Message Info:
- Text: Joel 2:1-17, NASB
- Series: Joel (2024), No. 3
- Date: Sunday morning, September 1, 2024
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Transcript:
⟦Transcript⟧ When I was in school, I used to get teased for my lack of pop culture knowledge, which probably didn’t come as much surprise to those of you who know me because it really hasn’t improved in the years since. but I remember one time in particular all of my classmates were talking about how much they loved M&M and I told them I preferred Skittles and realized they were talking about some rapper as a matter of fact they said no the rapper I said why would I care about the rapper still thinking they’re talking about a candy rapper there were a lot of instances like those I randomly ran into a guy from high school a few years ago. He said, man, do you remember that time?
And as it went on, I kind of started to play along and play the part. He said, do you remember that time that we asked you if you knew who Justin Timberlake was, and you said he was the Prime Minister of Canada? That was so funny.
I said, I wasn’t sure who he was, but I knew it wasn’t the Prime Minister of Canada. No, no, you said that. Yeah, I was seeing if y’all were dumb enough to think I was that dumb, and clearly it worked.
I asked my wife, I said, have you ever run across somebody you really didn’t know who they were? She said, no, I’m great at knowing who people were. I said, well, you’re no help at all.
But I read an amusing article this week about people who’ve run into celebrities without knowing who they were. And the one that stuck out to me, this man was talking about his mother running into, well, being in line at a sandwich shop, I guess in New York City or LA, somewhere like that. Being in line at a sandwich shop and this man walks up to the counter and she starts yelling at him to get to the back of the line like everybody else.
And after she dresses this man down, her son says to her, you just yelled at Pierce Brosnan. She says, who? He said, James Bond, you just yelled at James Bond.
She’s like, well, he ought to have known better then. I’m thinking it’s a bad idea to yell at somebody who might have a license to kill. It’s something I’m going to try to avoid.
But there were several stories like that, and some of you may have stories as well where you run into somebody that you didn’t know who they are. And it can happen even when it’s not celebrities. You know, we from time to time have people come to the door during the week here and we think they don’t And we have to be careful about letting people in because of the school on the premises and find And we’ll sometimes turn them away and say we can’t let you in, you know, we’ll feed you if If you need some food, but we can’t let you in.
I’m not here for food I need to get in the building and then we find out they belong to the school, but we didn’t we didn’t know that Sometimes we treat people differently based on, we treat people differently than we would if we knew who they really were. And there can be some funny stories about that when it’s people, but there are a lot of tragic stories involved when that comes to God, when we don’t really understand who He is, and we treat Him, and we interact with Him in a different way than what we would do if we really understood who He was, who He is. That clearly was what happened when Jesus showed up during His earthly ministry.
The world reacted to Him one way because they didn’t recognize who He was or didn’t want to recognize who He was, and they treated Him differently than they would have if they had understood or let themselves understand. This morning, we’re going to continue our study of the book of Joel. And if you have your Bible, if you’ll turn with me to the book of Joel, we’re going to pick up in chapter 2 where we left off last week.
And this passage we’re going to look at today deals with some of the same themes that we’ve been looking at all along. This calamity that was about to come on Israel, this invasion of grasshoppers that was going to destroy everything. Joel is still driving the point home of how awful that was going to be for Israel.
But even in the midst of that, he turns his focus away from just being on the disaster that was coming to pointing out who God is and his character so that Israel would understand. And I think that tells us that if Israel had really understood who God was and had really responded to who God is instead of who they thought God was or who they wanted Him to be, if they had simply recognized God for who He is and reacted appropriately, they wouldn’t have been in this predicament. And there’s a lesson in there for us as well.
So if you found Joel chapter 2, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Joel chapter 2, it’ll be on the screen for you this morning. But we’re going to look at 17 verses this morning, where Joel continues to talk about this invasion of locusts. Here’s what he says, starting in verse 1.
He says, Ò. . .
Blow a trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm on my holy mountain. Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming. Surely it is near.
Ó And by the way, I said Joel says this. Joel is repeating this. He’s telling the people of Israel, this is what the Lord says to go and do these things.
Surely it is near. A day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness. As the dawn is spread over the mountains, so there is a great and mighty people.
There has never been anything like it, nor will there be again after it to the years of many generations. A fire consumes before them, and behind them a flame burns. The land is like the garden of Eden before them, but a desolate wilderness behind them, and nothing at all escapes them.
Their appearance is like the appearance of horses, and like war horses, so they run. With a noise as of chariots, they leap on the tops of the mountains, like the crackling of a flame of fire consuming the stubble, like a mighty people arranged for battle. Before them, the people are in anguish.
All faces turn pale. They run like mighty men. They climb the wall like soldiers, and they each march in line, nor do they deviate from their paths.
They do not crowd each other. They march everyone in his path. When they burst through the defenses, they do not break ranks.
They rush on the city. They run on the wall. They climb into the houses.
They enter through the windows like a thief. Before them the earth quakes, the heavens tremble, and the sun and moon grow dark, and the stars lose their brightness. The Lord utters His voice before His army.
Surely His camp is very great, for strong is He who carries out His word. The day of the Lord is indeed great and very awesome, and who can endure it? Yet even now, declares the Lord, return to Me with all your heart, and with fasting, weeping, and mourning, and rend your heart and not your garments.
Now return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in loving kindness and relenting of evil. Who knows whether He will not turn and relent and leave a blessing behind Him, even a grain offering and a drink offering for the Lord your God. Blow a trumpet in Zion, consecrate a fast, proclaim a solemn assembly, gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children and the nursing infants, Let the bridegroom come out of his room and the bride out of her bridal chamber.
Let the priests, the Lord’s ministers, weep between the porch and the altar. And let them say, spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your inheritance a reproach, a byword among the nations. Why should they among the people say, where is their God?
And you may be seated. Now, this is a challenging passage to us, because the world that they were living in is in so many ways different from our own. They are talking about things that we’re not familiar with.
These solemn assemblies and these gatherings of the people and the different offerings and the blowing of the trumpet, these are things that are unusual to us. And yet, even while their specific circumstances don’t quite match up with ours, their problems aren’t that much different from our own. As we’ve been studying through this book and we’ve been diving even deeper on Sunday nights, picking up the little crumbs that we don’t have time to sweep up on Sunday morning, some of the things that are easy to miss, we’ve begun to see that the problems that Israel was facing was simply a matter of God’s people trying to be too much like the world around them.
And instead of trying to be the way God designed them to be, Instead of trying to walk with him, they were more concerned with what the pagan nations around them were doing. They were trying to be too much like them. They were adopting their gods.
They were adopting their practices and their ways and their lifestyles. They were enveloped in their own comfort. They were wrapped up in their own pleasures.
And it had led them to forget God. And that’s not too much different from the world we live in today. and so God is sending things to happen to them not to be mean to them not to destroy them but to get their attention and now this was not God’s first attempt to get their attention God had sent prophets God had sent the law God had done smaller things but as they refused to to hear and to turn and to repent and to cry out to the Lord and be restored to Him.
As they had refused, God had to escalate this every time. And now we’re up to the point of this invasion of locusts. And as I said in the introduction, it may feel repetitive because three weeks into the book of Joel and we’re still talking about this invasion of locusts.
But each section of this has a little bit different emphasis. And as I said, this one really points out the character of God in all of and their misunderstanding or their ignoring of the character of God was at the root of their problems. So I want to look at what this passage teaches us about the character of God. We can turn to just about any passage in Scripture, and it’s going to teach us something about who God is, and this is no exception.
First of all, in this passage, we see that God is indescribably holy. Now, we think of somebody being holy as just meaning they do good things, or maybe they don’t do bad things. But God is not holy because of what He does.
God is holy because of who He is. He’s the definition of what it means to be holy. I think I’ve given you this example before.
But when I was a freshman at OU in one of our philosophy classes, this professor threw out something called the Euthyphro Dilemma from Greek philosophy, and what he was doing, he was trying to use it as a gotcha against the Christians. Because if you can’t answer this, then your religion doesn’t make sense. I maintain you still have to deal with the reality of the resurrection, even if you think you got us on this.
But he would ask, is right right because God says so? or does God say so because right is right? Because in one option, if it’s right because God says so, then he can just make it up.
God could say tomorrow that lying is holy, and it would be. And so his argument there is there’s no really right and wrong, it’s just arbitrary, it’s just stuff God made up. The other option is that there’s a law higher than God, in which case he’s not really sovereign over everything.
And I knew that neither of those options was right. I knew that not even the question was right, but I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with it or what the answer would be until a couple years later I was reading, and in 1 Peter he says, he quotes the Old Testament and says, be ye holy for I am holy, or as I am holy. And I realized that the law, everything He told us to do, is a reflection of His character.
So it’s not something He made up on a whim. It’s not something outside that He’s subject to. Holiness is just who He is.
And so if we want to know where does the definition of right and wrong come from, where does the definition of sin and holiness come from, Where does all of this stuff that we live by come from? It’s all rooted in the character of who God is. Lying is a sin because God is truthful by nature.
Adultery is a sin because God is a God of faithfulness. You look at all the things that He tells us to do and not to do, and they are all reflections of what His character is. And in verse 1, he’s talking about his holy mountain.
He’s talking about being at the temple. He’s talking about blowing the trumpet that was summoning and assembling the people where they would come to worship him in this place that was set apart. And that was a picture of God in his holiness.
And the only sin that is specifically mentioned in the book of Joel, in chapter 1, verse 5, I believe, is this sin of drunkenness that was going on through the country. It’s one that most cultures look at and say it’s not a problem. In some cultures, it’s something we brag about.
The other sins that we’ve talked about that were plaguing Israel during this time, the desire to be more like the countries around them, the worldliness, the love of comfort, the idolatry, all of these are things that some parts of our world today consider praiseworthy. our world and much of their world would look at what what God was objecting to and say it’s not a problem but God’s standard of right and wrong is not the same as man’s and as God is is seated there in his holiness as God speaks from his holy mountain He makes it clear to the people of Israel and to us by extension that no sin is small in His eyes. And that’s why He there from His holy mountain in verse 1 begins to announce this coming judgment.
And that’s what leads us to the bulk of this passage. Because in that judgment we see that God is unimaginably powerful. Think about the things that he’s telling them in verses 2 through 12 are going to happen, the things that he talks about with these locusts.
And we see through it all that he’s the one orchestrating this. Now, everything that happens in our lives, God either causes or allows. That doesn’t mean that everything, everything that, you know, it doesn’t mean you stubbed your toe this morning and it’s because God said, I’m going to get you for that.
I’m going to make you stub your toe. But God allowed it. In this case, though, it’s become clearer as we’ve gotten into the book of Joel that God is not just allowing this to happen.
God is actually sending these locusts, which sounds really harsh from our standpoint until you realize that God is trying to get their attention and bring them back to where they need to be. And he didn’t just start with this plague of locusts. He’s been calling Israel to repent for a long time.
But he sent this unprecedented invasion of locusts. He talks about this in verse 2, this day of darkness and gloom. He said, like the dawn is spread over the mountains, so there’s a great and mighty people.
He’s using people in a metaphorical way as we see going further through this passage. He’s talking about the invasion of locusts. And he says, there has never been anything like it, nor will there ever be anything like it again to the years for many generations.
This was something unprecedented. It darkened the skies. It talks about blotting out the sun, bringing darkness and gloom on all the land.
And they had seen invasions of locusts before, but they’ve never seen anything like this one. And this thing that’s coming that they’re going to look at and see is the most powerful and terrifying thing that they as a country and they as individuals have ever experienced is going to be because God said, here it is. God has the power to command those things.
There is nothing that God cannot command, just like we sang about in that special song. And by the way, bravo, you picked one I didn’t know, again, that hymn. But that song reminded us of Jesus being able to speak to the storms, and even the storms had to stop when he said so.
God is unimaginably powerful. And it says in verse 3, they devoured the land. It compares them to a fire, a fire before them, a flame burning behind them.
But notice here toward the end of verse 3, the land before them is like the Garden of Eden. It said where they haven’t been yet, the land is lush and plentiful, but they move through and before them is this garden of Eden-like place, and behind them is a desolate wilderness, meaning they’ve stripped everything. They’ve eaten everything.
And we get to verses 4 and 5. It says their appearance is like horses. I guess if you look at grasshoppers closely enough that you could kind of see where they get that comparison from.
I mean, nobody’s going to mistake them for horses, but there’s a resemblance there. And they run like war horses. They know where they’re There’s a determination and a fierceness as they’re charging through the land.
And they come with the noise like chariots, and they sound like crackling fire, like a mighty people arranged for battle. Their look and their sound was fierce, and it was going to be terrifying. And verse 6 tells us that, that before them, the people are in anguish, and all the faces turn pale.
Now, for some of us, you can’t tell when that happens, but for them, there was going to be a noticeable change when they’re frightened of what’s coming. I know some people that will run and scream at the sight of one grasshopper. I won’t point to anybody in the room, but some people just don’t like them.
Now imagine these swarms coming through, and knowing not only are they going to be all over us, but they’re going to be eating up everything that we depend on for our livelihood. The people were terrified. Verses 7 through 9 tell us they advanced like an army.
They ran like mighty men. They climbed the wall like soldiers. They each march in a line, and they don’t deviate from their paths.
They were running like a well-trained army. They do not crowd each other. So it wasn’t even just like a mass of locusts.
I read this and think they each have their own lane. They don’t jump all over each other. I think of what I’ve seen in investigation documentaries, when people are going out in a field, for example, to do a search for evidence from a crime, and sometimes they’ll hold a rope or they’ll hold hands or something, and they’ll walk across and make sure they each stay in their path.
That way they make sure everything is covered. These grasshoppers, these locusts, we’re going to make sure everything was eaten and not a thing was left. They were going to make sure that they covered everything.
They burst through the defenses of the city. They don’t break ranks. They rush the city.
They climb on the walls. They climb into the houses. They enter the windows.
They’re going to be everywhere. And then we get to verse 10. He says, before them the earthquakes, the heavens tremble.
The sun and moon grow dark and the stars lose their brightness. everything in nature was thrown off. There were so many of these things that the ground was going to tremble.
There were so many of these things that they were going to blot out any light from the sun and moon. And all of this was a demonstration of God’s power. Because you notice in verse 11, it says, the Lord utters His voice before His army.
He’s calling them, he’s calling this army into battle. And in verse 11, he calls them his camp. He calls them his army.
He calls them those who carry out his word. And so the people are going to respond with fasting and weeping and mourning when this day of the Lord comes. Verse 11 says, the day of the Lord is indeed great and very awesome.
Who can endure it? When this judgment from God comes, who can stand against that? Who is powerful enough to stand up before the God of all creation?
And we look at God in His holiness, His desire to deal with sin. And we look at God in His power. That’s His ability to deal with sin and deal with it as harshly as it needs to be dealt with.
And sometimes that makes it all the more surprising when we get to this third point, that God is astonishingly merciful. God wants to destroy sin. God can destroy sin.
And yet God looks on us and takes mercy on us, even in our sin. Even in this terrifying judgment, it did not mean that God was finished with Israel. One of the most beautiful phrases in the book of Joel is right here at the beginning of verse 12 where it says, yet even now.
That means we look at God and His holiness and His power, we see the destruction that’s about to be ripped through Israel, and yet even now signals that there’s a change in the tone that’s coming. Yet even now declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart. And as I mentioned last week, the world might look at things like this and say, that’s so harsh.
You mean God is going to say, turn back to me or I’m going to do all these things to you? I’ve heard skeptics refer to God as though He were an abusive partner. But folks, this is not like an abusive relationship where God says, come back to me or I’m going to hunt you down.
This is God as a loving parent saying, sometimes I have to take harsh measures and discipline to call you back so that you don’t get yourself into even a worse situation. Because no matter how much we may struggle and suffer, and no matter how much our circumstances here on earth may be unpleasant, they are nothing compared to an eternity separated from Him. I do not enjoy having to spank my children.
It is not my first stop in discipline. Now, I’m willing to do it. Sometimes it’s necessary.
For example, we get out of the car and I can’t get them to not run across a parking lot. Sorry, you’re going to get a spanking, not because I want to hurt you, but because that is a physical reminder of how important it is to listen to me in this circumstance before you get hit by a car. And that’s what the Lord’s doing here.
Yes, there’s going to be a little temporary pain with this locus situation, and I’m willing to do that if that’s what it takes to get your attention to pull you back from something worse. If we look at it that way, even the discipline here is a function of God’s mercy. Because if God wasn’t merciful, He’d just let them run wild in their sin and let them enjoy all the consequences of that.
He’s calling them back to Him. Why would such a God call a wayward people like this to return to Him? Why would He even want them back?
Verse 13 gives us the answer. Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in loving kindness, and relenting of evil. It’s because it’s in his nature to be gracious and compassionate.
It’s in his nature to be slow to anger. You look at the locust thing and say, wait, he’s slow to anger? He’s about to eat up their whole country.
It took God a long, long time to get to that point. Abounding in loving kindness. Yes, abounding in loving kindness, because even though they’ve continued to reject him for years and years and for generations and generations, even now, he’s giving them the opportunity to come back and relenting of evil.
At no point does God call them back because of their goodness. At no point does God call them back because of what they can do for him. At no point does God call them back because they’ve done anything approaching deserving it.
They’d been pretty bad because despite the fact that God says, I’m slow to anger, they’d manage to anger him. But even in his anger, he’s willing to forgive. And his willingness to forgive is rooted entirely in who he is.
Folks, his willingness to forgive you, just like his willingness to forgive Israel, is not rooted in anything you’ve done or deserved. It is totally unaffected by what you’ve done in the past or what you’re going to do in the future. His willingness to forgive is rooted in the fact that He is forgiving.
Which I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned, that is the best news possible. Because even on my best day, there is sin that I don’t deserve His forgiveness. Thank God it doesn’t depend on who I am, it depends on who He is.
He’s so merciful. He’s so merciful. He’s so compassionate that He even announces He may even spare them.
He may even spare them from some of the evil that’s set to befall them. Now, God, God is willing to forgive those who repent, but it’s no guarantee He always spares us from the consequences we’ve earned. There’s a difference between the two, but God is so merciful that He’s saying, I may even spare you some of the consequences here.
They didn’t deserve the forgiveness, meaning they’re right with God again. They certainly didn’t deserve the forgiveness of the consequences. But God said, I’m so merciful, I may even let you off the hook on some of that.
In verse 14, he talks about he may even turn around and bless the nation instead. The only thing he’s asking for here is repentance. Even the discipline he imposed was a form of mercy drawing them back to him.
And here’s the lesson for us today, is that true repentance comes when we acknowledge who God is and we respond appropriately to that. It’s a terrible shame. It’s a terrible shame when we misunderstand who God is.
Because when we misunderstand who God is, it can keep us out of genuine fellowship with Him. we may end up fellowshipping with a caricature of him in our own minds it’s even worse when it leads us to worship a god of our own design we have to be careful about not worshiping who we think god is or who we want god to be we need to look at god for who he says he is and worship that God. Anything that’s not who He says He is is a false god.
And when we do this, when we do this, when we worship false gods, we give the world a reason to disrespect Him. That’s why at the end of this, verse 17, Joel says, Do not make your inheritance a reproach, a byword among the nations. Why should they among the people say, Where is their God?
If the people kept marching toward destruction and God ended up destroying them, Joel says the people of the other countries are going to look around and say, where’s the God of Israel? He could not save them. Folks, a proper understanding of the God of the Bible requires that we not only embrace the parts of who God is that are pleasant.
We all love to think about His love and His mercy. But we also have to embrace the parts of who God says He is that aren’t as pleasant. I can’t just focus on His love and mercy and forget about the holiness and the justice, or I’m worshiping somebody who’s not the God of the Bible.
And recognizing who God is, they were called to a time of national repentance in verse 15. Some of the details in verse 16, excuse me, about call the priests, call these people. Even it says, call the bridegroom out of the chamber.
When you’d just gotten married, you were exempted from all sorts of national duties and obligations, things that went on in the culture, but he’s saying, grab them too. Everybody in the nation, without exception. The babies, the old people, grab everybody.
We need to come together, and we need to cry out to God. There was one catch that we see in verses 12 through 13. It had to be genuine.
He said, return to me with all your heart and with fasting, weeping, and mourning, and rend your heart and not your garments. Sometimes they would tear their clothes as a symbol of repentance. And the more religious you were, the more likely you were to rip those clothes.
That’s kind of backwards from. . .
kind of backwards from our culture today, but the more religious you were, the more likely you were to tear those garments in public as a show of repentance. But he’s saying, I don’t want that. I want your hearts to be torn over this.
I want there to be brokenness and recognition of how far Israel has fallen. And folks, that’s true for us today. When people wander from God today, there’s still opportunity to repent.
It doesn’t matter how far you’ve wandered. It doesn’t matter what you think you deserve. It just matters how gracious God is.
And God is just as gracious now as He was then. And folks, we have the proof of it because Jesus Christ, several hundred years after this, Jesus Christ came to earth, lived a perfect sinless life that we could not. And He took responsibility for my sins and for yours.
For all the kinds of things they had committed, the outward sins, the inward sins, the public sins, the secret sins, He took responsibility for all of it and was nailed to the cross. So the justice of God could be poured out on sin in Him as He was nailed to that cross and took our penalty. And because of that, the grace, the mercy, the compassion of God is free to forgive us of our sins.
If we’ll simply believe that Jesus died to pay for our sins, we’ll repent and trust in Christ as our one and only Savior. Today, God is still gracious and compassionate, and he’s still calling you to return to him.
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