17 Let the priests, the servants of the Lord, be weeping between the covered way and the altar, and let them say, Have mercy on your people, O Lord, do not give up your heritage to shame, so that the nations become their rulers: why let them say among the peoples, Where is their God?
For this reason, you mountains of Israel, give ear to the word of the Lord; this is what the Lord has said to the mountains and to the hills, to the streams and to the valleys, to the unpeopled wastes and to the towns where no one is living, from which the goods have been taken and which have been put to shame by the rest of the nations who are round about: For this cause the Lord has said: Truly, in the heat of my bitter feeling I have said things against the rest of the nations and against all Edom, who have taken my land as a heritage for themselves with the joy of all their heart, and with bitter envy of soul have made attacks on it: For this cause be a prophet about the land of Israel, and say to the mountains and to the hills, to the streams and to the valleys, This is what the Lord has said: Truly, in my bitter feeling and in my wrath I have said these things, because you have undergone the shame of the nations: For this cause the Lord has said, See, I have taken an oath that the nations which are round about you are themselves to undergo the shame which they have put on you.
O my God, let your ear be turned and give hearing; let your eyes be open and see how we have been made waste and the town which is named by your name: for we are not offering our prayers before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercies. O Lord, give ear; O Lord, have forgiveness; O Lord, take note and do; let there be no more waiting; for the honour of your name, O my God, because your town and your people are named by your name.
And they will give the news to the people of this land: they have had word that you, Lord, are present with this people, letting yourself be seen face to face, and that your cloud is resting over them, and that you go before them in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night. Now if you put to death all this people as one man, then the nations who have had word of your glory will say, Because the Lord was not able to take this people into the land which he made an oath to give them, he sent destruction on them in the waste land.
And I saw that you had done evil against the Lord, and had made for yourselves a metal image of a young ox: you had quickly been turned from the way in which the Lord had given you orders to go. And I let the stones go from my hands, and they were broken before your eyes. And I went down on my face before the Lord, as at the first, for forty days and forty nights, without taking food or drinking water, because of all your sin, in doing evil in the eyes of the Lord and moving him to wrath. For I was full of fear because of the wrath of the Lord which was burning against you, with your destruction in view. But again the Lord's ear was open to my prayer. And the Lord, in his wrath, would have put Aaron to death: and I made prayer for Aaron at the same time. And I took your sin, the image which you had made, and put it in the fire and had it hammered and crushed very small till it was only dust: and the dust I put in the stream flowing down from the mountain. Again at Taberah and at Massah and at Kibroth-hattaavah you made the Lord angry. And when the Lord sent you from Kadesh-barnea, saying, Go up and take the land which I have given you; you went against the orders of the Lord your God, and had no faith in him, and would not give ear to his voice. From the day when I first had knowledge of you, you have gone against the word of the Lord. So I went down on my face in prayer before the Lord for forty days and forty nights as I did at first; because the Lord had said that he would put an end to you. And I made prayer to the Lord and said, O Lord God, do not send destruction on your people and your heritage, to whom, by your great power, you have given salvation, whom you have taken out of Egypt by the strength of your hand. Keep in mind your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not looking at the hard heart of this people, or their evil-doing and their sin: Or it may be said in the land from which you have taken them, Because the Lord was not able to take them into the land which he said he would give them, and because of his hate for them, he has taken them out to put them to death in the waste land. But still they are your people and your heritage, whom you took out by your great power and by your stretched-out arm.
But Moses made prayer to God, saying, Lord, why is your wrath burning against your people whom you took out of the land of Egypt, with great power and with the strength of your hand? Why let the Egyptians say, He took them out to an evil fate, to put them to death on the mountains, cutting them off from the earth? Let your wrath be turned away from them, and send not this evil on your people. Have in mind Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you gave your oath, saying, I will make your seed like the stars of heaven in number, and all this land will I give to your seed, as I said, to be their heritage for ever.
Because of this we are turned back by the attacker: those who have hate for us take our goods for themselves. You have made us like sheep which are taken for meat; we are put to flight among the nations. You let your people go for nothing; your wealth is not increased by their price. You have made us to be looked down on by our neighbours, we are laughed at and shamed by those who are round about us. Our name is a word of shame among the nations, a sign for the shaking of heads among the peoples.
Keep this in mind, O Lord, that your haters have said cruel things, and that your name has been looked down on by a people of evil behaviour. O give not the soul of your dove to the hawk; let not the life of the poor go out of your memory for ever. Keep in mind your undertaking; for the dark places of the earth are full of pride and cruel acts. O let not the crushed be turned back in shame; let the low man and the poor give praise to your name. Up! O God, be the judge of your cause; keep in mind the bitter things which the man of evil behaviour says against you every day. Keep in mind the voice of your haters; the outcry of those who come against you goes up every day.
O Lord, why do you send us wandering from your ways, making our hearts hard, so that we have no fear of you? Come back, because of your servants, the tribes of your heritage. Why have evil men gone over your holy place, so that it has been crushed under the feet of our haters? We have become as those who were never ruled by you, on whom your name was not named.
Your holy towns have become a waste, Zion has become a waste, Jerusalem is a mass of broken walls. Our holy and beautiful house, where our fathers gave praise to you, is burned with fire; and all the things of our desire have come to destruction. In view of all this, will you still do nothing, O Lord? will you keep quiet, and go on increasing our punishment? []
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Joel 2
Commentary on Joel 2 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 2
In this chapter we have,
Thus the beginning of this chapter is made terrible with the tokens of God's wrath, but the latter end of it made comfortable with the assurances of his favour, and it is in the way of repentance that this blessed change is made; so that, though it is only the last paragraph of the chapter that points directly at gospel-times, yet the whole may be improved as a type and figure, representing the curses of the law invading men for their sins, and the comforts of the gospel flowing in to them upon their repentance.
Joe 2:1-11
Here we have God contending with his own professing people for their sins and executing upon them the judgment written in the law (Deu. 28:42), The fruit of thy land shall the locust consume, which was one of those diseases of Egypt that God would bring upon them, v. 60.
Joe 2:12-17
We have here an earnest exhortation to repentance, inferred from that desolating judgment described and threatened in the foregoing verses: Therefore now turn you to the Lord.
Joe 2:18-27
See how ready God is to succour and relieve his people, how he waits to be gracious; as soon as ever they humble themselves under this hand, and pray, and seek his face, he immediately meets them with his favours. They prayed that God would spare them, and see here with what good words and comfortable words he answered them; for God's promises are real answers to the prayers of faith, because with him saying and doing are not two things. Now observe,
Joe 2:28-32
The promises of corn, and wine, and oil, in the foregoing verses, would be very acceptable to a wasted country; but here we are taught that we must not rest in those things. God has reserved some better things for us, and these verses have reference to those better things, both the kingdom of grace and the kingdom of glory, with the happiness of true believers in both. We are here told,