Day of Pentecost: A Sign that the Last Days Had Arrived

Day of Pentecost: A Sign that the Last Days Had Arrived Below is the 18th of multiple excerpts from The Parousia, the late 19th-century masterpiece on the Second Coming by James Stuart Russell. "THE LAST DAYS COME. "ACTS ii. 16-20 [Acts 2:16-20]---'This [the outpouring of the Holy Spirit] is that which is spoken by the prophet Joel: It shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; moreover on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy: and I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs on the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke: the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord' [Joel 2:28-32]. "In these words of St. Peter, the first apostolic utterance spoken in the power of the divine afflatus [inspiration] of Pentecost, we have an authoritative interpretation of the prophecy which he quotes from Joel. He expressly identifies the time and the event predicted by the prophet with the time and the event then actually present on the day of Pentecost. The 'last days' of Joel are these days [A.D. 30] of St. Peter. The ancient prediction was in part fulfilled; it was receiving its accomplishment before their eyes in the copious effusion of the Holy Spirit. "This outpouring of the Spirit was introductory to other events, which would in like manner come to pass. The day of judgment for the Theocratic nation [1st-century Israel] was at hand, and ere long the presages of 'that great and notable day of the Lord' [Joel 2:31, Malachi 4:5] would be manifested. "It is impossible not to recognise the correspondence between the [cosmos-collapsing] phenomena preceding the day of the Lord as foretold by Joel, and the phenomena described by our Lord as preceding His coming, and the judgment of Israel (Matt. xxiv. 29) [Matt. 24:29-30]; see previous Parousia blog posts on Jesus' apocalyptic prophecy on the Mount of Olives in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21]. The words of Joel can refer only to the last days of the Jewish age or [Old Covenant] aeon [which ended in A.D. 70, when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed by the Romans], the sunteleia tou aionos [Greek: consummation of the age], which was also the theme of our Lord's prophecy on the Mount of Olives. In like manner the words of Malachi as evidently [i.e., in an evident or clear manner] refer to the same event and the same point of time,---'the day of his coming,' 'the day that shall burn as a furnace,' 'the great and dreadful day of the Lord' (Mal. iii. 2 [Mal. 3:2]; iv. 1-5 [Mal. 4:1-5]). "We have here a consensus of testimonies than which nothing can be conceived more authoritative and decisive,---Joel, Malachi, St. Peter, and the great Prophet of the new covenant Himself. They all speak of the same event and of the same period, the great day of the Lord, the Parousia [Second Coming], and they speak of them as near. Why encumber and embarrass a prediction so plain with supposititious double references and ulterior [post-A.D. 70] fulfilments? Nothing else will fit this prophecy save that event to which alone it refers, and with which it corresponds as the impression with the seal and the lock with the key. The catastrophe of Israel and Jerusalem was at hand, long foreseen, often predicted, and now imminent. The self-same generation that had seen, rejected, and crucified the King would witness the fulfilment of His warnings when Jerusalem perished in 'blood and fire, and vapour of smoke' [Acts 2:19, Joel 2:30]."

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