Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/168

 The Lord said by the prophet Joel, "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions: and also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my Spirit. And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come." The extraordinary events thus described seem to involve such convulsions and changes in the ordinary course of nature as to endanger the safety of the universe; but that was not the meaning of the prophecy. It had reference to circumstances which were to attend the breaking-up of the Jewish Church and the commencement of Christianity. About this conclusion there can be no doubt. The Apostle Peter most distinctly tells us that the prediction received its fulfilment in the phenomena that occurred upon the day of Pentecost. Then, as it is well known, all the affairs of the natural universe continued in the same orderly courses in which they had always run. There were no very remarkable appearances in the sky or disasters upon the earth. The sun maintained his brightness and the moon her shining. The Apostle quotes the very language to which we have just referred, and applying it to the phenomena of the cloven tongues like as of fire, says, "This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel." It is therefore plain that those extraordinary descriptions of the prophet were never understood by the Apostles to have any reference to the destruction of the universe; they clearly regarded the predictions as pointing to the circumstances which would attend the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ; namely,