Joel 1

Discussion Questions

1. Who was your generational spokesperson for the Gospel (v. 1-3)?  Do you feel the responsibility of being this for someone else?
2. We see locusts waking up the people of God in the book of Joel (v.4). Have you ever been dramatically awakened from spiritual sleepiness by God? How can you actively “stay awake” for the Lord?
3. Have you ever been sorry for the consequences of sin instead of the sin itself?
4. It is never too late to repent—to return to the Lord. Are you convinced of this? Do you make allowance for this in your own life, and in the lives of those who seem to be the furthest away from God?

Transcript

We do study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel. If you’d like a paper copy of the Bible, just lift up your hand and someone will bring one along to you so you can follow along in the text. It would be good to have the text in front of you as we begin this new series in the minor prophets. And as they’re passing the Bibles out, and if you have one in front of you, let’s open our Bibles to the Book of Joel. If you go to the first book of the New Testament, Matthew, if you know where Matthew is, and you just turn to the left just a little bit, you will see Joel right between Hosea and Amos. Some of your Bibles, the pages will be stuck together a little bit, as is mine.

Also so glad to have the students here. Can we welcome the students this morning to our 11:00 AM? Just so you guys know, as a regular practice, on the first Sunday of every month, we come to the Lord’s table, and the students are going to join us. Instead of Sunday school, they’re going to come up here and join us, and what a privilege it’ll be to come to the Lord’s table together alongside of them. So glad you guys are here.

We are beginning this new series on the minor prophets and what the Hebrew Bible calls The Book of the Twelve. Throughout the next few months, our study will focus on three of these prophetic books. We’re going to start with Joel, then we’re going to go to Jonah and Habakkuk. I’m going to put up on the screen here the 12 minor prophets so you can see all of them listed there. It’s the last 12 books of our Bibles. And they’re minor only in the length of their text compared to the major prophets; Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.

Now, I think the minor prophets have been put at a disadvantage when they were labeled the minor prophets in the fourth or fifth century. When we meet some of these prophets in eternity, I’m going to ask them, “How did you feel about being called a minor prophet compared to some of the major ones?” We’ll see what they have to say about that. The minor prophets span roughly the years of 780 BC at a 420 BC, and perhaps more importantly, two events that form the scaffolding of most of the prophets in the Old Testament, the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, which we just studied in our watershed class earlier today, and then the fall of the Southern Kingdom a few generations later in 586 BC. And you can see that up there on the screen. The Assyrian conquest and the Babylonian conquest form essentially the bookends and sometimes even the middle of some of these prophets.

The message of the minor prophets is anything but minor. And for the original readers in their context and for us today, they have something for us to hear, a word from the Lord. The voice of God still calls through them today. And there are themes, there are particular themes, thematic approaches, theological and pastoral purposes that are specific to each book, but there is a continuity of themes between the minor prophets, a few of them including: God’s character, His holiness, His sovereignty, His patience, His promises. We’ll see that all through the minor prophets. Many of the minor prophets shine a bright light on human unfaithfulness, human sinfulness, unrighteous and injustice. Sometimes the minor prophets are talking directly to the covenant people of God, sometimes they’re talking to the wider society, and sometimes it’s both together. As we’re reading the minor prophets, keep that in mind.

The minor prophets are often calling His people and other nations to repent. And repentance is a good word. It’s a turning back to the Lord, waking up from spiritual complacency, from lethargy. We see the promises of restoration. We’re calling this series “The God of our Salvation.” And all of the minor prophets have an eschatological hope, an eschatological disposition. And I’m not sneezing there when I say that word. There’s something important there for us. What we think is going to happen in the future, what we know is going to happen in the future because the promises of God, matters here today. Where we think history is going is what gives us hope today and for tomorrow. And the minor prophets continue to tell us about the future hope that we have as believers.

Most of the minor prophets were written during years marked by moral confusion, national and political uncertainty, theological ambiguity, spiritual sleepiness. Does that sound familiar? And the voice of God calls out into that darkness and says, “Wake up. Turn around.” And it’s the voice of a loving father calling His children to come home. I heard another pastor this week. He said, “All the prophetic books could be summed up as God saying, ‘I want my people back.'” And that is good news for us today. His voice is still calling. Are we listening? Are we staying awake enough to pay attention? I hope we are.

Let’s turn our attention here to the prophet Joel this morning and listen for God’s word for us today. Let me pray for us and we’ll get started: Lord, we pray that You would open up Your Word to us. It’s on Your Word that we rely, as we sang. And then open us to Your Word. Tune our ears to hear it and lead us to Your Son, Jesus, in whose name we pray. And we all said amen.

Prophet Joel, Chapter 1, verse 1: “The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel. Hear this, you elders. Give ear all inhabitants of the land. Has such a thing happened in your days or in the days of your fathers? Tell your children of it and let your children tell their children and their children to another generation.” Verse 4, Tell them what? “What the cutting locus left. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten. What the hopping locust left the destroying locust has eaten.”

We’ll pause here for a second. Joel here is describing God’s hand of discipline on these people, the people of God through these locusts. And throughout history, scholars have debated whether this is poetic imagery describing an actual locust invasion, or perhaps it’s describing a human army. I tend to think it’s actually a locust invasion. And he’s going to use all kinds of language that leads me to that conclusion. But go to verse 1 for just a second. Just to set the stage, we don’t know much about Joel. That’s a unique feature of the Book of Joel. We don’t know much about him other than this: The word of the Lord came to him, so the imprimatur was on him to speak the words of God, a heavy responsibility. His name, Joel, in Hebrew, Yo’el, means Yahweh is God. That’s what we know about Joel.

And then I think this is beautiful, in verse 3, after he’s talked to the elders and all the inhabitants, basically to everyone, in verse 3 he says, “Tell your children of this discipline that the Lord has brought. And let your children tell their children, and their children to another generation.” In other words, there is a generational obligation for us to communicate both the warnings, the spiritual warnings of drift, but also of the gospel promises of hope and restoration. We have a generational obligation to pass it to our children and for them to pass it to their children. There’s such beauty here in this text.

Verse 5: “Awake, you drunkards, and weep. And wail all you drinkers of wine because of the sweet wine for it is cut off from your mouth. For a nation has come up against my land, powerful and beyond number. Its teeth are lion’s teeth, and it has the fangs of a lioness.” I think he’s describing the locust here. Verse 7, “It has laid waste to my vine and splintered my fig tree. It has stripped off their bark and thrown it down. Their branches are made white.” And you could circle or highlight the vine and the fig tree. These are symbolic all throughout the Bible of God’s people, and either they’re flourishing in prosperity or they’re shriveling up. And we can see here, it’s shriveled up.

Verse 8: “Lament like a virgin wearing sackcloth from the bridegroom her youth [or for the bridegroom of her youth].” Verse nine: “The grain offering and the drink offering are cut off from the house of the Lord. The priests mourn the ministers of the Lord. The fields are destroyed. The ground mourns.” Are you getting the sense here of what’s going on? Because the grain is destroyed, the wine dries up, the oil languishes. Wine and oil again being symbolic of prosperity or a shriveling up.

Verse 11: “Be ashamed, O tillers of the soil.” He’s talking to the farmers now. “Wail, O vine dressers, for the wheat and the barley because the harvest of the field has perished. The vine dries up; the fig tree languishes. Pomegranate, palm, and apple, all the trees of the field are dried up and gladness dries up from the children of man.” Verse 13: “Put on sackcloth and lament, O priests. Wail, O ministers of the altar. Go in and pass the night in sackcloth, O ministers of my God.” Pause here for just a minute. Sackcloth, you’ve noticed it here in verse 13 twice, also in verse 8. Sackcloth, to the original readers that would’ve immediately brought to mind this mourning garment, something that they would wear in a season of loss. And it’s employed here at least these three times. Put on sackcloth; something has been lost in the land.

And at least in part at the end of verse 13, it tells us why. Because grain offering and drink offering are withheld from the house of your God. The grain offering and the drink offering were a regular offerings, the regular practice of worship. Daily worship in the temple had ceased. The worship of Yahweh had shriveled up. To the original readers, it would’ve seemed like the covenant was now inoperable. That was how dire this situation was, from the locust and also as we’ll continue reading in their own heart. Verse 14, he gives them a task now. “Consecrate a fast. Call a solemn assembly. Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the Lord, your God, and cry out to the Lord.” It’s so appropriate that we just sang that. Cry out to the Lord. It’s the most important thing every person can do.

15, “Alas, for the day of the Lord is near, and as the destruction from the Almighty, it comes.” The day of the Lord, of course, if you’ve read your Old Testament and the new, that’s a theme throughout. And anytime we’re reading a prophetic book like this or other ones, we need to often look at a prophecy when we’re peering into the future, which I think we’re doing here in part. Think of a threefold fulfillment of what’s going on here. That’s often what happens here. Something past, something present, and something in the future, something near, intermediate, and some far fulfillment.

And I think here it’s likely he’s referring to the locust. That’s what’s happened in the past or is happening right then. But there’s also a day of the Lord that is to come. And he wouldn’t know it yet, but the day of the Lord has come; the gospel day of the Lord when Jesus died on the cross and rose again from the dead. But there’s a greater day of the Lord yet to come, a far fulfillment. And Joel wouldn’t have known it yet, but I think he’s referring to that. That’s helpful for us to interpret prophetic books like this. Verse 16: “Is not the food cut off from before our eyes, joy and gladness from the house of our God? The seed shrivels under the cloths. The storehouses are desolate. The granaries are torn down because the grain has dried up. How the beasts groan. The herds of cattle are perplexed because there is no pasture for them. Even the flocks of sheep suffer.” Our sin affects all of creation, even the cattle and the sheep.

But now Joel has a prayer, a personal prayer. Verse 19: “To you, O Lord, I call.” And for our English Bibles, the word call there could be translated “to shout or cry.” “To You, Lord, I am desperately in need. Lord, I’m calling. I’m calling on Your mercy.” Really looking back to his character. He’s the only one to call on in a time like this. “To you, oh Lord, I call, for fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness and flame has burned all the trees of the field. Even the beasts of the field pant for you because the water brooks are dried up and fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.” This is the reading of God’s Word. Just as a point of clarity, we did not intentionally time our study of the locust invasion of Joel with the cicada invasion of Nashville in 2024. We knew it might be around the same time, but it wasn’t exactly what we had in mind. The Lord works in mysterious ways. He has wonders to perform.

Although we don’t know with certainty the precise date of Joel’s ministry or who he’s writing to, because he’s addressing temple worship, and I hope you saw that, he’s likely speaking to those in Jerusalem either before the Babylonian exile, we looked at those dates earlier, or perhaps after the temple’s rebuilding in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah and others. What we do know is that economically the land had been laid waste by the invasion of these locusts. We also know that the spiritual condition of these people had shriveled. The worship of God, the worship of Yahweh had dried up. And as we study the entire Book of Joel over the next few weeks, we’ll see the spiritual condition of their hearts toward God was indeed growing cold even before the locust invasion and is at least in part why the Lord sent these locusts, in order to make them pay attention so that they would turn back to Him.

Although the Nashville cicada invasion was gross and annoying, [Can I get a witness?] an invasion of locust, a different insect altogether, would have been severe and costly in the ancient world. This was an agrarian culture. It was based on farming. The destruction of their crops would decimate their food supply, of course, both for themselves and livestock. Their entire way of life would come to a halt. And we see that here in the text. When locusts migrate in massive swarms, they eat the land, and they die. And even the decaying insects can actually carry disease and a stench. Even today, locusts can cause severe damage. And we have government agencies that watch and try to mitigate against locus migrations. Here are a few photos, I’ll put them up on the screen, from East Africa and India. This is from 2020, so not very long ago. You can see the devastation that locusts can cause.

We know that from Exodus and other places in the old and New Testament, the locusts were one of the ways God disciplined both His people and other nations. Do you remember the Exodus? The Book of Deuteronomy speaking to the people of God, the covenant people at Mount Sinai explicitly mentions locust as one of the ways Yahweh will get His people to pay attention when they wander from His covenant so that they might come back to Him for His glory and for their good. And in Joel, we’re not told all the reasons for God’s discipline using these locusts, but we are told what’s going on, at least in part, in the hearts of these people. They were spiritually asleep. They were spiritually sleepy, in a stupor. Their hearts had turned cold.

That may be one of the primary issues for believers today, friends: spiritual complacency, lethargy, indifference, apathy. Have you been there? Are you there now? This is one reason why I think Joel is so timely for us to study today. God is never content for His children to be spiritually ineffectual walking around empty. His love for us is far more robust than that. He calls us to a flourishing and fruitful life of faith with a heart satisfied in Him, treasuring in Him, delighting in Him with a mind being renewed daily by His word and by His spirit and with hands that demonstrate that we are part of His kingdom. I think God’s grace is seen in the locust and in the ministry of Joel. It’s loving when we wake someone up from the dangers of spiritual sleepiness, from spiritual sleepwalking.

Did you notice the reading this morning? In this reading, we have a holy urgency, if you will, from Joel. There’s an urgency in the text. If you look at verse two, “Has such a thing happened in your days?” Verse 13: “Pass the night in sackcloth.” “Call a solemn assembly,” in verse 14. “The day of the Lord is near,” verse 15. There’s a holy urgency here. This morning, I’d like us to consider four urgent responses to the grace of God that we see here in Joel. And it is good news for us. One, there is a time for waking. Two, there is a time for lamenting. Three, there’s a time for repenting. And four, there’s a time for reviving.

Let’s start with waking. If you would, look with me at verse 5. “Awake, you drunkards, and weep and wail all you drinkers of wine because of the sweet wine, for it is cut off from your mouth.” Joel, the prophet, as I said before, is also Joel, the poet. And he’s using poetic language to assess the spiritual condition of the people. And it compares at least some of them to drunkards, to sleepwalkers walking around in a haze. They were living the good life, perhaps, according to the values and the priorities of the world, but not living in light of eternal things, living like a drunkard, intoxicated with pleasures and resources and security of the world, empty of the spiritual resources of the Lord. To them, he says, “Wake up. Awake.” It’s important to remember as we’re studying this kind of a book; he’s speaking to the people of God in Jerusalem. They knew the Word of God and they should have been delighting in Him and treasuring Him and worshiping Him, but they were asleep. And Joel says, with this divine urgency, “Wake. It’s time to get up.”

I’m going to pick on my little sister, Britney, for a minute. My sister, Britney, is an incredible woman. She’s a wonderful mother, a gifted teacher, but she is not a morning person. Anybody in here not a morning person? All right, we got some honesty in the student section. I like this. This is good. I remember, growing up, when it was time for her to get up from school, my mom or dad would go to her room. It wasn’t like Cora’s dad, which I think I would’ve loved Cora’s dad singing “A Mighty Fortress.” That’s great. But my mom and dad would go to Britney’s room, try to wake her up, and she’d say, “Five more minutes.” They’d go do whatever they were going to do, and they’d come back, and she’d again say, “Five more minutes.” Some of us use the snooze button way more than it was intended to be used.

In this moment of spiritual sleepiness that I think we see here in Joel, God speaks to the prophet, Joel, with a timely warning, “Awake today. Right now, wake up. Do you see what’s going on around you? Do you see what’s going on in your own heart?” Now, if you’ve read the New Testament, Jesus would use similar language even to those He called His own. To his disciples, He said in Mark, Chapter 13, “Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning, lest he comes suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you, I say to all, ‘Stay awake.'” If you’re a believer this morning and you sense the pang of conviction in a text like this, I have a word of grace for you this morning. I think that’s evidence of the fact that you are in His grip. A loving father would never let his child run around languishing. Never. He calls His children to sober up, to wake up, to pay attention. You are in His grip. And if you sense the pang of conviction, I think that’s evidence of that. It’s an invitation to newness of life today.

Eugene Peterson, he has one of my favorite definitions of a Christian church: “A Christian congregation is a group of people who decide together to pay attention.” And I pray that for our church here in Nashville. Number two, I think we see a time for lamenting. I invite you to set your eyes at verse 13 for a moment. “Put on sackcloth and lament, O priest.” He’s talking to the religious leaders. “O ministers of the altar, go in. Pass the night in sackcloth, O ministers of my God.” Why? “Because the grain offering and drink offering are withheld from the house of your God.”

Christian lament is a prayer in pain or in sorrow. And in the Psalms, when we read Psalms of lament, most of those prayers end with a trust in the Lord, a declaration of trust in the Lord. I think the lament that we see here in Joel is a double lament, a lament over the consequences of their sin, but also a lament over the sin itself. And there is a distinction between the two, isn’t there? When I do something wrong, I can be sorry about the consequences. When I get a speeding ticket, I’m really sad that I have to pay the fine. But have I learned the lesson? Am I genuinely remorseful for not following the rules, perhaps putting people in danger with my lead foot?

I think they are learning the lessons of the locusts in this text. Yes, in part, I think they’re rightly lamenting the economic condition on the ground, the lack, the loss of their earthly resources. But as we continue to read in Joel, and I think we see here as well, there’s a deeper lament over their own unfaithfulness. They’re turning away from the Lord, their shriveled worship of Yahweh. In other words, they’ve woken up to the reality of their spiritual condition and they properly lament where their hearts are. Have you done that? Has that been a part of your Christian experience? There is a time, friends, to lament not simply over the consequences, but over the sin itself, behaviors, patterns, dispositions that are turned away from God, living as if God didn’t even matter, His Word and His ways. It’s why we recite the confession of sin, which we’ll do later before we come to the table of the Lord. We should rightly be saddened by the ways that we have not loved God with our whole hearts and not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

But there is another danger in the Christian life of never moving beyond lament, wallowing in self-pity and shame. For those who believe on the Lord Jesus, we cannot stay in lament – “…therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” That is a word of grace for us here today who are perhaps wallowing in a season of lament. Lament over our sins should lead us swiftly to the gospel of grace. Lament should lead us to joy over what the Lord Jesus has done for us on the cross and in His resurrection. Amen? My sins, they are many, but His mercy is more. Thanks be to God. Ian Duguid says this: “The purpose of confessing our sins is not to render us miserable by simply reminding us of what great sinners we are, it is to remind us of what a great savior we have.”

Number three, there’s a time for repenting. Look with me at verse 14, if you would. Joel gives them something to do, the Lord through Joel does. “Consecrate a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the Lord and cry out to Him.” The word of God through Joel is calling them to a turning point. When a solemn assembly like this is called, all work would likely cease.

And I think it’s interesting, a corporate fast… Did you catch this? Fasting in a season already lacking in the basic resources of food and water, it speaks to the urgency of the moment. A biblical fast in its most broad sense is a period of abstaining from something, ordinarily food, in order to heighten our sensitivity to the word of God. It’s a denial of self for the purpose of growing in godliness. That’s the broad definition of what a fast is. Spiritual disciplines like fasting, though, have no power in and of themselves. Rather, they place us before God. They are a means that the Lord uses to tune and retune our hearts towards Him and towards His ways.

And they’re calling for a fast. They’re calling for this solemn assembly. Joel essentially is saying, “Stop everything and turn around.” Have you been there? That’s what repentance is. It’s a stopping of the direction you’re going in and it’s turning towards the God of all grace. Keller would call repentance an antiseptic. It stings, but it heals. Joel doesn’t know it yet, but the help and healing that they’re calling for and the promise of future hope would be realized most fully in our Lord Jesus Christ, who began His own earthly ministry with what? A call to repentance. “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” Jesus said. You can come back to God today. That’s the good news. There is time yet. Why else would Joel call these people together and call upon the Lord? But because the Lord is abundant in mercy, far more abundant in mercy than we’ll never know. Jack Miller says this about repentance, so good: “Repentance is a return to sanity. It’s an awakening to our desperate need for God’s mercy.”

Number four, I think we see a time for reviving. Look with me again at the end of verse 14, “…to the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.” That’s the purpose of the gathering. That’s the purpose of the fast. Or later on in verse 19, Joel says, “To you, oh Lord, I call,” or I cry or I shout. Most important thing every person can do is call on the name of the Lord. In one sense, I think it’s describing revival. That’s what revival is. It’s my own heart, it’s my family, it’s my community turning together, falling on our faces before Him in worship and trust and gratitude, delighting in Him. It’s interesting that many of the great revivals throughout history are called awakenings. Wake up. Pay attention.

And revival, if you think about revival, sometimes, at least for me, it can conjure ideas of public spectacle. Revival doesn’t have to be public spectacle; it can be a quiet turning of hearts back to the love and mercy of the Father who delights to see His children walking in the light of His grace. The Book of Joel has an urgency that is full of grace, and I hope you see it. We still today can call on the name of the Lord. Don’t hit the snooze button. Don’t say, “Five more minutes.” Today we can call on the name of the Lord. Today we can turn around towards Him, awaken to the mercy that Joel didn’t even know fully about yet in Jesus. Forgiveness of sin, newness of life, and hope of eternity, it’s available to all who call on Him. I love that.

Isaac Watson, his great hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” he says, “Love so amazing, so divine, it demands my soul and my life and my all.” I think that’s a picture of repentance. I’m going to turn towards that love that is so amazing and divine, it’s captivating. May that be for us today.

Church, let’s pray. Let’s take a moment of silence just for a moment to give thanks for the extraordinary mercy and grace of the Lord: Lord, we confess our need of You and Your word for us today. Many of us are famished and need to drink from the depths of truth, wisdom, and joy that You have on offer. And Holy Spirit, we pray You would wake us up. Wake us up in areas where we have fallen asleep, where we’ve gone cold. Restore to us, though, the joys of Your salvation. We cry out to You, Lord, Hallelujah! What a savior! In the precious name of Jesus, we all said, amen.