Pentecost in prophetic perspective
On the day of Pentecost the Apostle Peter in Acts 2 quotes the prophecy from Joel 2. With Joel the outpouring of the Holy Spirit ‘on all flesh’ is put in prophetic perspective.
In the first place Joel 1 and 2 are about the trials caused by enormous plagues of locusts, which Joel compares with enormous armies of the Assyrians that will invade Israel. Then he calls for penance and conversion. “Who knows? He may turn and relent.” And then he speaks of the ‘early rain’ and the ‘latter rain’: twice an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Israel.
Foretaste
The Apostle Peter says about the ‘early rain’, about the first outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost in Jerusalem in Acts 2:16: “this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: “‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out My Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.”
So on the Jewish people in Israel. However, the Holy Spirit only fell on 120 people of the 1 million Jews that were in Jerusalem, young and old, high and low. Not on all Jews. It is only a foretaste. Nor did the apocalyptic phenomena then occur, such as “wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and awesome Day of the Lord comes.”
Latter rain
One day it will happen. When for the second time the ‘latter rain’ will fall on Israel, in the midst of these apocalyptic phenomena. Joel 2:32 (NASB):
“And it will come about that whoever calls on the Name of the Lord will be delivered; For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be those who escape, as the Lord has said, even among the survivors whom the Lord calls.”
My thoughts and prayers are with those who survived the Holocaust. To those who have returned, like God promised, from the Diaspora to Israel and Jerusalem. In order that under the rule of the Coming King of kings and Lord of lords, the Messiah of Israel, peace may cover the whole earth from Jerusalem.
Hosea 6:1-3 NKJV “Come, and let us return to the Lord; For He has torn, but He will heal us; He has stricken, but He will bind us up. After two days [a ‘day’ is like a 1000 years] He will revive us; On the third day [in the third Millennium] He will raise us up, that we may live in His sight. Let us know, Let us pursue the knowledge of the Lord. His going forth is established as the morning; He will come to us like the rain, Like the latter and former rain to the earth.”
The former rain was at Pentecost. The latter rain will be soon. For in the ‘second’ day, in the second Millennium, the Jewish people are returning home to Israel. And in the ‘third’ day, in the third Millennium that we have entered now He will come to them as the ‘latter’ rain’. Compare Zechariah 12:10-14.
