Dennis Tuuri

Sermon Transcript: Joel Chapter 1
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon scripture is Joel Chapter 1. Joel Chapter 1. Joel Chapter 1. Joel is the second of the minor prophets. The word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel. Hear this ye old men and give ear all ye inhabitants of the land. Hath this been in your days or even in the days of your fathers? Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.

That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten. And that which the locust hath left, hath the cankerworm eaten, and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten. Awake ye drunkards, and weep, and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine, for it is cut off from your mouth. For a nation has come up upon my land, strong and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a great lion.

He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree. He hath made it clean bare, and cast it away. The branches thereof are made white. The lament like a virgin girdle the sackcloth for the husband of her youth. The meat offering and the drink offering is cut off from the house of the Lord. The priests, the Lord’s ministers mourn. The field is wasted. The land mourneth, for the corn is wasted, the new wine is dried up, the oil rather languisheth. Be ye ashamed, oh ye husbandmen. Howl, oh ye vine dresser, for the wheat and for the barley because the harvest of the field is perished. The vine is dried up and the fig tree languisheth. The pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree. Even all the trees of the field are withered because joy is withered away from the sons of men. Gird yourselves in lament, ye priests.

Howl, ye ministers of the altar. Come lie all night in sackcloth, ye ministers of my God. For the meat offering and the drink offering is withholden from the house of your God. Sanctify ye a fast. Call a solemn assembly. Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land into the house of the Lord your God. And cry unto the Lord. Alas for the day, for the day of the Lord is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.

Is not the meat cut off before our eyes. Yay, joy and gladness from the house of our God. The seed is rotten under their clouds. The garners are laid desolate. The barns are broken down, for the corn is withered. How do the beasts groan? The herds of cattle are perplexed because they have no pasture. Yay, the flocks of sheep are made desolate. Oh Lord, to thee will I cry. For the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and the flame hath burned all the trees of the field.

The beasts of the field cry also unto thee, for the rivers of waters are dried up, and the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness.

Now, words about your outline. Hopefully you got both pages as a two-page outline today. Hopefully that doesn’t mean I’ll talk twice as long. You will have noticed if you’ve looked at it at all that the text is integrated into the outline. I did that for a reason that I’d like to talk about for just a minute.

Essentially, we’ll be covering the book of Joel over the next three weeks. The first chapter today, next chapter next week, and the third chapter on Christmas Eve. It’s a lot of material to be covering, but I want you to understand the book first of all, and then hopefully some lessons from it for our lives and for some theological truths that are contained in it. We want to point out those at the end of each of these talks, but essentially I want you to understand the book first.

It is an excellent book in terms of the Advent season. I believe it talks about the coming of God in judgment, coming of God in salvation, and the coming of God in deliverance from enemies. And so this morning we’re talking about Advent, the coming of judgment, and specifically upon the church. I broke out the outline this way for some reasons. First, you’ll notice there are four essential major points to the outline that I’ve given you for the first chapter of the book of Joel.

The first section is simply the introduction of the book itself. It says that the word of the Lord came to Joel the son of Pethuel. And so there’s no time identifier here given and it simply identifies who gave the word of the Lord. And it doesn’t tend to then want us to focus upon the time element either. There’s been a great deal of discussion about what time it was written, but it isn’t essential to the understanding of the book.

Secondly, the next couple of verses, 2 and 3, give us a call to understand the importance of what’s going to be spoken of. And so that’s two sort of introductory elements of the book I believe. And then the rest of the chapter is primarily two sections. First is a section that deals with catastrophes cited and then appropriate responses called for on behalf of several groups of people. And that’s essentially the first half of the first chapter of Joel.

The second half of Chapter 1 of Joel gives them a call for a national convocation, a day of lamentation before God, and then I think gives sort of a model liturgy to use for that service of repentance and lamentation. And so first, apart from the introductory sentences, the first three verses, the next set of verses deal with catastrophe citation and the response of the people called for in relationship to that.

Then the last half of the chapter deals with essentially the same structure of catastrophe and response. But now it’s given in terms of a day of a worship day. It’s supposed to be convened nationally so that people would come together in lament before God. And the reason I’ve given you the text is to help you understand how this flows through. You’ll notice under point three, which is the first half of most of this chapter, that I have indentations on your outline that don’t line up with the outline points themselves.

I did that to show you the back and forth thing that’s going on in this chapter. In other words, if you look at point 3A1, for instance, under these citations of catastrophe and appropriate responses called for, we have the catastrophe cited and then indented is the appropriate response called for on behalf of the people. And this is, you know, if you’ve been listening to what we’ve been saying about worship and about how God’s word relates to us, God speaks, we respond.

And so Joel gives a corrective word from God. He tells the people, “This is what’s happening. This is what God has done.” And then this is your appropriate response to the catastrophe that God has brought upon the land. And so I’ve tried to on your outline, the indented parts are the appropriate responses regardless of where they occur in the text. And so that’s why I’ve broken it up that way. It shows the back and forth.

God speaks. He calls for a response on the behalf of his people. God called us to worship. We read the word of God, the inspired word of God from the center of the stage. I moved over here for the prayer. That’s our response to God. And that’s not inspired. And so it’s call and response. And that’s the way Joel works out as well. Citations of catastrophes and then calls for correct response. And that’s why I’ve given you the outline with the text integrated in.

We’ll go through the first chapter then trying to explain it. And then we’ll draw some important lessons from it for our day.

Okay. As I said, the heading simply identifies the prophet Joel, that the word of the Lord came to, identifies this is sacred text of course and as relevant. And then the second verses, 2 and 3, tells us the great importance to this particular subject matter. There’s a call to hear—have real big ears, pay attention. This is something that’s very important and it’s very important for transmitting generationally what’s happening about and what he’s talking about here.

You’ll notice that verses 2 and 3 sound an awful lot, for those of you who are familiar with Psalm 78. Psalm 78 begins the same way—that there’ll be this thing recited that it’s supposed to pass on generationally. And this shows the transmission of the faith and in terms of this book, the transmission of the reality to the children that follow us and to their children and their children’s children.

The reality of God’s judgment when he comes—when the Advent, that we all for instance just sang about. O Come Emmanuel. Jesus comes in history, there’s a judgment aspect to the church. There’s deliverance from sin and from oppressors, but it begins with judgment and it’s a very important thing to transmit to the generations that come.

Okay. Now, getting into the bulk of the book, then, or the first chapter, the catastrophe cited and appropriate responses called for. I believe that we have essentially first the nation and then farmers. Catastrophes are cited, national response is called for on the part of everybody. And then specifically cultic or religious things are cited. Response called for from the priests. Farmer things are cited, response called for from the farmers. And then it goes back and restates the priests. But we start with a citation and appropriate response called for from the nation.

There’s a two-fold witness to catastrophe and appropriate response on the part of the nation as there is to each of these three nations, priests, and farmers. First, the nation. The catastrophe cited is verse 4. And this is the central aspect of what this judgment is. The palmerworm leaves things behind, the locust eats. The locust, whatever the locust leaves behind, the cankerworm eats. And whatever the cankerworm leaves behind, the caterpillar eats.

We have here pictured four things coming through and eating up everything in the nation. I do not believe the King James version translation here is not the best. These are not specific citations of different types of insects. These are four different descriptions that are used in the scriptures for locust in general. Now, some people have seen gestational stages of the locust pictured here. I don’t think that’s there either.

I think the real emphasis here is that this is a four-fold judgment as it were, of completeness of judgment by locust upon the people. The many—the common name for locust—is here cited. The other names could be transliterated almost, or rather descriptively pictured as the mini, that’s locust, the gnar, the licker, and the devourer. It describes actions of these insects, these locusts that would come into a land and would gnaw, lick, devour, and there’s a whole bunch of them.

And so it’s a tremendous plague, as it were, a tremendous natural disaster, so to speak, that’s being spoken of here. So this great plague of locusts that probably had already occurred. Some people think he was talking about what would occur. I think it probably already had occurred. He calls their attention to it. And then he says there’s a response that we should make to this catastrophe. The response is given in verse 5.

Awake ye drunkards and weep. Howl all you drinkers of wine because of the new wine. It is cut off from your mouth. Now the second half of that verse is real obvious. These locusts come through and destroy all the grapes. You’re certainly not going to have wine very long. The wine will be cut off from your mouth. The response called for is to awaken, to sober up, to weep, and to howl because of the great catastrophe.

Now in verse 6, we have a restatement of this national disaster. Now he’s been talking about locusts. And now in verse 6, he describes these locusts as a nation. He says in verse 6, “A nation has come up upon my land.” Note that my land. I’ll make reference to that later. Strong and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a great lion. Verse 7, he hath laid my vine waste. He hath barked my fig tree. He hath made it clean bare, and cast it away. The branches thereof are made white.

So here the plague of locust is pictured as an army, a foreign nation invading the land, stripping everything of everything. And you again have the number of multitude. They’re without number and they have real sharp teeth. And again there’s a response called for after this restatement of the catastrophe on the part of the nation.

The response is to weep like a virgin with sackcloth because of her dead husband. The idea here is that a woman is betrothed to a husband. They haven’t actually come together in consummate of the marriage. They haven’t been put together in holy matrimony. They’re simply engaged. But remember, engagement in the Old Testament was a much stronger relationship than it is in our day and age. It meant something.

The betrothed woman would look forward to the marriage with great anticipation. This was a tremendous thing to get married. I’m sure it is to most young girls today. It causes them a lot of anxiety. When will I marry? And this particular girl is described as one who has gotten engaged. She’s looking forward to the wedding day and her husband is killed and she has great grief and the lamentation is called for.

So I believe that also pertains to the nation as a whole. Then the nation of Israel is pictured as betrothed to God and in a sense the God that she is betrothed to has died in a sense. He’s no longer there to sustain her with the gift of food and protection. And so I think there’s a double citation here. The catastrophe and response called for.

Now to address a couple of questions from these first couple of verses. Many people commentators you read will discuss whether these locusts are symbolic of an army. Was he talking about real locusts? Was he talking about enemy nations? What’s going on here? Almost all of the early church fathers believe that the four species of locusts depicted in the verses we’ve just read refer to four specific empires that would be used by God to come through and chastise his people. Different empires such as the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, finally the Romans, before that the Greeks.

The church fathers weren’t all agreed on which four empires, but they all thought it portrayed a succession of empires that would come upon the nation of Israel as they moved in disobedience to God. I think, however, that if we keep in mind that people say this because they think, well, what’s the big deal with a few locusts coming in and eating your crops? Locust accounts of locusts devastating crops are probably many. You probably read some of them, but suffice it to say that if you haven’t heard of locusts and what they can do to a farm area, they can absolutely devastate it. Not simply for a short period of time, not for a year, but for years because of the tremendous damage they do.

Locust swarms have darkened skies over miles of a particular area. There’s a tremendous number of locusts at times that have come through into various regions of the world given in historical accounts. People have died from suffocation because there have been so many locusts in the air. And the locust, their teeth are strong like lions. They do strip off everything and they can just absolutely denude an agricultural area and bring tremendous havoc and destruction. So it is a big deal when you have this successive series of four locust plagues—perhaps a tremendous judgment of locust upon a land.

It essentially rips away the things of life and it’s a picture of death. And so I think that probably there is a real locust problem that is here cited. But I believe there’s also reference that I think is rather obvious. We won’t go to all the reasons why I think it’s obvious, but I think also it’s supposed to extend beyond the present crisis. Remember I said that this isn’t a time-dated prophecy. It indicates that there is a timelessness to it.

And indeed, there were a series of successive nations that did come upon Israel. And as we get into the second and third chapters of Joel, you’ll see where part of the deliverance that comes at the day of the Lord to God’s people is deliverance from other nations and not just locusts. And so I think that nations are also here spoken of.

Kuyper, speaking of these four terms of locust, says that this talks about the spread of judgment in all four directions of the land. There’s a completeness of the judgment here. This four-fold pattern is found throughout scripture in times of devastation by God. In Jeremiah 15:2 and 3, for instance, we see there that God appoints over the people of Israel or over the people that he is judging four specific plagues. The sword to slay, the dogs to tear, the fowls of the heaven and the beasts of the earth devour and destroy.

And so this four-fold destruction is pictured in Jeremiah 15:3. Ezekiel 14:21. I don’t have these scripture citations on your outline, so you’ll have to jot them down if you want to remember them for later. Ezekiel 14:21 also says—we read it—says, “For thus sayeth the Lord God, how much more when I send my four sword judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword and the famine, the and beast and the pestilence to cut off from it man and beast.”

So we have a four-fold picture of judgment found in many places of the Old Testament. Indeed, there were four angels in Ezekiel’s vision, four kingdoms which came upon Judah, Jerusalem over the centuries culminating in the Roman Empire being used by God to judge his apostate nation in the time when our savior did come. I wanted to read a commentary by Milton Terry that David Chilton cites in his commentary in the book of Revelation about this four-fold pattern of judgment.

Milton Terry talks about the first four seals in the book of Revelation and he says this. He says, “There are symbolic representation of the wars, famines, pestilence and earthquakes which Jesus declared to be the beginning of sorrows in the desolation of Jerusalem. The attempt to identify each separate figure with one specific event misses both the spirit and method of apocalyptic symbolism. The aim is to give a four-fold and most impressive picture of that terrible war on Jerusalem which was destined to avenge the righteous blood of prophets and apostles and to involve a great tribulation the like of which has never been before.

Like the four successive but closely connected swarms of locusts in Joel 1:4. Like the four riders on different colored horses in Zechariah 1:8 and the four chariots drawn by as many different colored horses in Zechariah 6:1-8. These four sword judges of Jehovah move forth at the command of the four living creatures by the throne to execute the will of him who declared the scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites of his time to be serpents and offspring of vipers and assured them that all these things should come upon this generation.

The writings of Josephus abundantly show how fearfully all these things were fulfilled in the bloody war of Rome against Jerusalem.”

Now, the point of that quote again is to say that God has in his revelation this four-fold pattern of judgment and eventually it culminates in the judgment upon apostate Israel at the time of our Lord. All the Old Testament pictures the coming of Jesus Christ and then truths for what happens post the coming of Christ as well. But certainly the book of Joel also pictured those four-fold judgments that are talked about coming upon the nation of Israel when they rejected Christ.

Okay. So the picture of the locust and the army essentially means a totality of judgment from God’s hand. A very severe judgment picturing the coming of the of Jesus Christ. The great judgment. All the judgment of the old covenant sins fell upon the Jews that killed Jesus and rejected him during his advent, his first advent on earth. And Jesus says all the blood of the past will fall upon your head because you killed the son. And they did. And all those judgments fell upon them.

Additionally, it’s pictured the day of the Lord. And we’ll get to that in a couple of minutes. Okay. So that’s the first citation cited. And essentially the rest is just simply going to explain that in the next couple of chapters. And then in terms of this, why I’ve broken out these first group as the nations—some people would posit several groups mentioned here. They would see the drunkards as a specific group apart from the rest of the nation and apart from the priests and the farmers.

But I think that the double witness parallelism found in this text indicates that as the priests are twice cited and we’ll show that in a couple of minutes and the farmers are twice cited, so also the two-sided pattern here, it tells us that it should be interpreted in terms of the nation instead of just drunkards. Now, we got to remember why is Joel giving this prophecy? Why is he being used by God to sound this alarm, so to speak? He’s doing it because the people don’t realize what’s happening. He’s doing it to waken the people up. The people are asleep. They are drunk as it were. You know, they’re drunk with wine. Wine is a picture of God’s blessings he gives. He makes men’s hearts glad. And God warned them in the book of Deuteronomy. When you go into the land and you get all these blessings from me, don’t think your own hand has done it because when you do, judgment will fall upon you.

Well, that’s what they’ve done. They become intoxicated with the blessings of God as it were. And they no longer are sensible to their own sins and to the judgments that God brings upon their land. And so I believe that the drunkards here spoken of, while perhaps literally also the drunkards in the land, in the context of them primarily means the people, the whole nation have become drunkards, they don’t realize that this plague is from God to cause them to lament and howl and weep.

That’s what my studies led me to. And then when I read Calvin and Pusey, they also concurred in this opinion. Calvin writes the following in his commentary in the book of Joel. “Ye drunkards, he says, awake and weep and howl. In these words, he addresses on the subject in hand those who had willfully closed their eyes to judgment so manifest. The Jews had become torpid and had covered themselves over as it were with hardness. It was then necessary to draw them forth as by force into the light. But the prophet accosted the drunkards by name. And it is probable that this vice was then very common among the people. However that might be, the prophet by mentioning this instance shows more convincingly that there was no pretense for passing by things and that the Jews could not excuse their indifference if they took no notice.

For the very drunkards who had degenerated from the state of men did themselves feel the calamity, for the wine had been cut off from their mouth. So he’s saying that even the drunkards, the wine is cut off from their mouth—even they’re going to finally come to their senses. And so much, he uses that as a symbol then of the nation to say the whole nation of Israel, of Judah here specifically spoken of, has become torpid and drunken in their insensitivity to God’s judgments.”

Pusey also concurred in this saying the following. He says, “All sin stupefies the sinner. All intoxicates the mind, bribes and perverts the judgment, dulls the conscience, blinds the soul and makes it insensible to its own ills. All the passions—anger, vain glory, ambition, avarice, and the rest—are a spiritual drunkenness, inebriating the soul as strong drink doth the body. They are called drunkards who, confused with the love of this world, feel not the ills which they suffer. You know, a drunkard doesn’t even know when he gets beat up. And so the people here are so insensitive to the things of God and to their own sins that have brought these things upon themselves, they don’t even feel it when the judgments come.

We can see, I think, obvious parallels in our own nation today.

Okay. So first there’s citation of the catastrophe—locusts, armies, horrible judgment from God—a call for response on the part of the nation to wake up, to quit their being drunk, and to sober up as it were, and to howl like a virgin because she has been in a sense cut off from the God who is to sustain her. Now we have citations and responses called for from two representative groups. First, priests. Verse 9.

The catastrophe cited here is that the meat offering and the drink offering are cut off from the house of the Lord. Now, there’s different reasons why people think this is being cited. Obviously, if all the crops are destroyed, people say you wouldn’t have meat and drink offerings. Other people say, “No, it’s these armies that come in and make the people stop doing their sacrifices.”, but the whole point is that regardless of the reason why this occurs, it should strike horror in the hearts of the people that the meat and drink offerings that they were required to participate in—terms of their covenantal sign and seal with God under the old covenant—is now cut off.

It is as if God has ceased being their God. He has ceased receiving their offerings. For whatever reason they’ve had to stop, he has essentially removed himself from the people. It’s a sign that God has rejected his people. It’s interesting that even in the last siege of Jerusalem, Josephus tells us in the time of our savior, at the time the Romans besieged Jerusalem, that the meat and drink offerings continued even under the tremendous famine in the land.

And the thing that finally stopped the meat and drink offerings were the destruction of all the people. They had no ministers left to serve. It wasn’t that they ran out of the physical items to do the offerings themselves. That’s how important you see—they knew how importantly they perceived the offering system itself. People could starve but the house of God had to be supplied because the covenant had to be kept in place with God or there was no help at all for the nation. Of course, there was no hope at all for them then because they were trying to have hope against God’s judgment itself.

This was no longer the house of God after our savior had done his work—after he died on the cross. The house of God then was the house that he entered in heaven. And so the house of God on earth was made desolate because it wasn’t God’s house anymore. It was their house.

Okay. So the priests, he says the meat and drink offerings are cut off and the appropriate response is to mourn. He says, “The priests, the Lord’s ministers mourn.” There’s an indication here that the priests were apparently already mourning. He doesn’t tell them to mourn. He says the priests do mourn. What we’ll see as we go through this is that the priests are encouraged to mourn even more and to make their lamentations loud and to be heard and to call the other people to lamentation as well.

The second specific group apart from the priests then are the farmers. The catastrophe is cited in verse 10. The field is wasted, the land mourns, the corn is wasted, the new wine is dried up and the oil languisheth. So we have a destruction of crops, a crop failure. The appropriate response in verse 11 is to be ye ashamed ye husbandmen. Howl, oh ye vine dressers. Okay, so the farmers are cited, the crops have failed. They’re called to be ashamed and to howl to God.

And then there’s a restatement now of the catastrophe in verse 11b, “for the wheat and for the barley because the harvest of the field is perished.” And so he, in my way of thinking here, what he has done is he’s got the vine dressers and husbandmen here before it. He gives a citation of catastrophe. After it, he cites a catastrophe and they’re bracketed by the citation of catastrophe and they’re called to weep and mourn. And the second bracketing of what the catastrophe is—the failure of wheat and barley.

Now those are the essential grains for life. Wheat was better than barley. Barley was the poor people’s stuff they baked with, but both are cut off. Rich and poor alike suffer from the judgment of God here. And then verse 12 goes on to talk about this agricultural judgment to the farmers. The vine is dried up. The fig tree languisheth, the pomegranate tree, the palm tree, the apple tree, all the trees of the field withered.

Why? Because joy is withered away from the sons of men. God removes joy and is the picture of that removal of joy. He takes away the fruit from the fruit trees that were supposed to bring joy to men. Pomegranates, apples, fig trees, etc. Joy is removed. That’s the reason why all these things are coming to pass.

Kuyper and Delitzsch in their translation of this verse, instead of “because joy is withered away,” they say the word there should really be translated “yay” with an affirmation. “Yay. Joy is withered away from the sons of men.” They go on to say that here the last and principal ground a sign for the lamentation is that joy is taken away and withered from the children of men. That’s kind of the substance of what God has done with these locusts and with these armies. He’s removed joy. Joy is an essential aspect of life. And if you know people who are joyless, you know some pretty bad people in pretty bad straits.

Now let me back up here, and I want to restate the section where the priests are called to enhance their lamentation. In verse 13, starting from verse 13, and going through verse 18 is essentially the second half of the chapter, the second major point of the outline. He calls them now to specifically convoke a holy assembly, a day of lamentation. The priests are first mentioned again in verse 13. Gird yourselves and lament, ye priests. Howl, ye ministers of the altar. Come lie all night in sackcloth, ye ministers of my God. For the meat offering and the drink offering is withholden from the house of your God.

He’s telling the priests to do more than just mourn. They’re to gird themselves. They’re to sanctify themselves. They’re to lament. They’re to howl. They’re to lie all night in sackcloth. He’s essentially telling the priests to lead a public, very visible, very audible lamentation before God. And the whole idea is that they are to see themselves as leading the nation in this public lament before God. The priests are to put on sackcloth. They’re to be visible symbols of repentance and lamentation to the people around them. And they’re not just to do it for a moment. They’re to lie all night. They’re to make their lamentation persistent and continuous, a very loud and public thing.

But also they were to call a holy convocation, a convocation not of joy but of sorrow for the whole nation. They were to see themselves as leading the nation in this lament before God because the terrible thing that had come upon them. And so in verse 14, he tells them to sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the people together. And the specific thing you’re supposed to do is to cry unto the Lord. And the word “cry” there means a loud, boisterous, important prayer to God. They’re to cry unto the God.

So in the first half, we had in verses 2 and following the call to mourn. And starting at verse 14, he tells them the means whereby their mourning is to be accomplished. He tells them to call a holy convocation. Then I think what he does in the next, in the rest of the chapter, is to give them a lamentation liturgy that he then instructs them in. He takes the lead as it were in terms of leading the ecclesiastical leaders in this lamenting liturgy before God. And the first thing that he does is he cites a theocentric response to the catastrophe that has been come upon them.

And he starts that with the announcement of the day of the Lord. In verse 15, then, I think we have the beginnings of Joel’s liturgy to the people. And he tells them first of all to announce that the day of the Lord is upon them. Verse 15 reads, “Alas for the day.” And later we’ll see the second half of his liturgy. You have a same similar sort of thing where he cries to God. “Alas for the day,” he said. Why? “For the day of the Lord is at hand and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.”

What has been hinted at for the first half of this chapter is here quite obviously and distinctly pointed out that the judgment he is speaking of—the dire straits the nation finds himself in—the context of is a result of the approach of the Lord to the people. The final theocentric spin as it were is given that the nation shall know for a certainty that God’s judgment is at work in the locust and the armies that are pictured here.

Now they had earlier hints in this chapter about that in the first few verses. And he said the importance of this for generational instruction to other people. That sort of stuff is usually talked about important to pass on to your children. How we sinned, we fell away and God corrected us. That was a hint to them. In verses 2 and 14, he refers to Israel as “the inhabitants of the land.”

God will do these things to the inhabitants of the land. And if you look through that phrase in the Old Testament, “the inhabitants of the land,” that is used first to describe the Canaanites, the Hittites, and all the other evil people who inhabited the land prior to the people of Israel coming into that land. That’s what it talked about. And then in the prophetic books, we see “the inhabitants of the land” used almost exclusively to talk about Israel when they become Canaanites and when they’re the ones now who God is going to wage war against.

And so when they got the word in verse 2 that they’re being instructed as inhabitants of the land, they would have understood that meant—or be beginning to think through—that he’s talking about judgment here upon us from God. He’s not talking about a natural disaster in that way. He’s talking about judgment for sins.

Verse 5, when the picture of the judgment was locust. They would know, if they’d read their Bibles, that Deuteronomy 28 said that one of the plagues that God would send upon a rebellious people was: You’ll plant a lot, but you won’t get much because the locust shall consume it. In First Kings 8:37, remember we’ve talked about First Kings 8 a lot. It’s where Solomon dedicates the temple in a long prayer. And he says, “When your people do what’s wrong and they sin and you bring these judgments upon them and they come to your house and they spread their hands in lamentation, the tearing of themselves”—remember we talked about last week. “When they repent before you for these judgments, hear them and heal us.” One of the judgments he talks about in First Kings 8:37 and 38 is the judgment of locusts. “When the locust come and destroy them for their sins and they cry out to you, hear them.”

And so when Joel used locust as the indicator of the judgment from God, they should have been thinking judgment for sin, curses from God, not just natural disaster. In verse 7, he talked about the vine and the fig. Combine those things together in verse 7. The vine and the fig are given as a picture of blessing from God normatively. First Kings 4:25 says that Judah and Israel dwelt in safety each man under his vine and fig tree. Remember we were in the book of Micah in the fourth chapter. One of the great pictures of blessing in the future is that every man would be under his own vine and fig tree. The vine of the fig tree is a picture of blessing. The removal of vine and fig tree from the people, then the denuding of it through locust and from armies cutting it down—whatever it is—that’s a picture of moving from blessing to cursing. And they should have started to get that picture.

Verse 10, he talked about corn, wine, and oil. Those are the three things he talked about there. And again there in Deuteronomy 7, God says that he’ll love you. He’ll bless you. He’ll multiply your fruit. And he mentions specifically he’ll multiply your corn, your wine, and your oil, the increase of your field, your kind as well. Corn, wine, and oil in Deuteronomy 7:13, Deuteronomy 11:14 are given as pictures of blessing from God. The removal of corn, wine, and oil should be seen then as curses from God.

Verse 11, we talked about wheat and barley. Remember the sustenance of life. And again there Deuteronomy 8 says the blessings from God will be you’ll have a land of wheat and barley. And Job 31:40—Job says if I’ve done wrong and if I’ve sinned, let the land cry out against me, let thistles grow instead of wheat and cockles instead of barley. The words of Job are ended. So when they saw these phrases, these specific phrases that Joel used early on in the first half of the chapter, they should have started to get the hint this is moving from blessing to cursing. This isn’t natural disaster. This is judgment. They had a harbinger of that in the first half of the chapter. But Joel, the first half of the chapter, Joel drives it home to them with a vengeance.

Now, because now he talks about the day of the Lord. He says, “This is the approach of God in judgment.”

Now, we need a little background to realize the horrific nature of this proclamation to the people that this was the day of the Lord. Kuyper and Delitzsch described the day of the Lord in this way. Yom Yahweh—day of the Lord—is the great day of judgment upon all ungodly powers when God as the mighty ruler of the world brings down and destroys everything that has exalted itself against him.

Thus making the history of the world through his rule over all creatures in heaven and on earth into a continuous judgment which will conclude at the end of this course of the world with a great and universal act of judgment through which everything that has been brought to eternity by the streams of time unjust judged and adjusted will be judged and adjusted once for all to bring to an end the whole development of the world in accordance with its divine appointments and perfect the kingdom of God by the annihilation of all his foes.

And accordingly then this particular judgment through which Jehovah on one hand chastens his people for their sin and on the other hand destroys the enemies of his kingdom forms one element of the day of Jehovah. And each of these separate judgments is a coming of that day and a sign of God’s drawing near.

Now, the day of the Lord is used in prophetic literature. In Ezekiel 30:2 and 3 and Isaiah 13:6, this same terminology that Joel uses in terms of the coming of the day of the Lord is talked about there. But in both of those instances, it’s talking about the day of the Lord coming against the foes of the people, on the Gentiles, on the Canaanites, on the bad guys, and the day of the Lord will come upon them as terror and darkness and desolation.

So what we have here is Joel doing a reversal as it were. We’ve talked about this before, but historically in the church for the last 2,000 years, Advent liturgies have involved a lot of readings in terms of John the Baptist. They call repentance. And it always strikes me as a little bit funny. We’re supposed to be singing about, you know, the baby in the cradle and how neat it is. You know, all these neat postmillennial songs we get to sing at Christmas time. Why are we reading some of these liturgies of the reformed, not the reformed church, the Episcopal churches and other churches that deal with repentance and John the Baptist?

Well, that’s because—remember—Jesus said that when he came, he didn’t come to bring—