Locusts and Repentance

Introduction to Joel:

— We don’t know when Joel was written — probably after the return from exile — during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah

— Unlike many other prophets, Joel does not mention a specific sin that they are to repent. It’s as if you are to fill in the blank.

— Joel is very knowledgable of the OT and specifically the other prophets. Quotes or alludes to Amos, Isaiah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Obadiah, Malachi, Ezekiel.

Joel has a good understanding of Israel’s history and her tendency to wander from God and into sin and rebellion and he expects you do to.

He writes from the perspective of a prophet with the backdrop of Deut 28.

Deuteronomy 28:1–3 (ESV)

Blessings for Obedience

28 “And if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. 2 And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God. 3 Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field.

— Blessings for the land, livestock, children, victory against enemies

Deuteronomy 28:15 (ESV)

Curses for Disobedience

15 “But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.

Deuteronomy 28:20 (ESV)

20 “The Lord will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me.

Deuteronomy 28:37–38 (ESV)

37 And you shall become a horror, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples where the Lord will lead you away. 38 You shall carry much seed into the field and shall gather in little, for the locust shall consume it.

Wake up!

Joel 1:1–3 (ESV)

1 The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel: 2 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? 3 Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children to another generation.

To return to the usual and NOT to the Lord invites disaster and rejects the restoration that God wants to do.

Day of the Lord = Day of God’s judgment on sin and evil.

Similar terms, particularly “that day,” “the day of,” and “the day when,” appear nearly 200 times in the prophets, occasionally in Lamentations, and twice in Psalms

Joel describes a recent locust invasion

Locust invasion has happened many times.

For agrarian society this is a huge deal!

Can be hundreds of millions of locusts.

Swarm can be 40 miles wide.

Still happens today — (due to climate change?) We must remember that God is in control of all nature, so it is His tool to use.

Joel 1:4–5 (ESV)

4 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.

5 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.

Joel 1:10–12 (ESV)

10 The fields are destroyed, the ground mourns, because the grain is destroyed, the wine dries up, the oil languishes.

12 ... gladness dries up from the children of man.

Joel uses this natural disaster to prophecy of a greater military defeat if the people of Jerusalem do not repent.

Chapter 2

Joel 2:1–2 (ESV)

1 Blow a trumpet in Zion; sound an alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming; it is near,

2 a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness there is spread upon the mountains a great and powerful people; their like has never been before, nor will be again after them through the years of all generations.

Joel 2:6–8 (ESV)

6 Before them peoples are in anguish; all faces grow pale.

7 Like warriors they charge; like soldiers they scale the wall. They march each on his way; they do not swerve from their paths.

8 They do not jostle one another; each marches in his path; they burst through the weapons and are not halted.

It would have been such a disaster that people would naturally be asking, “What is going on? Why is God allowing this?”

God is NO less in charge of nature today — locust / virus.

They even get to a place where their worship is interrupted

Joel 1:9 (ESV)

9 The grain offering and the drink offering are cut off from the house of the Lord. The priests mourn, the ministers of the Lord.

I don’t care about the cause because I can assure you of it’s purpose — Wake Up!!

5 Awake, you drunkards

Past Day of the Lord with judgment by a swarm of locusts

Future Day of the Lord with judgment by military swarm

(A past Day of the Lord is a mild forerunner for a future Day of the Lord - both of which are judgment on sin.)

It would have

Amos 4:9 (ESV)

9 “I struck you with blight and mildew; your many gardens and your vineyards, your fig trees and your olive trees the locust devoured; yet you did not return to me,” declares the Lord.

Sin is serious.

Psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a book titled, Whatever Became of Sin? in which he states,

““The very word, “sin,” which seems to have disappeared, was once a proud word. It was once a strong word, an ominous and serious word. … But the word went away. It has almost disappeared — the word, along with the notion. Why? Doesn’t anyone sin anymore? Doesn’t anyone believe in sin?”

― Karl Menninger

We don’t talk about sin anymore. The word has fallen out of usage.

“sinful” is used more to describe a chocolate cake on a menu than the condition of the human heart.

While the word has fallen out of usage it is alive and well within the human heart.

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.” —

— G. K. Chesterton.

We must return to calling sin those things which the Bible calls sin — if for no other reason than the fact that when we redefine sin, we blind ourselves from the path of God’s blessing and wonder why we receive consequences.

It’s not “stretching the truth” — It’s a lie. It’s sin.

It is not “taking a peak” — it’s lust. It’s sin.

It’s not “sharing a concern” — It’s gossip. It’s sin.

It’s not “holding someone accountable” — it’s unforgiveness. It’s sin.

Oftentimes it is not “righteous anger” — it’s bitterness. And it’s sin.

We must stop numbing our consciences with redefinitions of sin, and we must start tenaciously rooting out every shadow of our heart that does not reflect the light of Christ.

“We become so accustomed to our sins we sometimes lapse into a state of peaceful coexistence with them, but God never ceases to hate them.” ― Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness

All of us have sinned. You have sinned. You, at some time, have desired and acted in a way that places your will above God’s will. You, at sometime, have made yourself the authority of your life and not God.

We are each born in the line of Adam which means we are each born into the condemnation of sin and with a nature that is bent toward sin.

“Strangely there is no explicit reference to the sin of the people: the rhetorical form here used certainly has room for an accusation in which wrongdoing may be elaborated. Joel’s whole interpretation of the locust plague does presuppose serious sin in the life of the community. It is evidently left to the people and priests to search their own hearts and habits for evidence of the sin that God’s reaction proved to be there. Self-criticism could be an aid to true repentance, as Lam. 3:40 indicates:

Let us test our ways and examine them, and return to Yahweh.”

— Leslie C. Allen, NICOT: The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah, p.79

When we look for sin, we must remember we do not search our hearts as compared to other human hearts (I’m at least better than that guy — or Hitler), we compare our hearts to a perfect and holy God.

Better yet to ask the Holy Spirit to search out hearts for anything that displeases God.

Go ahead. I’ll wait. . .

God’s warning is judgment but His desire is mercy.

These two things can never be divorced from each other.

When we lessen God’s wrath we weaken His mercy.

The greater God’s wrath towards sin, the greater His mercy toward repentant sinners.

God’s wrath is not opposed to His love. In fact, God’s wrath is a natural outworking of His love.

ILLUST - I love my family with a love that is proportionate to my hate of anything that would harm their good.

This is how God is a God of love and still express wrath.

Problem is, without Christ we are objects of God’s wrath.

The first chapter of Joel and the the first 12 verses of chapter 2 explain what God will DO in response to the people’s sin, and here we have a description of who God IS even as the people are sinful.

Joel 2:13

13 . . . Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.

In addition to Deut, Joel also remembers Exodus:

Exodus 34:4–8 (ESV)

4 So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the first. And he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand two tablets of stone.

5 The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord.

6 The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,

7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

8 And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.

It is true that God will judge sin, there are consequences for our sin. But it is a lie of Satan when we hear that God is vengeful, or harsh, or cruel.

God only ever allows evil to touch us so that it might turn us, and that we might return.

2 Peter 3:8–10 (ESV)

8 But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

9 The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.

The Day of the Lord is coming! For those who know Christ this is the final day when all wrongs are made right.

Warning for those who do not know Christ.

Longing for those who do know Christ.

Urging to reach those who need Christ.

It is NEVER too late to return to God.

Joel 2:12–13 (ESV)

12 “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;

13 and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.

Yet even . . . NOW. . . return

Not when you feel you have a handle on things.

Not when it seems like a good time to you.

Immediately - when the Spirit prompts

With all our heart

It is a willful change not an intellectual agreement.

With fasting, with weeping, and with mourning

How wrecked do you get over your sin.

“It’s ok, God HAS to forgive me.”

Rend your hearts and not your garments.

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 5

21 I hate, I despise, your feasts!

I can’t stand the stench

of your solemn assemblies.

It’s as if God says, “I don’t even want you to go to church today — it’s not worth it.”

This repentance requires immediate action with complete sincerity.

Which hints that there is a repentance that might be delayed, or in thought / intention alone, or incomplete (part of my heart) or with hypocritical religious motions.

Return, Return

It is never too late to return to the Lord.

The mind-blowing reality is that we CAN return to the Lord.

Jesus is the bridge between the wrath and the love of God

Renewal cannot begin while there is unconfessed sin.

Communion

1 Corinthians 11:28–30 (ESV)

28 Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

29 For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.

30 That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.

1 Corinthians 11:23–26 (ESV)

23 For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread,

24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.