Joel 2:28-32 Part 2

Intro:

Well today we now take our passage from Joel 2:28-32 and we jump forward to the NT and will walk with Peter and the rest of the disciples as they experience the day of Pentecost and ultimately, as we read at the end of our last message in Joel, we will see Peter pick up this text and use it in its entirety to proclaim that the long awaited expectations of these people had been come.

If the theme of the last message, the overall feel of the text was one of anticipation and expectation then the theme that we will see today, while not totally yet jettisoning all expectation, becomes one of anticipation and expectation met and fulfilled.

Joel had set the expectation by proclaiming “It shall come to pass afterward,” that is a forward looking text, again we spent our last time together seeking to understand just how it was that this text and others like it formed the bedrock of the hope and longing that brought faithful Israelites like Simeon and Anna to the temple day in and day out as they waited for the consolation of Israel!

Well Peter, as we shall see momentarily, introduces this text from Joel by saying:

English Standard Version Chapter 2

But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel:

This IS, is being the operative word! What was taking place at that moment before these people in Palestine, in the city of Jerusalem, was in some way, as we will take our time to develop this morning, the long awaited fulfilment of these things.

I love little words that are full of tremendous significance and you would be hard pressed to find a word more pregnant with meaning than that word IS! Indeed as we will see Peter in his sermon there at Pentecost will do far more than draw out just this text in Joel alone, but we will get to that as we work our way through the text this morning.

For now lets just take a moment and pray and then read the text:

PRAY

Now as we read, again I remind you as I did last time, pay close attention to the overall feel of the text and especially to where it is that Christ winds up at the close of Peter’s message.

READ Acts 2:14-36

English Standard Version Chapter 2

14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them: “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. 15 For these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. 16 But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel:

17  “ ‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams;

18  even on my male servants and female servants

in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.

19  And I will show wonders in the heavens above

and signs on the earth below,

blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;

20  the sun shall be turned to darkness

and the moon to blood,

before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.

21  And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

22 “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know— 23 this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. 24 God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. 25 For David says concerning him,

“ ‘I saw the Lord always before me,

for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken;

26  therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced;

my flesh also will dwell in hope.

27  For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,

or let your Holy One see corruption.

28  You have made known to me the paths of life;

you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’

29 “Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. 30 Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, 31 he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. 32 This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. 33 Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. 34 For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says,

“ ‘The Lord said to my Lord,

“Sit at my right hand,

35  until I make your enemies your footstool.” ’

36 Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

Now as we begin here it is important to know that we aren't going to cover every aspect of Peter’s sermon in depth or of the theological framework needed to understand it. I am again grateful that we have had the opportunity for Jake to expound on an Ahmillenial understanding of the Kingdom of God and the arc of redemptive history which I believe will be tremendously helpful as we take up this text today.

Ill lead with it now and then labor to show it from the text but my main conclusion about this sermon and Peters use of Joel here in Acts chapter 2 is that the point is that the Kingdom has come! The messiah is on His throne. As Jake has pointed out and as we will see today, the language of inauguration and consummation will be important. We will see that the inauguration has come, the expectation long held by the faithful remnant of elect Israel as broken the horizon of history. The tent of David to use earlier language from Joel, has been rebuilt. However, it is also important to note as we will also see in the text that though the Kingdom has come, has been inaugurated, it yet awaits a future consummation the day that we yet await when this age will fully pass away and the age to come will be brought to its fullness. We live in that overlap and even here in Peter’s sermon I believe that we can see some expectation of that overlap made manifest.

This may be one of the most difficult transitions to make coming from a more dispensational perspective. I have talked to folks coming from a dispensational perspective that object to the Kingdom now understanding of the ahmillenial position because they don't see all of the passages that speak of a kingdom consummated fulfilled now in the time of the kingdom inaugurated. However, the key is to understand that if the Kingdom has been inaugurated, and it will be consummated in the age to come, then there is no reason to look for a 1000 year earthly kingdom to fulfill these prophecies! This is precisely the dispensational problem and we will see how problematic that position becomes for that view as we press on into Peter’s sermon this morning.

So now as we come to the sermon we note that Peter leads with Joel. This is not surprising at all! Joel has been called the prophet of the day of the Lord and Joel clearly sets some amazing expectations of what these people were looking and longing for.

So then, as the disciples exit the upper room and as we read there in Acts the people in the streets are amazed because, though these are people from far and wide, from the far reaches of the known world, yet here they find these Israelites from around the Palestine area speaking and yet they hear each of them in their own language. This admittedly causes quite the stir. In response the Holy Spirit, who has just filled him, moves Peter to address the people.

“These men aren't filled with new wine like you may be imagining,” he says.

Isn’t it amazing how easy it is for some people to skip the amazement part and go straight for what ever type of earthly explanation they can find for what is happening before their eyes.

Peter though puts a stop to these types of reasonings and picks up this passage in Joel immediately to show that what is happening is supernatural in nature and not just supernatural but is something that these people would have known quite well. These are people that have come to Jerusalem to worship, these are people, who whether they were all truly faithful worshipers or not, yet these are people who would have been well familiar with the messianic expectations set by the OT prophets and writers! And here Peter reaches back and grabs a seminal passage of messianic expectation to kick off his message that this long awaited thing has now come to pass.

English Standard Version Chapter 2

this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel:

And he then quotes our passage:

English Standard Version Chapter 2

And in the last days it shall be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams;

18  even on my male servants and female servants

in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.

19  And I will show wonders in the heavens above

and signs on the earth below,

blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;

20  the sun shall be turned to darkness

and the moon to blood,

before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.

21  And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

Now Peter’s main point here is that this messianic age has come, it has been inaugurated. The day that the prophets had spoken about was now here.

We saw that part of the expectation that Joel had created about this day was that there was going to be a broad outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all of God’s people. This is specifically tied to prophesy in the OT but we saw that the real desire behind Moses’s words in Exodus 11 and indeed behind Joel's words in Joel 2 is that there would be a filling of the people by God’s Spirit that would enable them to do the work that He had called them to do.

And so here Peter has now experienced this filling which has empowered him in a supernatural way through the Spirit to fulfill the ministry that Christ has left to His followers and Peter reaches back and says, the time has come, the Spirit has now been poured out.

Prophecy and Tongues

Now there are some additional important points that we can gather from this part of the text and they primarily relate to our understanding of prophecy and maybe more importantly to some common modern misunderstandings of prophecy. Ill mention these briefly but note that the point here in this text is not that the gift of prophecy will be the universal experience of God’s people, the primary point of the text is that the gift of the Holy Spirit will be the universal experience of God’s people.

In regards to prophecy we need to see, primarily, that the NT believers including Peter here, draw a one to one comparison between the OT texts about and the peoples experience of prophecy and that in the New!

Debate continues to be held at large in the church about the nature and function of prophecy for today and one of the primary errors, I would say, that has crept in is an effort to make prophecy something different today that it once was.

Proponents of this view use passages like 1 Corinthians 14:29 to propose a view that says, as I have often heard it said in more charismatic circles, that we ought to weigh a word of prophecy and “eat the meat and spit out the bones.” In other words, modern prophecy can contain a mixture of truth and error and we are to hold those prophecies up to the lens of scripture and take what is scriptural as a word from the Lord and let everything that doesn't pass muster pass away.

Now this is a dangerous view and it relies on a misreading of the text there in 1 Corinthians 14 which is actually just instructing the prophets to weigh carefully who among them is going to speak not to make some sort of division between error and truth in the actual messages themselves.

Though I lean towards a more secessionist position on these issues, meaning that I tend to believe that specific gifts like the gift of prophecy are given at significant points in redemptive history, particularly points where the message of God’s Word is made more clear through further divine revelation of God’s plans for His people and this world, though I lean that direction I would say that I am willing to be shown examples of prophecy but those examples would need to adhere to the OT standards for prophetic ministry and messages not some modern conception of truth mingled with error.

This also sheds some light on the function of tongues. Peter clearly takes an example of people speaking in tongues and attaches it to a passage about prophecy meaning that tongues as well serve a prophetic function and ought to be approached in the same manner. Tongues is by definition a word from the Lord because the speaker has no ability to even understand what is being said and therefore cant even, in a real occurrence of this gift, make it up!

Commentator O. Palmer Robertson says here:

Prophet of the Coming Day of the Lord: The Message of Joel 3. The Nature of the Gift of Tongues

Peter can make this application because he understands this speaking in other tongues to be a kind of prophecy. Tongues, like prophecy, involved the inspired speaking of the very word of God, only, in the case of speaking in ‘other tongues’ the prophetic speaking apparently occurred in another language that the prophet had never studied. The amazement of the crowd on the Day of Pentecost was that each one heard the apostles speaking ‘in his own language’ (Acts 2:6).

Much idle speculation and harmful practice in the church today has arisen out of a failure to see the Old Testament roots of the New Testament phenomenon of this gift of speaking in ‘other tongues’. Joel’s prophecy builds on the ancient promise to Moses about the inspired utterances of prophets. Peter’s subsequent appeal to Joel’s words as explaining the tongues of Pentecost should settle the question of their nature and their significance.

Now one last point here that I believe is supremely important. Though we ought to see clearly that this gift of prophecy and tongues speaking is not the universal expectation of God’s people and even that a good case can be made for the temporary nature in time of these specific gifts themselves, it is because of these gifts that we can have great confidence in our own carrying forth of God’s word today.

We come back to the point of Joel and Peter here, God is doing something now, He is filling His people with His spirit that they might be empowered supernaturally to carry out the work He has for them to accomplish. The Kingdom has been inaugurated and as the King rules from His throne He is empowering His people now to live and work in and for that Kingdom!

Because of this understanding that we have of prophecy as the very words of God being made manifest for us we can understand that when e pick up our Bibles we have in our hands the very words of God, brought down to us through time by faithful men people who have, by God’s help translated and carried it forward to us.

Knowing then that we have God’s prophetic words that He spoke into our world through His prophets to fulfill his purposes and knowing that a time has come when we as God’s people experience the blessings of this millennial age when our Messiah reigns and fills us with His Holy Spirit that we might accomplish that which He has prepared for us to do these two seminal truths ought to fill us with great confidence to take up God’s Word and to go out and do these works that He has prepared for us to do!

Again, these gifts signify that the long awaited Messiah has come and that the long awaited Kingdom of that Messiah has been inaugurated and the gifts of that long awaited time are being distributed to the servants of that King!

Difficulty

Now we do need to discuss momentarily a difficulty that I find in this passage.

We need to note that Peter quotes the entire passage from Joel from verses 28-32. So we see also that just as he has said that the gift of the Spirit has come, the first of the dual expectations concerning the messianic Kingdom, the blessing of God;s people. So Peter also quotes the verses that show the flip side of this, the judgement that was to follow the Messiah as He brought God’s divine recompense on those who would not submit to His rule.

Peter quotes Joel:

English Standard Version Chapter 2

And I will show wonders in the heavens above

and signs on the earth below,

blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;

20  the sun shall be turned to darkness

and the moon to blood,

before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.

Now there are three ways that this section can be understood.

Refers to Christs death on the cross

Doesn't seem linguistically in Peter’s sermon to be reward looking though nor does the saving death of Christ, though darkness was present, seem to fulfill the judgement on sinners that this text speaks of.

Therefore I am torn between two views:

Refers to the destruction on Jerusalem

Refers to the future judgement to be poured out when Christ returns and judges the earth.

I lean toward the first option because of the close connection here with the language of Matthew 24 particularly verse 29 where we read of the coming destruction of Jerusalem:

English Standard Version Chapter 24

Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 30

We also see Jesus in the following verse speak ofHis coming on the clouds in power and great glory which certainly reflects the language of wonders in the heaves above. We know from Jakes conections drawn in Matthew 26 this this reference to Jesus coming on the clouds is a reference to His coming in Judgement on JErusalem.

It is also significant for this view of