The prophets tended to see the future as a series of mountain peaks. Joel’s prophecy is a great example. He paints, in vivid colours, the picture of a swarm of locusts attacking ancient Judah, as a sign foreshadowing the awesome, still-in-our-future, ‘Day of the Lord’.
There were a series of ‘days of the Lord’ in the Old Testament, as the northern tribes were taken into exile by Assyria, and Nebuchadnezzar descended like a vulture on Judah, leaving Jeremiah to lament the devastation he left behind. But those days of the Lord were only foretastes of the ultimate and climactic ‘Day of the Lord’ when people will cry out for the rocks to fall on them, so they don’t have to face the full glory of the returning Christ.
Then Joel, who himself seems to leap like a locust from one glorious theme to another, jumps from terrifying scenes of judgment to glorious scenes of the Holy Spirit being poured out on the people of God. Peter quotes him practically verbatim on the Day of Pentecost: ‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams’ (Acts 2:17, quoting Joel 2:28).
