Immediately following Joel’s description of how the priests were to pray and petition the Lord to bless the people instead of curse them, we are told that God became jealous for His Land and that He pitied His people. It is interesting that there is no intermediate notation of their actual repentance that we have been led to believe would have been a prerequisite for such a blessing to occur. That would cause us to assume that the people did repent in fasting, weeping and mourning and that the priests did offer up this prayer prescribed by Joel. Now we are given a description of God’s answer to that repentance. Joel says that God had pity on the people—how is this pity expressed? For one thing, it is manifested in the blessing of the people and Land through the restoration of those things that had been previously removed by the curse for their covenantal disobedience. God told the people that He was going to send them grain, wine and oil—all items that were taken from those who idolized them in the first chapter. But here Joel describes the reversal of their circumstances in terms of sustenance. Here He turns fasting into feasting; not only where those crops returned, but they were returned in plenty. Furthermore, God answered their petition from verse 17. He decided to remove the reproach they had experienced from other nations. But this must mean that they had experienced reproach of some sort. In 2:17 the priests prayed that God would not allow the nation, God’s very people, to become a byword before the nations; they didn’t want God’s name to be tarnished in the world by the perception of other nations; they did not want the nations of the world to think that Yahweh had forsaken them.
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