The Results of Restoration

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If you would, turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Joel, chapter 2. The book of Joel, chapter 2. And over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about, we’ve looked at the book of Joel, where it describes this time of pestilence, this time of trial that Israel was about to go through, where they were going to suffer from famine, and they were going to suffer from drought, and they were going to suffer ultimately from a plague of locusts that God compared to his righteous army invading Israel on his behalf.

But at the end of this, and God compared this, as we’ll see in later parts of the text, we’ll see that God compared this to the day of the Lord, which was coming at a time of judgment and a time of purification for the people of Israel. But at the end of his judgment, whether it’s that far off future, maybe not so far off, but that future judgment, that awaited judgment, it’s probably the right way to say that, whether it’s that awaited judgment or the time of the locust that he was using as a picture of it, God talks about the restoration of his people at the end of that judgment. And tonight, what I want to talk to you about is this idea of restoration from Joel chapter 2.

So let’s look at Joel chapter 2, starting in verse 18. Joel chapter 2, starting in verse 18. It says, Then the Lord became jealous for his land and spared his people.

The Lord answered his people, Look, I am about to send you grain, new wine, and fresh oil. You will be satisfied with them, and I will no longer make you a disgrace among the nations. I will drive the northerner far from you and banish him to a dry and desolate land.

His front ranks into the Dead Sea and his rear guard into the Mediterranean Sea. His stench will rise, yes, his rotten smell will rise, for he has done astonishing things. Don’t be afraid, land.

Rejoice and be glad, for the Lord has done astonishing things. Don’t be afraid, wild animals, for the wilderness pastures have turned green. The trees bear their fruit, and the fig tree and grapevine yield their riches.

Children of Zion, rejoice and be glad in the Lord your God, because he gives you the autumn rain for your vindication. He sends showers for you, both autumn and spring rain, as before. The threshing floors will be full of grain, and the vats will overflow with new wine and fresh oil.

I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust ate, the young locust, the destroying locust, and the devouring locust, my great army that I sent against you. You will have plenty to eat and be satisfied. You will praise the name of the Lord your God who has dealt wondrously with you.

My people will never again be put to shame, and you will know that I am present in Israel, and that I am the Lord your God and there is no other. My people will never again be put to shame. So what he’s telling them here is that when this time of the locust has finished, as bad as it’s going to be, as desolate as the country will be, that after that period of judgment, there’s going to come a time of restoration of God’s people.

And this is unique to God’s people. We didn’t see this with Edom in the book of Obadiah. When we read through the book of Obadiah and looked at every chapter, we saw God promising judgment to the people of Edom.

We saw God promising judgment against the people of Edom. And he said, when I get through with you because of what you’ve done and the way you’ve rejected me and the way you have harassed my people, the way you have been a thorn in the side of my people for thousands of years, even after I have given you opportunity after opportunity to repent. Because of this, there’s going to be nothing left of your country when I get done with you.

Not because God is harsh. Again, God had given them opportunities to repent. God is merciful, and God is patient, and God is long-suffering, but there comes a time where we can only reject God’s mercy so long before we’re headed for judgment, and it’s irrevocable.

That was his message to Edom. For Israel, there was hope on the other side of the judgment, though. There was this hope of this restoration where God was going to restore the things that had been taken from them.

See, for God’s people, and I told you this back during the book of Obadiah, for God’s people, judgment is different from those who have rejected God. There’s always a time of God dealing with sin. No matter what it is, God will deal with our sin.

No matter who we are and what we’ve done, he’ll deal with our sin. For God’s people, that dealing with sin is for our purification. It’s so that he can burn off the hay, the wood, and the stubble, and leave behind the gold and silver and precious gems, leave behind his work in us, and burn off all the wickedness.

It’s so that we can be purified like a precious metal. But where judgment is, where God’s dealing with sin is for our purification, it’s for the punishment of those who’ve rejected him. And there’ll be nothing left after the sinful works have been burned off. So where Edom was told, there’s going to be nothing left of your country.

God said, I’m going to send you through this time of judgment, but you’re actually going to come out stronger on the other side. Now, it’s not that Israel was particularly righteous. If they were just a wonderful, holy, godly people, always did all the right things all the time, there’d be no need for them to be judged.

What the difference was, was Israel was in a covenant relationship with God. And they had made promises to God, and God had made promises to them. And even when they were unfaithful, God was faithful to do what he said he would do.

And Israel, in Israel, there was always a remnant as well. There was always a remnant of the people who sought God’s forgiveness. And honestly, I think that remnant that seeks God is in many cases the catalyst for restoration.

It’s what God uses, and it’s why I think God is more merciful sometimes than we deserve. God promised Abraham that he wouldn’t destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if a faithful remnant was found. He never mentions the word remnant.

He says, if I could find 50 righteous people, and eventually Abraham talked God down to 10 righteous people, if there was that remnant of people who still feared him, then God would have spared Sodom and Gomorrah. You know what? I don’t know this for a fact.

It doesn’t say this in black and white in my Bible, but I suspect with all the wickedness, all of the wickedness that goes on in our country today, the reason God has not destroyed the United States of America is because there are still faithful people who cry out to him in the midst of the wickedness. And I hope that we are found part of that faithful remnant. And there was always that faithful remnant in Israel that God would use.

And in the midst of the judgment, they would be the ones calling on their friends and neighbors to call out to God. As we’ve seen throughout the book of Joel already. What God wanted was not to destroy them.

God wanted them to repent because God saw that they could repent and God had given them the capacity to repent. Now he’s giving them the opportunity to repent. And he said on the other side of that repentance, as he works with that faithful remnant who’ve remained steadfast to him and have called the rest of the nation to repentance, and they’ve gone through this time of trial, this time of judgment, where they have recognized that we’re really not as independent as we thought we are.

We really are dependent on God because at just the words of his mouth, all of our prosperity, all of our joy can go away. They’ve realized their dependence on God and it’s made them see the depth and the gravity of their sin. And they finally repented and God promised restoration to the people.

And we see in verse 18 that God has promised this restoration where he said, the Lord became jealous for his land and spared his people. And we know that this restoration, as I’ve already hinted at, this restoration didn’t come because Israel deserved it. It didn’t come because Israel deserved it.

What Israel deserved was the judgment, but it came because God was faithful to his promises. It came because God’s motivation was for the people to repent. If God’s motivation had been simply to destroy the sinners, he would have been well within his rights to do it, but God wanted them to repent.

He didn’t want to destroy them. He wanted to restore them to himself. So we see that the restoration of Israel comes not because Israel deserved it, but because God was loving and merciful enough to restore them after giving them the opportunity to repent.

And verse 18 says that it happened when he became jealous for his people. And I don’t know if you remember a couple weeks ago when we last looked at the book of Joel, we talked about the idea of repentance in the earlier part of chapter 2. And one of the things that the prophet Joel said when he was talking about Israel’s need to repent, he called out to God in verse 17 and said, let them say, have pity on your people, Lord, and do not make your inheritance a disgrace.

That’s in verse 17, an object of scorn among the nations, why should it be said among the peoples, where is their God? Then to turn around in verse 18 and say that God became jealous for his people. We think of that word jealousy as being something negative.

jealousy is only a negative when you’re jealous over something you don’t deserve that’s not that you’re not entitled to you know if I’m if I’m jealous of brother greg’s motorcycle by the way I’m glad he has it but I’d be terrified to get on it all right I just it’s just an example because I was out there in the parking lot and I saw him come flying up on that thing and man he looks so cool and I thought I wish I could look that cool but anyway I’ll never be as cool as brother greg but if I was jealous of his motorcycle and I begin to lie awake at night and think, how could I get Brother Greg’s motorcycle? By the way, something I read this week explained this idea of jealousy. It’s not necessarily jealousy in the biblical sense.

If I see Brother Greg on a motorcycle and say, man, I sure would love to have one of those. Jealousy is where I want to have it and I want him not to have it because I want his. And so I’m plotting, how can I get Brother Greg’s motorcycle?

Well, that’s a bad jealousy because I’m not entitled to that. That doesn’t belong to me. But if, on the other hand, I see another man out on a date with my wife, which has not happened, by the way, but if I see another man out on a date with Charla, and I think, wait a minute, that’s my wife.

That’s not necessarily negative jealousy, all right? She’s my wife. If she has time to go on dates, it ought to be with me.

By the way, that doesn’t happen very often. We try to squeeze in date night when we can, but they’re few and far between. have four kids and nobody brave enough to watch all four of them at once.

God was jealous, but not in that negative sense. He was jealous over his people. He was entitled to be jealous over his people because they were his people.

If they had any love, if they had any devotion, he was entitled to it. If they were to bring glory to anything, God deserved for himself to be glorified through Israel. And so you look back at verse 17 and the prophet Joel is echoing what Moses said.

You know, if we are killed out here in the wilderness, the Egyptians and the Midianites, they’ll just say that the God of Israel wasn’t powerful enough to keep his people alive. And Moses pled with God and said, please don’t destroy Israel because think of how they’ll blaspheme you by saying you’re not even powerful enough to protect your own people. And God didn’t destroy Israel.

By the way, there were other times where Moses came to God and said, just kill him. And God said, no, no, what about being merciful? It’s a good thing for Israel that God and Moses never got on the same page here, all right?

But God is merciful. And God looked at them, and it was not because Israel was so deserving of another chance. It was not because Israel was so deserving of restoration, but it was because they were God’s people, and he had made promises toward them.

He had made a covenant toward them, and so it was his will that they repent. And God also, for his own glory, said, I need to work this for them to be restored rather than destroyed. Because not only have I made this covenant with them, and he’s a God who keeps his promises, but also on top of it, if he were to destroy them, it would rob him of the glory he deserved in the eyes of the pagan world.

So God became jealous over his people. God became jealous for his glory. And God, out of this holy jealousy, he spared Israel, as was his plan all along.

We need to understand this. If restoration happens after judgment, it doesn’t happen because the recipient of the restoration deserves it. It happens because of who God is.

All right, if God judges us and then restores us on the other side that restoration is not because of who we are or what we’ve done. It’s all because of who God is and what God has done. So he told Israel, I’m going to restore you.

And we see in this case that once they were restored spiritually, everything was going to be restored. Everything was going to be made right. We see this in verse 19, where he begins to lay out his promises.

The Lord answered his people, I’m going to send you grain, new wine, fresh oil, all these things that he talks about. These are physical things that they had lost as a result of this judgment that had taken place. And the judgment had taken place because they spiritually were so far from God.

They spiritually were alienated from God. And what had to happen for the restoration to take place was for there to be repentance. That repentance was a spiritual restoration.

The relationship with God had to be fixed first. There had to be spiritual restoration. And then God said, I’m going to restore other things to you. And what we see from this is that when we’re spiritually restored to God, it has an effect on everything else.

Now, nowhere in the New Testament, and by the way, these are promises for Israel, nowhere in the New Testament do I see a blanket promise that once we’re Christians, that once we’re restored, once we’re reconciled to God, is the terminology I like to use, that once we’re reconciled to God, that He’s going to bless us abundantly with corn and wine and new oil and all these things, that He’s going to pour out material blessings on us. All right, if you want that message tonight, there are plenty of TV networks you could go home and watch. That’s not a promise I see anywhere in Scripture, that for us as Christians, God’s going to pour out on all of us material blessings in abundance as a result of this restoration.

But we also see that when we become restored to God, when we become reconciled to God, it affects everything in our lives. We may not be rich. Our health may not immediately return.

We may not see all of these material blessings, but everything in our lives will be different because of that spiritual change. And I submit to you that when God does that work in our hearts, restoring us to himself, God begins to work on restoring our relationships. God begins to work on restoring our families.

God begins to work on restoring the things that the locusts have eaten. All right, does that mean you come to Christ and immediately all your broken relationships are fixed, your family becomes intact again? No, not necessarily.

But God works in those things. And as God works through us and changes us, it has an effect on those circumstances. And I’ve seen people, I’ve seen people who were estranged from their children, and they began to grow closer to God, and they began to pray for their children.

And as their relationship with God grew, even though they’re in no contact with their children over here, God is working on their children through other circumstances. And I’ve seen God restore those relationships as a result of people being restored to Him. I’ve seen marriages that were headed for divorce, and people were restored, were reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, and God, as He began to change them.

Divorce is a result of sin, because two sinful people have committed to live together, and guess what? That’s never going to be perfect, is it? Even in church, we’re sinners, so we’re going to grade against each other.

It’s never going to be perfect. But as God begins in Jesus Christ to sand off those rough edges, as God begins to change our hearts, God begins to make us more patient and more compassionate with one another. Guess what?

That has a good effect on a marriage. What marriage couldn’t stand two people being a little more compassionate and a little more gracious with one another? Amen?

Even a good marriage, it works better when we’re gracious and compassionate with us. Guess what? God does that in us.

So that’s where I’m saying even we as Christians, even though we don’t have all of these promises that are given specifically to Israel, we can see that the principle applies here, that when we’re restored to God, God begins to work in other areas toward restoration. It begins to affect other things. For Israel, what that meant was all this physical loss and all this physical hardship that they’d gone through, that once they were spiritually restored, God was going to begin to restore those things as well.

And we see a listing of them here in verses 19 through 24. He told them that this restoration that was needed, even though it wasn’t because of who they were, even though it wasn’t because of them, God did it because they had repented. And so he promised that he was going to send them these things.

He said in verse 19, their food supply was going to be restored. If you read back through the previous chapters of Joel, we see a listing of things that were going to be taken away from them, and their food supply was hit hard. They were going to be starving.

You know how to change my tune and get me repentant real fast? Cut off the food supply. That’s one of the reasons why I learned how to cook when I was young or younger, is because I’ve seen enough episodes of I Love Lucy to know that if the husband and wife get mad at each other, the wife can cut off the food supply.

And I don’t like to admit when I’m wrong, so I need to learn how to cook so I don’t starve. You know, that’s one of the techniques that God used to change Israel’s tune. The food supply began to be cut off.

And that’s one of the things God said, I’m going to restore that. because God wasn’t doing it to torture them. The reason was to call them to repentance.

So once they’ve repented and once the relationship’s been restored, it takes away the reason for them to be deprived of these other things and God begins to restore what they’ve lost. The food supply was going to be restored in verse 19. Grain, new wine, fresh oil. He said, I’ll make you, you will be satiated.

I might have read satisfied with it earlier in it when I read it to you, but satiated. That means they were going to be overwhelmed with it. they were going to have an abundance.

We see in verse 19 that not only their food supply would be restored, but their reputation would be restored. Now, what do I mean by reputation? Well, he says in verse 19, you will no longer be a disgrace.

I will no longer make you a disgrace among the nations. In terms of their reputation, what this means is that the nations around them had seen the trouble that they were going through. And again, the welfare of every nation had its own particular deities, and the welfare of the nation was tied directly to people’s perceptions of the strength of that deity and how well that deity liked that nation.

So what people had thought when they saw Israel’s suffering was, what that means is they saw Israel’s suffering, and they assumed either A, the God of Israel is not that powerful, or B, the God of Israel really doesn’t like the people of Israel. So imagine being known by all these rival nations. You know, there are nations that just don’t get along, and they’re kind of rivals with each other.

Imagine all these rival nations looking at you and saying, oh, you’re the ones who serve that weak God who doesn’t even like you. Well, that kind of hurts your national prestige, doesn’t it? And God said, you will no longer, I will no longer make you a disgrace among the nations.

Because God, when he took care of his people, not only was he glorified, but it increased Israel’s standing in the world. And by the way, I still think some of that goes on today. You hear about the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

You hear about the Yom Kippur War, the Six Days War. All these wars where Israel, on paper, should have lost, where Israel should have been annihilated. By the way, don’t take that phrase out of context.

I’m not saying Israel should have been annihilated. But on paper, you look at the strength of the Arab nations and you look at the relative strength of Israel. It makes no sense that they were wiped off the map unless God is intervening.

And there’s a history of that going back thousands of years. That didn’t start in 1948. Those kind of victories happened all throughout the Old Testament.

Well, each time one of those victories happened, it was a victory where God was glorified, but it was also a victory where Israel’s standing was improved among their neighbors. There were times in the Old Testament when Israel, you know, we read about all these battles they were involved in and all these people who threatened them. But there were times in the Old Testament where Israel was so strong and had won so many military victories that their neighbors didn’t want to mess with them.

And I believe today that what holds some of their neighbors back from invading them is the fear of getting kicked around the battlefield like they have multiple times in the last 70 years. They don’t want to do that again. And so God said, I will no longer make you a disgrace among the nations where they had been disgraced, where their reputation had been damaged by all the suffering they were going through, God said, I’m going to restore that too.

We see in verse 20, their security would be restored. That’s important. He said, I’ll drive the northerner far from you.

Now, again, that is not a promise to us today. All right. God is not going to drive the northerners out of our midst. All right.

I just want to make that clear. I will drive the northerner far from you and banish him to a dry and desolate land. He’s talking about invaders from the north.

At this point in their history, they’re dealing with threats of Assyria. If this was written during, I’m trying to remember the chronology here, I believe this may have been written during the period of time after Israel had fallen to the northern kingdom, had fallen to the Assyrians, but before the southern kingdom fell to the Babylonians. If that’s the case, God’s either talking here about the Assyrians or the Babylonians, who would kind of come from the northeast as they would threaten Judah.

God said, these people who threaten you, I’m going to turn them back. I’m going to banish them off into a dry and desolate land. And you know what?

The Assyrians and Babylonians both, if they’re kicked out of Israel, they go back to where they came from, which is a dry and desolate land, Iraq or Syria, as we know them today. He said, I’ll banish him to a dry and desolate land, his front ranks into the Dead Sea and his rear guard into the Mediterranean Sea. So what he says here is their armies from front to back, their full armies, they’re going to be drowned, they’re going to be destroyed, they’re going to be marched into the sea, you’re going to drive them back no problem at all with my help, there’s going to be nowhere for them to run, they’re going to be marched into the sea.

His stench will rise, this is a beautiful verse of scripture, his stench will rise, yes his rotten smell will rise, for he has done astonishing things. God says here, basically it’s a poetic way of saying the bodies are going to pile up, that your enemies are going to be overwhelmed on the battlefield. So he’s saying Israel’s security is going to be restored because during their time of judgment, during their time of trial, any nation that wanted to could just march right through Israel.

And because God had taken their strength away, God had taken his hand of protection from off of them for a time, anybody could just walk through and they couldn’t really do anything about it. That’s not an enjoyable way to live, is it? Imagine having no security.

Imagine There’s no security system. There’s no lock on your door. You just have to go to bed at night and pray that nobody wanders in because the door’s unlocked.

You can’t lock it. How securely are you going to sleep? Not well.

I keep us deadbolted down, alarm set. We’ve got sensors on every door, on every window that opens. We’ve got glass break sensors.

I told Benjamin and Madeline when they get old enough to start trying to sneak out of the house, it’s going to be like East Germany. They’re not getting out. But I do that because scary things happen.

And there are burglaries and home invasions. And I know you can’t 100% prevent it, but I want to do what I can to dissuade it. Because I want us to be able to sleep securely at night.

You want that feeling of security. That’s one of the things that we as humans long for. When we’re in an insecure position, we want to find some place secure.

And they as a country for a while had no deadbolt on the door of their country, and they had no security system. And now God is promising to restore their security. He’s promising to defeat their enemies and drive them far away.

He said in verse 21, their joy would be restored. He said, don’t be afraid, land. Rejoice and be glad, for the Lord has done astonishing things.

So from this time of weeping and tears, he said, now it’s time to go into a time of joy and gladness. It’s a time for laughter. It’s a time for celebration.

Why is that? Because you remember the incredible things God has done. Now, our human tendency might be to sit there and think about all the stuff we’ve just suffered.

Well, I can’t celebrate because look at how my farm was destroyed. Look at how my livestock were killed off. Oh, you know, woe is me.

Wait a minute. God’s restored every bit of that. We can sit around and we can mourn over what we’ve lost. We can mourn over what we’ve been through.

Or we can praise God and we can rejoice over what He’s done for us now. because God has righted all of these wrongs. Oh my goodness.

If you stop thinking about the pain that came before and think about how God used that pain to bring about even a better day in Israel, that would have been an incredible time to be alive in Israel and to sit there and to discuss, to talk about what God had done and just to praise Him and glorify Him for what He had done. You know what? That’s something we ought to do more of.

Not only as individuals. I was telling somebody, it might have been dewy a couple weeks ago, that I realized how much I complain and I started making a conscious effort to try to complain less. And I realized, wait a minute, once I was complaining less, it felt like things aren’t so bad.

It kind of changed my perspective. I think we as believers should do that. Stop complaining and think about how God’s blessed us.

But also as a church, we ought to be celebrating every week what God has done in our midst. If we’ve seen a prodigal child return to one of us, we ought to be rejoicing in that. If a loved one has come to know Christ, we ought to be rejoicing in that. If somebody’s been healed, we ought to be rejoicing in that.

We come together and sometimes we focus on what’s going wrong. And I think we ought to take time to set aside and talk about the victories, talk about what God’s doing in our midst, what he’s done in our midst just this week. And we ought to celebrate those things.

We ought to give him glory for it. That’s what Israel was being told to do. Don’t be afraid.

Rejoice and be glad because God has done astounding things. And I’d be willing to bet. No, I wouldn’t.

But that’s just a figure of speech. I would assume, it’s a more Baptist way to say it. I would assume that each of us, if we look back over the course of our lives, and we started on purpose thinking about the things that God has done, how he’s blessed us, things that he’s worked out, things that maybe we didn’t even understand until years later.

But we look back and say, what has God done in my life? I think if we were to write those things down, we would not help but be astounded over what God’s done in the midst. Their joy would be restored. Their land would be restored.

In verse 22, don’t be afraid, wild animals, for the wilderness pastures have turned green. The trees bear their fruit, and the fig tree and grapevine yield their riches. You may remember me telling you it was going to be so bad in Israel.

It was going to be so dry that even the wild animals were going to cry out for help. And the livestock, they were going to be crying out to the people for help. Like, why won’t you feed me?

There’s going to be no water for the animals out in the wilderness. And God said, no, I haven’t forgotten about you. I’m going to heal the land as well.

I’m going to heal the land. For the animals, but also for the sake of the people, the trees bearing their fruit, the fig trees and the grapevines, the things that these people ate that they lived on, God was going to restore those things. He was going to heal their land.

And we see in verses 23 and 24, where he says, children of Zion, that’s the people of Israel, That’s specifically those who live in and about Jerusalem, children of Zion, but it can apply to the whole nation. He says, rejoice and be glad. Why?

Because we got our stuff back? He says, rejoice and be glad in the Lord your God. Getting the stuff back is great, but the best thing for them is the realization that their relationship with God has been destroyed.

Not destroyed, that’s the opposite of what I mean, has been restored. Their relationship with God had been restored. And they were now being refreshed spiritually.

They were being blessed with abundance materially. But they needed to rejoice in the Lord your God. And he turns their attention again to the material blessings.

You know, he gives you the autumn rain. He sends showers for you. The thres

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