Today's text begins with Him warning the nations who took His people captive that they will find themselves scattered to foreign lands, whereas He will return the Jewish people to their own nation. "See, I am going to rouse them out of the places to which you sold them, and I will return on your own heads what you have done. I will sell your sons and daughters to the people of Judah, and they will sell them to the Sabeans, a nation far away. The Lord has spoken." (Joel 3:7-8)
The Sabeans are mentioned several times in the Bible as being enemies of Israel. We will find the prophet Isaiah predicting destruction for the wicked Sabeans when we arrive at his book. An ancient tradition states that when Alexander the Great laid siege to and conquered the city of Tyre (a city against whom the Lord prophesied destruction in yesterday's study), Alexander set free the Jewish people who had been sold into slavery to the people there. It is said that the Jews turned around and sold their evil captors to the Sabeans. It is also said that when Sidon (another city whose destruction was foretold) was conquered by the Persians, the Jews there were set free and they sold many of their captors from Sidon to the Sabeans. Although it is not entirely clear who the Sabeans were or where their country was located, they are believed to have been an Arabic nation and their land may have been in the region of modern day Iraq.
One of the ancient examples of a return to the promised land, which the Lord foretells in our text today, occurred when Cyrus the Great of Persia allowed the people of Judah to return to their land after the Medo-Persian Empire conquered the Neo-Babylonian Empire. In Joel's time the nation of Judah has not been conquered by anyone; but later, when Babylon conquers Judah, the Babylonians will take captive all but the poorest of the land. When Cyrus takes over Babylon he will issue an edict stating that all the people taken captive by the Babylonians are free to return to their own lands if they so desire. Another ancient example of a return to the land occurred during the zenith of the Greek Empire when Alexander the Great set at liberty the Jewish people who had been sold into slavery to the various places he conquered. A more modern fulfillment of this prophecy occurred when, following closely upon the heels of World War II and the holocaust, Israel was reinstated as a sovereign nation in 1948 and a mass migration of Jewish people returned to Israel from many foreign lands.
Earlier in the week we talked about how the Lord has already judged, at least from an earthly standpoint, many of the nations that persecuted the Jewish people in the Old Testament. Earthly consequences have already been brought to bear on those nations; they have fallen and are no more, such as the Assyrian Empire and the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Spiritually speaking, there is still a day in the future where every person who ever persecuted His people will stand before His throne for judgment, but He has already rid the earth of some of the nations or regimes that perpetrated cruelty upon the Jewish people. Sadly, a spirit of antisemitism is still in the world and appears to even be on the rise in our day. The Lord will judge not only those nations in the past that persecuted His people but also anyone in today's world or in the future. Next, in our text today, we find the Lord speaking of a time in the future when He challenges "the nations" (Gentile nations) to a fight with Him.
"Proclaim this among the nations: Prepare for war! Rouse the warriors! Let all the fighting men draw near and attack." (Joel 3:9) When Chapter 3 opened we were told of a war that would occur in the end times. The Lord said He would gather the troops of these nations all in one place---although I am sure they will think they are assembling there of their own volition when it is actually His will for this battle to occur---and that He would judge those nations in "the Valley of Jehoshaphat". There is no known location that was actually called "the Valley of Jehoshaphat" but the name "Jehoshaphat" means "the Lord is judge" or "the Lord has judged". In other words, He's going to gather these nations together to judge them for their sins against the Jewish people. He said earlier in our chapter, "There I will put them on trial for what they did to My inheritance, My people Israel."
The battle to which the Lord is calling the nations here in Joel 3 is believed to be the battle spoken of by the Apostle John in the book of Revelation. The Lord showed John things to come at the end times and one of the things John saw was this: "Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon." (Revelation 16:16) John used the word "kings" for the leaders of the nations who assembled for the battle but this word could just as easily be translated as "presidents" or "prime ministers". In John's day he would only have been familiar with kings and would naturally have referred to the leader of a nation as a king. His use of this word does not preclude a democratic nation from being involved in the battle of Armageddon. We do not know the identities of the nations involved in the coalition that forms in the end times to fight against the coming of the Lord's kingdom on earth. But in tomorrow's study we will learn some more details about that battle.
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