The Book of Joel is a book about the crisis and calamity in Israel’s day. In the past six studies, we’ve seen God’s purposes in their calamity: Firstly, to foreshadow a far greater, more devastating judgement to come – the day of the Lord, and secondly, to stir their hearts to the appropriate response of repentance and faith, in light of this coming day.
In our reflection on the current crisis caused by COVID-19, we, too, are reminded to repent in the face of calamity. In Luke 13, Jesus echoes the words of Joel 2 as he reflects on the calamities of his day. His message to his hearers was simple – repent. In response to Joel’s prophecy, Israel responded in repentance. In this final study, we will see their promised experience of God’s good favour and amazing restoration.
Joel 3 reads like an earth-shaking, soul-rattling thunderstorm that gives way to great comfort in the coolness of the morning. The vision of God and His judgement shakes our soul more than any thunder has shaken our souls, but in the midst of this terrible judgement, we see a beautiful picture of salvation unlike any other – salvation that springs up a deep wealth of peace and restedness more satisfying than sleeping in on a rainy morning.
(A) VINDICATION PREPARED FOR GOD’S PEOPLE (Joel 3:1-8)
In Joel 3:1, the prophet speaks of “those days” and “that time”, when God will restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem. From Joel 1 and 2, we’ve seen that in this time frame, Israel will experience gospel restoration – a reversal of brokenness, restoration of overflowing joyfulness in God, and reconciliation with Him.
We recall that Joel was speaking to the remnant of Judah who had returned from exile in Babylon. They were beginning to see this promise of restoration come to pass as the people were brought back from exile over time. In Joel 2:28-32, we saw that this restoration included God pouring out His Spirit – and this was fulfilled at Pentecost, where God’s Spirit was poured out on all who believed and they were empowered to speak His word (Acts 2:14-18). This is a blessing we enjoy richly to this very day.
To understand the Old Testament prophecies rightly, we bear in mind the multiple horizons of fulfillment elaborated upon in the first study of Joel. Apart from being fulfilled in the immediate events of that day where Judah was brought back from exile, the prophecies also stretch across multiple events, each building on the previous event, until the great day of the Lord to come.
In the previous studies, the focus of this prophecy has been rich, immense blessing of restoration, reconciliation and God’s presence with His people. However, in chapter 3, Joel shifts gears and things get sombre.
In Joel 3:2-6, the immediate action that will take place in “those days” and at “at that time” is judgement. God Himself will gather the nations to the Valley of Jehoshaphat (which means “God has judged”) for the final, decisive judgement. God is the actor of this judgement on behalf of His people and His heritage Israel (v2), and the reason for His judgement is the nations’ heinous, despicable actions against Israel – crimes we struggle to imagine – the casting of lots for human lives, trading a boy for a prostitute and selling a girl for the enjoyment of wine (Joel 3:2-3). The nations have also taken God’s silver and His gold, carried His rich treasures into their temples, and sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks to remove them from their own border (Joel 3:5-6). Tyre, Sidon and Philistia (Joel 3:4) typify the sort of enemies that Israel has. Historically, the coastal cities of Tyre and Sidon were hubs for slave trade; they were emblematic of the evil of their day. Thus, God was bringing judgement on them for the great evil they had wrought. This evil is also referenced at the end of the book in Joel 3:19, where Joel speaks of the violence of Egypt and Edom against the people of Judah, having shed innocent blood in their land. In Joel 3:21, God likewise vows to avenge their blood.
The big idea here is this: God knows the whole span of sins committed against Him and He is coming in personal judgement. This is not the sort of neutral, objective judgement we expect in legal systems where judges are not personally involved in the cases they’re judging. Here, God is personally offended by the sin committed by the enemies of Israel.
Besides knowing the sin committed against Him, God also knows well the suffering of His people. As much as these words were a comfort for the people of Israelites in their day of exile, they are also a comfort for us today as we share in the pains and persecution of the global Church. Christians being persecuted around the world and treated as the scum of the earth are precious jewels in God’s sight. He doesn’t stop at knowing their suffering; He will move to act in judgement.
In Joel 3:4-8, God repeatedly promises to return the payment of his enemies on their own heads swiftly and speedily. Part of God’s judgement and restoration of His people is His vindication of all their suffering. Historically, we know that this happened to Tyre and Sidon in around 300BC when Alexander the Great besieged these coastal cities, and historical records tell us that about 13,000 of Tyre’s inhabitants were taken and sold into slavery. Yet beyond these specific instances of God’s judgement fulfilled in history, the larger idea is that God vindicates His people in His judgement of the evil that plagues the world.
This passage addressed not only the heinous crimes against humanity, but also the personal suffering that all God’s people face – be it from family, from work, having to pass up promotion opportunities or losing a job for standing up for Christ. God knows, God is listening, and vindication will come from Him.
This passage also helps us to see clearly that the vengeance and vindication we yearn to see in the proceedings of justice belong to God. As eager and desperate we might be to see people brought to task for the injustices we, and especially the global Church, experience, we can trust and know that vengeance belongs to the Lord. He will act in terrible judgement of the nations for the vindication of His people. He is indeed coming to judge the nations, and He is coming swiftly and speedily.
(B) TERRIBLE JUDGEMENT DECREED FOR GOD’S ENEMIES (Joel 3:9-16)
In Joel 3:9-12, God issues a challenge to the nations and summons them for battle. He speaks with a strong, authoritative, commanding tone, the voice of one who is absolutely confident of victory.
The section begins with God commanding the nations to “consecrate for war”. This language of consecration is something we don’t expect to hear in a challenge to war. Yet we’ve seen this language before in Joel 2:15-16, where God calls His people to consecrate themselves not for war, but for repentance. When Israel sees calamity, their response should be to consecrate themselves for repentance. But the enemies of God were consecrating themselves for rebellion. There is also a sense of wide-sweeping urgency as the nations are called to summon all their strength – to transform their tools of agriculture into military tools, and even the weak were to be warriors.
When all the nations are gathered in the fullness of their ability, they will find themselves gathered not for contest but for judgement. At the peak of their rebellion, at the utmost of their strength, nothing but God’s soul-crushing judgement awaits them. As they ready themselves for war, God sits to judge them. There is almost a certain sarcasm to the challenge – these nations have absolutely no chance whatsoever; there would not even be a fight. This is a sobering picture. The extent of this judgement is entirely crushing.
In Joel 3:13-14, we notice a shift in the language from military to agricultural metaphors. V13 gives us an image of a sickle reaping the ripe harvest. After the grapes are harvested, they are thrown into a great winepress and treaded upon. Such is the crushing weight of the full wrath of a holy God pressed upon His feeble enemies. Before we think that this is just “Old Testament anger”, we turn to Revelation 14:14-20, where Jesus Christ takes this same image of judgement and cranks the knob to its maximum. The extent of this judgement has blood flowing from the winepress for 1,600 stadia, which is 300 kilometres – the length of 6 Singapores.
Evil has as much chance against God’s judgement as the harvest has against the sickle. Judgement is coming and it will be terrible. None can withstand it. If we were to stand before the wrath of the holy God in this manner, we would be utterly crushed.
We might think that judgement of this sort must be reserved for true evil – murderers, rapists and the like. Surely it doesn’t apply to us who are largely good, right? We volunteer and speak up against social injustice; we’re politically active, generally law-abiding Singaporeans. But God knows the entirety of our past records, our deepest thoughts, the recesses of our hearts, and the secret sins we indulge. God knows. And He not only know and sees them all, but He is personally offended by all the wrong He sees.
God is coming in personal judgement. The truth is that God stands over all creation not in the fashion of a disinterested engineers letting it run on its own, but as the loving Father of all creation. At the most fundamental level, all the sins we’ve committed – the lies we tell one another, the relationships we ruin and abuse, the way we treat creation and migrant workers and participate in systems of inequality and injustice – are most offensive, first of all, to God Himself. They reflect our rebellion against His rule and our rejection of His person. And in this rebellion against Him, we are His enemies. Let us not think for a moment that the harsh judgement in this passage is reserved just for the really bad people. Let this passage awaken us to how seriously God treats sin – sin we know all too well.
Most of us don’t think about judgement, and the preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones has this to say:
“What accounts for the fact that so few ever speak of the judgement in these days is that they do not believe in God. They think that they do, but when you come to analyse their belief you find that it is but a projection of certain ideas which happen to please them. Their god is something which they created themselves, a being who is always prepared to oblige and excuse them. They do not worship him with awe and respect, indeed they do not worship him at all. They reveal that their so-called god is no god at all in their talk. For they are forever saying that “they simply cannot believe that God will punish the unrepentant sinner to all eternity, and this and that”. They cannot believe that God will do so, therefore they draw the conclusion that God does not and will not. In other words, God does what they believe he ought to do or not do. What a false and blasphemous conception of God! How utterly untrue and unworthy! Such is the new paganism of today.”
Joel breaks this false image of God through and through.
We may wonder if all this talk about judgement is not inclusive of tolerant enough, but inclusivity really doesn’t matter in this instance. The God who sees with pure eyes sees past all of our excuses. In the Bible, sin is not just the bad things that people do, but the entire posture of our hearts, where we do not give God the glory that is due to His name. In every instance that we elevate anything above the place of God, we are sinning against Him and deserving of His condemnation. Joel calls us to think clearly about this. What would it look like for all of us to think seriously about God’s judgement? Do we tremble seeing the seriousness of sin – not just at the severity of its consequence, but at its repulsiveness to God? Even Joel is stunned at the sight of the “multitudes, multitudes” (Joel 3:14) who will gather to be judged on that day.
As we ponder this impending judgement, we respond with fear, reverence, and worry about our eternal condition – and rightly so. But our response has to go beyond these. The day of the Lord is described as a great and awesome day (Joel 2:31). The more we reflect on the severity of God in judgement, the more we should be filled not just with fear, but with awe. This is not the kind of admiration we feel when we see someone do a cool yo-yo trick, but the sense of awe we get when we stand before a vast ocean and hear the crashing waves, when we behold thunder that shakes our souls. It is an awe that leaves us deeply convicted of our place as a creature before our Creator. It brings into clear focus just how small we are and how big God is.
When the day of the Lord comes, nothing will mask its awesomeness. None of the 1001 ways we have cultivated to distract ourselves from the current crisis – whether it’s binge watching TV shows, being engrossed in political gossips and happenings, or other frivolous things we enjoy – will protect us from facing the reality of that day. When the Lord roars from Zion, the heavens and the earth will quake (Joel 3:16). All of us will be called to account before a holy God who judges His enemies with holy and terrible power.
Joel 3 calls for us to hit pause and think seriously: Judgement is real and it is more severe than we can ever imagine. The pictures we see in Joel and Revelation are but metaphors of the actual experience to come. It ought to shake our souls, especially when we realise how complicit we are in our sin.
But thankfully, Joel 3 doesn’t just leave us with awe and fear. Joel shows us that there is hope. We’ve seen this idea of the sun and moon darkened and the stars withdrawing their shining (Joel 3:15) in Joel 2:31 as well. And what follows in Joel 2:32 gives us great hope: “And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.” Similarly, in Joel 3:16, after God thunders in judgement, we see beautiful words – the LORD is a refuge to His people, a stronghold to the people of Israel. In this text, salvation stands at both ends of judgement. As grave as God’s wrath is, greater still is His good pleasure to save His people.
The way salvation is described as being hidden in God is wonderful. When we hide in something, our only hope of protection is the strength of the vessel we are hidden in; nothing of our own effort, good or bad, counts anymore. Here, God is the vessel in which His people are hidden – our refuge and our stronghold.
In the same way that Jesus cranks the knob of God’s judgement on His enemies to its maximum, He also cranks the knob of salvation of God’s people to its fullness on the cross. In the New Testament, we see that our lives are hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3) and that He has come to give His people eternal life and nothing can snatch us out of His hand (John 10).
This is the good news – that we are powerless to save ourselves, but Jesus Christ is a refuge for all who will respond in repentance and faith. In dying the death we should have died, he took our sins upon himself and bore the wrath of God – the terrible wrath we’ve just seen in Joel 3. Jesus Christ took that upon Himself, that we would find our refuge in Him. And He calls us to respond to Him today by turning away from sin and placing the weight of our life on Him. Find Him to be our sure refuge we can hide in from the wrath of God.
This refuge is not mere architecture but the person of Jesus Christ. Another way of saying “personal architecture” or “personal communion” is “home”. Repentance is not merely the dutiful bowing of the knee in reverence and awe. Godly repentance is the response of a homesick heart. God’s call for repentance is really a call for us to come home. Hear the words of Christ today – He is here to bring us home.
In the past weeks, we have been bombarded and saturated with information and distracted by so many things. Let us pause and sit in this truth – that as great as God’s wrath is, Jesus is calling us home. Respond to Him in repentance and faith.
In the next verses, we get a sense of the colours and the smells of this home, a sense of the tone and timbre of our salvation.
(C) ASTOUNDING GLORY PROMISED WITH GOD’S PRESENCE (Joel 3:17-21)
While God’s enemies are being gathered for judgement, God’s people are promised a glorious future. Joel 3:17-21 give us a more complete picture of this salvation in 3 types of promised blessing. These don’t just describe the immediate events after the exile, but a more perfected restoration, just as Joel 3:1-16 describe a more perfected judgement. When we look back in history, we realise these verses have been partially fulfilled in the return of the exiles and God’s Spirit being poured out on His people, but there’s more, and their complete fulfilment is still ahead of us.
The first type of blessing is purity. To Israel, it looked like strangers never passing through the land again (Joel 3:17). This wasn’t xenophobia; when God’s people mixed and mingled with the nations, they were defiled (Ps 106:35-38). Contrasting that, in this glorious future, the purity of God’s people will be preserved. We will be made holy through and through, freed from the struggle against the sin that plague us!
The second type of blessing is prosperity. The mountains shall drop sweet wine, the hills shall flow with milk, all the streambeds of Judah shall flow with water, and a fountain shall come forth from the house of the LORD and water the valley of Shittim, which was an arid desert place (Joel 3:18). Even deserts one would consider worthless and beyond repair will enjoy God’s wonderful provision and prosperity; even the areas we deem unredeemable or unrestorable will know God’s fullness.
Finally, the third type of blessing and the cornerstone of this glorious future is God’s presence. Bookending this section is the repeated promise that God will dwell in Zion (Joel 3:17a, 21b).
God’s purity, prosperity and presence will be with Judah and Jerusalem forever, to all generations (Joel 3:20). Everything we enjoy now, as good and holy as they might be, will pass in this life – if not with the passing of time and age, then with trouble; if not with trouble, then with calamity; if not with calamity, then with death. But this glorious future for God’s people will be established forever.
These blessings are given to God’s people not by their merit or anything they have done, but so that they will know that He is the LORD their God (Joel 3:17a). This stands in contrast to judgement, where God lays out clear reasons for judgement. These blessings are completely undeserved; they are God’s grace to His people.
In response, we worship God, rejoicing in every experience of His presence, enjoying communion with Him, and growing in our affections for heaven. Such a glorious future awaits God’s people, and the invitation for us today is to turn to it and fix our eyes on it. In the midst of calamity, we repent and place our faith and hope in God, and not in the treasures of this world.
Rev 21:1-5 paints a beautiful picture of God’s presence with His people and blessing on them in the glorious future to come:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true