The Giving of the Spirit.

        Evidently the call to repentance and fasting was followed, for there is an immediate promise of Divine blessing (note tenses in 2:18f, R.V.). These verses (2:18-27) refer to Joel’s own time rather than to the more distant future.

        Then there comes the promise that even as the judgment of locusts was followed by spiritual turning to God, so in the judgments of the Day of the Lord (2:31f) there will be a tremendous outpouring of the Spirit. From the New Testa­ment we know that this promise was fulfilled on the first Whit-Sunday (Pentecost, now the feast of the Holy Trinity, Acts. 2:16). The coming of the Holy Spirit to found a body in which all barriers of birth, sex and social standing should be swept away, and in which the will and purposes of God should truly find ex­pression is, in conjunction with the work of Christ, the supreme intervention of God in human affairs up to our time. The forty years that followed were the most catastrophic in their history for the Jewish people until perhaps our own time.

        While the lack of perspective in the prophets’ vision of the future is universally recognized, it is not sufficiently seen that the two comings of our Lord are inseparably connected, two phases of one great divine intervention. So the Day of the Lord looks not merely to our Lord’s second coining, but to His first as well.

        Unless, therefore, other evidence can be found, it would be dangerous to base any view of world-wide revival before the second coming of our Lord merely on this passage.