14 Declare a holy fast, call a special meeting, get the leaders together, Round up everyone in the country. Get them into God's Sanctuary for serious prayer to God. 15 What a day! Doomsday! God's Judgment Day has come. The Strong God has arrived. This is serious business! 16 Food is just a memory at our tables, as are joy and singing from God's Sanctuary. 17 The seeds in the field are dead, barns deserted, Grain silos abandoned. Who needs them? The crops have failed! 18 The farm animals groan - oh, how they groan! The cattle mill around. There's nothing for them to eat. Not even the sheep find anything. 19 God! I pray, I cry out to you! The fields are burning up, The country is a dust bowl, forest and prairie fires rage unchecked. 20 Wild animals, dying of thirst, look to you for a drink. Springs and streams are dried up. The whole country is burning up.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on Joel 1:14-20
Commentary on Joel 1:14-20
(Read Joel 1:14-20)
The sorrow of the people is turned into repentance and humiliation before God. With all the marks of sorrow and shame, sin must be confessed and bewailed. A day is to be appointed for this purpose; a day in which people must be kept from their common employments, that they may more closely attend God's services; and there is to be abstaining from meat and drink. Every one had added to the national guilt, all shared in the national calamity, therefore every one must join in repentance. When joy and gladness are cut off from God's house, when serious godliness decays, and love waxes cold, then it is time to cry unto the Lord. The prophet describes how grievous the calamity. See even the inferior creatures suffering for our transgression. And what better are they than beasts, who never cry to God but for corn and wine, and complain of the want of the delights of sense? Yet their crying to God in those cases, shames the stupidity of those who cry not to God in any case. Whatever may become of the nations and churches that persist in ungodliness, believers will find the comfort of acceptance with God, when the wicked shall be burned up with his indignation.