Unsustainable Worship
Joel the Prophet • Sermon • Submitted
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· 4 viewsYahweh sends a plague of locusts upon the Judahites because of an undisclosed sin. During this desolation, speaking through the prophet, God calls them to wail, weep, and lament. The response in their suffering is to gather together and call on the name of the Lord.
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Introduction to the book of Joel
The life of the church is dependent on all the canonical books of the in sacred scripture including the book of Joel. (2 Tim 3:16)
Even though Joel was not written specifically for the church, God’s Spirit intended his word to be read applied to our life today.
What the historical context of the book of Joel?
Most likely written in early 6th - late 5th BC during the postexilic era. Internal evidence points us in this direction because of lack references to reigning kings. We cannot be for certain, but we can be confident it is written to Israel/Judah in a time of great distress. Also, the sacrificial system was operating because their was a priest and a temple.
Who is Joel? We’re unsure, but his name means YHWH is God. Pethuel his father raised this man intended him to know God and love him. We internal biblical evidence on Pethuel in the scope of scriptures.
When God has something to say he will say it!
The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel:
Something disturbed Yahweh so much that he send word to his prophet to speak the nation.
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?
Joel message to was inclusive to all people regardless to age, social class, etc. and something devastating was going to happen. Joel suspense the drama by building up the hype.
Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children to another generation.
Four generations will know of this event that will take place. Similarly retelling the horrors of the holocaust or destruction of the twin towers.
Then Joel preaches what is about to take place a picture of eight plague that befell on Egypt.
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.
Four kinds of locus destroying everything in sight. Takes me back to the novel we read in class called “The Birds.” In the novel the birds attacked in kamikaze fashion. All you could do is take cover and head indoors. Perhaps that’s what it looked like for the Israelites.
Then Joel calls out the drunkards and calls them to wail.
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.
God’s sorrow for his own land.
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 imperative of the Lord for the people of God during this crisis. It the appropriate response for the occasion. As a betroth woman as loss her groomsmen. They have lost their prosperity and security. Comparable to having the bank strip you of all your money and your house burned down. That’s the gut wrenching lamenting that God wants from his people.
Lament like a virgin wearing sackcloth for the bridegroom of her youth.
Then he explains why everyone is wailing, weeping, and lamenting. There’s not sacrifices to give any longer. A years supply of harvest is gone instantly.
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. 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.
Left in their shame and having nothing to offer the Yahweh, all the people joy has evaporated into the sky. No food means hungry and starvation. No grain and wine means no offering to God which greatly impacts their relationship with him. Everything is now unsustainable.
Then Joel calls out to the Priest who have nothing as well and commission them with a new task. They take off their holy garments and call the people to the temple.
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.
Yahweh gives the remedy to unsustainable world. Get everyone together and cry out to God! Truly repent of our sins and see what God does.
The world would be different if this happened daily. Waking up from our beds we cry out to him in prayer.
Which takes us back to when Jesus cried out to God in the garden of Gethsemane and then on a cross (Matthew 27:46; John 19:30).
Yahweh heard the cries of his suffering servant. Jesus had no sin, because became sin so that we might be the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21).
God will is for us to cry out to him and we know from history God will redeem us through the resurrection.