CRITICAL NOTES.]
Joel 1:16.] Food cut off, the joy of festivals and sacrifices banished.
Joel 1:17. Seed] decayed under the clods. Garners] Storehouses went to ruin and prospects of future harvest were blighted.
Joel 1:18.] From the homestead attention is directed to the fields. Cattle] bewildered because the plains often cropped yield no pasture. Sheep] seem to mourn the guilt of man.
GREAT NATIONAL CALAMITIES.—Joel 1:16-18
As a proof that the day of the Lord is approaching the prophet sets in detail the judgments that were upon the land. Present prospects were cut off, all future hope frustrated, rotten seed, withered fruits, and desolate land, cause man and beast to mourn.
I. Human sustenance taken away. “Is not the meat cut off before your eyes?” When the fruits were ripe, the corn ready for the reaper, and the grapes longing to be pressed; when everything was set before their eyes for their enjoyment, they were taken away. God can easily disappoint our expectations. Meat is often cut off from our eyes by sin. True sustenance is in God and in his word. Man’s life, even his physical life, is not dependent for its continuance upon bread alone. God has but to will to the subject elements, material and spiritual, and any other means will suffice, as well as bread, to sustain life. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”
II. Festive joy cut off. “Joy and gladness from the house of our God.” Pinched by famine, the offerings for the priest and the temple had perished. Annual feasts and national thanksgivings had departed. The joy, all the deeper because it was “the joy of the Lord,” the gladness, all the more pure and sweet because it was “gladness in the house of their God,” had ceased perforce. How sad to be deprived of necessary food and the ordinances of God’s house! When the body is not fed the mind will starve, the morals will suffer. As the brain depends upon the blood for its nourishment, so the soul depends upon God for its health. He imparts to those who love him a joy of exuberance in all the good things of life. None are poor but those who sin and despise the warnings of God’s providence. “The Lord will not suffer the soul of the righteous to famish; but he casteth away the substance of the wicked.”
III. National drought prevailed. The land greatly suffered, cattle and herds were distressed, and groaned out their life through want of pasture.
1. The cattle suffered. “How do the beasts groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed.” Touch after touch is given. Not only do men suffer, but innocent cattle groan who depend upon their care. The herds of oxen find the oft-cropped plains destitute of pasture. The sheep, which can feed where herds cannot, wander in their pitiful distress and bleat in vain. “Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust.”
2. The homesteads were destroyed. “The barns are broken down.” It is not enough to lose joy and mirth. The very “seed is rotten under the clods.” The prospects of the harvest are destroyed. Vegetation and grass, smitten by the burning sun, have withered. The husbandmen despair, and suffer their “barns” to break down, and their “garners” to become heaps of ruins. Thus one mischief is heaped upon another. All nature is touched in sympathy and robed in mourning for man’s guilt. “Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field and with the fowls of heaven” (Hosea 4:3).
HOMILETIC HINTS AND OUTLINES
The husbandman was called to mourning for a threefold calamity that lay upon his tillage (Amos 5:16). First, immoderate rain in or about seeding; secondly, locusts and other vermin at spring; thirdly, extreme drought after all (Joel 1:19-20). Thus God followeth sinners with one plague in the neck of another (as he did Pharaoh, that sturdy rebel), till he has made his foes his footstools. To multiply sin is to multiply sorrow (Psalms 16:4); to heap up wickedness is to heap up wrath (Romans 2:5) [Trapp].
Let us here recall the fact, that it is the Spirit of God who speaks by the mouth of his prophet; for it is to be feared that we do not make enough of the humanity of God, of his intense delight in trees and flowers, in herds and flocks; of his humane care for them, of his tender sympathy with them. The Psalms and Prophecies are full of this Divine humanity, no Prophecy fuller, perhaps, than that of Joel; and in no passage of Joel’s is that tender, intense humanity more beautifully and pathetically expressed than in the verses (18–20) we have just considered [Cox].
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 1
Joel 1:16-18. Nature presents two aspects towards us. If we sin and oppose her, she is stern, implacable, and destructive, charged with storms and thunder, famine and pestilence; if we yield and obey, we secure her blessings, co-operate with her laws, and command her forces. Love and serve God, and nature shall be at peace with thee.