CRITICAL NOTES.]
Joel 1:15. The day] of anger (Isaiah 13:9) and ill omen; evil in itself, and foreshadowing greater evils; a transition from invading locusts to the day of judgment upon all ungodly men. Present calamities are clothed in greater terror when regarded as a type of the last judgment. Joel would have the people thus to regard them. Hence present suffering should quicken to penitence and faith. Destruction] An aspect of the last day seen now.
THE TERRIBLE DAY.—Joel 1:15
The prophet urges them to repentance by fresh motives and more calamities. Judgments had fallen upon the city and the field, in the temple and the vineyard. Hints are now given at the truths typified by the plagues. Trouble is not only at a distance but near. So great is this trouble that men will cry, “Alas for the day!”
I. This day is a day of terror.
1. On account of the evils which attend it. (a) The chastisement of God’s people for their sins. What can people expect but desolating strokes when they continue to sin? “In the day of adversity consider.” (b) The destruction of sinners for their guilt. All the enemies of God’s kingdom will be destroyed. “Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate, and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it” (Isaiah 13:6; Isaiah 13:9). (c) The desolation of the land (Joel 1:10-12).
2. On account of the evils which it predicts. “As a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.” In every judgment almighty power is seen. This aspect of the day was seen in present events. Vegetation was consumed, and the face of nature blackened by fire; flocks and herds roamed disconsolate over wasted fields; food was cut off before the eyes of the people, and joy and gladness departed from the house of God. But present calamities predicted greater evils to come—evils beyond description, displays of power never seen before. “Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it; it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble” (Jeremiah 30:7).
II. This day is near. “The day of the Lord is at hand.” Sinners put evil days far away, and think they will not come. “Evil tidings to-morrow,” said one in festive joy. The word of God declares that they are present and pressing—that it is folly to delay repentance, and that judgments may fall suddenly upon men to overwhelm them (Ecclesiastes 9:12; Isaiah 28:15). The antediluvians disregarded the warnings of Noah, and were swept away by the flood. Men now cry, “Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” Some put off the day in a sort of philosophic argument. “The course of nature has remained the same for ages, and therefore not likely to change.” Others live in stolid indifference, quench their forebodings of evil, and deceive themselves by lies. Alas, some change the threatened vengeance into mirthful jest, and ridicule the devout anticipations of the godly. “The Lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of.”
III. This day should be regarded by men. Destruction from the Almighty shall come. There is no uncertainty, no delay. In this light the prophet regarded and desired the people to regard the day. Present adversity should quicken us to a profound sense of the moral government of God, to continual recognition of his purpose in life, and to live so that we may escape the dangers of that eventful day. Heed not the sneering infidelity of the times. Go to your beds to-night, enter upon your duties to-morrow, as in sight of the judgment-seat. Live daily under the powers of the world to come. Grow in love for the appearing of Christ. The promise will not fail. “For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.’
THE DAY OF JUDGMENT.
I. The day of judgment written in the convictions of men. Natural theology teaches a retributive providence. The writings of the heathen are full of ideas of God as a God of justice. Retributive justice was made a separate deity, whose awards would only be full and perfect in a future life. There is a sense of future judgment in the heart. Every sin committed carries with it a monition, a prediction of this judgment. The idea is inwrought in the consciousness of mankind, and clearly taught in the writings of ancient philosophy. Seneca says, “The good man God accustoms to hardships, and prepares him for himself. But the luxurious, whom he seems to indulge and to spare, he reserves for evils to come. For you are mistaken if you think any one excepted. The man who has been long spared will at last have his portion of misery; and though he seems to have escaped it, it is only delayed for a time.” “Thus ought we always to believe,” says Plato, “those ancient and sacred words, which declare to us that the soul is immortal, that judges are appointed, and that they pass the highest sentences of condemnation when the spirit is separate from the body.” Thus it is a dictate of natural religion, that the future state will be one of misery to the wicked. The day of the Lord is foreshadowed in our moral constitution. All men fear it and all men believe it. It is a mark of the Divine origin and moral nature of man, which nothing can destroy. “That which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them.”
II. The day of judgment prefigured in the events of history. The judgments of God, extreme and awful, have even been regarded by the darkest minds as evidences of God’s anger against sin, and his determination to punish it. Heathen seers and Jewish prophets bid us regard the inner meaning of calamity and look at it, in some sense as a part and prediction of another. The vicissitudes of life, the unequal conditions of men, and the providences of God, point to a day when all things will be rectified and each one receive his due. Each particular judgment is a warning of its approach and a pledge of its certainty. Present chastisements must be viewed as steps in a progressive plan, realized in the final day; the beginning and the anticipation of “the day of the Lord.” The history of the world, through the government of God, is turned “into a continuous judgment, which will conclude at the end of this course of the world with a great and universal act of judgment, through which everything that has been brought to eternity by the stream of time unjudged and unadjusted will be judged and adjusted once for all, to bring to an end the whole development of the world in accordance with its Divine appointment, and perfect the kingdom of God by the annihilation of its foes.” “All these are the beginning of sorrows.”
III. The day of judgment predicted in Scripture. What is rendered possible by the creed of the atheist, and probable from the teachings of nature, is morally certain from Divine revelation. Scripture confirms natural theology in this respect, and teaches distinctly that God designs to impress upon our minds that he will by no means clear the guilty, but reserve them to the day of punishment. The judgments of God are said to have happened as examples, warnings to us to repent of the sins and avoid the dangers which brought them on. Earnest and emphatic declarations are given in Old and New Testaments. “He hath prepared his throne for judgment. And he shall judge the world in righteousness, he shall minister judgment to the people in uprightness.” “He hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained.” “For we must all stand before the judgment-seat of Christ.”
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 1
Joel 1:15. Judgment will assign to every one a place according to character; ranks will be adjusted and precedency set right; virtue will be rewarded and vice punished. Thoughts of this day should restrain from vice and urge to virtue, preserve human society and defend religion, vindicate the character of God, and justify his providence to men.