Sounding the Alarm

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Tonight we’re going to be in the book of Joel. We looked at the first 14 verses of the book of Joel last Sunday night, and I want to pick up from there tonight. We’re going to start in Joel chapter 1, verse 15.

I’m going to read the text to you just so you can get the idea of the context, and then we’re going to come back and take a look at what Joel was talking about here. Starting in verse 15, it says, woe because of that day, for the day of the Lord is near and will come as devastation from the Almighty. Hasn’t the food been cut off before our eyes, joy and gladness from the house of our God?

The seeds lie shriveled in their casings, the storehouses are in ruin, and the granaries are broken down because the grain has withered away. How the animals groan, the herds of cattle wander in confusion since they have no pasture, even the flocks of sheep and goats suffer punishment. I call to you, Lord, for fire has consumed the pastures of the wilderness, and flames have devoured all the trees of the orchard.

Even the wild animals cry out to you, for the riverbeds are dried up, and fire has consumed the pastures of the wilderness. Blow the horn in Zion. Sound the alarm on my holy mountain.

Let all the residents of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming. In fact, it is near. A day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and total darkness like the dawn spreading over the mountains.

A great and strong people appears such as never existed in ages past and never will again in all the generations to come. A fire devours in front of them and behind them a flame blazes. The land in front of them is like the Garden of Eden, but behind them it is like a desert wasteland.

There is no escape from them. Their appearance is like that of horses, and they gallop like war horses. They bound on the tops of the mountains.

Their sound is like the sound of chariots, like the sound of fiery flames consuming stubble, like a mighty army deployed for war. Nations writhe in horror before them. All faces turn pale.

They attack as warriors attack. They scale walls as men do. Each goes on his own path, and they do not change their course.

They do not push each other. Each proceeds on his own path. They dodge arrows, never stopping.

They storm the city. They run on the wall. They climb into the houses.

They enter through the windows like thieves. The earth quakes before them. The sky shakes.

The sun and moon grow dark, and the stars cease their shining. The Lord makes his voice heard in the presence of his army. His camp is very large.

Those who carry out his command are powerful. Indeed, the day of the Lord is terrible and dreadful. Who can endure it?

All right. Remember back to two weeks ago, So when we first took a look at the book of Joel, I told you the book of Joel is focused on the day of the Lord. All right, the day of the Lord, in their understanding, was a day of judgment, but also a day of salvation.

And it really depended on where you stood in relation to God. If you were right with him when the day of the Lord came, it was going to be a day of your salvation, a day of your rescue from all the things that were going on in the world. If you were against God, if you were not right with God, then it was going to be a day of judgment.

It was going to be a day of purification where God cleansed sin and in some cases cleansed sinners. Now, we know a little bit more of the story as God’s revealed more things in the New Testament. We know that there’s coming a day of final judgment where the living and the dead will stand before the judgment seat of Jesus Christ as he passes judgment.

And those who belong to him will be purified. It’ll be the end of all things in this world. We’ll receive our glorified bodies and we will be with him forever.

It’ll be the ultimate realization of our salvation. It’ll be the ultimate purification of who we are into who God desires us to be. And for the world that rejects God and his mercy, it’ll be a day of final judgment, where the sentence is finally meted out and God writes all the wrongs that have been committed.

Now, he was pointing them forward to this, to this day of the Lord. Now, they didn’t understand at that point about the coming of Jesus Christ. They were still waiting for the appearing of the Messiah, but they understood the day of the Lord to be this time of judgment, that one day God would judge the nations. and throughout this first part of the book we see Joel trying to help them understand in part what the what the day of the Lord is going to be like what that judgment is going to be like by comparing it to this plague of grasshoppers this plague of locusts that’s about to devour their their nation and and he explained to them in the beginning of chapter one that we looked at two weeks ago, he explained to them that this invasion was coming.

And now as we get into this second part, he’s telling them it’s almost here. It’s no longer just something that’s months out. It’s no longer just a prediction, hey, we’re going to be looking at this somewhere down the road.

By the time we get to the second part of the book of Joel, he’s telling them the locusts are on their way. You know, if we had find my friends on an iPhone back in that day, you could see them incoming. All right.

Google Maps could tell you they’re going to be here in such and such time. They are on their way. And that’s why the very first verse of chapter two, he says, sound the alarm.

They are coming. In that day, you had people who stood watch that you had watchmen on the wall and they would sound the alarm when they saw the enemy armies approaching. They were letting people know.

It’s not just word from scouts out in the field that there are armies possibly moving toward our city and toward our fortifications, but, you know, they’re days out. We don’t know if they’re coming here for sure. At this point, the watchmen on the wall can see them.

They’re inside of the city or in sight of the city. I want to make sure that was clear. Not inside, but in sight of the city walls, and the watchmen are sounding the alarm because it’s everybody to their battle stations at that point.

So now when we get to this part, the grasshoppers are on their way. And I know we might think big deal grasshoppers are coming. Then you might not, if that’s your thought, you might have not understood what I was reading to you.

And that’s what we’re going to look at here in just a moment. But this, he was explaining this as a coming time of suffering. It was going to be a time of suffering for Israel that was a result of God’s discipline.

Now, this was a picture of the day of the Lord to help them understand what the final judgment was going to be. But it was like Joel saying, you think this is bad, there’s a greater judgment coming. It’s kind of like sometimes you see those signs on church marquees.

It drives me crazy. I shouldn’t say I hate it, because it’s not a sin, but it drives me crazy when church marquees try to be funny, because sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they are, I’ll admit, sometimes they are, but more often they’re not, And they kind of come across as corny.

And I wonder what, you know, it’s supposed to attract the attention of people outside. And I wonder if, you know, what kind of attention it attracts. But you always, every summer you see somebody put on their marquee, oh, you think it’s hot here.

Like they were the first ones that thought about that. Now, if you’ve ever put that on a church marquee, I’m not trying to shame you. It might have been clever when you did it.

But now we’ve all seen it thousands and thousands of times. But it’s sort of that sentiment, all right? Joel is saying, you think it’s bad when these things happen.

This is just a foretaste of the judgment that’s coming. And so he explains to them what these grasshoppers were going to, well, not just the grasshoppers, but what all of this time of trial for Israel was going to be. And it was going to be a time of discipline.

And this was not about God trying to destroy Israel because of their sins. It was about God disciplining Israel and chastening them. And we talked about the difference a little bit in the book of Obadiah, that God will always deal with sin.

It may not happen when we think it’s going to. God may, in mercy, give the sinner more time to repent before he deals with the sin. But God will eventually deal with all sin.

How he deals with it depends on where you are in relation to his covenant. If you’re in a covenant relationship with him, he deals with it to purify you. If you’re outside of that covenant, if you have willfully placed yourself outside of the love and mercy of God, then he deals with it through punishment.

And we learn that from the book of Obadiah, when the Israelites were guilty of a lot of things, and God promised to restore them. Or the Edomites were guilty of a lot of things, and God said, there’s not going to be any of you people left. It was because one nation was tremendously flawed but cried out for the mercy of God, and one nation was tremendously flawed and turned its back on the mercy of God.

And there’s the difference. What we see here in God’s dealings with Israel in the book of Joel is not God wanting to punish and destroy Israel, but God wanting to discipline Israel as a means of purifying them and bringing them back to him. Just like when I discipline my kids, the intent is not to do any real damage.

It’s not to wear them out so they can never sit down again, even if I may warn them of that. That’s not the goal. The goal is to get them to see the gravity of the direction they’re going in hopes that they will come back to a place of obedience. So Joel warned them that there was going be a famine in the land.

In verse 16, he said the food was going to be cut off. He warned them that there was going to be sorrow in the temple. This place where they were supposed to go and worship God was going to be a place of sorrow.

It was going to be a sad place. Verse 17, we see that the crops were going to rot in the ground. And that’s what he means when he said the seeds lie shriveled in their casings.

You know, we’re hungry because the crop failed, so we’re going to plant some for next year and, oh, guess what? Those seeds just rotted in the ground. You go a couple years without a crop and you’re in real trouble.

And so verse 17, we’re going to see that the famine was not going to be over in just a short period of time. In verse 17, it tells us that the storehouses would lie empty. It tells us in verse 18 that their livestock would starve.

In verse 19, it talks about a fire sweeping through and destroying the pastures and the orchards, the farmland. And it’s not just the livestock that we’re going to suffer. In verse 20, he says that even the wild animals were going to suffer.

Even the wild animals cry out to you. Even the wild animals were crying out to God because they knew something was wrong. The riverbeds were dried up.

Now, that is a part of the world where it doesn’t rain a lot. They survive by collecting what water does come down in the rain and collecting from the streams that run through there. They’ve got the Jordan River, they’ve got a few other streams. Those may run dry in the summer, and they have to rely on the water that they’ve stored.

But after a while, if the water you store isn’t being replenished by the stream beds having water in them seasonally, but you go through several seasons and into multiple years with no water running in the brooks and the rivers, the water you’ve stored underground runs out, and you’re in real trouble. There wasn’t a place they could go. You know, I think of our water situation here in Oklahoma.

And until we had that last round of big rains at the beginning of the summer, that was the craziest, that was the craziest summer I’ve ever seen as far as the beginning. It was so wet, so stinking wet. Until then, you know, we had some reservoirs in southeast to Oklahoma, I’d go look at the water resources board maps because I’m a map nerd.

You put anything on a map and I’ll look at it. And that, you know, some of those reservoirs were 20 feet down from where they were supposed to be. And you think that could be a precarious situation for people in cities like Altus or Lawton, but there’s always a solution.

I mean, they could bring water in from someplace else. There’s always a plan B. There’s always something that could be done.

It may not be easy and it may not be cheap, but nobody in those cities was going to, the rest of the country wasn’t just going to sit around, the rest of the state wasn’t just going to sit around while they dried up and blew away, the people dying of dehydration in the streets. They didn’t have a plan B because they were without water so long, even their plan B failed. And the stream beds are still empty, even the wild animals were crying out.

Now to remember that God’s people, with his help, had clawed a civilization out of the desert. As soon as God’s hand of protection over them was lifted, that desert came back in and took over with a vengeance. So you see, even the wild animals would suffer, the rivers would run dry.

It was going to be a miserable situation, and on top of that, the locusts were going to come in and wreak havoc. And if you remember the verse that I read to you last time, Joel 1. 4, what the devouring locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten.

What the swarming locust has left, the young locust has eaten. And what the young locust has left, the destroying locust has eaten. They weren’t going to have much left just because of the drought, and what little they had was going to be eaten by the locusts.

And you’ve got these various stages of the life cycle of the locust. That’s what he’s talking about here, not different kinds of locusts probably, probably these life cycles. But he said what the infant locusts, what’s left, they’re going to come and eat. And what they manage To Leave Behind, the teenage locusts are going to eat.

And what they manage To Leave Behind, the adult locusts are going to eat. And what they manage To Leave Behind, the senior citizen locusts are going to come behind and clean up. There’s not going to be anything left.

There will be nothing left for the people. So we saw last week the locusts were going to just be the icing on the cake. not in a good way.

They were going to come and finish everything off. But it’s really frightening the way he describes the locusts in chapter 2. Now we see in chapter 2, verse 2, he’s talking about them coming through, and he says, the day of the Lord’s coming is a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and total darkness like the spreading, like the dawn spreading over the mountains.

He said these locusts are going to come spreading over the mountains like the break of dawn. And I know we live in fairly flat land here, so we may not see this, but I remember my time in Arkansas. I remember I’ve been driving at times early in the morning through southeast Oklahoma where there’s a lot of mountains.

And you can tell off in the distance, the sun’s coming up, but you still can’t see it over the mountains. And when it comes over the mountains, it fills up valleys and it’s just there. It just streams down into the valleys and up the side of the mountain until it breaks over the other mountain, the next mountain, until everything is lit up.

He’s saying that the locusts were going to come swarming over the mountains like the break of dawn. They were going to fill everything. They were going to cover everything.

He says in verse 3, they were going to be like a sweeping prairie fire that turns a paradise into a wasteland. I mean, he says, Joel, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, said that in front of them, in front of the approaching locusts, the land would be like the Garden of Eden. Now, it seems like he’s saying that to make a point, because we’ve already got this drought and famine going on.

But he says, compared to what they leave behind them, the ground in front of them is like the Garden of Eden. And so you take what’s marginally good, and they just would leave behind a barren wasteland. If you’ve ever seen one of those fires that spreads, I’m not talking about a house fire, but up at Pawhuska at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, they’ll go in there and do controlled burns.

And you’ve got these tallgrass prairies, beautiful flowers, all sorts of things going out there, and you can see the difference in the places that have burned and the places that haven’t burned. I’ve never been in there while they’re burning. I don’t know if they’ll even let you go watch it go through.

But you can see this side of the road over here, lush grasses, flowers, all kinds of grazing land. And this side over here, it’s just black and dead. And it’s neat to see as eventually things will grow up behind it.

But for the moment, it’s just black and dead and there’s no benefit from the land. There’s nothing to eat. There’s nothing for the bison to scavenge from.

And that’s what the locusts were going to come through and do. They were going to be like that fire that leaves nothing behind in its wake. verse 2 also points to the fact that this invasion of locusts was going to be like an it was going to be like an invading army the likes of which Israel had never seen because he said you know this is a like the dawn this is like the dawn spreading over the mountains a great and strong people appears now this great strong people is going to be an army such as never existed in ages past and never will again in all the generations to come so they’re going to march in like an army you’ve never seen.

And as we go back to the previous passage we studied two weeks ago, he told them this is going to be the kind of thing that you tell your children about and your grandchildren and their children. This is going to be the kind of story that they pass down and remember because nobody has ever seen anything like this in Israel. What kind of army was this?

And he tells us in verse 4, their appearance is like that of horses. They’re going to come galloping in like horses. And apparently, I’ve not seen pictures myself, but I’ve read that there are grasshoppers that kind of have an appearance like horses, maybe.

I’m not saying they’re the same shape, but there’s something about them that has the appearance of horses. Maybe their wings are a different color where it looks like they’re wearing a saddle or something like that. But these locusts were going to come galloping in there like war horses.

Their appearance is like that of horses. Yeah, big grasshoppers. and the swarm of them was going to be as overwhelming as a cavalry charge.

I mean, the people of Israel were going to be powerless to do anything to stop these locusts. He said in verse 5 that they were going to sound like chariots. Well, he actually explains three things that they were going to sound like.

They were going to sound like chariots. They were going to sound like roaring fire. They were going to sound like marching armies.

These chariots, they were going to sound like loud vehicles making noise out in the streets. They were going to sound like a roaring fire. You know that sound that fire has when it gets really going?

They were going to sound like that. They were going to sound like an army on the march. And I think of those military parades that they have now in North Korea, where you’ve got tens of thousands of men and women stomping, marching in unison, and the sound that it makes.

I mean, the sound that it makes is eerie even coming across my TV screen. I can’t imagine sitting there in front of it. He said these sounds, a marching army, chariots, roaring fire, those are the things you’re going to think of when you think of when the locusts come.

Now, for us, you know, we get a few grasshoppers here and there. We think about the little noise they make as they fly off. He said there’s going to be so many of them.

They’re going to sound like an invading army. He said in verse 7, they were going to attack with the ferocity of warriors. They attack as warriors attack.

You know, most bugs are afraid of us. You know, they just as soon be left alone, most of them. Well, they’d rather you steer clear of them, the wasp would, but if you get near them, they’re going to fight you.

Yeah. But most creatures, you know, don’t see you from a quarter mile away and say, oh, I’m going to go attack them. Now, they just assumed give you a wide berth, give you a clear area.

He said these were going to attack. They were going to attack like warriors attack. They were going to attack with ferocity, not like when Benjamin accidentally startles a June bug and it flies into his face by accident.

That happened, and I got it on our camera from our front porch. It was great. Now, these were going to attack on purpose.

These were going to, you know, we see you from down the way, and we’re coming for you. They were going to attack as warriors. These were going to be some brave insects.

I hope we don’t see things like this. I really don’t want to be chased by bugs. It says in verse 7 that they were going to be scaling walls.

And verse 7 teaches that they would be an unstoppable force. I might have the wrong verse written down there. They attack as warriors attack.

They scale walls as men of war do. Each goes on his path and they do not change course. So you can keep an army out of your city for a little bit.

until they figure out a way to break down the walls or get over the walls. These grasshoppers were just going to come over the walls. They were just going to fly right in.

They’re going to scale the walls. They’d be unstoppable. That’s what he means in verse 7 when he says, they each goes on his path and they do not change their course.

We have these dogs, not me, but we out here, we have these dogs. I don’t know who they belong to. They seem to belong to the whole area.

And when you’re driving to or from church sometimes, These dogs will just stand out in the middle of the road because that’s where they want to be and they’re not moving. A few of them, though I’ve never hit one, but I’ve noticed a few of them kind of walk with a limp now. Because I see them out there chasing cars.

That’s how that dog got that limp. He went after a car and the car lost. Those ones that kind of walk with a limp, you go down old Highway 99 fast enough, they’ll get out of the way. But those that haven’t tangled with a car yet, they’re just going to stand there and they’re not moving because that’s where they want to be.

And he said, these grasshoppers were going to be like those stubborn dogs. There’s not a thing you could do. They’re going where they want to go and there’s not a thing you can do to stop them.

There’s not a thing you can do to move them. It says they do not change their course. Verse 8.

I love this description. They do not push each other. Each proceeds on his own path.

Again, they’re not going to be moved or dissuaded. They dodge the arrows, never stopping. How much do you.

. . I suspect that God had Joel put that in there because there’s some Israelite out there who did what an oki would do, faced with this grasshopper invasion, said, here, hold my drink, and went out with a shotgun, only to learn that it’s powerless against the grasshopper invasion.

My guess is somebody in Israel went out there and said, I wonder if there’s something we can do with our bow and arrow. Because it’s just such an odd thing to say. They’re impervious to these arrows.

They dodged the arrows, never stopping. God was saying, all the warriors you have in Israel are powerless to stop these. Your arrows aren’t going to do anything.

Your archers, your swordsmen, they’re not going to be able to do a thing to stop these grasshoppers. You are powerless. It says in verse 10, they were going to shake the ground.

The earth quakes before them. Even the sky shook before them. And it says that they were going to darken the sky.

The sun and moon grow dark and the stars cease their shining. There were going to be so many of them that it was going to darken the sky. Now, why was all this happening?

Sometimes in times of calamity, people will say, doesn’t God know? Doesn’t God realize? God always knows and God always realizes.

Everything that happens, everything that happens, God either causes or allows. Now that or allows is very important because I’m not someone who subscribes to the idea that God has determined everything you’re ever going to do and left us with no free will. That’s not what I believe the Bible teaches.

But we have free will because God allows us free will. See, even Satan couldn’t go after Job unless God had allowed it. That doesn’t mean that God made Job suffer.

It doesn’t mean that God was the cause, but God allowed it. This, though, was one of those circumstances where God caused it. God was behind it.

How do I know that? Look at verse 11. After he’s described this massive army of grasshoppers, of locusts that was going to invade Israel, verse 11 says, The Lord makes his voice heard in the presence of his army.

God’s the one who sent the locusts. And I’ll admit that’s an uncomfortable picture. That’s not normally the way we think of God.

But also how many years had God been dealing patiently with Israel, giving them chance after chance to repent, just like he did with the Edomites, just as he does with us. God had given them opportunities to repent, and now God sent his army into Israel to make his voice heard among his people who had turned their backs on him. This was an effort by God to get Israel to wake up, to recognize their sin, and to return to him.

He used these locusts as a tool to make his voice heard. Now, as I’ve read through this to you, there are two places where Joel outlines his response. And I think it’s important for us to focus in on those two spots and understand what Joel’s response is, because we can learn from it ourselves.

Even though we’re in a totally different situation, we can learn from it as well. You see, in verse 1 of chapter 2, he said, Blow the horn in Zion. Sound the alarm on my holy mountain.

Let all the residents of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming. Joel was talking about sending out that warning. Joel was talking about warning God’s people, making sure they understood what was about to happen and why.

Now, the reason why that’s important is because many times when we’re in a difficult situation, maybe we’re being tried, maybe we’re being tested, maybe we’re being tempted, maybe we’re just suffering the consequences of a bad decision we made. We could be going through some kind of difficulty. As individuals, we can face this.

As a church, we can face this. A lot of times our first thought is just to ignore it. Just deny there’s a problem.

Does anybody else do this or just me? After our last prayer breakfast, Lavelle called and told me my tire was flat. I knew instantly which one because I’d been fighting with that tire, airing it up about every five or six days.

It was totally flat. It was like pancake flat when I walked out there, though, and that was new. It hadn’t been that way when I drove here.

Of course, Brother Greg told me, no problem. Just turn it over and drive on the round side. thanks that’s helpful you know what I did I had charla bring my air compressor up here I aired it up drove to a tire shop here in town saw they were closed said you know it took all those days for it to go flat maybe I’ll just air it up and see if uh maybe it’s just the cold weather sometimes that’ll you know you’ll lose some pressure due to the cold weather you have to It starts getting colder.

You have to put a little more air in. Not that much. Yeah, I know.

Thank you. Thank you for pointing out my denial. So I got it home, and it’s nice and cold. This is my time of year.

The cold weather, this is my time of year. This is when I want to get outside and do things. So I was, okay, I’ll clean my truck, and I’ll do some things in the garage.

And not an hour later, it was pancake flat again. And I couldn’t deny there was a problem. But my first thought was, maybe it’s just the cold.

I’ll air it up, and we’ll see. Do that all the stinking time. And not just with car stuff.

I think we all do that. Sometimes it’s easier just to think, maybe this isn’t that big a problem. Maybe this is something I can live with.

Maybe it’s something. . .

No, Joel wants them to understand there is a problem, wants them to understand there is a time of judgment, there is a time of discipline coming, wants them to know it’s coming, and wants them to know why. And I think it’s important for us We go through times of difficulty to stop and ask ourselves, stop and use that time to reevaluate, is everything where it’s supposed to be between us and God? Is there a reason for that?

Now, I’m not saying every problem you go through is God’s punishment. You wake up in the middle of the night, tonight you go to get a drink of water, and you manage to find the coffee table with your shin. Okay, isn’t that helpful that God gave us those shins to find furniture?

I’m not saying that that’s God’s punishment because of something you did wrong. Sometimes we go through things just because we live in a fallen world, and sin never takes place in a vacuum. But I think it’s a good opportunity for us to look, to sound the alarm, to recognize that there really is a problem, that there’s something that needs to be dealt with, and let it be a time to check in with God and see if there’s a reason for this and if there’s something God’s trying to teach us.

But we look back at chapter 1, verse 19, and he’s talking about all the things that are happening, all the trouble in the land, including the locusts, but even before that, and I think this is the most important response of all here in verse 19, I call to you, Lord. He sees the trouble. He knows, Joel knows why it’s happening, and his response is to call out to the Lord.

Times of trouble will either drive us closer to God, or they’ll drive us further away. And I’ve seen both happen. Sometimes we go through things and we recognize, I’m not getting through this if it’s not for God’s help.

It makes me recognize how utterly dependent I am on Him. And we come closer to God the way we ought to. I’ve also seen times where people go through times of struggle and they get mad at God about it.

I don’t know that I’ve eve

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