The Day God Pours Out His Spirit on Everyone

Down in Judah, south of Hosea's runaway kingdom, a prophet named Joel stood beside a wheat field and listened to it being eaten.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. The locusts had come. (Locusts never travel alone. Each one brings a few million cousins, and every one of them is hungry.) They ate the wheat and the barley. They chewed the bark off the fig trees until the branches stood white. When they flew away, the cows wandered through bare fields, groaning.

"There's nothing left," the farmers said.

"Even now," said the LORD, "come back to me with all your heart. Tear your hearts, not your clothes." (People in those days ripped their robes to show they were sorry. God wanted the sorry part, not the ripping.)

So Joel blew the trumpet on Mount Zion. "Everyone come!" he called. "Old people and children! Babies still drinking milk! Even the bride and groom, out of the wedding party!"

The priests wept by the altar. "Spare your people, LORD!"

And God did. "I will pay you back for the years the locusts ate," he said. The autumn rain came, and the spring rain after it, pouring down until the fields went green.

Then God told Joel what would come afterward, and it was stranger than any cloud of locusts.

"I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and your daughters will speak my words.
Your old men will dream dreams.
Your young men will see visions.
Even on the servants, men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days."

Until then, God's Spirit had come on a few chosen people, a prophet here, a king there. Now he would pour it out like spring rain, on grandfathers and girls, on masters and the servants who swept their floors.

The vision grew dark and strange. "I will show wonders in the sky and on the earth," God said, "blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun will turn dark and the moon red as blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD." Joel did not explain those signs. He wrote them down, and with them a promise: "Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved."

God did not say when "afterward" would be.

The barns filled up again. But a harvest lasts one year, and Joel's "afterward" waited, for hundreds of years.

At the Jordan River, John the Baptist told the crowds, "Someone greater than me is coming. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." That man came, and the Spirit rested on him like a dove.

He died on a cross, rose on the third day, and went up to his Father. At the wheat-harvest feast, his friends, men and women, were praying in Jerusalem. A roar like wind filled the house. Something like flames of fire rested on each of them, and they began praising God in languages they had never learned. Visitors from Egypt and Rome and Arabia heard their own languages pouring out of these Galilee fishermen.

"They're drunk!" people laughed.

"At nine in the morning?" said Peter. "This is what Joel told us about!" The great day was still coming, but the pouring had begun. He told them the name to call on: Jesus, alive again, the one doing the pouring.