After all that had happened, Joel affirmed that the Lord had dealt wondrously with them. This adverb doesn’t carry the connotation of pleasance and delightful, but more of the sort of description of awe striking. The Lord dealt with the people in such a way as to drop their jaws in wonder. As though he says that the people, when they look back on all that had happened in their recent history, they would say to one another, “I can’t believe all this that has happened to us and our fathers. So, the Lord’s hand was in this all the time; how could we have been so blind to His work?”
And so there you have it, even after their disobedience, the Lord had pity on them because He commanded them to repent and He gave that gift to them. He invested in the people the capacity to see their sin and plea for God’s mercy. And so He did have mercy on them and He kept His promise to Abraham and He would maintain the representation of His Kingdom on Earth until He brought forth David’s Great Son, Christ. That Anointed One who would suffer as a Lamb in the fulfillment of all the Law and triumph as the Lion over sin, temptation, and the Devil. As he says in v. 27, they will never see shame, for Christ (just as with all believers) bore that shame in their place. And thereafter, He would expand His Kingdom to all tribes, tongues and nations, filling the earth with the gospel until His return in glory whereby He will finally rid His universe of sin and death forever through the intrusion of His Kingdom. So we pray, Maranatha! Come quickly Lord Jesus!
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