Joel 2:28-29 "And it shall come to pass afterward That I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your old men shall dream dreams, Your young men shall see visions. 29 And also on My menservants and on My maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days.
On the fiftieth day after the Passover, when seven Sabbaths had passed from that day, God’s Old Testament people gathered from all over the world in Jerusalem to celebrate the harvest at the Festival of Weeks. Little did they know that on that particular Pentecost, there would be the start of a new harvest—the harvest of souls for the New Testament church, thanks to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit which began on that day. That day is the day we now celebrate as Pentecost, the birthday of the New Testament church.
And this is not one of those birthdays where you go to the party and the host gets nervous because she sees so many people waiting and the cake is not very big, and so you get your piece of cake and it’s more like a sliver than a piece.
No, this is not one of those birthdays at all. Our God is generous, especially when it comes to the portion of His Spirit that He shares with us. It’s not just a sliver, but a slab, a giant heaping helping, a cup overflowing. As Peter in his Pentecost sermon pointed back to the word of our Lord written in the prophet Joel, the word which we heard this morning, he draws our attention to the fact that God freely pours out His Spirit.
- On all His people.
In the days of the prophet Joel, though, things were different. At that time it wasn’t His Spirit that God was freely pouring out. It was locusts. It wasn’t just a couple of little harmless bugs gnawing on some blades of grass. It was a plague, a great swarm, so thick that they even blocked out the sun and the moon. And they destroyed everything.
Not just the fruit of the crops, but the plants themselves! It had all become a giant meal for the locust swarm (Joel 1).
What a terrible disaster! And yet, at this time in human history, the Lord was using this disaster, this plague of locusts, to talk to His people, to get their attention, to call them to repentance—to call them back to Himself because they had wandered from Him. But think about that: the fact that the only way God could get people’s attention and communicate with them was to allow a disaster to befall them! What a sorry state!
And yet, that was the exact state of humanity’s relationship to God. Instead of knowing God, people knew only their own ideas about God. Instead of listening to God’s will, people listened to their own desires. Joel wasn’t the first prophet to call people back to the LORD or to lament the fact that so few people truly knew Him. When the LORD put His Spirit on the seventy elders of Israel and they started prophesying, the great prophet Moses had cried out, “Oh, that all the LORD’s people were prophets and that the LORD would put His Spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29).
In some ways times haven’t changed all that much. Instead of believing what God has said about Himself, people choose to believe and worship their own ideas about God. For two sad, young girls in Waukesha, they believed that in order to know their god better, they had to make a human sacrifice. With others it’s not quite as obvious. Some people think that in order to know God and receive His Spirit that you have to pray hard enough, that you have to be holy enough in your everyday life, that you have to feel sorry enough for your sins. But what happens to those who try their hardest and never quite achieve that experience with the divine? Do you give up? The agnostics of the world—the people who say that God exists, but that there’s just no way for us limited mortal beings to know or comprehend Him—by and large they’re the ones who have tried to fill up on God on their own, but have come away empty.
That’s because in a way, the agnostics are right. By nature, we are born spiritually dead. A dead person can neither know the ice cream truck is coming nor get up and get an ice cream cone. Neither can we naturally know who God is or come to Him. And so Moses’ wish is our wish too—if only we could know God. If only we could have His Spirit put on us.
Here in Joel chapter 2, the LORD announced the fulfillment of Moses’ wish with this promise: “And it shall come to pass afterward that I shall pour out My Spirit on all flesh” (v. 28). What amazing love God has for sinful human beings! We can’t come to God; so God comes to us. We can’t know God on our own; so God reveals Himself fully and completely to us, freely pouring out His Spirit on all people.
When does He do this? “Afterward,” He says. The LORD had just finished describing through Joel how He was going to make everything better, how He was going to relent from sending the people to eternal destruction, how He was going to put things back the way they were supposed to be. What He was talking about was what the promised Savior was going to do when He came. Jesus, by His perfect life and innocent death, paid for our sinful wandering from God, and restored our standing before Him. He made everything right once more between us and God.
And following that restoration—the forgiveness of sins that Jesus won for us at the cross and proved for us by His empty tomb—that’s the “afterward,” when the Lord promised to pour out His Spirit on “all flesh”—all people. Gender wouldn’t matter; the Spirit was poured out on both “sons” and “daughters” (v. 28). Age would no longer be relevant—old and young alike would receive Him. Even rich or poor, slave or free—it didn’t matter: “also on My menservants and on My maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days” (v. 29).
This promise saw its initial fulfillment on Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out first on the disciples of Jesus, and then on the crowd, as they, too, received the gift of the Holy Spirit. And we still see it fulfilled today: God’s Spirit poured out on all people through the means of grace—through the preaching and teaching of the Gospel; through the water and the Word in Holy Baptism; through the bread and wine that is also Christ’s body and blood in the Lord’s Supper.
You want to find God? Go to the places where He has promised to be found. Peter was the one who told the crowd that day to repent and be baptized in Jesus’ name for the forgiveness of sins, “and,” he said, “you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). God has freely poured out His Spirit upon all of His people.
- To reveal His will to all.
And He has poured out that Spirit on us with a special purpose: to reveal His will to all. According to the Lord’s promise, He says, “I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your old men shall dream dreams, Your young men shall see visions” (v. 28). So what does this mean? That since the Spirit’s been poured out we’re going to spontaneously start prophesying, that God’s going to give us miraculous dreams and vision? My son had a dream about bagels this week—was that a vision of God?
You have to understand that the Lord’s speaking of New Testament promises in Old Testament terms. How did God reveal His will to men in the Old Testament? Through dreams, visions, and prophecy. So when Joel talks about sons and daughters prophesying and old men dreaming dreams and young men seeing visions, these were the images that folks understood as representing God revealing His will to people.
The underlying thing here is that as God promises to freely pour out His Spirit, He’s also promising to reveal His will to us. What is the will of God? Didn’t God reveal His will for all people in the perfect life and innocent death of Jesus Christ? Didn’t God reveal His will when He raised Jesus from the dead and seated Him at His right hand to live and rule eternally?
And with the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost—this is the will of God that’s revealed. It’s the Gospel! The vision we all have—young and old alike—is of a God who loves us so much that He was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to save us; a God who loves us so much that when we can’t come to Him, He finds us. With the outpouring of the Spirit that takes place with the preaching of the Gospel, we never have to wonder whether or not God loves us. It’s from Christ’s death and resurrection that we learn that God our heavenly Father has welcomed us prodigal children home with open arms of love. It’s from Christ that we learn that God wants all people to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. He’s made His love as plain as day, along with His eternal will for our future.
And God reveals that will not only to us, but to the whole world—through the bold testimony of faith. “Your sons and daughters will prophesy,” God told those Old Testament people. And that’s what’s happened. There are no “chosen few” who are our prophets anymore. While those in the public ministry preach and teach at Christ’s command and on the church’s behalf, you are all priests in God’s kingdom—all able to proclaim the truth of God’s Word in your own lives. “If you cannot speak like angels, if you cannot preach like Paul, / You can tell the love of Jesus, you can say ‘He died for all.’” And that telling the love of Jesus—it isn’t left to us, but it’s thanks to God’s generous outpouring of the Spirit. It’s the fruit of our Spirit-born faith in what God has done for us.
God freely pours out His Spirit on all His people that all might know His will, His good and gracious, saving will. May He continue to freely pour out His Spirit on us, that we faithfully proclaim that salvation until the day of the LORD dawns and Jesus comes again to judge the living and the dead. Amen.