Well, good evening and welcome to this first session in the book of Joel. When Colin said these words, let’s turn together to the book of Joel, I’m willing to guarantee that not many of you will have heard those words from a pulpit in a church like this, possibly in all of your life. Where do you start with a book like Joel? Well, I thought it may be helpful to start with some factoids about Joel.
It is near the top of the list of the least read and least preached from passages in the Bible. According to Bible Gateway, that online Bible resource, Joel is right up there in the least accessed passages of the Bible. We don’t know much about Joel as a person, apart from the fact that his name means God is God, which is actually quite relevant when we get into the text a little further.
We also don’t know for certain where he wrote and when he wrote. There’s no mention, sorry, although there is mention of the temple here, so it’s likely that it was after the Judah-Israel split. And actually, if we believe in the inspiration of Scripture, which we most certainly do, then all of that is okay.
It’s okay not to know the fine detail here. There’s probably a reason for that. If the fine detail were important, God the Holy Spirit would have made that clear to us.
But the fact that the prophecy is more general actually gives it a wider application and a broader impact, because it deals not so much with specific issues, specific sins, but it deals with disobedience as a big issue, as a root cause, if you will, that brings God’s judgement, and it warns us. And as we saw there in verse 2 and verse 3, through all generations, it warns us that there are serious consequences when God’s people and society at large ignore God’s words of warning. So in that regard, this book is very applicable to our situation here in Scotland at the beginning of 2025.
Joel is speaking to a people who had a spiritually strong heritage, but they were now facing the consequences of neglecting that heritage and living in disobedience to the Word of God. And in that regard, I believe this book has much to say to Western Christians in general, and specifically to Scottish Christians. Our country has a rich Christian heritage.
It has been abandoned by society at large and is in danger of being abandoned by God’s people in particular. Our country used to be called the land of the book, Bible-loving Scotland. The history of the Reformation in our land is as strong as it was anywhere in Western Europe.
But look at us now. But although Joel is writing to say things are bad, he is also writing with a glimmer of hope. He’s also wanting to say to us, there is hope no matter how bad it is or how bad it has been or where you have got to as a result of your neglect of God’s Word, there’s hope if you repent.
And so we’ve called this series, The God of Second Chances. Now, most of us don’t like to be bossed around. I know I don’t.
We don’t like people telling us what to do. We like to do what we want to do, and we like to do what we want to do, when we want to do it, and how we want to do it. Well, here’s another factoid.
Joel is the bossiest book in the Old Testament. It has the highest percentage of command words in any Old Testament book as a percentage of all the words in that book. It’s full of imperative words, command words, do this, do that, and do it now.
And you can see from the chart there that by a margin of some distance, Psalms is next on that list if you can’t read the infograph. By a margin of some distance, Joel stands out in the Old Testament as a book full of imperatives, full of commands. We’re going to pick up some of these command words as our title headings this evening, because for Joel, this is no time in his day for small talk.
And we’ll see the reasons why as we get into the text. So let’s look at some of these commands, starting with the first chapter or stanza in the book, because Joel is written almost entirely in poetic form. Let’s start with verses one to four and think about them under these command words, consider and communicate.
The first command word is listen or consider. Now, if you’ve ever seen Steven Spielberg’s movie, Private Ryan, about the Normandy landings, you’ll know that it contains one of the most dramatic and intense openings in all of cinematic history. It cuts straight into the action with the soldiers on the boat heading towards those Normandy beaches.
And for the next 20 minutes, unremittingly in the movie, it is carnage. It is action all the way. It immerses you right in the awfulness of what that situation looked like, and you begin to feel it viscerally.
Joel is the Private Ryan of Bible books. It has a very dramatic and intense opening. The dial is turned up to 10 right from the beginning, very little introduction, no small talk.
We get a brief introduction sentence, the word of the Lord that came to Joel, son of Pethuel. That’s it by way of introduction, just to clarify that this is the word of the Lord. So Joel is a bona fide prophet.
And that’s it. Then we’re straight into the action. And right away, Joel identifies his target audience.
There’s a special shout out to the leaders. You’ll notice there in verse 2, the elders. And then all the inhabitants of the land are just called in right behind the elders.
They’re all in the crosshairs of Joel’s sights. Everyone needs to listen. Then he refers to an event that is so recognisable by everyone to whom he’s speaking, he doesn’t even need to tell them what it is.
It’s like one of those events that you can always remember where you were whenever they happened. Those of you who were alive in 2001 will remember as soon as I say this, where you were, 9-11. You’ll remember where you were when you heard about it.
And if you had said to anyone in the days and weeks after 9-11, without mentioning the words 9-11, if you just to say to someone in the bus stop, has anything like this happened in your days or in your father’s days? They would know immediately what you were talking about without you actually having to reference it. Because it was such a massive thing that sent shockwaves all through the world. Well, says Joel, that big thing that happened back there, listen to what it’s telling you.
It wasn’t just a random event. It was a message. It was a wake up call.
You’re sleepwalking your way into God’s judgement. Can you see what’s going on here? Now, how good are we at listening or considering the apparent catastrophes that happen in the world, of which there are many and will continue to be many? Because God’s word tells us to expect that in the last days. And when we see apparent catastrophes happening in the world, how do we as God’s people feel about them? Yes, we’re grieved by them, but are we listening to them? Are we listening to them? Are we considering them in the way that Joel encourages the people of his land and God’s people in his day to consider the catastrophes that were happening in the land? Is there the possibility that God is speaking to us and to the world through these catastrophes? C.S. Lewis famously said that suffering is God’s megaphone.
When we see suffering and tragedy in the world, God is shouting at us. The question is, are we listening? So he wants us to consider, and then he wants us to communicate. That’s the second big imperative verb there.
Tell it, hear it, listen, consider. Then in verse 3, do you notice? Tell it to your children, tell it to their children, and their children tell it to the next generation. He wants them to consider this event, but he wants them to communicate it.
He wants this event to serve as a warning for everyone who would hear about it in future generations, which we could argue includes us this evening, because here we are reading about it and learning from it and being warned by it. So what is this big dramatic warning event that should be listened to and learned from? Well, we find out in verse 4. It is a massive plague of locusts. By the way it’s described by Joel, perhaps a greater locust plague than anyone had ever seen before in Israel.
Verse 4 piles on the imagery with pictures of waves upon waves upon waves of these creatures. Now I was on holiday once in North France and a big locust grasshopper type thing got into the caravan. I was scared stiff by this thing.
It was horrific. It was horrifying. Just imagine, just imagine swarms of these beasts, great locusts.
It depends what your text says. The NIV uses words like young and old, and if you’ve got an ESV it’s got some other words like cutting and hopping and swarming and destroying. And for all those that you can’t classify etymologically, they’re actually classified as other locusts.
So this passage is full of locusts, full of them, leaving nothing but destruction in their wake. What is the point Joel is making? Well here’s the surprise. It’s not a lesson about how to avoid dangerous insects.
It’s not got anything to do with insects at all actually. It’s nothing to do with locusts. It’s about God’s judgement on his people.
How do we know that? Well in the Old Testament, as in the Disney kids movie A Bug’s Life, locusts are bad news. Where have we seen them before? Well their first mention, as is often significant in scripture, is in Exodus chapter 10. Moses was begging Pharaoh to let the Israelites go free.
Remember they were in bondage in Egypt and Pharaoh was having none of it. And God pronounces 10 plagues on the nation of Egypt. Plague number eight is a plague of locusts.
In Exodus 10 15 we read that the locusts covered the ground until it was black. Nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt. But there’s more.
In Deuteronomy 28, when God was giving the law with all of its blessings and curses, locusts, destructive locusts, are specifically mentioned as a disciplinary curse on God’s people for disobeying his word and taking him for granted. Imagine you’re planning a special meal out. I’m sure we’ve all done this from time to time, or looking for somewhere to go nice on holiday, and we’re looking for a nice restaurant or a nice resort.
One of the first places we go to these days is TripAdvisor. And when we go to TripAdvisor, we want to check out the reviews. How did it score from other people who have been there? Now, if you’re looking for a restaurant, there are loads of restaurants that score four point something out of five.
They’re unremarkable. You kind of scroll past them, and you think, oh yeah, okay, I’ll come back to that one, come back to that. Then suddenly you see one that scores one and a half, and you think, man, oh man, that must be really bad.
So what you do, you go in and you read all the reviews. You know that five to one, one being terrible. Isn’t that a great word on TripAdvisor? Terrible.
Terrible. You want to read these terrible reviews. So you click on it, and you read all these things.
Don’t go here. We got Campolobacta afterwards, and all that kind of stuff. And you think, man, oh man, I am not going there.
I’m going to listen to the warnings. I’m going to listen to the warnings. Now, we would listen to the warnings on TripAdvisor, and yet we are so slow to listen to the warnings from Scripture.
Why is it that we are so willing to listen to the warnings from TripAdvisor, and we’re so slow to listen to the warnings from Scripture? We are just not taking the warning seriously. If you took a warning seriously, the reason why you take those warnings seriously about these restaurants is you believe and trust the people that wrote them, right? You believe that’s a true and accurate representation of that establishment, and you’re no going near it with a barge boat. Why did we play so fast and loose with the warnings of God’s Word? It’s because we don’t believe the one who wrote them.
We don’t believe him. We don’t believe he would ever judge in the way he says he will. We play fast and loose.
This very negative event has happened to God’s people, and Joel wants it shared far and wide. Now, we aren’t Israel or Judah, and I acknowledge that we need to be cautious about just taking the warnings that are given there in this passage and just applying them straight to us without any context or any sensitivity, but clearly the Holy Spirit included this passage and the generational warning within it so that we should pay attention, more attention than we would or should to a TripAdvisor review. So Joel spends the majority of this chapter describing how horrific this plague was, and he calls on everyone in the nation, no matter their status, to mourn before God for the consequences of their collective disobedience.
You see, when Joel heard God’s Word, he wasn’t just to consider it himself. He had to communicate it. There are implications for the wider community, which is why in our New Testament times so much emphasis is placed on verbal communication of the truth that Jesus is Lord.
God’s revelation and judgement and salvation in Jesus is never intended simply for our own selfish enjoyment as God’s people. There are warnings and implications firstly for the church, but also for the whole world. So communication is our second word.
But as we move into the heart of the text of this section, the next section is no less intense. There are four groups of people brought to us in verses 5 to 13 who represent, when viewed together, the whole community, and each of them receive a strong visceral command specifically for them, followed by a description of the tragic consequences if they fail to listen. And the first group Joel speaks to there in verse 5 looks a bit random to us.
It’s a little bit unexpected. Wake up, you drunkards. Why would Joel start with drunkards of all people? On the surface, the drunkard doesn’t seem to have a care in the world.
Don’t seem to have a care. But Joel calls them in verse 5 to waken from their stupor and open their eyes to the reality of the world around them. This was the foundational problem.
The foundational problem was that the people were stupefied to the reality of the danger they faced. Now, I want you to think this evening of the times you’ve tried to ignore or distract yourself from bad news by doing something fun and pretending that that bad news didn’t exist, as though by doing this fun thing, it might make that nasty thing or bad thing go away. I think we can all identify with doing a bit of that, can’t we, from time to time? Then think of the times specifically in a spiritual sense where you’ve deliberately done something you know to be wrong.
You’ve deliberately rebelled against God, but you’ve pretended it’s no big deal. It’ll just go away. There are no consequences for that.
Joel is not leaving that as an option that’s open to us. He’s saying, waken up, waken up. This is real.
The consequences of your stupor are real and they affect everyone. Yes, even you, whoever you are, whoever you are. Then when he goes on to talk about the vine and the fig trees being destroyed, obviously there’s a connection to the drunkards because their wine, the source of their joy, is going to be cut off at source.
Did you notice that? It’s going to be cut off by this divine plague of locusts. The locusts are described again there in verse 6 with big animal language, sharp teeth like a lion, fangs of a lioness, and the devastation that they wreak behind them. But actually, Joel wants to communicate to the nation and to those drunkards within it and the wider nation that the business of having their joy cut off at source, of having the vine and the fig tree destroyed is actually bigger than the vine and the fig tree themselves because it’s likely that the vine and the fig tree here in Joel’s mind and in the mind of those who are listening were symbols of Israel themselves.
Joel probably means here that the whole nation being stripped of its vegetation and left bare is a visual picture of their spiritual state. If somebody could peel back the veneer and the facade of God’s people, they would have looked like a land spiritually that had just been subjected to a locust invasion. They were empty.
They were dead. They were stripped bare. There was no life there.
Now, I want to ask you this evening if the Lord were to do that for us tonight, if he were to peel back the veneer and make it obvious what our spiritual nutrition looked like and our spiritual state and our spiritual life looked like. The challenge here is would it resemble the nation of Israel with its barren brown covering everywhere and no vegetation and no greenery, no life, no signs of life. The command here you see is, waken up, waken up.
The second group of people Joel speaks to is also an unusual group of people that requires a bit of thinking around why they might be included. Mourn like a virgin in sackcloth grieving for the husband of her youth. What does Joel mean? There were two terrible causes of mourning if you were a Hebrew.
Firstly, the mourning associated with an only son in the family who had died and the family name was being lost. That was a huge source of mourning because the family name was important. We all know that from ancient literature.
But the second example, the second cause of terrible mourning in Jewish culture is given here in verse 8. This is a betrothed girl. Remember, Mary was betrothed to Joseph before she was married to him. This is a betrothed girl whose husband-to-be has died before they get married.
So the anticipation of the joy of intimacy has gone. All that she was looking forward to by way of intimacy, by way of friendship, by way of sexual contact, by way of children, all gone because he’s died. Her joy has been cut off harshly and cruelly.
That was the impact of this severe locust plague on the economy and the spiritual life of the community. Verse 9 is particularly striking because the grain offerings and the drink offerings had been cut off from the house of the Lord. Not that they had been stopped deliberately, but there was no grain and no wine to carry out the offerings.
Do you see? They would still have wanted to go through the ritual of the offerings, but there was nothing to do it with. The very items required for proper worship were unavailable. The elements had gone at source.
There was no joy. No joy. And we feel that.
That resonates, doesn’t it, in our own lives. Following our disobedient behaviours, what happens? Our joy is cut off. The joy in our lives is cut off.
What we once looked forward to, maybe because of our failure and our sin, has turned to ashes in our hands. And we fear that we will never rediscover that joy or comfort, and we won’t unless we learn to mourn over our disobedience. As Jesus taught us in Matthew 5 verse 4 in the Sermon on the Mount, do you remember when he said, blessed are those who mourn over their own sin and disobedience? And then he says, for they will be comforted.
And the essence of the structure of what Jesus says in all the Beatitudes, when he says they will be comforted, what he really means is they and only they, or they and they alone will be comforted. Because there is no ultimate comfort apart from a relationship, a living relationship with the living God, brought about by confession of sin and repentance. I’ve known something of that in my own life, and I’m sure many of you have also known those times when you’ve been far from the Lord, and in his grace, and it’s empty, and it’s barren, and it’s dry, and it’s awful, and it’s bleak, and it was all for nothing, and it’s all a waste.
And then by his grace, God comes to you again with a second chance that we’ll see a bit more of later in the book, and through repentance can restore. Well, the third category, or category is a category that’s a bit closer to home, because we’ve seen quite a bit about the farmers on our news recently, haven’t we? The farmers are next up. We’ve begun to understand, I think, as a result of some of these issues around farming and some of the challenges that our farmers face, we begin to respect them a little bit more maybe, and recognise just how much we actually depend on them for our very survival.
If that’s true for us, how much more true was it in an agrarian culture that Joel lived in? Because almost everyone who had a job worked the land. There wasn’t a tech industry, and an entertainment industry, and a hospitality industry, and a healthcare industry. It was none of that at all.
There was the land, and you worked the land. And these people’s lives were linked to the land and the harvest in a way that it’s very hard for us to understand when we can pop down to Morrison’s for a loaf quite literally at any time of the day or night. But here the crops are all gone, and along with that the enjoyment of the nation itself, and fear about the survival of the nation till the next harvest, because you’re stuck with this for a year at least.
No crops means no blessing, and the Lord doesn’t withhold blessing in their mind without reason. So a sense of hopelessness and despair permeates their lived experience. That’s the note given to the farmers there.
Do you notice it in verse 11? Despair, you farmers. Wail, you vine growers. And that’s what a life lived in disobedience to God looks like.
It’s a life of hopelessness and despair. The command here is to experience that despair and hopelessness, to own it, acknowledge it, recognise where it’s come from, feel what it’s like to hit rock bottom. Sometimes God will take you there, because it’s only there that you start to look elsewhere for help.
Finally, Joel turns to the priests in verse 13. Now, notice the instruction there to dress in sackcloth, which we also saw back in verse 8. But the different thing here in verse 13 is that there is a further instruction given to spend the night in sackcloth, not just to wear it in the day when everyone can see it and see how much you’re mourning and grieving. Wear it at night when it’s just you and no one can see.
Wear it at night. This isn’t brief grief. This is a grief that has to permeate all of their day.
It’s to permeate their lives. Their life has now to be marked by deep cries of mourning day and night. And there’s a need here, you see, for the priests as the spiritual leaders of the people to take personal responsibility for their part in all of this and humble themselves before God to seek His forgiveness.
I want you to think about those situations in your past when you’ve had a big fallout with someone you care about deeply. They happen, don’t they? They do. Let’s not pretend they don’t.
They happen. A friend, a family member, a spouse maybe. The relationship turns sour.
Then as the loud words and the confrontation settles and you reflect in the quietness of the wreckage all around you, you realise that actually you’re wrong. You’re in the wrong. You know deep inside that to restore that relationship, you’re going to have to humble yourself and apologise.
But often that’s the last thing you want to do. Certainly the last thing you feel like doing. Because apologising just adds to the embarrassment and the shame and fear of further rejection.
And so often, and sometimes too often, the feud remains unresolved, often destructively so. Here the people need to return to proper-hearted worship of God. They need to say sorry to God because of their own guilt or shame or fear, or maybe even just their plain old love of sin.
They either can’t do it or they won’t do it. Is that you tonight? You know things aren’t right between you and the Lord. There’s that distance there, that destructive pattern of behaviours that has led you to where you are now.
The feud remains unresolved, but it’s just too embarrassing to confess it, too shameful to admit it, too scared that he’ll reject you. What’s interesting in this passage is that Joel doesn’t actually name what the disobedience is, probably because the people knew exactly what actions had led to the catastrophe. But there might be a deeper reason.
Specific sin here might not be their main issue. What Joel is urging them to do is to take seriously their disobedience, which in this case here is what Tim Keller calls the sin behind the sin, the root sin. So what happens in our lives sometimes is if we are prone to lying or prone to visiting inappropriate sites on the internet or whatever it happens to be, we say sorry for the specific sin, right? And we kind of deal with it at a superficial level the next time it happens, and we’re sorry and we repent of the sin itself, but we never deal with the sin behind the sin.
Why do we go there in the first place? Why do we behave that way? What is the root problem here? What’s the sin behind the sin? As God’s people, we need to learn this lesson about disobedience, too, for although we may not face the same extreme consequences in terms of our physical human survival in a post-new covenant world, that’s not because our disobedience is any less heinous to God than theirs was. It’s not. It’s just the same.
You see, the reason we don’t see the full consequences of our disobedience is because of this table, because of this sacrifice. It’s because of what the Lord Jesus Christ has done on the cross when he faced the ultimate punishment for all our disobedience. But even so, even so, unconfessed sin in our lives, if we carry it and harbour it and refuse to deal with it and refuse to confess it, hear this tonight, unconfessed sin in your life will always, always, always, always lead to carnage.
Our enemy is always whispering to us, it’s not that big a deal. It’s not that big a deal, but sin’s always a big deal. And so as we come to the table shortly, we’re reminded to constantly turn away from our sin, constantly turn away from sin, as individuals, yes, but as we gather together around the Lord’s table tonight to turn away from sin together and to support one another in our turning away from sin and turn towards God himself, the great lover of our souls.
So let’s see finally how Joel does that here. And we come to the last section from verse 14 through to the end of the chapter where the big word really underneath all of the things he says is repent. Look at verse 14.
Declare a holy fast, call a sacred assembly, cry out to the Lord, this is the language of repentance. If the people want to receive a lifeline from the Lord, it’s going to help them if they’re facing him to catch it. There’s no point in doing this, Lord help me when the Lord’s there.
Repentance means that we turn towards him. We turn away from our sin to him. And as we turn towards him and we cry out to him, he throws us that lifeline.
But we only receive it if we’re facing him. You can’t catch it if you’re not facing it. So turn around and cry to the Lord and do it now says Joel in verse 15.
Because if you think that day was bad, those locusts, if you think that was a bad day, I’ve got some news for you. It’s going to get a whole lot worse one day. Verse 15, the day of the Lord is near.
Not the day of the locusts. It was a warning about the day of the Lord. The day of the Lord is near.
And this is the first of several references in Joel to the day of the Lord, which for us as New Testament Christians, of course, immediately conjures up images of final judgement in the book of Revelation. And we’ll get to those references in future weeks. But the underlying message to the people was this.
God’s judgement came on your disobedience and it was horrible when the locusts came. But it wasn’t global. It affected you.
It didn’t affect the whole earth. And it wasn’t final. There’s an opportunity to still repent.
But repent now because a greater day of the Lord is coming when God’s final judgement will come on a disobedient world and there won’t be a second chance. So as we close, just notice one final thing in verse 19. In verse 19, Joel speaks personally.
The tone changes. Until this point, he’s been calling on the nation to repent and all these categories of people to wail and mourn and repent. But now in verse 19, look what he does.
He does something very remarkable. He speaks personally as God’s prophet. And he says, if I’m going to tell you what to do, I need to be willing to do it myself.
So I’m going to start us off. To you, O Lord, I call. That personal identification of himself with all that was going on in the nation.
And he goes first. I repent. I turn away from a lifestyle marked by disobedience.
I cry out. I turn towards God. I seek him.
I rely on him. I cry out to him. I beseech him.
I trust him. And going first is always hard. It’s always the hardest.
If you’re in a difficult meeting at work and it’s tense, going first is difficult. If you’re in a broken relationship, going first is difficult to try and restore it. But here, Joel sets the example and he cries out to God himself.
“To you, Lord, I call”. Brothers and sisters, as individuals who have heard God’s word, ourselves, we mustn’t wait for others. We must be prepared to go first because revival begins with me.
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