and the wine-vats full and trodden till they overflow with wine—which in such a connection represents human blood. Dropping all figure, the reason is given in plain language—“For their wickedness is great”—not “the wickedness,” indefinitely, but theirs, the wickedness of these hostile nations.
14. Their vast number strikes the prophet’s mind, and prompts the exclamation, “O, the multitudes! the multitudes in this valley of judgment!” The word rendered “decision” means judgment in the sense of a final verdict which decides the criminal’s destiny, past all reversal. (See the usage of the original word, 1 K. 29: 40 and Isa. 10: 22.) This is “the day of the Lord,” it comes exceedingly near in this valley of judgment. The word “near” should not carry the mind onward to any other day beyond this. God is here, and His great day has come!
15. These figures must here take their usual sense—extreme calamity—casting the deep shades of night over all the hopes of the wicked—engulfing them in deep, impenetrable darkness. So in all languages, of every land or nation, darkness is the symbol of whatever is most fearful to rational beings.
16. In this strain of the boldest poetic imagery the Lord becomes a lion, and His roar shakes the heavens and the earth. (See the same figure under analogous circumstances, Jer. 25: 30; Isa. 42: 13.) These figures combined give the climax of the dreadful scene, in which blended terror and majesty, justice and wrath, encircle and gird the throne of the Almighty round about, as, with the guilty nations, the oppressors of His people, assembled before Him, He sits for judgment and final decision. Then, with inimitable beauty and force, turning to those on His right hand (may we not borrow from that other analogous scene?) he says: “But the Lord will be the hope of His people, and the strength of the children of Israel.” H. C.
In the judgment of the great day God’s voice will then shake terribly both heaven and earth (Isa. 2: 21) yet once more (Hag. 2: 6; Heb. 12: 26). This denotes that the voice of God will in the great day speak such terror to the wicked as were enough to put even heaven and earth into a consternation. To the righteous it will be a joyful day. When heaven and earth shall tremble, and be dissolved and burned up, then will the Lord be the hope of His people, and the strength of the children of Israel (verse 16); and then shall Jerusalem be holy (verse 17). The saints are the Israel of God, they are His people, the Church is His
Jerusalem, they are in covenant and communion with Him; now in the great day their longings shall be satisfied. The Lord will be the hope of His people. As He always was the founder and foundation of their hopes, so He then will be the crown of their hopes. He will be the harbor of His people (so the word is), their receptacle, refuge and home. The saints in the great day shall arrive at the desired haven, shall put to shore after a stormy voyage; they shall go to be forever at home with God, to their Father’s house, the house not made with hands. H.
13-21. The heavens above the countless multitudes, who surge and contend in the valley of Doom, darken beneath the frown of Jehovah; the hills which enclose the valley echo with the thunder of His indignation:
“Sun and moon turn dark, And the stars refuse to shine; For Jehovah thundereth out of Zion, And uttereth His voice from Jerusalem, And heaven and earth quake!”
We cannot doubt what scene it is that thus shakes the prophet. It is no wasting calamity, it is no bloody conflict, in the annals of a single race. It is the august and most terrible scene in which the great tragedy of Time is to culminate. It is the final catastrophe in the history of the world (verses 13-16).
The scene which follows it (verses 17-21) lies beyond the coasts and bounds of time. To the terrors of judgment, to the quaking heaven and earth, there succeeds the kingdom that cannot be shaken, the fruitful and peaceful splendors of the new heaven and the new earth, though even these are shadowed forth in the historic forms of time. The Lord, who thunders wrathfully against the wicked, is “a refuge for His people” in that great and terrible day, “a stronghold for the sons of Israel.” And that day, darkened by storms of fate, ushers in an era of concord, abundance, joy. God dwells with His people. Zion becomes a holy mountain, Jerusalem a sanctuary, no more profaned by alien and unrighteous feet. The mountains, often so barren, drop with new wine; the hills flow with milk; “all the watercourses,” now so often dry, run forever with pure living water. Nay, a fountain springs up in the house of the Lord, which flows down the barren “Valley of Acacias”—the valley trending down from Jerusalem to the Salt Sea, the valley in which heretofore only the sand-loving acacia could thrive—causing it to take fertility again. Egypt and Edom—Egypt, the open enemy of Israel; and Edom, the false, treacherous kinsman of Israel—these two, the symbols of all that exalts itself against God, are smitten with an eternal barrenness and desolation for the sins they have committed against the chosen people; while Judah and Jerusalem, the Divine kingdom and the holy city, abide forever, God purging from them all taints of evil not hitherto removed, that He may dwell in them through all generations.
Our best comment on this passage is John’s vision of the new heaven and the new earth. As the rapt apostle gazed into futurity, looking for “the end of the Lord,” he saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. A river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeded out of the throne of God, and “ran forth from the house of Jehovah;” and on either side of the river grew the tree of life, bearing twelve manner of fruits, and yielding its fruit every month. He saw the city which had the glory of God, and could never be moved, into which nothing could enter that defiled. And as he gazed he heard a great voice from the throne proclaiming, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and He shall be God with them, their God.”
In fine, the closing chapter of Joel’s prophecy is a brief apocalypse, cast in the forms of Hebrew thought and story indeed, and only dimly bodied out, yet setting forth, in language which even the Jews could not and did not mistake, the terrors of the last judgment, the issue of the time-long struggle of good with evil, and the golden age of peace and fruitful service which is to succeed to the conflicts and storms of time. Cox.
Thus ends this grand, sublime and glorious chapter! We might fitly apply these epithets to the whole book, for few more sublime compositions can anywhere be found, distinguished for conceptions so lofty, a style so pure, truths so vast, so far-reaching, so vital to the moral government of God over nations, and so fraught with instruction to mankind. H. C.