Message Info:
- Text: Joel 1:14-20, NASB
- Series: Joel (2024), No. 2
- Date: Sunday morning, August 25, 2024
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Transcript:
⟦Transcript⟧ And as I’ve read through this passage this week, I’m struck, and you’ll see this too, by just the description that God gives through the prophet Joel of the suffering that the people of Israel were about to experience. He started talking about it in the passage we read last week, the first 14 verses, and he continues in this part. And as I read this, I just, I put myself in their shoes, thinking about what was coming their way and how I would have felt.
And I just kept thinking, they’re not going to like this. This is a rough time that’s coming their way. And it raised questions for me that get thrown around a lot of how a loving God can punish, how a loving God can allow suffering, how a loving God can do these things.
And yet we see in Scripture that it is taught that God is loving. It’s shown that God is merciful. And yet we also see that in the midst of that, God judges sin.
And it’s that attitude that I take with my kids, although God’s better at it, but it’s that attitude that I take with my kids that I love you, but I love you too much to let you act that way. I don’t know if any of the rest of you have ever experienced this, but every one of my children at some point has received a consequence that they’ve said some variation of, I don’t like that. I don’t want to sit in time.
Well, I know you don’t want to. That’s why it’s a consequence. If it was fun, we’d call it Disneyland of time out or, you know, I don’t know.
Disneyland doesn’t sound fun to me, but I know a lot of people enjoy it. We look at consequences and say, well, that sounds awful. That doesn’t sound fun.
Why would I want that? But that’s what makes it a consequence is that it’s unpleasant. And so as we read through Joel, we’re struck by the fact that this was a group of people God loved.
But it’s also a group of people who had pushed God so far that now God was no longer going to let them get by with the things that they had been doing. And so we’re going to see here this morning this painful correction that God tells them is coming. And we’re going to be in Joel 1, 14 through 20, if you’ll turn there with me.
And once you find it, if you’ll stand as we read together from God’s Word, or if you can’t find it or don’t have your Bible with you, it’s all right. It’ll be on the screen for you where you can see. But follow along as we read this this morning and see what God says through the prophet Joel to the people of Israel.
He says, consecrate a fast. We read this one last week, but it’s important. It’s kind of a bridge between the two passages. Consecrate a fast, proclaim a solemn assembly, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.
Alas for the day, for the day of the Lord is near, and it will come as destruction from the Almighty. Has not food been cut off from our eyes? Gladness and joy from the house of our God.
The seeds shrivel under their clods. The storehouses are desolate. The barns are torn down, for the grain is dried up.
How the beasts groan. The herds of cattle wander aimlessly because there is no pasture for them. Even the flocks of sheep suffer.
To you, O Lord, I cry, for the fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and the flame has burned up all the trees of the field. Even the beasts of the field pant for you, for the water brooks are dried up, and fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness. You may be seated.
And we might look at this and say, well, that’s a really negative passage of Scripture, and it was intended to be because there was a problem that needed to be corrected. And sometimes when there’s a problem that needs to be corrected, you can’t come in and be sunshine and light. I would say this even if my wife was still in here.
She may be watching from the nursery for all I know. But in our house, I tend to be more gentle and diplomatic, and my wife tends to be a little more direct and forceful with kids, and sometimes we’ll say, I don’t care if this hurts your feelings, you need to know X, Y, and Z. And there’s some merit to both of those approaches, and I say all the time that I think God put us together to balance each other out.
And while there’s some merit to both of those approaches, sometimes the problem is such that you do have to be forceful and get somebody’s attention. And sometimes my diplomatic approach, they don’t know what in the world I’m talking about. And she has to come in and say it a different way.
Sometimes the gentle way just doesn’t get the point across. Now, I’m not saying she can’t be gentle and I can’t be forceful. I’m just saying that’s the overall way our personalities work.
We’re at a point in Israel’s situation where the gentle approach has not worked. And now God is coming at them with everything He’s got. Well, no, not everything He’s got.
He’s still holding back a little bit, but God’s coming at them more forcefully to get their attention. And so it is a little bit of a negative passage, but by design. And we might look at it and say, this is about a drought and a famine 3,000 years ago.
What does it have to do with us? It’s because it teaches us about the character of God and the way God views sin. And who God is now is no different from who God was then.
And how God views sin now is no different from how God viewed sin then. and as we started this last week, I pointed out that God doesn’t really mention specifically what the people of Israel had done, although I think they knew what they had done, but as we look at what was going on in this time period, we see that a lot of the problems that Israel was dealing with were the fact that they were God’s people, and yet they wanted to be just like the world, and when we understand that was the problem with Israel, this gets a whole lot more applicable to our world and to the situation that churches all over this world are in, of trying to be too much like the world that we live in. So Joel was continuing to warn about this coming judgment.
If you recall from last week, the immediate thing he’s warning about is this plague of locusts, these little grasshopper things that were going to come in and strip everything clean to where there would be no food left in the country. But in the longer-term context, even as he’s talking about the locusts, he’s comparing them to an invading army. And what he’s also doing, whether Joel realized it or not, God was using him to warn them about the invasion of the Babylonians, that if the locusts weren’t enough to get their attention, God was going to step it up and send the Babylonians.
And if the Babylonians weren’t enough to get their attention and bring them back to him, eventually there’s a future judgment that still awaits. And so he’s talking about the locusts. He’s talking about the Babylonian invasion, he’s talking about what he says in verse 15, the day of the Lord.
And as Joel talks about the day of the Lord at least five times in this book, he’s talking about this coming future judgment and all the little rumblings of it beforehand. I understand that in a lot of cases, if there’s going to be a major earthquake or a volcanic eruption, not in every case, but in many cases, there’ll be rumblings ahead of time. Smaller things that kind of warn, hey, we need to pay attention to this.
The future judgment, the day of the Lord, is the eruption. And these things with the Babylonians and the locusts are just the foreshocks to get their attention. And each of these events, though, is going to be a kind of punishment or kind of consequence to get their attention and to draw them back to the Lord.
And we see through this that sin poses a problem so dire that only God can fix it. We looked at this locust invasion, and He explained, hey, the trees are going to be gone, the pomegranates are going to be gone, the apples are going to be gone, the locusts are going to eat everything. He kind of focuses in a little bit in this passage.
In verse 17, He tells us the whole ground is going to dry up. He said that the crops are going to rot in the fields. And this is another one of those places where I told you last week, commentators and theologians, they want to focus on the details and what exactly does this mean?
And I think they missed the point by getting very specific. Somebody said, oh, the plants are going to rot because the grasshoppers, the locusts, they ate the little sprouts. And so the seed had nothing there to produce food for itself.
And so it Other people say, well, the ground was so dry that the seeds just rotted. And I’m thinking, y’all are missing the point. I mean, those details are interesting to talk about.
But his point here is that there’s going to be nothing. The seeds you plant in the ground are not going to grow and produce food. There’s going to be nothing for the people of Israel.
It says in verse 17 that they’re going to exhaust their grain supply. Their storehouses are going to be empty. Their barns are so worthless.
Well, we might as well just tear them down. Maybe to use us as kindling or something else. Verse 18 tells us that the animals would despair.
It said the beasts groan. When they want water, we don’t have beasts like they’re talking about, cows and things, but we have chickens and ducks. And the ducks, when they don’t have as much water as they would like, they are noisy.
You can hear them from a block away. Noisy. They will let you know.
Bet you didn’t think you were going to come to church and hear a duck impression today. I didn’t think I was going to do one until about a second ago. But they will let you know when they don’t have what they want.
As a matter of fact, we can hear them in the house and say, Benjamin, they want more water. He’ll go out there and give them more water. These creatures were crying out because they didn’t have the food and the water that they needed.
And this was going to be widespread throughout the land. They’re going to be wandering from place to place, looking for some kind of food, but not able to find anything in verse 18. Even the flocks of sheep suffer.
Even these things that have been raised to provide sacrifices for the temple, not even they are exempt. In verses 19 and 20, he talks about fire. And all throughout the Old Testament, we see fire being a picture of divine judgment.
So I think there was a literal fire, but I think God also points to symbolism and literal things. And as this fire swept through and burned up every little morsel of anything that happened to be left, there was a sign to them that God’s judgment was going to cleanse everything. And even the water in the streams would dry up.
If you look at this, this is a hopeless, hopeless situation. This was not something they could fix. and the irony of it is that their sin had brought them to this point this was not just a coincidence their sin had brought them to this point and we know this because God sent a prophet to tell them this does not mean that every calamity that befalls us is a punishment from God okay I’m not Pat Robertson, telling you that every time there’s a hurricane is because somebody did something to somebody else.
And a lot of those guys who say those things, we could say, well, how do we know they’re not a prophet? Because they get so many things wrong in what they say is going to happen. And the Bible’s very clear that if somebody’s speaking on God’s behalf as a prophet, what they say is going to happen happens.
There’s a pretty high bar for prophets. I’m not telling you that everything negative that happens to you is a result of something you’ve done, or that everything that negative happens, everything negative that happens to our country is a direct result of some sin. In more indirect ways, it’s just the result of there being sin in the world, and this is a fallen world, and things don’t work the way they were designed to originally.
But in this case, God sent a prophet to let them know that this was a consequence of their sin. Their disobedience, their rejection of God as His people had brought them to this point of judgment. Even the animals cried out to God.
This, I think, is so ironic. In verse 20, he talks about the animals panting after the Lord. Even the animals cried out to God to save them when God’s own people didn’t have the wisdom to do it.
And sin poses a problem so dire that only God can fix it. It’s the same way for us. The results of our sin may not result in famine.
Our sin may not result in drought or plagues of locusts. But if you think back on some situations in your life, I bet you can think of some places where you were in dire situations you could not fix, and it was a result of you not being where you were supposed to be with the Lord. Now, I’m not the Holy Spirit.
I don’t know what those circumstances would be for you. I can’t tell you which ones they are. But I look at my own life and see where I got in some trouble because I did stupid things that I was not listening to what the Lord told me to do.
And I think that’s human nature. our sin poses problems that only God can fix even the presence of sin in our lives that separates us from God is a problem that you and I can’t fix and I love that brother Huey brought up the the cross timbers definition of sin for those of you who don’t know what cross timbers is it’s the camp that we send our third through sixth graders to it’s a children’s camp and yet that is the best definition of sin that I have ever heard is that sin is anything we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God. And so if you’re new to church especially and you’re familiar with the word sin but don’t say, well, I kind of know what it is but I can’t define it, that’s as good a definition as I’ve ever heard.
Sin is not just the Ten Commandments. Oh, well, I haven’t murdered anybody, so I’m good. Anything we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God.
I was raised in a home where my parents taught me to fear the Lord, a healthy fear of the Lord, and I had a healthy fear of my parents, so I didn’t step out of line too much. I could look at the commandments and say, yeah, I’m pretty good. But the attitudes in my heart, the attitudes in my heart that the things I think are not always pleasing to God.
So no matter how good we look on the outside, there’s always a problem of sin. The Bible tells us that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And as a result, God’s people are going to endure the pain of correction when we step out of line.
Now, ideally, when you and I sin, we’ll recognize it immediately. That conviction comes on us, and we know we’ve been wronged, and we’re broken over it. And we cry out to the Lord, and we’re repentant over it.
That’s what’s supposed to happen. 1 John 1. 9 says, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
But what I’m talking about here when we go astray, what leads us to the pain of correction, was not the fact that Israel messed up and so God said the first time you step out of line, that’s it, I’m going to squash you. It’s that they persisted in this. They persisted in their sin.
They knew they were wrong. They knew they were out of step with the will of God and they just didn’t care. And sometimes even people who are believers can get in that mindset temporarily.
Now, if we really belong to him, we won’t stay in that mindset forever. But we get in those places where we say, no, Lord, I don’t care that this is what you want. And in circumstances like this, we see from the book of Joel and elsewhere that God will do what’s necessary to get our attention.
And sometimes that correction is painful. I think this is a minor example, but I can tell you from my own life, God was calling me, I knew that God was calling me to pastor. And then I eventually realized which church God was calling me to pastor, and I did not want to go there.
It’s the church that I’ve talked about, I won’t name any names, but it’s the church that I’ve talked about and told the story, where a friend of mine had filled in there and said, I heard you’re going to preach at such and such this week. you better take the Holy Spirit with you because he ain’t there. Those were his exact words to me.
And it was not a tremendous exaggeration. I didn’t want to go there because I thought, Lord, I finally got a good job. I’ve got this house that we’re in the process of buying from the landlord.
We’re in a good position. I don’t want to walk away from that. I’ll still continue to preach.
I’ll still continue to go places and fill in, but Lord, I don’t want to do that. Lord, don’t ever ask the Lord, don’t you know? Yes, He knows.
But I found myself asking Him, Lord, don’t you know what you’re sending me into? I don’t want to do that. And I was so hung up on that job and that house that I didn’t want to walk away from.
And then I became so miserable in that job, like some days I would weep in my car on the way to downtown Oklahoma City to that job, and came home one day shortly after this conversation with the Lord and pulled up in front of my house, and there’s water running down the driveway into the street. And I thought, well, that’s never a good thing. The house, a piece of the plumbing in the sink had fallen out, flooded the whole house, ruined a bunch of my stuff.
And I thought, Lord, if you’re trying to break me of the attachment to this house, it has worked. And that was a big ordeal we had to go through. And for me to get out from what then became a miserable situation at that job.
And I know that’s relatively minor. Oh, house flood, a bunch of stuff ruined, and a bad time at your job. But it was a difficult situation.
but that’s what had to happen for God to get my attention because I was out of step with his will. I was not listening to what he told me to do. I didn’t care what he was telling me to do.
I wanted to do my own thing and he tried other ways to get my attention and I wasn’t budging. So there had to be the pain of correction and we see in verse 15 that these locusts and everything else. It was sent there by God Himself, and the question is, why would a loving God do this?
I heard some folks talking on the radio yesterday about how this is widely taught in churches that would label themselves progressive or churches that would label themselves part of the Word of Faith movement, that God doesn’t punish, and that it’s never God’s will for us to suffer. I can’t support that from the Scriptures. I mean, Joel clearly shows God punishing, and maybe we want to use the word discipline, but clearly shows God disciplining his people, and clearly shows that it was God’s will for them to suffer in order to bring them back.
And the only thing he’s done here, though, when you look at the condition of the land, this drought, this famine, everything they were having to suffer through, All he had done was taken their physical condition and made it match up with their spiritual condition. Because their spiritual condition was dead and dry. God made the physical condition line up with that to get their attention and make them see what was going on in their spiritual condition.
And we look at this and we say, how can a loving God allow suffering? How can a loving God punish? How can a loving God do any of these things?
there are a few things sometimes we have to look at it like it’s not mutually exclusive god either loves or god disciplines or punishes god disciplines us because he loves us proverbs 3 12 says whom the lord loves he reproves even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights I love my children I know everybody loves their children I love my children too much to let them act like their sin nature wants them to just like my parents did with me and so as much as it breaks my heart there are times I have to step in and impose the law because I don’t want them to become what they would if I didn’t love them enough to step in and discipline them. And God looks at us and says, I love you too much to let you go down that road that’s going to hurt you and other people.
And so sometimes he’ll bring something that is painful, but we don’t always know the pain that we are avoiding down the road that may be worse. And that’s where a lot of the confusion comes from. We’re looking at things from our perspective instead of from God’s perspective.
And I like to be comfortable. Most of us do like to be comfortable. And because we like that, we think that’s the highest good.
That’s the highest good in life, is to be comfortable and experience things that are pleasant. But when we see things from God’s perspective, there’s something infinitely more important than passing comfort. We were created, we were created to have fellowship with God.
We were created to walk with Him in this loving relationship and to know Him and to live out the plan that He designed for each of us. And our sin gets in the way and it robs us of that. Our sin robs us of the greatest good that God has designed for us.
And the greatest good that we can imagine is to be rid of that sin and to be able to walk with Him in holiness the way He designed us to, to live out what He created us for. And because sin stands in the way of that, if we recognize that there’s something that’s even better than comfort, then it doesn’t seem like such a big deal that we’ve suffered. And you may hear that and think, well, you don’t know what you’re talking about because you don’t know what I’ve been through.
I don’t know what everyone in this room has been through. But I do know what I’m talking about. The things that have happened in my life have been way worse than that flood.
The reason I didn’t use them earlier is because I can’t pinpoint this something that I did that led to that. But just for starters, I’ve mentioned how attached I am to my children. It’s because my dream for as long as I could remember was to have a huge family and tons of kids, and I was attached to my children before they were ever born.
And I have five, but I have three more waiting for me in heaven. that is a pain that I could not have ever imagined and I still don’t understand why either of the miscarriages or the stillbirth why they happened but I know God had a reason for it and walking through those circumstances and having to rely on God to get me through the next five minutes, let alone the next day or next year, having to rely on God at that level just to make it through the next five minutes drew me closer to Him. And it taught me that if He can handle that, there’s nothing He can’t handle.
If God is faithful to see me through those circumstances, there’s nothing He can’t handle. And so I look at the darkest days of my life and I see what God did in the midst of those. and I cannot do anything other than admit that God can bring good out of suffering.
And I have a choice whether I can be mad at him that it happened and say it’s not fair that this happened to me or I can recognize that there’s something better on the other side. That as much as I still have to say I wish that had never happened, pain is not always the worst thing that can happen to us. Suffering is not always the worst thing that can happen to us.
The worst thing that can happen to us is to go through this life and into eternity without knowing our Creator. And God disciplines His people because the joy of the restoration on the other side is greater than the pain of correction. This physical starvation was a reminder to them that they were starving themselves spiritually because when he points in verse 16 to the fact that gladness and joy were gone out of the house of God, I don’t think that’s something that started just when the famine hit.
Because the fact is that these people had been wandering from God for a long time. That gladness and joy were gone even before the famine. And yet God looks at this how they had neglected Him, how they had ignored Him, how in many ways they had turned their backs on him and rejected him, and still he called them to return.
God at no point said, I’m going to send you all this punishment, and then I’m done with you. God called them back to himself. Verse 14, they were instructed to cry out to God.
Why? Because he would hear them. Because he would hear them and he would restore them.
Even the prophet in verse 19 says to you, O Lord, I cry. Even this prophet who was serving God is walking through the suffering with the people of Israel and says, God, I’m crying out to you too. In the midst of the suffering, I know nothing else to do except cry out to you because you heal, because you restore, because you change things, because you bring this joy of restoration that would be greater than the pain of the correction.
And that’s what I was talking about before with the loss of the children, the pain. Even though I can’t say that was a correction thing, but the pain was enormous. But the joy that I found on the other side of the pain, walking with the Lord in a deeper way, The joy was greater.
The heights of the joy was greater than the depths of the pain. Because no matter how bad our circumstances are, whether it’s something that happened to us, like Joel, I don’t think he’s guilty of the things that Israel is going through, and yet he’s suffering like everybody else because there’s no food in Israel. Whether the circumstances happened to us, or whether the circumstances are caused by us and our choices, we’re never in a place so deep that God is not willing to hear us and willing to restore us.
It doesn’t mean that all the pain is immediately taken away. It doesn’t mean that everything goes back to how it was before. But it means we can walk with the Lord in a new way.
We can walk with the Lord in a deeper way than we’ve ever experienced before. And so God called these people, even in the depths of their sin, to repent and be reconciled to Him. Even though they had caused their suffering, they had rejected Him, God still stood willing to forgive.
And God today still calls us to repent and be reconciled to Him. It doesn’t matter how far you’ve wandered. It doesn’t matter how badly you’ve messed up.
And not just you, all of us, me too. It doesn’t matter how badly we have messed up. It does not matter how big a mess we have made of our lives.
God is willing to restore and forgive those who repent and come to Him. Now, for them, the answer was the fasts and going back to the temple and repeating the sacrifices. We are in a very fortunate situation, you and I are.
that one perfect sacrifice has already taken the place of all the others. We don’t have to go and offer sheep and goats and incense and all this stuff. Jesus Christ, the book of Hebrews talks all about this, Him being our perfect sacrifice.
Jesus Christ took responsibility for your sin and for mine. Every bit of it. The big ones, the little ones, the outward ones, the ones in your heart and mind, the things that everybody knows about, the things that nobody knows about.
Jesus Christ took responsibility for all of it and was nailed to the cross and shed His blood to be punished in our place. And He died to pay for our sins in full. And then three days later, He rose again to prove that He could do everything He said He would do at the cross.
He rose again to prove it. And now that salvation, that forgiveness, that relationship with God, everything that we were created for that sin has messed up is available to us. If we’ll simply acknowledge that God is right about our sin and that we’re wrong, and we’ll believe that Jesus paid for all of that sin in full and ask for that forgiveness, we’ll have it.
Not because we’ve earned it or deserved it, but because Jesus loved us enough to pay for it.
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