Bible Commentaries

Prophet of Judgment

Joel 1:1).

Not the word that came to Hosea or to Joel 1:2.)

The prophets will attend to history; they will not have little or narrow views taken of providence. They summon councils of the old and the young and the many-minded, and they say, How stands this fact in the history of the ages? Fixing our minds upon locality, we miss the universe. It is possible for a man to be so devoted a geographer as not to know there is any other world but the earth in all the shining heavens. A man may so belittle himself by his geography as to lose all right to give a judgment on the providence of the universe. We do not understand one age until we have called in all the ages. To-day is the product of all the days. This is the advantage of studying history on large lines; this is the advantage of the true university course, that takes in all points, all influences, all factors; this is the education that attempers the mind, gives it a new judicial quality, enables it to be cool where minds that have not undergone the discipline fly off into little spasms and sparks of anger and retaliation, not knowing how one thing blends with another, and how all things work together in holy edification. So Joel will have a large council, not the young men only, for they can talk but little wisdom; and not any one class, for they only know what belongs to their own relationship; he will have old and young, he will have experience and passion, he will have sobriety and enthusiasm, and he will constitute the whole into judgment.

"Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation. [And what is to be told? This:] That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten" ( Joel 1:3-4).

God hath many locusts. Only four of them are named here, but they are the greatest devourers that ever fell upon a landscape. They came but an hour ago; they are multitudinous beyond the power of arithmetic to enumerate, and in a few hours not one green thing will be left upon the land. Nay, their jaws are like stones, they will seize the bark upon the trees and tear it off, and none can hear the crunching of that gluttony; and tomorrow what will the fair landscape be like? It will be like a country smitten by sudden winter; the trees that yesterday were green and fair and lovely will be naked, and their whiteness shall resemble the whiteness of snow. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." All the fourfold locust tribe—for all mentioned here are locusts—belong to the Lord. The great providence of God is responsible for its own Joel 1:5).

Why? The reference need not be specifically and exclusively to wine, though that word is mentioned here; the reference is no doubt to wine and to all narcotics and to all the base alternatives of which corrupt men avail themselves in the time of peril and distress; but the eternal lesson of the exhortation is that all sin ends in stupefaction. "Awake." Are not drunkards always awake? No; they never can be awake in the full sense of the term. Are not all bad men awake, on the qui vive, on the alert? Are they not watchful, keen-eyed, lynx-eyed? No; they may boast of being such, but all bad men are stupefied; there is an alcohol working upon them which takes out the brain force and the nerve power, and leaves them feeble indeed. Though under some vain hallucination they may believe themselves to be sane, when the mocking spirit of judgment has drawn a film across their eyes, and made them see a mirage when they thought they saw a mountain on which was spread a feast of fat things. All evil stupefies, all wrongdoing takes away brain volume, brain force. Every evil thought robs the mind; every cruel passion that surges through the blood steals not the purse, but that without which the purse is empty. "He that sinneth against me," saith wisdom, saith the Lord indeed, "wrongeth his own soul." Suicide is not limited to one act or to one species of madness. A man cannot plot an evil conspiracy without being less a man afterwards than he was before. No brain can bear the action of sin without going down in quality, in fire, in fine delicacy, in gift of prayer. He who sins much prays little; he who gives himself up to the captivity of the devil cares not to look aloft and face the upbraiding stars. All through these grand prophetic books men are called to awake, rouse themselves, shake off their lethargy, and be men in attention and in consecration.

We need a Joel to-day. For his wages we would award him starvation. He would not live in kings" houses. There is nothing to-day in Church or state that does not need pulling to pieces, cross-examination, analysis, that all that is good therein—and there is much good—may be brought into new cohesion, and set to new and fuller uses. Men are bribing men, and then going to the Sunday school; many are saying, If you will get this property on these terms through my hands it will be on the understanding that—And the all but silent reply is, That will, of course, be understood. And then they go to church! They say, This is public property, and is not like private property; and if I can arrange this for you, the commission will be—You understand what I mean; and then they go to some Liberal meeting and shout, "The people for ever!" or to some Tory meeting, and say, "Church and Queen!" If some Joel were to come he would be starved—he must be starved. No one ever came to do Messianic work who was not nailed and pierced and crucified. It is in vain to preach peace until we have first preached repentance; it is mischievous to say, Peace, peace, where there is no peace; it is iniquity in the sight of God to daub the wall with untempered mortar. Nothing is settled until it is settled at the foundations. A painted cheek is not a healthy one; the true colour must come up from the heart, and write itself in healthy hue on the face. Having preached repentance, we can then preach peace—we ought to preach peace. This was the method of Jesus Christ. He began to preach by saying, "Repent"; after that came all the sweet gospel of offered love, of sacrifice, of pure doctrine, of noble life, and then came the wondrous mystery of the Cross—Christ being delivered because of our offences, and raised again because of our justification: the mystery of the Atonement, the mystery of Calvary, the ineffable mystery of the Just dying for the unjust, that men might be saved. But first there must be Joel -like denunciation, criticism, exposure, and afterwards there shall come all that Christ has to say, Peace on earth, goodwill toward men—all that Christ can do by way of reconciliation, and until Christ has undertaken the case we undertake it in vain. Except the Lord keep the city, the watchmen cannot keep it; except the Lord build the city, the masons cannot put it up. It is the Lord that doeth all things, but he must have all his ministers at work—his denunciators, his prophets that fear no face of clay, his singers that know the subtlety and wizardry of music, and his apostles who come with great gospel speeches to heal broken hearts and dry the tears of repentance. It is in the midst of this mystery that we are set. Blessed is that servant who shall be found waiting, working, watching, when his Lord cometh!