The Contemporary Day Of The Lord
Notes
Transcript
We are starting a series on Joel, one of the minor prophets. Minor does not mean lesser. Being a minor prophet means the books were relatively shorter than the four major prophets.
While the writing is shorter, the lessons we can learn are just as important.
Open your Bibles to the book of Joel. Follow along as I read our passage, Joel 1:1-20.
1 The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel:
2 Hear this, you elders, And listen, all inhabitants of the land. Has anything like this happened in your days, Or in your fathers’ days?
3 Tell your sons about it, And have your sons tell their sons, And their sons the next generation.
4 What the gnawing locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten; And what the swarming locust has left, the creeping locust has eaten; And what the creeping locust has left, the stripping locust has eaten.
5 Awake, you heavy drinkers, and weep; And wail, all you wine drinkers, Because of the sweet wine, For it has been eliminated from your mouth.
6 For a nation has invaded my land, Mighty and without number; Its teeth are the teeth of a lion, And it has the jaws of a lioness.
7 It has made my vine a waste And my fig tree a stump. It has stripped them bare and hurled them away; Their branches have become white.
8 Wail like a virgin clothed with sackcloth For the groom of her youth.
9 The grain offering and the drink offering have been cut off From the house of the Lord. The priests mourn, The ministers of the Lord.
10 The field is ruined, The land mourns; For the grain is ruined, The new wine has dried up, Fresh oil has failed.
11 Be ashamed, you farm workers, Wail, you vinedressers, For the wheat and the barley; Because the harvest of the field is destroyed.
12 The vine has dried up And the fig tree has withered; The pomegranate, the palm also, and the apple tree, All the trees of the field have dried up. Indeed, joy has dried up From the sons of mankind.
13 Put on sackcloth And mourn, you priests; Wail, you ministers of the altar! Come, spend the night in sackcloth, You ministers of my God, For the grain offering and the drink offering Have been withheld from the house of your God.
14 Consecrate a fast, Proclaim 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.
15 Woe for the day! For the day of the Lord is near, And it will come as destruction from the Almighty.
16 Has food not been cut off before our eyes, and Joy and rejoicing from the house of our God?
17 The seeds have dried up under their shovels; The storehouses have become desolate, The grain silos are ruined, Because the grain has dried up.
18 How the animals have groaned! The herds of cattle have wandered aimlessly Because there is no pasture for them; Even the flocks of sheep have suffered.
19 To You, Lord, I cry out; For fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness, And the flame has burned up all the trees of the field.
20 Even the animals of the field pant for You; For the stream beds of water are dried up, And fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.
One of the most devastating national events in recent history took place on September 11, 2001. Most of you can probably remember where you were when the news came on about those attacks.
I can still remember where I was, which TV I saw the news on and the difficulty in accepting what I was seeing and hear. I can also remember being far away from my family.
In the days, weeks, months, and even years ahead this country was involved in the aftermath of that devastating attack. The stock market was closed on Wednesday, the day after 9/11. On Thursday, the market fell 684 points, 7.1% decline, setting a record for the biggest loss in exchange history for one trading day. At the close of the week, the Dow Jones was down over 14%. An estimated $1.4 trillion in value was lost in the first week of trading.
If there had been newspapers during Joel’s day, the first headline people would havre read is:
LOCUSTS INVADE THE LAND!
Then the next headlines would read:
NATIONS FACES SEVERE ECONOMIC CRISIS
and finally a third section would be headlines with:
NO END TO DROUGHT IN SIGHT
The people in Joel’s day had just experienced a devastating attack of locusts. So, God led Joel to use that event for the backdrop of his message to the people.
Joel 1:1-20 teaches us to pay attention to what God is saying to us through contemporary circumstances.
I. The Call to the Prophet (1:1)
Let’s look at the call to the prophet.
We read in Joel 1:1, “The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel.” There are about twelve men named Joel in the Old Testament. We know nothing about our Joel, except what we learn about him in his book.
We know: (1) that Joel means “Yahweh is God”; (2) that Joel was the son of Pethuel (about whom we know nothing); (3) that Joel was perhaps the earliest of the Old Testament’s writing prophets; (4) that Joel probably lived in or near Jerusalem; and (5) that Joel probably prophesied in Jerusalem.
Scholars differ widely over the date this book was written. I don’t think putting a date on this writing is critical.
Joel gives us very little information about himself or the time of the writing. Maybe he did this because his focus, just like the readers’ focus should be, was on God’s message. It wasn’t important how the message came or when the message came, only that it came from God and was God’s message to His people. As each new set of readers read this message, their focus must be on God.
God’s word is always divine, always comes from divine initiative and as such, every reader should have the same awe that Israel had when they received this message.
Whether this message appeals to us or not, it must be accepted as God’s word to His prophet, Israel and to us. It is not man’s word.
II. The Call to the Nation (1:2-12)
Next, let’s examine the call to the nation.
The occasion for Joel’s message was a massive and devastating invasion of locusts. There are a couple of points at which we need to look.
A. The Severity of the Devastation (1:2-4)
Notice the severity of the devastation.
Joel began by addressing the elders, probably for two reasons. First, they were respected citizens in the land. And second, they had lived a long time and could authenticate what Joel was saying. With their support, he was not just a lone voice crying in the wilderness. They would agree with Joel about the severity of the devastation that had come upon them.
The elders would affirm that the nation faced a catastrophe of monumental proportions, the likes of which had never been seen.
In verse 2-3 we read:
2 Hear this, you elders, And listen, all inhabitants of the land. Has anything like this happened in your days, Or in your fathers’ days?
3 Tell your sons about it, And have your sons tell their sons, And their sons the next generation.
Tell your sons about it. The elders would be able to testify about what happened in earlier life.
Last night, Adam, Megan and Adaline were going home and ran by the house to pick up their dog Arty. Of course, Susan and I went out and played with Adaline, even after Meg and Adam were ready to leave. I looked at Adam and asked him if he could remember those times his parents were ready to leave but his grandparents kept playing with him. He laughed and shook his head.
One of the ways we learn life is by listening to the stories of our youth and stories that happened before our time.
It isn’t clear what is meant in verse 4. Are there four different kinds of locust or does it describe the four stages of locust. What we do know is that when these locust came, right behind them were more locusts, more locusts and even more locusts.
The point is clear, there was complete devastation from the locusts.
Commentator James Montgomery Boice writes:
In 1915 a plague of locusts covered Palestine and Syria from the border of Egypt to the Taurus mountains. The first swarms appeared in March. These were adult locusts that came from the northeast and moved toward the southwest in clouds so thick they obscured the sun. The females were about two and one-half to three inches long, and they immediately began to lay eggs by digging holes in the soil about four inches deep and depositing about 100 eggs in each. The eggs were neatly arranged in a cylindrical mass about one inch long and about as thick as a pencil. These holes were everywhere. Witnesses estimated that as many as 65,000–75,000 eggs were concentrated in a single square meter of soil, and patches like this covered the entire land from north to south. Having laid their eggs the locusts flew away.
Within a few weeks the young locusts hatched. These resembled large ants. They had no wings, and within a few days they began moving forward by hopping along the ground like fleas. They would cover four to six hundred feet a day, devouring any vegetation before them. By the end of May they had molted. In this stage they had wings, but they still did not fly. Instead they moved forward by walking, jumping only when they were frightened. They were bright yellow. Finally the locusts molted again, this time becoming the fully developed adults that had invaded the land initially.
According to a description of this plague by John D. Whiting in the December 1915 issue of National Geographic Magazine, the earlier stages of these insects attacked the vineyards. “Once entering a vineyard the sprawling vines would in the shortest time be nothing but bare bark. When the daintier morsels were gone, the bark was eaten off the young topmost branches, which, after exposure to the sun, were bleached snow-white. Then, seemingly out of malice, they would gnaw off small limbs, perhaps to get at the pith within.”
Whiting describes how the locusts of the last stage completed the destruction begun by the earlier forms. They attacked the olive trees, whose tough, bitter leaves had been passed over by the creeping locusts. “They stripped every leaf, berry, and even the tender bark.” They ate away “layer after layer” of the cactus plants, “giving the leaves the effect of having been jackplaned. Even on the scarce and prized palms they had no pity, gnawing off the tenderer ends of the swordlike branches and, diving deep into the heart, they tunneled after the juicy pith.”
This is exactly what had happened in Joel’s day. There was a massive locust invasion of the land. The devastation caused by the locusts was extremely severe. Everything was gone.
B. The Sorrow of the Devastation (1:5-12)
And, notice the sorrow of the devastation.
What is so remarkable about Joel’s description of the severity of the devastation caused by the locusts is how he dealt with it. He did not minimize the severity of the devastation. He did not treat the disaster lightly. He understood that something terrible has struck the people of God.
He wanted the people to understand the full severity of the devastation, so he called on various groups in the land to mourn with him.
The first group was the drunkards. Joel told them to wake up and notice there will be no more wine for them to drink. Those who become drunk often miss the biggest things happening around them. But they, like everyone else, will have to face this devastation without the aid of drunken bliss. There will be no way for anyone to find respite from this.
The second group is the whole nation of Israel. They are called to “wail like a virgin clothed with sackcloth.” The image here is of a bride who was dressed in white, ready for her wedding when she receives news her groom has been killed and she now must change into sackcloth to lament his loss.
Verses 9 and 10 talk about agricultural devastation. Combined with the wailing virgin, we have an image of an entire nation without the means to worship God. There would be no way the people could approach God since they had nothing to offer for the different sacrifices. How is it possible to find something to eat when you cannot even petition God for help?
The third group are the farmers. He lists different plants and produce that would normally keep the farmers and workers in food and money. That has all been lost. Then he talks about the produce like the palm and apple tree having been dried up. Just like the joy for the nation has been dried up. There is no joy.
Have you ever been to a church or seen a worship service without worship; where all those gathered look like they took a drink of the bitterest drink imaginable. Even if they tried to smile, their faces could not show it. This is what Joel is calling on the nation and it’s leaders to to realize.
Joel called the nation to sorrow and mourn with him over the devastation that had been caused by the locust plague. He wanted people to understand what God was saying to them through that natural disaster.
In our own day, people all over the world experience natural disasters, earthquakes, droughts, famines, floods, health epidemics, and so on. Even for ourselves, we experience personal disasters, the death of loved ones, financial setbacks, relationship failures, health breakdowns, accidents, and so on. In all of the issues that come our way, Joel wants us to ask, “What is God saying to us?” Joel wrote his book so that people would know what God was saying through these critical events.
III. The Call to the Ministers (1:13-18)
Now, let’s look at the call to the ministers.
Joel specifically mentions the priests because they have an exceptionally important job in society. There are two things I believe that a minister must do.
A. The Need for Repentance (1:13-14)
First, they point to the need for repentance.
Joel uses some clear imagery of how the ministers should point out the need for repentance in the first part of verse 13.
13 Put on sackcloth And mourn, you priests; Wail, you ministers of the altar! Come, spend the night in sackcloth, You ministers of my God, For the grain offering and the drink offering Have been withheld from the house of your God.
Ministers must always do what they call others to do. I have talked about this before in different sermons. A pastor’s best sermons tend to be the ones that God has preached to that pastor first. Before calling someone to repentance, the pastor should already have repented.
Once the ministers have repented and start to call to others, they should prepare for for a day of repentance for the entire nation. The ministers should not only call for a day but they should schedule a day that the who congregation can gather and repent before God as a group.
This isn’t for a day of fear and terror. Every child does something wrong from time to time and must be corrected by their parents. But a child that is loved does not live in fear of being corrected.
God doesn’t call us to repent out of fear but out of love; out of His love of us and our love of Him.
B. The Need for Prayer (1:15-18)
And second, notice the need for prayer.
At this point, we read the dominate theme of Joel’s letter. In verse 15, Joel writes:
15 Woe for the day! For the day of the Lord is near, And it will come as destruction from the Almighty.
There is a day of the Lord coming.
Throughout the OT, the theme of the day of the Lord is repeated. The day of the Lord can be defined as “the time of the decisive visitation of Yahweh, when he intervenes to punish the wicked, deliver and exalt the faithful remnant who worship him, and establish his own rule. Both judgment and salvation are especially prominent aspects.”
The people in Joel’s day had just experienced a contemporary day of the Lord with the visitation of the locusts. It had devastating effects on the land, the people, and even the animals, as Joel said in verses 16-18:
16 Has food not been cut off before our eyes, and Joy and rejoicing from the house of our God?
17 The seeds have dried up under their shovels; The storehouses have become desolate, The grain silos are ruined, Because the grain has dried up.
18 How the animals have groaned! The herds of cattle have wandered aimlessly Because there is no pasture for them; Even the flocks of sheep have suffered.
However, that contemporary day of the Lord was intended to cause the people of God to know that a future “day of the Lord is near.” The contemporary day of the Lord should cause the people to repent and return to the Lord because a day is coming when it will be too late to repent and return to the Lord.
IV. The Call to Prayer (1:19-20)
Finally, let’s look at the call to prayer.
Joel himself led the people in prayer. He was not outside of the Lord’s judgment and salvation. He prayed not only for the people but even for the beasts of the field because of the locust infestation. He prayed in verses 19-20:
19 To You, Lord, I cry out; For fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness, And the flame has burned up all the trees of the field.
20 Even the animals of the field pant for You; For the stream beds of water are dried up, And fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.
Having read this passage and heard what Joel is teaching Israel and us, we must always repent and turn to Him. We should always place our total dependence on Him.
On one occasion Jesus was asked about a human disaster against some Galileans when they were worshiping. Pilate had his soldiers kill the Galilean worshipers and then mingled their blood with their sacrifices. How could God allow such a thing to happen? And how could he let it happen when his people were in the midst of worshiping him?
Again, Jesus was asked about natural disaster when the tower of Siloam fell and killed eighteen innocent bystanders. How could that be? Were these eighteen more sinful than others that they deserved to be struck and killed by a falling tower?
How did Jesus answer? He did not say, “Well, you know, accidents happen. God can’t be responsible for everything that goes wrong in the world!” We know that Jesus did not answer in this way.
2 And Jesus responded and said to them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans just because they have suffered this fate?
3 No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
4 Or do you think that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse offenders than all the other people who live in Jerusalem?
5 No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
What is Jesus saying? He is saying that those who object to tragedies like the locust plague or 9/11 or an accident or a cancer diagnosis, etc. do so because they are asking the wrong question. They ask, “Why should disaster fall upon these people? Why should God strike innocent people?”
But they should be asking, “Why haven’t these disasters fallen on us? Why haven’t they destroyed us?” You see, our problem is that we so easily forget how sinful we are. As James Montgomery Boice says, “We have forgotten that it generally takes a disaster of unparalleled proportions to wake us from sin’s lethargy.”
Boice goes on to say, “This brings us to the bottom line, which is the point of Joel’s prophecy. Both the delays in God’s judgment (the periods of grace) and the previews of judgment in such catastrophic events as locust plagues and earthquakes are for our good, that we might repent.”
When you are going through a difficult time; when you are experiencing what you might think is a disaster, see it as God calling you to repent and to return to Him in total dependence.
Let’s pray.
