Two kinds of Prophets form a major portion of the Old Testament – the four Major Prophets (so called because they are long books) and the 12 Minor Prophets (so called because they are short books). Joel is one of the Minor Prophets.
Written after the exile of the Israelites in Babylon, what does this short book hold for us today?
(A) DISCERN THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CURRENT EVENTS (Joel 1:1-10)
The prophet Joel begins the book in the same way all prophets begin (Joel 1:1, Deut 18:18). He announces that the God who speaks gave His word to him, and as a prophet, Joel dutifully speaks. The theology of prophecy is that God is a speaking God who uniquely reveals not only His plans but His very nature through speech. The character of prophecy, then, is bound up in revealing who God is. This reminds us that as with all Scripture, we are studying neither the historical context of the day, nor archaeology, nor worldview of philosophy, nor theory, nor political economy, but we are always discovering who God is – how He reveals Himself in His spoken word.
In studying prophecy, we must give attention to this speaking God whose word is power. Ps 33:8-9 exhorts us to fear the LORD and stand in awe of Him, for He spoke and the world came to be; He commanded, and it stood firm. We must always hold on to the majesty and power of God’s word. As we listen to God’s word, as He speaks, we must seek to know Him as He reveals Himself.
As Joel begins, he addresses the inhabitants of the land, who were the remnant of Judah who had returned from exile in Babylon (Joel 3:1). From this exile, a remnant was released from the rule of the Persian king, and they came back to re-establish God’s Kingdom in Jerusalem.
In this post-exilic period, the nation of Israel had not been re-formed, but in Joel 1:2, the prophet refers to some sort of community life, a societal structure by which the people were organised. So he urges the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to pay attention to a significant event that has happened in their time and to educate their children and their children’s children on this (Joel 1:2-3).
In Joel 1:5, he addresses drunkards and all drinkers of wine. He asks them to weep and wail, for there is no more sweet wine. This gives us an indication of the state of the calamity that has taken place – as a result of this tragedy, there is no sweet wine and no reason to rejoice.
What is this great tragedy? Joel 1:4 and Joel 1:6-7 give us a vivid picture of total devastation caused by a locust invasion. This was an act of God – He sent locusts to devastate the agricultural society they were building up. The poetic structure in Joel 1:4 is meant to describe complete annihilation of the crops, not that there were four types of locust.
This is not the first time we’re seeing a swarm of locusts in Scripture. In Exodus 10, God sent a plague of locusts on Egypt. There are a number of features in the Exodus narrative that Joel pulls from as he describes the locusts that have come upon God’s people in Jerusalem.
Firstly, the text in Exodus describes how God’s people are to teach their children about this, so that they understand, generation upon generation, who the LORD is. That is the same injunction we see here in Joel 1:2-3.
Secondly, we see the impacts of the locust swarm on agriculture and the wrecking of supply chains (Exo 10:14-15, Joel 1:6-7). The vines that bear the fruit for wine are no longer able to bear fruit; the fig trees are nothing but splinters. God has sent an unusual swarm of locusts to destroy the produce of the land. In other words, He literally destroyed the economy and broke all of His own people’s supplies. And this is stunning, because unlike in Exodus, this was not judgement unleashed upon God’s enemies, but on His own people.
This should make us rethink the events going on in the world right now. We often have only two spiritual modes when responding to current affairs. We either look at current affairs at a distance and say, “That is happening over there. Maybe God is doing something there, I don’t know.” or when the events happening out there come towards us, we say, “O God, please rescue me.”
Joel 1 introduces us to another way of responding to calamity we see elsewhere. The instruction in Joel 1:2 is “Hear this, you elders; give ear, all inhabitants of the land.” As we look at the events around us, listen! Listen and tell our children. He goes on to tell the drunkards: you who are enjoying yourselves, awake! Awake, weep and wail. This is a very different response. God does not just owe it to us to give or to suffer – those are not the only two options. There are many other options, and one of those is to listen, to consider, to reflect, to meditate, to think, to commune, to draw near to God and be sensitive to what God is doing in our time.
God is urging us to be conscious of the spiritual significance of the events that are going on in our world. God could have kept silent and the people would have treated it as just an economic disaster, but God chose to speak a word to them about their situation. He goes on to tell them the consequences of these events in Joel 1:8-10.
The people are to lament like a virgin wearing sackcloth for the bridegroom of her youth. As you think about your circumstances, about loss and pain, wail. But why? Joel goes on to say that the real consequence of this economic disaster was not that they had no wine to drink, but that worship of God through the grain and drink offerings were cut off. The real reason to wail and mourn is that God’s people are not able to worship him according to the covenant stipulations in Exodus and Leviticus. Without wine and grain, they couldn’t offer anything to the LORD. The priests and ministers of the LORD mourn because the fields and grain are destroyed. The wine dried up and the oil used to replenish the lamps for the worship of God were gone.
The great tragedy Joel laments here is not primarily economic impact, but that God’s people were not able to worship God. That should cause us to mourn. It should cause our hearts to be broken.
How does this shape the way we think about current events? It makes us consider the significance of our mourning – what are we sad about? What makes us grieve? What makes us feel that the world is broken? Is it retrenchment, hardship, not being able to drink our sweet wine? Is it not being able to be with the ones we love? Or is it a God-centred reason?
Joel lays it out here – that the reason we should lament, first of all, is that the worship of God is disrupted. This should be the highest thing on our minds because it is the highest thing on God’s mind.
What is the spiritual significance of our suffering right now? Why are we unhappy? What do we miss? What do we treasure? What do we hope for, and how does that help us understand our day? Hear the words of Jesus in Luke 12:54-56 as he rebukes the crowd for failing to think rationally about God’s purposes for their time despite their ability to think intelligently about the world around them.
Have we thought about what the Lord is doing in this present time – not just in our lives or schools or jobs, or in a trajectory defined by our own progress, although that is important to the Lord – but what is the significance of our day from the Lord’s perspective?
As Joel looked at the economic disaster of his day, he did not set that suffering in his personal inconvenience. He set it in the context of how the worship of God was disrupted. He set it in God’s perspective, focused on what was important to God.
The apostle Paul urges us in Eph 5:15-16, “Look carefully how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” How are we discerning the spiritual significance of the events around us?
(B) THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE OF LAMENT (Joel 1:11-14, 16)
The prophet Joel goes on to address three groups of people, detailing the actions they should take and the reason for doing as such.
First, he calls the tillers of the soil and the vinedressers to be ashamed and wail, because the harvest of the field has perished – not only the vine and the fig, but also the pomegranate, palm and apple trees – a picture far from the blossoming orchards we can imagine. As a result, gladness, the joy of man, dries up (Joel 1:11-12).
Second, the priests, ministers of the altar, and ministers of God – those who facilitate the worship of God through sacrifices and offerings – are to put on sackcloth and lament and wail, even all night, because grain and drink offerings are withheld from the house of your God (Joel 1:13). Instead of putting on their priestly garments, they were to wear clothes that depict sorrow and wail as a sign of brokenheartedness, because they could not worship God or give glory to Him, or atone for their sins, or express any thanksgiving, devotion or prayer, because there was nothing left to offer on the altar.
Third, the elders and inhabitants of the land are to organize themselves to consecrate a fast and a solemn assembly at the house of the Lord and cry out to Him, because there was no joy and gladness in the house of their God (Joel 1:14).
Looking at these instructions closely, notice that none of them were to solve the problem! This is unlike in other parts of Scripture, where the people are called to repent, that God might relent. They were being called to a time of national mourning before God, just acknowledging how broken everything was.
Christian ought to respond to calamity very differently from the rest of the world. Instead of denying calamity, engaging in distraction, or blaming others, the appropriate Christian response laid out in Scripture is lamentation. In lamentation, we take with one hand the reality of the circumstances we see, and with the other hand, we hold on to the truths God has revealed. We don’t allow the frustrating circumstances to pull us into despair, and neither do we allow the truths about God to pull us into triumphalism, where we say that everything is going to be fine when our hearts are breaking. We must hold on to both as we say, “God, You who are trustworthy, You who are good, God, this is so painful, this is so hard.”
What do we lose when we don’t lament? If we don’t acknowledge reality, our faith becomes a caricature that is unengaged and unrelatable to life in a fallen world. If we let go of God’s word and stop clinging on to Him and wrestling with Him, we go into despair and have nothing to offer the world but our tears.
Psalm 44 shows us what lament can sound like. Consider what it would look like for God’s people to collectively say these words. If these words do not provoke us, even now, to think about the world around us, perhaps we do not see the sin around us. Perhaps our hearts are really hard. We lose so much when we don’t lament. We lose sight of reality, empathy, love for others, compassion, a God-centred view of suffering, and a long-term perspective of heaven to come, because earth seems too satisfying. Those who lament have their eyes fixed on the future day of the Lord.
(C) TURNING TO THE LORD IS REPENTANCE (Joel 1:15-20)
In response to all these events, the prophet announces that the day of the Lord is near (Joel 1:15). Indeed, God had a purpose for these events, but they were not in themselves the end of all things. They pointed forward to the day of the Lord. As we see the seed shrivelling under the clods and the beasts groaning because there is no food (Joel 1:17-18), as we look at the events around us, can we not see that these events are in reference to a day of judgement that is surely coming and coming soon?
How, then, should we respond as we see the day of the Lord drawing near? Joel 1:19-20 does not sound like the triumphant vindication that might come to mind when we think about the second coming of Jesus. Seeing the total devastation, the prophet cries out, “To you, O LORD, I call”.
As we think about the day of the LORD and the spiritual significance of the catastrophes around us, our lamentation should extend to personal repentance. We have to awake from our spiritual malaise and complacency and turn from every other refuge, comfort, security and solution, and turn to God, saying, “Lord, I have nowhere else to go. To You, O Lord, I call.” That is the beginning of repentance.
The more we sit lamenting the impact of these tragedies from God’s perspective, the more we will be convinced that we need to be released from every idol that occupies our hearts, so that we can go to God and call to Him, saying, “like the animals that have no food, just like they thirst and pant for You, O God, that’s how we need You.”
As God explains these events through the prophet, His main call to His people is to “come back”, to return to Him with all their hearts (Joel 2:12-13). He desires for His people to turn to Him afresh. He wants to draw hearts to Himself, then and now. In these words, He invites us to respond to Him: Come back. He sent His Son for this very purpose, to find each of His sheep, leaving behind the 99 to find the one that is lost. We only know Jesus as our Saviour because He first sought us and we repented, turning away from what we love and turning to Him. And now, day by day by day, we return to Him.