Joel: The Immediate Day of the Lord

Between 1874-1876, giant hordes of Rocky Mountain locusts invaded the Great Plains. These locusts covered 2 million square miles and devastated the food supply and economy of the Great Plains.

In response to the situation, President Ulysses S. Grant declared the first state of emergency in US History sending troops into the Great Plains with food, supplies, and gold to booster the economy.

Those people living on the Great Plains during that plague of locusts were experiencing a terrible and devastating situation. The people of Judah could well sympathize with those farmers on the Great Plains as they experienced their own horde of locusts.

As the people were panicking, Joel was a realist who looked at life from the standpoint of God’s Word.

We need to be more like Joel today. Instead of framing everything politically, economically, racially, and morally, we need to frame everything in the context of God’s Word.

During Judah’s swarm of locusts, Joel addressed specific groups and gave them admonitions from the Lord.

1. The Elders: Hear This! (Joel 1:2-4)

Joel 1:2–4 “Hear this, you elders; give ear, all inhabitants of the land! Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers? Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children to another generation. What the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten, and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten.”

Joel first addressed the elder because they were experienced and could authenticate what he was saying and because they were respected citizens in the land.

With their support, Joel was not just another voice crying in the wilderness. We do not ever need to undersell the value of Christian experience. If a church is going to effectively serve the Lord and to effectively minister to the lost world, youthful enthusiasm, energy, and ideas must mesh with Christian experience.

Joel says that what they were experiencing was something they would tell their children and grandchildren. Their experience was real. Their crisis was real but so would God’s deliverance be real.

Verse 4 describes the total destruction of the swarms of locusts. Four swarms of locusts devastated Judah. Nothing was left.

It really says a lot about the human condition when many times we must endure terrible crises in order to see something in the context of God’s Word.

2 Corinthians 1:9–10 “Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.”

2. The Drunkard: Wake Up and Weep! (Joel 1:5-7)

Joel 1:5–7 “Awake, you drunkards, and weep, and wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine, for it is cut off from your mouth. For a nation has come up against my land, powerful and beyond number; its teeth are lions’ teeth, and it has the fangs of a lioness. It has laid waste my vine and splintered my fig tree; it has stripped off their bark and thrown it down; their branches are made white.”

The drunkards could be literal drunks, or it could be that drunkards represent all the careless people whose desire sinful pleasure.

Everyone in Judah was going to suffer loss even those who did not even drink wine. That’s why I personally believe drunkards refers to a careless desire for sinful pleasure. Regardless, Joel describes the locusts as if they were an invading army and like hungry lions with sharp teeth.

In verse 7, you see that God uses the possessive pronoun my as God says my land, my vine, and my fig tree.

What does that mean?

In that day, having one’s own vineyard and fig trees was a symbol of success, but God says my land, my vine, and my fig tree meaning regardless of what you think belongs to you, it does not because it all belongs to God to do with as He pleases.

3. The Farmers: Despair and Wail! (Joel 1:8-12)

Joel 1:8–10 “Lament like a virgin wearing sackcloth for the bridegroom of her youth. The grain offering and the drink offering are cut off from the house of the Lord. The priests mourn, the ministers of the Lord. The fields are destroyed, the ground mourns, because the grain is destroyed, the wine dries up, the oil languishes.”

Joel 1:11–12 “Be ashamed, O tillers of the soil; wail, O vinedressers, for the wheat and the barley, because the harvest of the field has perished. The vine dries up; the fig tree languishes. Pomegranate, palm, and apple, all the trees of the field are dried up, and gladness dries up from the children of man.”

In these verses, Joel lists all the crops being destroyed by the locusts. Now, if you do not pay close attention you will miss one critical point.

I want you to notice what was destroyed.

The grain and drink offerings

The grain offering symbolized a recognition of what God had done for them and given them. It was an offering of thanksgiving in a spiritual sense and a physical sense. The grain offering indicated thankfulness to God and dedication to God for the atonement made in the burnt offering.

The drink offering was a way to recognize God’s favor, good will, and provision. It symbolizes the blood of Jesus spilled on the cross. The purpose of the offering was to draw a person to God.

Joel is telling Judah that superficial religious ceremony would do them no good in this immediate day of the Lord.

The fields

The fields being destroyed is telling Judah that this was a hopeless situation. There was nothing Judah could do about this situation. It was hopeless. There were no manmade solutions or answers.

All the farmers could do was to grieve like an engaged girl whose fiancee had died as Joel 1:8 says. It is really an incredible picture. If Judah was going to survive, it must turn to the Lord. The Lord God Almighty was their only hope.

Have you been there? Have you been at the point where you have exhausted everything you know to do yet your situation worsened by the minute? We finally get to the end of the rope and realize that God has been waiting for us there the entire time we were relying on ourselves.

4. The Priests: Call for a Fast (Joel 1:13-20)

Joel 1:13–15 “Put on sackcloth and lament, O priests; wail, O ministers of the altar. Go in, pass the night in sackcloth, O ministers of my God! Because grain offering and drink offering are withheld from the house of your God. Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly. Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord. Alas for the day! For the day of the Lord is near, and as destruction from the Almighty it comes.”

Both the people and the Temple were in need.

Can I ask you a question?

Are Christians and the church not in need today?

The proper sacrifices could not be brought because the locusts were destroying everything.

Joel’s response to the crisis was to call all priests, including those who worked the night shift, to lament, pray, and repent.

In the Bible, lament is a prayer that expresses sorrow, pain, or confusion. It is a way for Christians or the Jews to process grief in God’s presence. It is prayer for God to act.

Lamenting was done in various forms such as crying, wailing, fasting, wearing sackcloths, or writing poems or songs.

Sackcloth in the Bible is a coarse cloth made from goat’s hair that is worn to express mourning, grief, humiliation, or submission. It was worn as a sign of repentance as the one wearing the sackcloth was expressing his humiliation before God for sin committed.

I hope you are beginning to see the picture. This was an emergency, and the people needed to humble themselves before God and repent. Only God could resolve this situation, and God was not going to act until the people submitted to Him.

As I was studying Joel, I finally realized that 1st and 2nd Kings, 1st and 2nd Chronicles, and all or most of the minor prophets are interconnected. You really can’t study any of those books individually and get the entire picture.

Judah was a sinful people. God says in Ezekiel that the sins of Judah were worse than the sins of Sodom. Is that not amazing?

The point is this.

It was Judah’s sin, the sin of God’s people, that was the problem and not the locusts. In our day, it is not the Progressives that are the problem. It is not immorality that is the problem. Yes, those things are problems, but the real problem is sin within the church.

1 Peter 4:17 “For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?”

We can take this verse a long way.

We will take lying as an example. Most of us condemn politicians for being liars. Most politicians are not Christians. They have not been saved, but we condemn for being liars. In God’s eyes, lying by the lost was taken care of at Calvary.

It is lying within the church that should be judged first. How many Christians make commitments to God and never honor those commitments? What is that? It is lying.

Joel would be telling the church that it was time to lament, pray, and put on sackcloth until we submit to what God says about lying.

Can I just say this?

We are wrong with our concept of confession.

Confession is not just simply confessing that you lied. Confession is the act of seeing lying how God sees it, and if we did that, we would be much slower to condone it and ignore it within the church.

2 Chronicles 7:13–14 “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

2 Chronicles 7:15 “Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place.”

I am telling you, dear friend, that Judah had one way out of the immediate crisis it was facing, and it was to do as 2nd Chronicles says. 2nd Chronicles just echoes what Joel says about lamenting, praying, and putting on sackcloth.

Too many times, we drift along taking our blessings for granted until God permits a natural calamity to occur and remind us of our total dependence on Him.

This is where many Christians misunderstand God’s providence or sovereignty. Nothing happens in your life or on planet earth unless God allows it to happen, but everything that happens God uses those events to complete His purpose. God’s hand is at work.

Can I give you two examples?

Abortion

Was it God’s desire that any baby be aborted? No!!!! But God did not stop it. It is the mystery of God that we talked about in Revelation 10.

Is abortion a nation crisis? Yes!!!!

What should Christians do about it? Pray, lament, and put on sackcloth.

The locusts that attacked Judah were allowed to attack as a God’s way of drawing Judah to Him, but to end the crisis, the people of Judah had to do as Joel said.

Was God using abortion in much the same way? I do not know, but it is possible. Instead of lamenting over abortion begging God to act, many Christians framed abortion as a political problem, and that scourge has devastated the land for over 50 years now with 62 million babies paying the price.

I do know this.

Some of the greatest Christian testimonies come from young ladies who had an abortion that got saved later or that begged for God’s forgiveness of that sin, and their testimonies are keeping many young ladies from falling for the lies of the abortion industry and the lies of radical women groups.

2. COVID-19

I really do believe, based on God’s Word, that the COVID pandemic was allowed or sent by God to get Christians to totally depend on God.

Unfortunately, most Christians dismissed God’s role in it which we should never do because it is God who is Sovereign.

I think it is God’s way of saying that he can take the smallest thing, such as a virus, and bring great judgment on man.

Have you ever heard of the Black Death? Do you know how it was spread? By fleas on rats, and 1/3 of Europe was killed. Do you know what happens in the future?

Revelation 6:8 “And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.”

During the Tribulation, 1/4 of planet earth will be killed by war, famine, pestilence, and disease. Diseases that will be spread by the wild beasts of the earth such as viruses and bacteria that man cannot control.

During the Great Tribulation those things will get worse and worse because man refuses to do what Joel told Judah to do.

Revelation 9:21 “nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.”

Revelation 16:21 “And great hailstones, about one hundred pounds each, fell from heaven on people; and they cursed God for the plague of the hail, because the plague was so severe.”

I am telling you this from experience. COVID was real. On a muggy day, I can still feel its lingering effects in my lungs. The Chinese could not have done that on their own. God was trying to get the attention of His people, but too many of us blamed the Chinese instead of lamenting, praying, and putting on sackcloth.

On this immediate day of the Lord, God did not have to send great armies to Judah to bring the people to their knees. He has not had to do that to America yet either.

All God had to do to Judah was send a swarm of insects to bring Judah to its knees.

Colossians 1:15–17 “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Today, as in Judah, God sometimes uses bacteria or viruses so tiny you need a microscope to see them, and those viruses and bacteria bring us to our knees; regretfully, the Devil deceives many Christians, and as a result, Christians look for someone to blame instead of recognizing God’s hand at work.

Can I close with some good news?

Romans 8:28 “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

Romans 8:38–39 “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Because of Jesus Christ, I am never going to separated from the love of God, and if I have faith the size of a mustard seed, I can move any mountain that comes up in my life resting on the promise that God is going to work together for good those things that come up.