SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/7/2015
9:53 PM
My Worship Time Focus: The Jewish
Context
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Joel 2:28-32
Message of the
verses: “28 "It will come about
after this That I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; And your sons and
daughters will prophesy, Your old men will dream dreams, Your young men will
see visions. 29 “Even on the male and female servants I will pour out My Spirit
in those days. 30 “I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth, Blood,
fire and columns of smoke. 31 “The sun will be turned into darkness And the
moon into blood Before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. 32 "And it will come about that whoever
calls on the name of the LORD Will be delivered; For on Mount Zion and in
Jerusalem There will be those who escape, As the LORD has said, Even among the
survivors whom the LORD calls.”
We ended our last
SD from this section by quoting Dr. Wiersbe who tells us that these verses some
different contexts in them and they are divided up between “The Jewish Context”
and then “The Church Context.”
When we look at verse 28 we see the word in the NASB “after”
and in the KJV we would see this word as “afterward,” and the events that Joel
is writing about are what happened in verses 2:18-28 where he writes of how the
Lord will heal the nation of Israel after the invasion of the Assyrians. Dr. Wiersbe writes “However, it doesn’t
necessarily mean immediately afterward, for many centuries passed before the
Spirit poured out. When Peter quoted
this verse in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit led him to
interpret ‘afterward’ to mean ‘in the last days’ (Acts 2:17).”
The end times or the last days began with the ministry of
Christ on earth: “in these last days has
spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom
also He made the world (Heb. 1:2).”
These last days of end times will end with the “Day of the Lord,” and
again this is what we are studying in the 16th chapter of the book
of Revelation in the Spiritual Diaries that I write and are posted in the
morning (my time morning). Actually the
sixteenth chapter of Revelation tells us about the last seven plagues that God
brings upon planet earth and directly after that the Lord Jesus Christ will
return to end the war of Armageddon and then set up His Kingdom on planet
earth, a kingdom that has been promised to the Jews for centuries by the OT
prophets and then also what the NT writes speak of along with what our Lord
spoke of while here on planet earth. Much
of what He said is recorded in Matthew 24-25, along with Mark 13, and some in
Luke 21. It would be prudent to quote
the end note that Dr. Wiersbe has on the Millennial Kingdom: “Note the phrase ‘a thousand years’ is used
six times in Revelation 20:1-7. The
Latin word for ‘thousand years’ is millennium; it is used to describe the
kingdom Jesus Christ will establish on earth in fulfillment of the Old
Testament promises to Israel. However,
some students prefer to ‘spiritualize’ these promises and apply them to the
church today, and these people are called amillennialists, meaning ‘no
millennium.’ Premillennialists are
Christians who believe Jesus will return before the Kingdom is established, for
how can you have a kingdom without the King?
There was a time when a postmillennial interpretation was popular: the church would ‘change the world’ and ‘bring
in the kingdom,’ and then Jesus would return to reign. The wars and atrocities of this past century
and the speed of apostasy in the church have pretty well done away with this
optimistic outlook.” I have written
about this type of thing in earlier SD’s stating that those in the church who
believe that there will not be a kingdom on earth for the Jews are using this
as an excuse to persecute the Jews, something God will never be pleased with
for He told Abraham “And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I
will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed’
(Gen. 12:3).”
We can see from these verses in Joel 2:28-32 that he
promised that right before the “Day of the Lord, “ that God would pour out His
Holy Spirit in a remarkable way, and this partly happened on the Day of
Pentecost” after the preaching of Peter, but will happen in a greater way
during the Tribulation Period. It must
be remembered that the ministry of the Holy Spirit was a bit different in the
days of the Old Testament as He would come on people and then leave them as David
writes in “Ps 51:11 Do not cast me away
from Your presence And do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.” We also see that there was a time when the
Holy Spirit came upon Saul, the first King of Israel, and then there was a time
when He left Saul and then we read that He came upon David. “1Sa 10:10 When they came to the hill there,
behold, a group of prophets met him; and the Spirit of God came upon him
mightily, so that he prophesied among them.”
(This verse and the next one speak of Saul.) “1Sa 16:14 Now the Spirit of the LORD
departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD terrorized him.” “1Sa 16:23
So it came about whenever the evil spirit from God came to Saul, David
would take the harp and play it with his hand; and Saul would be refreshed and
be well, and the evil spirit would depart from him.” Now in the New Testament when a person is
born again into the family of God they are done so by the effectual call of the
Holy Spirit and then the Holy Spirit comes into that person’s life as a “down
payment” or earnest “13 In Him, you also, after listening to the
message of truth, the gospel of your salvation-having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the
Holy Spirit of promise, 14 who is given as a pledge of our
inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to
the praise of His glory (Eph. 2:13-14).”
Dr. Wiersbe writes of this promise that Joel gives: “But the promise God gave through Joel
declared that the Spirit will come upon ‘all flesh,’ which includes men and
women, young and old, Jew and Gentile. ‘And
it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’
(Joel 2:32, NKJV; see Acts 2:39).”
8/7/2015 10:30 PM
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