Commentaries:
Barnes' Notes
Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe - So Jesus saith, "let both grow together until the harvest, and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them;" and this He explains, "The harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the Angels" Matthew 13:30, Matthew 13:39. He then who saith, "put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe," is the Son of Man, who, before He became the Son of Man, was, as He is now, the Son of God, and spake this and the other things by the Prohets; they to whom He speaketh are His reapers, the Angels; and the ripeness of the harvest is the maturity of all things here, good and evil, to be brought to their last end.
In itself, the harvest, as well as the vintage, might describe the end of this world, as to both the good and the bad, in that the wheat is severed from the chaff and the tares, and the treading of the winepress separates the wine which is stored up from the husks which are cast away. Yet nothing is said, here of storing up aught, either the wheat or the wine, but only of the ripeness of the harvest, and that "the fats overflow, because their wickedness is great." The harvest is sometimes, although more rarely, used of destruction Isaiah 17:5; Jeremiah 51:33; the treading of the winepress is always used as an image of God' s anger Lamentations 1:15; Isaiah 63:3; Revelation 19:15; the vintage of destruction Isaiah 17:6; Judges 8:2; Micah 7:1; the plucking off the grapes, of the rending away of single lives or souls Psalms 80:12. It seems probable then, that the ripeness of the harvests and the fullness of the vats are alike used of the ripeness for destruction, that "they were ripe in their sins, fit for a harvest, and as full of wickedness as ripe grapes, which fill and overflow the vats, through the abundance of the juice with which they swell." Their ripeness in iniquity calls, as it were, for the sickle of the reaper, the trampling of the presser.
For great is their wickedness - The whole world is flooded and overflowed by it, so that it can no longer contain it, but, as it were, cries to God to end it. The long suffering of God no longer availed, but would rather increase their wickedness and their damnation. So also, in that first Judgment of the whole world by water, when "all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth, God said, the end of all flesh is before Me" Genesis 6:12-13; and when the hundred and twenty years of the preaching of Noah were ended without fruit, "the flood came." So Sodom was "then" destroyed, when not ten righteous could be found in it; and the seven nations of Canaan were spared above four hundred years, because the "iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full" Genesis 15:16; and our Lord says, "fill ye up the measure of your fathers - that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth" Matthew 23:32, Matthew 23:35. So , "God condemneth each of the damned, when he hath filled up the measure of his iniquity."
Other Barnes' Notes entries containing Joel 3:13:
Hosea 6:11
Zephaniah 3:8
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