Joel 3:9

Joel opened with a plague of locusts and a call for Judah to repent (Joel 1–2), and the LORD answered with the promise to pour out his Spirit and to save all who call on his name (Joel 2:28–32). Chapter 3 turns to the nations. God says he will gather them into the valley of Jehoshaphat (Joel 3:2), and he gives his reasons in Joel 3:1–8: they scattered his people, divided his land and sold his children. He names Tyre, Sidon and the coasts of Philistia among them (Joel 3:4–8). Verse 9 is the summons that follows.

“Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles” sends the message out to the nations. The word is gôwy, a foreign nation or people, the same word the KJV renders “heathen” in verses 11 and 12. It means the nations outside God’s covenant, and here above all the ones that had oppressed Judah. The proclamation is a string of commands: prepare, wake up, draw near, come up. This is the voice of one who gives orders to armies, and the armies he orders are the nations’ own.

“Prepare war” is literally “sanctify war”. The verb qâdash means to make clean, to hallow, to consecrate, and joined to the word for war (milchâmâh) it means to set a war apart as sacred. In that day nations went to war with sacrifices and rites to win the favour of their gods, and in Israel a war was holy when God himself commanded it. Joel’s words carry a sharp irony. The LORD tells the nations to consecrate a war that he has ordained, and it is the war that will undo them.

“Wake up the mighty men” calls for the gibbôwr, the warrior or champion, the strongest and bravest of an army. “Let all the men of war draw near; let them come up” leaves every soldier on the march. All the fighting men are to come to the place God has named, the valley of verse 2.

People ask why God would call his enemies to arms when he means to defeat them. He does it because he rules them. He is so fully in control that he can summon his enemies to the field of their own judgment, as the psalm says of the kings who set themselves against him: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath” (Psalm 2:4–5). The summons also shows the size of what is coming, a decisive and final reckoning. And it shows the nations’ guilt, since they come willingly and eager for war, and so show their opposition to him. Zechariah sees the LORD gathering all nations against Jerusalem to battle (Zechariah 14:2), Revelation tells of the kings of the earth gathered at Armageddon (Revelation 16:16), and Isaiah says that the nation and kingdom that will not serve Zion shall perish (Isaiah 60:12).

Verse 11 repeats the summons with growing force: “Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about.” The heathen are the gôwy of verse 9, all the nations together. “Round about” pictures them coming in from every side, as if herded into the place of judgment with every way of escape closed.

Then the prophet turns from the nations and speaks to God: “thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O LORD.” He calls on God by his covenant name, Yᵉhôvâh, the self-existent and eternal God who bound himself to Israel, so the battle that follows is the work of the God of Israel himself. The nations bring their mighty men, and the LORD has mighty ones of his own. The word is again gibbôwr, and since these come down from heaven at his command, they are most likely the hosts of heaven, the angels who carry out his judgments. The prophet Micaiah saw “all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left.” In Isaiah God speaks of calling “my mighty ones for mine anger” (Isaiah 13:3). When the Son of Man comes to judge the nations, all the holy angels come with him (Matthew 25:31–32), and the armies of heaven follow the rider on the white horse (Revelation 19:11–16). The psalmist calls the whole creation to rejoice before the LORD, “for he cometh to judge the earth” (Psalm 96:13).

“Let the heathen be wakened” uses ʻûwr, to wake, rouse or stir up. The nations are stirred from their ease and drawn to a meeting God has set, and they “come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat”. A valley, ʻêmeq, is a vale, a broad stretch of low-lying land, the kind of open ground where armies met. This one’s name, Yᵉhôwshâphâṭ, means “the LORD judges”, so the name itself says what will happen there.

“For there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about.” The nations have come to fight, and the LORD takes his seat as their judge. The verb yâshab is the ordinary word for sitting, and here it is a judge taking his seat to hear the case and give sentence. Scripture uses this human picture to show God’s authority and the finality of what follows. The verb shâphaṭ means to judge, to decide, to pronounce sentence, and by implication to vindicate the one in the right or punish the one in the wrong. The psalm says of the LORD, “he hath prepared his throne for judgment. And he shall judge the world in righteousness” (Psalm 9:7–8), and God says through Zephaniah, “my determination is to gather the nations, that I may assemble the kingdoms” (Zephaniah 3:8). Whole nations stand before him here, and he holds peoples as well as persons to account.

Verse 13 gives the order to begin: “Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe.” The command is most likely to the LORD’s mighty ones of verse 11, who come as reapers. The verb for ripe, bâshal, means to boil up or be cooked, and so to ripen or be done. A ripe crop has to be cut, and the nations’ wickedness has come to its full growth.

“Come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow.” The picture moves from grain to grapes. A winepress had an upper floor, the gath, where the grapes were trodden, and a lower vat (yeqeb) where the juice ran down and collected, which the KJV calls the “fats”. “Get you down” calls the treaders into the press. The press is full of grapes and the vats overflow, shûwq, run over, with what is trodden out. In Scripture this juice pictures blood and the outpouring of God’s wrath. Isaiah sees the LORD coming with garments stained red, and he says, “I have trodden the winepress alone” (Isaiah 63:1–6). Revelation joins Joel’s two pictures, the harvest of the earth reaped with a sickle and the vine of the earth cast into “the great winepress of the wrath of God” (Revelation 14:14–20), and it says of Christ that “he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God” (Revelation 19:15).

“For their wickedness is great” gives the reason for it all. The word raʻ means evil of every kind, both the wrong people do and the harm it brings, and rab means much or great. The judgment is God’s answer to sin that has grown to its full measure. God told Abraham that his descendants would return to the land in the fourth generation, “for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Genesis 15:16). He bears long with sin, and he also sets a limit to it. Jesus told of wheat and tares left to grow together until the harvest (Matthew 13:30), and explained, “the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels” (Matthew 13:36–43).

“Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision.” The word hâmôwn means a multitude or crowd, and elsewhere it can also mean a noise or tumult, or an abundance. Here it is the crowd, and the doubling, hâmôwn hâmôwn, stresses a number past counting, all the nations gathered in one valley. Valleys were where armies met, as Israel and the Philistines faced each other at the valley of Elah (1 Samuel 17:2), and the broad ʻêmeq has room for them all.

The valley of decision is the valley of Jehoshaphat under its second name. The word for decision, chărûwts, comes from a root meaning to cut or incise. It can mean a trench that is dug, gold that is mined, or a threshing-sledge with sharp teeth, and figuratively a decision, something determined. So this is the valley where sentence is cut and settled. The threshing-sledge fits the harvest of verse 13, since threshing separates grain from chaff, and here the nations are judged and separated.

“For the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.” The day of the LORD runs through all of Joel and through the prophets. It is the time when God steps into history to judge the wicked and to deliver and restore his people. The word near, qârôwb, speaks of a day that is certain and close at hand. In Joel that day comes near more than once. The locusts of the first chapters were a day of the LORD on Judah (Joel 1, Joel 2), and chapter 3 looks to the final day on all the nations (Joel 3). The scale of this gathering, all the nations of Joel 3:2, reaches beyond any one war in history and points to the end of the age.

Other prophets speak of the same day against Babylon (Isaiah 13) and against Judah and the whole earth (Zephaniah 1): “The great day of the LORD is near, it is near, and hasteth greatly” (Zephaniah 1:14–18). Peter says that “the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night” (2 Peter 3:10). The New Testament shows where this road ends, in the return of Christ to judge the nations (Matthew 25:31–46) and in the last judgment before the great white throne (Revelation 20:11–15).

“The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.” The verb qâdar means to be dark or black, and it is also used of mourning, when people went about in dark sackcloth. The darkened sun and moon are a picture of deep gloom, the heavens themselves in mourning. The stars, kôwkâb (a word used figuratively of a prince), “withdraw their shining”. That verb, ʼâçaph, most often means to gather, and so to take in or take away, and here the stars gather in their light. Their shining, nôgahh, is their brightness. Joel has already said that “the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD come” (Joel 2:31), and here the darkness falls as the nations stand in the valley.

The nations around Israel worshipped the sun, moon and stars. Scripture treats them as things God made, steady lights that keep the order of day and night. When they go dark, the God who made them is acting, and the world as people know it is shaken. The prophets use the same signs for God’s judgment on Babylon (Isaiah 13:10) and on Egypt (Ezekiel 32:7–8). Jesus says that after the tribulation “shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven” (Matthew 24:29), and the sixth seal in Revelation brings a black sun, a moon like blood and falling stars (Revelation 6:12–13).

“The LORD also shall roar out of Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem.” The roar is a lion’s roar, the sound of terrifying power and authority. Amos uses the same picture: “The lion hath roared, who will not fear?” Zion was the holy mountain where the temple stood, the place God chose to dwell among his people, as the psalm says: “Sing praises to the LORD, which dwelleth in Zion” (Psalm 9:11). So the voice that judges the nations comes from his own dwelling, and it speaks in public for all to hear. The next verse goes on, “So shall ye know that I am the LORD your God dwelling in Zion” (Joel 3:17).

“And the heavens and the earth shall shake.” At his voice the whole creation trembles. Isaiah says that men will go into the holes of the rocks “for fear of the LORD, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth” (Isaiah 2:19–21). Haggai hears God promise, “I will shake the heavens, and the earth” (Haggai 2:6–7), and the letter to the Hebrews takes up that promise: the things that can be shaken will be removed, and we receive “a kingdom which cannot be moved” (Hebrews 12:26–29).

“But the LORD will be the hope of his people, and the strength of the children of Israel.” The word “but” turns the whole passage. The same LORD who shakes heaven and earth is a shelter for those who belong to him. The word for hope, machăçeh, comes from a root meaning to take refuge, and it means a shelter or a refuge. The word for strength, mâʻôwz, means a stronghold, a refuge, a place of safety, and it is used of a person or of God who gives that security. Joel names the LORD himself as both. Yᵉhôvâh stands twice in the verse, once as the one who roars and once as the one who shelters, and he is the same God in both. The psalm says, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed” (Psalm 46:1–3), and Nahum says, “The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble” (Nahum 1:7).

The promise was spoken to Israel, and the New Testament opens the same refuge to all who believe in Christ. In him we have “a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). We “have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us”, a hope that is “an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast” (Hebrews 6:18–19), and we are “strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man” (Ephesians 3:16). Having been justified by his blood, “we shall be saved from wrath through him” and “saved by his life” (Romans 5:9–10).

Joel says the LORD will sit to judge, and the New Testament shows who sits on that throne. “The Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son” (John 5:22). Jesus said, “When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations” (Matthew 25:31–32). That is Joel’s scene: the gathering, the seat of judgment and all the nations. Peter preached that Jesus “was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead” (Acts 10:42), and Paul charged Timothy before “the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:1). All power in heaven and in earth is given to him (Matthew 28:18), he comes as the rider on the white horse who judges and makes war in righteousness (Revelation 19:11–16), and every knee shall bow to him (Philippians 2:10–11).

The Lord who roars from Zion is “the Lion of the tribe of Juda” (Revelation 5:5), and he is also “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The Judge of the nations bore judgment himself, so those who belong to him can face that day with confidence: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). For them the day of the Lord is the day he descends from heaven and they are caught up to meet him, “and so shall we ever be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17).

When nations arm themselves and the mighty of the earth look as if they have their way, these verses show who rules them. God sees what has been done to his people, he has set a day to judge it, and in his own time he will take his seat as judge. You can trust him with the wrongs you are unable to set right, and you can pray and work for justice knowing that the last word is his.

The same verses call us to take sin seriously. Wickedness ripens, and God bears with it a long time before the harvest. The gospel calls everyone to turn to him while the day is still coming, and it gives us a reason to bring that call to others with urgency, since the prophet says the day is near.

And when the heavens and the earth shake, in the world or in your own life, the LORD is the refuge and the stronghold of his people. The weak may say, I am strong, because he is strong for them. His strength is made perfect in our weakness, and he is the hope of all who have fled to him.