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Joel |
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| Chapter 1 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 3 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 2 | Prayer | Devotional |
Prayers
Lord God, when You sound the alarm to Your people through Your ambassadors will we listen? Will we give attention to Your word of warning? When You call us home for Your fatherly care and discipline, will we humble ourselves and return to You? Thank You for Your Word. We should wail over our sin. We should mourn because of the trouble that we face in our life and mission. We should gather together in a solemn assembly and call upon Your Name. Hear us, O Lord, when we cry out to You.
Father, help us to get the point of personal and societal disaster. Is not the Day of Your Judgment coming upon the whole earth in due time? Will we be ready for that Day? Locusts destroy the produce of the land. Invading armies take Your people captive and destroy life as we know it. Yet even in difficult days of trouble, the call goes out to Your people. We can repent today. We can return to You. We can gather together in solemn assembly. Spare Your people! Hear us, O Lord, and be jealous for Your children, for You love us. You can remove invading armies in a moment. You can give health to the land again, and restore what the locust has consumed. You can bring about a day of blessing that is beyond anything that we ask for or imagine. You are the Lord God. The Day is surely coming when we will all be full of the spirit like the prophets of old. On that same Day there will be frightening signs of Your judgment in the heavens and upon the earth. Yet all who call upon Your name shall be saved. We call upon Your Name now, O Lord, for You have provided Your perfect Son, through whom we have bold access to Your heavenly sanctuary. You have called us to Yourself. You will bless us forever.
Glorious God, a great age is coming. When Your Son returns to judge, He will surely save us from this evil day. You will bring judgment upon men. You will purify Your church, and You will reveal all of the sons of God. You will judge all the nations. We wait for You, O Lord. We turn to You now, trusting You for today, and believing Your Word for tomorrow. You are the Lord, our God. You shall make Your new Jerusalem perfectly holy, and You will bless us forever and ever. We will eat and drink with perfect peace and joy. Even now You are with Your people, and You will dwell with us forever.
Devotionals
There is something wonderful, in a way, about a book in the Bible where we don’t know anything about the author, and where we have a hard time definitively identifying the people and place where he served and the timing of his message. What we are left with are the words themselves, the brute force of the message of the divine author. This is refreshing, and is actually the case in the Bible more often than we admit. How much do we actually know about the context of those books and authors that we think we know so well? All of this is the Lord’s Word, and He had something to say to His people in the words of this prophet, something that we need to hear. He spoke to the leaders and to all the inhabitants of the Promised Land. He spoke with boldness and clarity as one who was a messenger from God. He said, “Hear this!” and called His message “the word of the Lord.”
With that all said, it may seem slightly disconcerting that we do not know the exact nature of the problem taking place in Joel. Is it that the Lord’s people are being overrun by locusts that are like invading armies, or will it be that they will soon be overrun by invading armies that are like locusts, or is it they have problems with both locusts and armies? In any case, the problem is a big one, so that they seem to be left with nothing, and they need much help with trials that are bigger than those that have been experienced in generations.
Whatever the problem may be in Israel, there are certain things that are very clear in this book. First, the root cause of the problem is the disobedience of the people. They are called “drunkards” by the prophet. They have lived for their own pleasures and given themselves over to an excess that is sinful. Second, the consequences of the locusts/armies that come against them are very devastating. The nation is being destroyed. This is not just a political problem or a minor security issue. The land is being decimated along with such staples as wheat, wine, and oil. All the fruit trees are withering and the people are distressed. The regular offerings to the Lord have been cut off, and even the children have no joy.
At a time like this there is a special responsibility upon the people who claim to represent the Lord. They are to clothe themselves with humility before God, and to seek Him on behalf of His people. The priests are also people and they also feel the crisis themselves. As the nation suddenly loses her prosperity, the ones who are set apart for dedicated service before the Lord are told to wail to God. They should have no problem seeing their situation. One wonders if we are smart enough to see what our troubles are. If the people seem unaware, God’s ministers should see not only the problem, but also the only possible solution. They must gather together in a solemn assembly before God, and call out to Him for help.
This situation of danger is described as the nearness of the Day of the Lord. The final day of God’s judgment upon the earth will come with the return of Christ and the end of the current age. We do not know when that day will be, but we have had many tastes of that future day in trials such as the one experienced by Israel in the time of Joel. Though the final Day of the Lord was many centuries away, the Lord of the Day who brings judgment upon the earth was very near.
It was time for the people of God to come before the Lord with the truth. It was time to speak to God about their trials, and to acknowledge Him as the only one who could ever provide food, shelter, safety, and joy. When we call out to God in our time of trouble, we take an important step in confessing the Lord to be our Almighty Provider and Judge.
That step would have no lasting meaning if it were not for the fact that the Lord of Judgment was willing to become man in order to take the full force of Judgment Day upon Himself. This is what a God of mercy does. He is not content to give us what we deserve. He invites us to ask Him for something beyond justice. He calls us to cry out to Him for help.
Jesus was no stranger to this activity of calling out to God. Though He had no sin, He identified with the guilty in His baptism. He associated with those who were lowly and who were far from the assembly of the righteous. He came not only to provide mercy for Israel. He prayed to His Father for many who would hear the truth through the witness of His disciples throughout the world. Especially, He cried out to His Father on the cross, and He was heard.
It is now for us to follow Him in crying out God. We can do this with confidence that the Lord who tells us to seek Him in this way will surely be found by His penitent children. We can call out to God with confidence because our Savior first called out to His Father for us, and His pleas for us have surely been heard.
The biggest problem that any human being on this earth will every have to face is the Day of the Lord. If there is something that is worth sounding an alarm about it is the coming of that day when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead. Somehow, so many centuries prior to the final coming of that day, the prophet Joel says that it is near. That can only mean that the smaller intrusions of divine judgment that we experience over the course of human history are a part of the true spirit of the day that will come in fullness in a distant time.
What is the Day of the Lord like? It is like an advancing army that destroys everything in its path. Even though an alarm may be sounded there is no way of escape. The land may be beautiful and plush in front of that army, but by the time they have passed through, all is destroyed. It is like a massive horde of insect life that consumes everything. There is no keeping them out. They find a way to get to their prey. They have no fear, and though each one may be so very small, easily destroyed by a man, how will a whole city defend against them when they descend as a host in massive numbers beyond counting?
It is too late for man to stop the judgment of God when it comes as a taste of the Day of the Lord. It is not too late for God. God speaks through His prophet. There is a note of remaining hope in a situation that seemed completely hopeless. The Lord says, “Yet even now return to me.” It will do no good to return to Him with hypocrisy or empty ceremony. It will avail nothing to claim to love Him insincerely since He knows the hearts of men. What must be done is to return to Him with all your heart. It is not that God cares nothing for outward expressions of repentance. They should weep. They should fast. They should all gather together in a solemn covenant assembly. They should do the other actions that were customary for those who were mourning. All this must be accompanied by hearts that were truly mourning for sin. Since the Lord is gracious and merciful, perhaps He would put off their impending doom.
It is apparent from Joel 2 that this is precisely what God’s people did. The prophet called them to truly repent and they did, young and old, priest and populace. The response of the Lord was dramatic and bountiful. He heard their cries made to Him for the glory of His own Name. He remembered them and helped them. He filled their land with a blessing that was far beyond their expectations. He did great things, and more than restored their fortunes. He sent rain and made the ground fruitful. He restored what the locust horde had destroyed, and promised that they would eat plentifully and be satisfied. The people would praise Him for His greatness, for He would be in the midst of the people as their only God. Instead of the devastating judgment of the Day of the Lord, they would be overwhelmed by the blessing of the Resurrection Day invading their lives.
As if that were not good enough news, God spoke through His prophet about a bigger day coming, beyond their lifetimes. He spoke of spiritual blessings that would only begin to be inaugurated on the day of the first Pentecost in the New Covenant era, blessings that could only find their complete fulfillment in the fullness of the coming age of resurrection. In that day it would not just be a few people who would be filled with the Spirit so as to be mistaken by some as having too much wine too early in the morning. No, in that day all of the Lord’s people would have the Spirit of God poured out upon them.
Yet there was also a note of the coming judgment of that day, a judgment that no one would ever be able to stand, reminding us of the destruction of Pharaoh and his armies in the time of the exodus of God’s people from Egypt. The Day of the Lord would not only involve the greatest blessings for some. For others it would be the Day of the coming of an unspeakably frightening curse.
The final words of the chapter give us the clue as to how one can pursue the blessing, and turn away from the curse of that Day. Using the language of the Old Covenant, but speaking of a fulfillment that would begin in the New, the prophet gave these important words: “All who call upon the Name of the Lord shall be saved.”
When this passage is quoted by Peter in Acts and Paul in Romans, it becomes very clear that the fulfillment of Joel 2 is all about a heavenly Jerusalem, and a Mount Zion that is above, one that will come to earth with the return of the Messiah on clouds of glory with an angelic host as they bring forward the Resurrection Age. As Peter and Paul reflect on this ancient prophesy, one other very important detail is taken out of the shadows and brought into the clear light of a new day: The Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the one who died on the cross for sinners and rose again, He is the Lord of the Resurrection. It is His Name that we must own in order to receive the fullness of salvation that comes to us by the grace of our merciful God.
The Day of the Lord is coming. It will involve a great judgment against the wicked. Others will have blessings granted to them that no eye has seen nor ear heard. The difference between an expectation of curse and a sure hope of blessing can only be found in Jesus Christ. Everyone everywhere should call upon the name of the Lord in covenant assembly with true repentance and faith and be saved.
There is a time beyond discipline. The discipline of the Lord is so important for us in this age of confusion. We so easily move off of the good pathway and turn from our God. Because He loves us, He calls us back to Himself. This frequently takes the form of some measure of disciplinary suffering. Our trials are not a sign that the Lord hates us. On the contrary, He disciplines those He loves. Yet there is a time beyond discipline coming, because there is an age beyond this age of confusion.
The final Day of the Lord will be a Valley of Jehoshaphat. This name means “Jehovah has judged.” It is the same as the Valley of Decision mentioned later. This is not a place of our decision, but of the Lord’s determinations in judgment. In that day, the nations shall be judged. Christ speaks of this in Matthew 25 as a separation of the sheep and the goats. The key point of evidence is what you did “to the least of these my brothers.” What is done to them is said to be done to Christ. This is just what the risen Lord says to Saul on the road to Damascus when He asks him, “Why do you persecute me?” Saul was persecuting the church, but this was an attack against the Lord. In the Old Testament context, an attack against Israel was an attack against her God. As this passage applies to us today, we need to make the covenantal translation that the New Testament authors make: The new Israel is the church. If people imprison the Lord’s children and sell them for their own pleasures, there is One who will make His decisions on these matters, and His day will be a day of life and death determinations.
If this is what “Israel” means in today’s use of this passage, what are we to understand about these other nations that are mentioned which were once enemies of the Lord’s people? They stand for the world outside of the covenant community of the church. God will bring judgment upon them. The case against them is clear. They have stolen from God’s people and have treated them like objects that could be sold. What they have done will come upon their own heads, for a final Day of Judgment will bring about a complete separation of the Lord’s Israel and her enemies.
This Day of the Lord will involve a call to war on the part of the enemies of the Lord. They will come forth in all their pride and power, but they will be coming to their own destruction. Their evil is great, and the Lord will judge them. Just as the Day of the Lord was near for Israel in the locust/army catastrophe that had come upon them in the days of Joel, the Day of the Lord will be near upon the whole earth when God comes in final judgment. The cosmic signs of the coming of Christ and the age of resurrection are to be a signal of both ultimate curse and ultimate blessing. What is our hope in that day? Our hope is in the Lord’s eternal decision for His people. That decision sent His Son forth to accomplish our redemption when He first came to atone for our sins. That same eternal decision assures us that He will always be a refuge for His people. The Lord is more than a crutch. A crutch is not enough for us. We need a solid mountain on which to stand.
This plan of God for the salvation of His beloved Israel through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ will bring great glory to His Name when what has been spoken by the prophets is fully accomplished at the return of the Savior. God dwells in the heavenly Zion, the holy mountain beyond this creation, the Jerusalem that is above. That Israel is growing day by day in this age of gathering, though we cannot really see it. Scoffers doubt its very existence, and all of us join in this doubting from time to time. But God’s electing decision does not ebb and flow based on our doubts. Whether we doubt or not, heaven is. The age of resurrection will be a place of the greatest provision and celebration as the stream of the presence of the Lord brings life everywhere. The Lord will dwell with us in His eternal Zion.
The New Testament tells us that it is in God that we live and move and have our being. We experience that now in the creation of which we are most aware. We have spent centuries understanding the biology, chemistry, astronomy, and physics of this creation. Yet God is bigger than this earth that cartographers traverse and record, and that astronauts have even gazed at from afar. When our bodies finish their years here and rest in a small plot of land, we yet have existence, and we are still in God, though not anywhere that could be located on a map. This need not mean that we go to a place with no physical reality.
Christ has physical reality. He was on earth in His resurrection body, and He still has that same body with visible wounds and the capability to eat. He sits at the right hand of the Father. Is it so hard for us to believe that such a place exists, of which it could be said for those who have gone to be with Him, in Him they live and move and have their being? Must we insist that the only possibility of physical and spiritual existence is in a place that we can find and measure?
When the Day of the Lord comes to this earth, there will be an end of one age and the beginning of a new eternal one. The Lord will come from that other place on the other end of Jacob’s ladder, together with myriad angels, and multitudes of human beings. The coming of this glorious team will overwhelm the current created order and, by the plan and power of God, there will be a new heavens and a new earth fit for a renewed population of immortal beings. On that day, it will still be the case, that in Him we will live and move and have our being. For the new Israel, the age of discipline will finally yield to the age of perfect delight.