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The prophet was successful. The people gathered at a great and solemn national fast. Verse 18 reads in R.V., "Then was the Lord jealous for His land, and had pity on His people." Then the message of the prophet becomes one of joy and hope. The scarcity shall be replaced by abundance. God will give the pledge of His loving regard in the sweet rain upon the burnt up and thirsty soil. He gives this gift of rain at first, because an after gift and a better one is to follow. Thus we reach the re-establishment of confidence and love. But we have reached a higher plane than merely the repose which comes because a terror has departed, and nature is resuming her normal regularity of beneficence. The true ground of the reposeful and confident spirit is this, that the people know the Lord is in their midst, and that He is their God and none else. Repentance if it is to do nothing else must convince men of that. It must establish the eternal fact of God's presence. It must lead us to feel that we are God's, and that we owe ourselves to Him. This confidence in the Lord their God alone is the first resting-place of our prophecy after the day of humiliation. But it is only a first resting-place. He who gave the former and the latter rain for the harvest gave them as gifts to be followed by others. A gift was coming which would lift the people into a much higher plane of thought, and into much more spiritual conceptions of life. It is the gift of the Spirit: it is the gift of new power upon repentant souls. The thought of the prophet carries with it a principle which to the men of his day must have been lofty, and perchance strange in its loftiness. This highest gift of God, like all gifts, is to make us great with that greatness which is service. Baptized with the Spirit, the apostles were baptized into the spirit of service. Here we see the higher region of the prophet's ambition. It is not the restoration of temporal blessings which exhausts his desires on their behalf. He desires for them a spirit of true insight into the meaning and significance of life. One method of raising and rousing others is by awaking aspirations, by painting the possibilities which may yet be achieved. It is the Divine method to inspire by placing high possibilities, yet higher ranges of life and duty before our eyes. No doubt there is always something above earth in all the higher gifts of the Spirit. The poetic gift is the power to see — not what is not — but what is. "Imagination is the power to see things as they are." The gift of the Spirit enables men to see the real significance of the facts of life — the true meaning of what men are, where they are, and why. This is exactly what the prophet has been leading us up to. The most real of all presences is the spiritual presence of Christ. The most real aspects of life for all men must be their spiritual aspects. The gift of the Spirit was to reveal the tremendous gulf which existed between life as men lived it and the life which God sought to see lived by men. Among the knights of Malta, the cross given and worn was the eight-pointed Maltese cross. The eight points signified the beatitudes. The cross was to be carried in the remembrance of the blessing which belonged to the poor in spirit, the sorrowful, the meek, the hungerers after righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. The Cross of Christ was to be carried in the Spirit of Christ. It is thus that the victory of Christ in the world will be won. More than ever we need the simple, guileless, loving, pure spirit of Christ.

(Bishop Boyd Carpenter.)

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KJV: Then will the LORD be jealous for his land, and pity his people.

WEB: Then Yahweh was jealous for his land, And had pity on his people.