the omnipotent and faithful God could not leave His work
unfinished. But Moses himself immediately subjoins the prophecy to the
wish, as a clear proof, that behind the wish the prophecy is concealed:
"Would God that all the Lord's people were prophets! for the Lord will
give His Spirit upon them," etc.; which is equivalent to: "At some
future time, the whole people of the Lord shall be prophets, not
against, but agreeably to, my wish; for," etc. It is this promise of
Moses which is here resumed by Joel, with whom, subsequently. Is. in
chap. xxxii. 15, "Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high;"
chap. xi. 9, liv. 13; Jer. xxxi. 33, 34; Ezek. xxxvi. 26 ff., and Zech.
xii. 10, connect themselves. The ultimate reference of the promise is
to the Messianic time; but the reference to the preparatory steps must
not, for this reason, be by any means excluded. The announcement of the
pouring out of the Spirit rests upon the insight into the nature of
God's relation to His kingdom. God's judgments, in which He draws near
to His people, in which the abstract God becomes a concrete God, excite
in the people a longing for a union with Him. Teachers sent by God give
a right direction to this longing, and then an outpouring of the Spirit
takes place. This proceeding does, and must continually, repeat itself
in the history of the Covenant-people. The perfect fulfilment at the
time of Christ could [Pg 333] not at all have taken place, unless the
imperfect fulfilment had already pervaded their whole earlier history;
and that there is, in the prophecy under consideration, no reference at
all to such imperfect fulfilments, could be maintained only, if there
existed in the text any hint that the prophet intended to speak of only
the last realization of the idea. But as the exclusion of all the
preliminary stages is entirely arbitrary, it is just as arbitrary to
separate, from the events which make up the main fulfilment in the
Messianic time, one particular event, viz., that which took place on
the first day of Pentecost. It is only to a certain extent that we can
affirm that the prophecy found its final fulfilment in this event,
viz., in as far as it formed the pledge of it,--in as far as the whole
succeeding development and progress were already contained in it,--in
as far as Joel's prophecy in words was then changed into an infinitely
more powerful prophecy in deeds. It is from overlooking the relation of
the prophecy to the thought