Sunday
Sunday
Peter’s Quotation from Joel
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.”
Acts 2:16–17
What Luke has described in Acts 2:1–13 Peter now explains. The extraordinary phenomenon of Spirit-filled believers declaring God’s wonders in foreign languages is the fulfillment of Joel’s prediction that God would pour out his Spirit on all humankind.
Peter’s exposition is similar to what in the Dead Sea Scrolls is called a pesher, that is, an interpretation of an Old Testament passage in the light of its fulfillment. So Peter introduces his sermon with the words “this is that” (v. 16 KJV). He deliberately changes Joel’s “afterward” (Joel 2:28) to “in the last days,” in order to emphasize that with the Spirit’s coming the last days have come. He also reapplies the passage to Jesus, so that “the Lord” who brings salvation is no longer Yahweh but Jesus, who saves from sin and judgment everyone who calls on his name (v. 21).
It is the unanimous conviction of the New Testament authors that Jesus inaugurated the last days or messianic age and that the final proof of this was the outpouring of the Spirit, since this was the Old Testament promise of promises for the end time. This being so, we must be careful not to requote Joel’s prophecy as if we are still awaiting its fulfillment. This is not how Peter understood and applied the text. The whole messianic era, which stretches between the two comings of Christ, is the age of the Spirit in which his ministry is one of abundance. The verb pour out seems to illustrate the generosity of God’s gift of the Spirit (neither a drizzle nor even a shower but a tropical downpour), its finality (for what has been poured out cannot be gathered again), and its universality (widely distributed among the different groupings of humankind, irrespective of gender, age, or rank).
“And [they] will prophesy”: that is, the universal gift (the Spirit) will lead to a universal ministry (prophecy). Clearly this is not a reference to the gift of prophecy, which only some receive. Rather, all God’s people are prophets in the sense that all of us enjoy the knowledge of God through Christ by the Spirit.
For further reading: Acts 2:14–21