Doug McMasters: Isaiah, jeremiah.
Doug McMasters: Lamentations Ezekiel, daniel, hosea, joel, amos, obadiah, jonah, micah.
Doug McMasters: If you get any further, you've gone too far.
Doug McMasters: What's that?
Doug McMasters: Did I forget name?
Doug McMasters: I did dear me.
Doug McMasters: Get any further, you've gone too far.
Doug McMasters: What's that?
Doug McMasters: Nahum, did I forget Nahum?
Doug McMasters: I did.
Doug McMasters: Dear me.
Doug McMasters: Poor Nahum, he never gets any respect.
Doug McMasters: That's because you're speaking on Nahum, right?
Doug McMasters: Yeah, on the first day of november in 1755, a very powerful earthquake hit lisbon, portugal.
Doug McMasters: The earthquake came in the morning, 9, 40 in the morning, lasted for about six minutes.
Doug McMasters: 12 000 buildings were destroyed in that six-minute earthquake and upwards of 60,000 people were killed, not only by the earthquake and the demolition of all those buildings, but also by a tidal wave that hit Lisbon.
Doug McMasters: There was also a fire that raged throughout the city for six days before it was able to be extinguished.
Doug McMasters: That's a horrific situation to be in.
Doug McMasters: People responded as people often do, by trying to find a reason for what happened.
Doug McMasters: And in England, protestant England, looked at the destruction of Lisbon and said well, it must have been because they were all Catholics.
Doug McMasters: Pretty tragic way to come to a conclusion, made just as bad by the fact that in Lisbon, the Roman Catholic clergy thought it was because there were some Protestants being harbored in some of the neighborhoods of Lisbon, and so they decided to hunt them down, and some of them were executed.
Doug McMasters: A tragedy that happened, a tragedy that people were demanding an answer to and coming up to their own conclusions based upon their own biases right, coming up to their own conclusions based upon their own biases, right?
Doug McMasters: How many times do we ask the question why, whenever life's troubles come?
Doug McMasters: I don't think I'd be too far from the answer if I just said always right.
Doug McMasters: Trying to find sense in the middle of life's difficulties and calamities is just something we feel driven toward, even Christ, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Doug McMasters: A question that came even from the lips of our Savior.
Doug McMasters: Finding an answer is sometimes extremely difficult, if not impossible, no matter how hard we look for one, but in the book of Joel we find out that, though we may not get an answer to that why question, there's still things that we can learn, things that will be helpful for us not only to understand outside of ourselves, but also how to respond within ourselves, to go beyond just asking the why question.
Doug McMasters: And so let's go to Joel, chapter one, and just sort of enter in to this prophecy.
Doug McMasters: Joel speaks very briefly and very well sparse is a kind way to put it In verse one, the word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel.
Doug McMasters: That's all we know about Joel.
Doug McMasters: We don't know where he grew up, we don't know where he lived, we don't even know when he lived.
Doug McMasters: All we know is name and his dad's name.
Doug McMasters: That's it.
Doug McMasters: No other place in scripture talks about him.
Doug McMasters: And after this very brief and sparse introduction, he jumps right in and gives us a message that his message is meant to be an enduring message.
Doug McMasters: Hear this, you elders, listen all you inhabitants of the land.
Doug McMasters: Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your ancestors?
Doug McMasters: Tell your children about it, let your children tell their children and their children, the next generation.
Doug McMasters: So something's happened, and Joel is summoning all the older people and all people in that generation to listen to what he has to say and to make sure that they pass it on, that they take it to their children and their children's children and their children's children's children.
Doug McMasters: I think, if I got that right, and so we're already grasping something of what Joel wants to communicate to her here there's some extraordinary experience that's been brought into this generation, the significance of which is meant not only to be a lifetime lesson for them, but for generational lessons Well past their lifetime, to the benefit of those who have not yet been born, a lesson that will carry on beyond their grave.
Doug McMasters: And so the prophet is telling us that he's got not only a prophecy to give and remember.
Doug McMasters: When we talked about prophecy, even though it talks about the future, it's meant to be for the present generation's.
Doug McMasters: Amendment, right?
Doug McMasters: We said that that was one of the characteristics of prophecy.
Doug McMasters: This is more than that, right.
Doug McMasters: This is generational teaching, generational influence.
Doug McMasters: But when we read Joel, it seems like Joel's kind of holding back some information here.
Doug McMasters: He's kind of cagey about a lot of details.
Doug McMasters: There's a lot of specifics that other prophecies fill up with that Joel doesn't even have.
Doug McMasters: What was the first verse of Isaiah 1?
Doug McMasters: Do you remember the vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem that Isaiah, son of Amoz, saw during the reigns of King Uzziah, jotham Ahaz and Hezekiah of Judah?
Doug McMasters: Joel doesn't mention a single king.
Doug McMasters: When was he a prophet?
Doug McMasters: We do not know.
Doug McMasters: He doesn't talk about the major powers of Assyria or Babylon or Egypt at all.
Doug McMasters: The question about when Joel prophesied is about a 200 to 300 year range.
Doug McMasters: That's a lot of time, and the fact that Joel is so restrictive in giving this information might be an important characteristic about what we're meant to learn here, and we'll get to that.
Doug McMasters: Some people suggest and I think they're absolutely correct that Joel deliberately omits these specifics so that his message might be easily transferable from generation to generation, and we'll explore more about that in a minute.
Doug McMasters: But before we do, we need to address the elephant in the room, or should I say the locust on the lounge chair right.
Doug McMasters: Bob Wepler and I were talking earlier today and he said you're going to talk about the locust and I said well, yeah, well, for some people they're a plague and for others they're lunch, you know, and for others their lunch.
Doug McMasters: But Joel has a lot to say about locusts, doesn't he?
Doug McMasters: You can't read the book of Joel without thinking locusts, and Joel has kind of a threefold vision over the three chapters, and the first part of Joel's vision concerns a locust plague which has recently swept over the promised land.
Doug McMasters: Take a look at verses 4 to 13.
Doug McMasters: What the devouring locust has left, the swarming locust have eaten.
Doug McMasters: What the swarming locust has left, the young locust has eaten.
Doug McMasters: And what the young locust has left.
Doug McMasters: The destroying locust has eaten, okay, four types of locusts.
Doug McMasters: And then wake up, you drunkards and weep.
Doug McMasters: Wail, all you wine drinkers, because the sweet wine for which it has been for it has been taken from your mouth.
Doug McMasters: Why?
Doug McMasters: Because the locust ate all the crops.
Doug McMasters: That's why, for nation has invaded my land, powerful and without number.
Doug McMasters: Its teeth are the teeth of a lion and its fangs of a lioness.
Doug McMasters: It's devastated my grapevine and splintered my fig tree.
Doug McMasters: It has stripped off its bark and thrown it away.
Doug McMasters: Its branches have turned white.
Doug McMasters: Grieve you young women dressed in sackcloth mourning for the husband of her youth.
Doug McMasters: Grain and drink offering have been cut off from the house of the Lord.
Doug McMasters: The priests or ministers of the Lord mourn.
Doug McMasters: The fields are destroyed, the land grieves, the grain is destroyed, the new wine is dried up, the fresh oil fails.
Doug McMasters: Be ashamed, you farmers.
Doug McMasters: Wail, you vine dressers, over the wheat and the barley, because the harvest of the field has perished.
Doug McMasters: The grapevine is dried up and the fig tree is withered.
Doug McMasters: The pomegranate, the date palm, the apple, all the trees of the orchard have withered.
Doug McMasters: Indeed, human joy has dried up.
Doug McMasters: That's devastating.
Doug McMasters: When the pandemic hit, we all cringed over the idea that we might not have enough.
Doug McMasters: You know, toilet paper.
Doug McMasters: These people have nothing, and you can live without certain types of paper, but you can't live without food.
Doug McMasters: And so Joel prophesies about this plague and the desolation that's resulted because of it, and researchers talk about locusts.
Doug McMasters: I don't know a lot about locusts.
Doug McMasters: When I was a boy I used to catch grasshoppers and let them loose in my mom's house and she didn't like that much.
Doug McMasters: But I don't know a whole lot about locusts.
Doug McMasters: But they do say that locusts can act exactly like this.
Doug McMasters: One person said that the sky can be blackened to an altitude of 5,000 feet when the locusts swarm, darkening the sky, and that a swarm contained over a billion locusts and that combined weight can be 3 million pounds, that they can travel upwards of 60 miles a day, eating everything in their wake.
Doug McMasters: And in 1959, a locust plague hit Ethiopia that lasted for six weeks, and someone estimated that the locust consumed enough food to feed a million people for a year in six weeks' time people for a year in six weeks time.
Doug McMasters: So Joel brings this locust infestation and the desolation of it to bear and talks about it being something so horrific that the lesson of it needed to be remembered, and we'll get to that in a moment.
Doug McMasters: He skips ahead and we'll skip over part of chapter one into chapter two, and when he reintroduces the locust again, we find ourselves with some questions about what he's actually driving at.
Doug McMasters: Chapter two, in verse one, blow the ram's horn in Zion.
Doug McMasters: Sound the alarm on my holy mountain.
Doug McMasters: Let all the residents of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming.
Doug McMasters: In fact, it is near a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and total darkness, like the dawn spreading over the mountain.
Doug McMasters: A great and strong people appear such as never existed in ages past, will never again in all the generations to come.
Doug McMasters: A fire devours in front of them, and it goes on into this discussion, which leads people to wonder exactly what Joel is driving at.
Doug McMasters: Some people think that what we're reading here is another description of the locust infestation of chapter 1, or perhaps another round of locust infestation, and what they do is they deny the metaphorical characteristics of this chapter and say that this is locusts here.
Doug McMasters: Others see it as locusts as a metaphor for the enemies of the people of Israel, maybe one of the surrounding peoples, or maybe metaphorical for all of them combined together, as sort of the locust infestation, as a warning about a future invasion of another nation that's coming in.
Doug McMasters: But then there's the approach that most commentators rely upon, and that is to say that this is an extended metaphor, reaching from chapter one into chapter two, that uses locusts to talk about god's army coming to bring judgment, the impending day of the lord, the day of judgment, in which the lord himself will be the head of his own heavenly army in holy war against evil.
Doug McMasters: And if you take a look at chapter 2 and verse 11, you read the Lord makes his voice heard in the presence of his army.
Doug McMasters: His camp is very large.
Doug McMasters: Those who carry out his command are powerful.
Doug McMasters: Indeed, the day of the Lord is terrible and dreadful.
Doug McMasters: Who can endure it?
Doug McMasters: So it certainly has, I think, some biblical warrant there.
Doug McMasters: One commentator put it this way.
Doug McMasters: He said that the motif, as he put it, of the locust plague is taken up and it's transposed into a higher key and then it's given a more strident setting and a faster pace, because it's the image of the wrath of God coming.
Doug McMasters: What are we to learn from this?
Doug McMasters: As we step into the book of Joel, this, pay attention folks.
Doug McMasters: Learn a lesson here.
Doug McMasters: Learn it not only for yourselves but for generations after you, and make sure this lesson is so well learned and so well communicated that it can go beyond you and beyond your children, and beyond your children's children, even into generations further.
Doug McMasters: Yet One of the things that we can learn is that calamity comes from the Lord, calamity comes from the Lord.
Doug McMasters: Now, that doesn't seem very helpful at first, but it can be helpful if we walk through this first, but it can be helpful if we walk through this.
Doug McMasters: One of the things that Joel repeats five times in this short three-chapter book is the phrase the day of the Lord.
Doug McMasters: Right, the day of the Lord.
Doug McMasters: Chapter 1 and verse 15, woe because of that day, for the day of the Lord is near and it will come as devastation from the Almighty.
Doug McMasters: Chapter 2, verses 1 and 2, blow the ram's horn in Zion, sound the alarm on my holy mountain.
Doug McMasters: Let all the residents of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming.
Doug McMasters: Verse 2 describes it.
Doug McMasters: Of the Lord is coming.
Doug McMasters: Verse 2 describes it.
Doug McMasters: Chapter 2 and verse 10, the earth quakes before them, the sun shakes the sun and moon grow dark.
Doug McMasters: And then, in verse 11,.
Doug McMasters: He continues to speak and he says the day of the Lord is terrible and dreadful.
Doug McMasters: Chapter 2, verses 30 and 31.
Doug McMasters: I will display wonders in the heavens and on the earth blood, fire and columns of smoke.
Doug McMasters: The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.
Doug McMasters: Then, in chapter 3 and verses 15 and 16, sun and moon will go dark and the stars will cease their shining.
Doug McMasters: The Lord will roar from Zion and make his voice heard from Jerusalem.
Doug McMasters: Heaven and earth will shake, but the Lord will be a refuge for his people, a stronghold of the Israelites.
Doug McMasters: And then he goes on into verse 18 and says in that day, in that day.
Doug McMasters: So we see the Lord's day here mentioned over and over and over again.
Doug McMasters: It's an expression that's used 20 times in the whole Old Testament, five of those times here.
Doug McMasters: Now there are other phrases that day, those days, that time, the day which get used a lot more, but this phraseology, this clear phrase, only gets used a few times, and Joel uses it more than anybody.
Doug McMasters: What is it talking about?
Doug McMasters: What is this day of the Lord?
Doug McMasters: Not to be too specific, because I think it has application in different ways means that it is a day or an era or a season that is predominantly one characterized by God's activity.
Doug McMasters: It's his day.
Doug McMasters: It's God's day, in which he's acting in a very unusual and dramatically direct fashion.
Doug McMasters: Does that make sense?
Doug McMasters: It's his day, in which he is the one to be on in view when it happens.
Doug McMasters: It could be for judgment, or it could be for salvation, but it's his day, right, and we can say that to our kids, right, don't we?
Doug McMasters: Hey, it's your birthday, it's your day, right.
Doug McMasters: We'd say to our sons what do you want for?
Doug McMasters: Hey, it's your birthday, it's your day, right?
Doug McMasters: We'd say to our sons what do you want for dinner?
Doug McMasters: That was one of their birthday gifts.
Doug McMasters: They could choose the birthday dinner.
Doug McMasters: And no, it wasn't Ruth, chris, it was.
Doug McMasters: You know what am I going to cook for you, right?
Doug McMasters: So it's their day, though it's your birthday.
Doug McMasters: This is the Lord's day.
Doug McMasters: This is something he is making himself known in, and one of those things that we find in the book of Joel is that the day of calamity is the Lord's day.
Doug McMasters: This locust invasion the people moaned the tragedy of it, but they only moaned the tragedy of it from a horizontal point of view.
Doug McMasters: The crops have failed.
Doug McMasters: We've had bad seasons before.
Doug McMasters: The drunkards cried, but they didn't cry to heaven.
Doug McMasters: The farmers went to the banks and said I need an extension of my loan, metaphorically but they didn't cry to heaven.
Doug McMasters: People were seeing all of this the stripped grapevines, so little grain that it even disrupted their worship.
Doug McMasters: They couldn't even worship the way they were used to worshiping because all of that was gone.
Doug McMasters: They couldn't even make bread to eat, let alone to offer, and all this devastation was seen as simply a natural disaster, until Joel intervenes and says Wait a second.
Doug McMasters: Behind all of this, it's the Lord's day.
Doug McMasters: It's the day of the Lord acting here, reminding them that this invasion had come from God to them and he was wanting to get their attention, that he brought this upon them for a reason he alerts them to listen and he calls them to gather, and he wants them to learn that this is not just something to moan about your immediate and your personal loss, or even to think about it as perhaps a societal difficulty to try to collectively overcome, but rather there was something more that they needed to realize is that God was waking them up, and I say that when you think of the old covenant way of thinking about the land and the fruit of the land.
Doug McMasters: What did God say when he told the people in Egypt I'm taking you to a land full of milk and honey.
Doug McMasters: I'm taking you to a place of prosperity.
Doug McMasters: I'm taking you to a place you don't even have to.
Doug McMasters: It's all turnkey, the houses are turnkey, the fields are turnkey, the harvests are ready, everything's heavy with fruit.
Doug McMasters: You just come in and take it as I move you in there.
Doug McMasters: It's there for you to enjoy and realize.
Doug McMasters: When it's there, it comes because of God's bountiful blessing upon you and conversely, when it's gone, it's gone because God has taken the gifts away.
Doug McMasters: So this was more than just an agricultural problem.
Doug McMasters: This was not just a seasonal dry time.
Doug McMasters: This wasn't just a let's fix this together thing.
Doug McMasters: This was God saying I've withdrawn my hand of blessing from you.
Doug McMasters: And so they needed to think about that.
Doug McMasters: That looking at this disaster was to think Godward.
Doug McMasters: That doesn't mean he's the author of sin, but he uses evil things for his purposes.
Doug McMasters: But he uses evil things for his purposes and there's not a single Christian that can argue with that because evil hands took our Lord Jesus and crucified him, but it was by God's determination and purpose to use those evil deeds to save.
Doug McMasters: So we find this calamity given in this time so that people would recognize something about God.
Doug McMasters: And one of the questions that arises is will Judah repent?
Doug McMasters: Will they learn this lesson?
Doug McMasters: Will they do more than just moan over their losses?
Doug McMasters: Will they move toward repentance?
Doug McMasters: Will they listen?
Doug McMasters: And that leads us to the second lesson.
Doug McMasters: That calamity, first of all, shows us that God is involved in the hard times.
Doug McMasters: God is involved in the hard times, but also that the purposes are meant to be a responsiveness on our part, to learn, to listen, to remember, to repent and to return to God.
Doug McMasters: So let's take a look at verse 12 and 13 of chapter 1.
Doug McMasters: The grapevine's dried up, the fig tree is withered, the pomegranate, the day palm, the apple, all the trees of the orchard have withered.
Doug McMasters: Human joy is dried up Verse 13.
Doug McMasters: Dress in sackcloth and lament, you, priest, wail you ministers of the altar Verse 13.
Doug McMasters: Will they listen?
Doug McMasters: And that brings us back to the lack of detail in Joel.
Doug McMasters: Yes, this situation is detailed and yes, the call to repentance is detailed, but there's a lot of other stuff that's not mentioned in Joel.
Doug McMasters: That's mentioned in other places, like I said, and it's because Joel stands as a template, if you will, of how to respond to calamity as one of God's people.
Doug McMasters: More detail in it would make us sort of box it into categories too neatly and too tightly, but the fact that it's more general in its demonstrations and discussions means that we can carry it into more places and use it as a template of response.
Doug McMasters: So when natural disasters happened in the community of Israel, there were three things that typically happened.
Doug McMasters: First of all, the people were summoned together to a fast at the sanctuary.
Doug McMasters: Let me just read a couple passages.
Doug McMasters: First of all, 2 Chronicles 20, in verses 3 to 5.
Doug McMasters: Jehoshaphat was afraid and he resolved to seek the Lord.
Doug McMasters: Then he proclaimed a fast for all Judah who gathered to seek the Lord.
Doug McMasters: They even came from all the cities of Judah to seek him.
Doug McMasters: Then Jehoshaphat stood in the assembly of Judah and Jerusalem in the Lord's temple before the new court.
Doug McMasters: They called an assembly, another one in Ezra 8, I proclaim to fast by the Ahava river so that we might humble ourselves before our God and ask him for a safe journey for us, our dependents and all our possessions.
Doug McMasters: When calamity hits, god's people need to rise up and gather together in this convocation of prayer.
Doug McMasters: And so what does Joel call for?
Doug McMasters: We read it together Verse 13 and 14.
Doug McMasters: Verse 14, particularly, announce a sacred fast, proclaim a solemn assembly, gather the elders, all the residents of the land at the house of the lord, your god, and cry out to the lord.
Doug McMasters: What do you do when you face calamity?
Doug McMasters: You humble your heart, you realize that it's bigger than you, you recognize that in some manner though you may not know all the details of it God is in this somehow, and that one of the responses if not the first response, is not to ask why, but to go to the Lord and call out to Him.
Doug McMasters: The second thing that happens when calamity strikes is that the people represent their complaint or their lament to the Lord in prayer, as they remind themselves not only of his judgments but also of his mercies.
Doug McMasters: Take a look at verse 12 to 17 again In chapter two.
Doug McMasters: I'm sorry, even now, this is the Lord's declaration Turn to me with all your heart, with fastings, weepings and mournings.
Doug McMasters: Tear your hearts, not just your clothes, and return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in faithful love, and he relents from sending disaster.
Doug McMasters: Who knows, he may turn and relent and leave a blessing behind him.
Doug McMasters: And you can offer a grain offering and a drink offering to the Lord, your God.
Doug McMasters: So here is not only gathering, but remembering who God is in the midst of this and bringing that before him.
Doug McMasters: Lord, be merciful to me in the midst of this.
Doug McMasters: And then to receive an answer, either of welcome or of woe.
Doug McMasters: And so the people would pray and they'd often would receive a response.
Doug McMasters: And in Joel we have that in chapter 2, in verse 18.
Doug McMasters: After calling together in verse 17, let them say have pity on your people, lord, do not make your inheritance a disgrace, an object of scorn among the nations.
Doug McMasters: Why should it be said among the peoples?
Doug McMasters: Where is their God?
Doug McMasters: Then the Lord became jealous for his land and spared his people.
Doug McMasters: And the Lord answered his people look, I'm about to send you grain, new wine, fresh oil.
Doug McMasters: You will be satiated with them.
Doug McMasters: I will no longer make you a disgrace to the nations.
Doug McMasters: So here is this template of what to do in calamity Gather before the Lord, cry out to God, remember his holiness, but remember his mercies and wait for an answer and wait for an answer, an answer that would come.
Doug McMasters: And so Joel here serves as a pattern that we're to follow when we face trouble, learning that calamity comes from God and our response is to go to God, not just demand a reply of an answer from him.
Doug McMasters: And so when we face troubles, it may not be a locust famine, may not be a plague, but it might be a calamity that totally wracks our hearts and minds with trouble and disrupts our life.
Doug McMasters: Remember the Lord is behind even that and remember Him with humble hearts.
Doug McMasters: Remember His mercies as well as His judgments.
Doug McMasters: Remember to seek an answer, to wait to see if God might turn even the trouble back into a flourishing of joy one day.
Doug McMasters: This is what we do with our failures, our distresses, our calamities.
Doug McMasters: A friend of mine was brought through a time like this, and this is what he said, and I'll quote to you what he said to me.
Doug McMasters: He said when I reached the darkest point I realized I had no place to go but back to God and I wouldn't want to go what I went through again.
Doug McMasters: But I wouldn't trade anything I learned, or I wouldn't trade anything that what I learned for anything else in the world.
Doug McMasters: He went back to God with that.
Doug McMasters: And this leads into another point that Joel is telling us that calamity is overshadowed by grace, despite the sin of the people and despite the calamity that came.
Doug McMasters: We read in here not just in chapter 2, but restoration and blessing, beyond the chastising discipline, that he's going to do that just as surely as he brought the locusts to bear upon the crops.
Doug McMasters: And that too would be his day.
Doug McMasters: His day would also include that Tear your hearts and not your clothes, and return to the Lord, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in faithful love, and he relents from sending disaster.
Doug McMasters: Joel, chapter 2 and verse 13.
Doug McMasters: This is the positive motivation that God is a God of grace, compassion and patience.
Doug McMasters: Time and time and time again with the people of Israel, he speaks these words in the face of their abject denial of him.
Doug McMasters: But calamity is also something else.
Doug McMasters: It's a warning of a future day of judgment.
Doug McMasters: And that brings us to chapter three.
Doug McMasters: Instead of the people of Israel being, or Judah being, called into a conversation, now the nations are called to a place, and it's called the Valley of Jehoshaphat.
Doug McMasters: Jehoshaphat, without going into details, won a really big battle in a particular place where he was able to take victory over a number of nations that had gathered against God's people.
Doug McMasters: And so these nations are now gathered back to the same valley and they're sort of taunted.
Doug McMasters: Beat your plows into swords in verse 10.
Doug McMasters: Your pruning knives into spears Let every weakling say I am a warrior.
Doug McMasters: Come quickly.
Doug McMasters: All you surrounding nations Gather yourselves, bring your warriors here.
Doug McMasters: Come on, let's fight.
Doug McMasters: Are you ready to rumble?
Doug McMasters: Come to the valley of Jehoshaphat, for there I will sit down and judge all the surrounding nations.
Doug McMasters: And instead of the sound of battle, there's going to be the sound of harvest Verse 13.
Doug McMasters: Swing the sickle because the harvest is ripe.
Doug McMasters: Come and trample the grapes because the wine press is full.
Doug McMasters: The wine vats overflow because of the wickedness of the nation is extreme.
Doug McMasters: What you're going to hear in the valley of Jehoshaphat is not might against might, but God slicing down the nations like he's taking a harvest.
Doug McMasters: The swoosh of the sickle as it cuts all the stalks down and he gathers them all into his barn.
Doug McMasters: They're his Calamity in our day is meant to be a warning sign that you haven't seen anything yet In the coming day of judgment that no person can stand against.
Doug McMasters: And so the people of God were to learn their lessons, so they could all be messengers of a lesson from generation to generation to generation to generation that calamity came to God's people to remedy their hearts.
Doug McMasters: But calamity came so that they might remind the world that God is a God of justice and righteousness and that they can't just watch upon his people suffer.
Doug McMasters: They need to think about their own eternal state.
Doug McMasters: So the people of God here are seen to be received while the heavens and the earth shake and the moon turns dark and the harvest sickle flies through the air and cuts down the nations.
Doug McMasters: And so this is why, when we finished this morning, we read together and spoke together a benediction from Peter, in which Peter said this, talking about the calamity that befell the world in the flood, he said through these, the world of that time perished when it was flooded.
Doug McMasters: By the same word, the present heavens and earth are stored up for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.
Doug McMasters: Dear friends, do not overlook this one fact With the Lord, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like one day.
Doug McMasters: The Lord does not delay his promises.
Doug McMasters: Some understand delay, but he's patient with you, not anyone wanting anyone to perish, but all to come to repentance.
Doug McMasters: But the day of the Lord, huh, did you hear that the day of the Lord will come?
Doug McMasters: Like a thief?
Doug McMasters: On that day, the Lord's coming.
Doug McMasters: Still, it happened then.
Doug McMasters: The day of the Lord's happening in that day also.
Doug McMasters: But Joel also gives us something else to think about, and in chapter 2, he says this, and we'll finish with this After this, in verse 28, I will pour out my spirit on all humanity.
Doug McMasters: Then your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men will have dreams and your young men will see visions.
Doug McMasters: And I will even pour out my spirit on the male and female servants.
Doug McMasters: In those days I will display wonders in the heavens and on the earth blood, fire and columns of smoke.
Doug McMasters: The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.
Doug McMasters: Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, for there will be an escape for those of Mount Zion and Jerusalem, as the Lord promised.
Doug McMasters: Among the survivors the Lord calls.
Doug McMasters: The day of the Lord is also today, in a day of deliverance, of gospel proclamation before the coming day of the Lord of judgment, and the wondrous word is now is the accepted time.
Doug McMasters: Today is the day of salvation.
Doug McMasters: The day of the Lord is today too, in which he's on display in receiving the repentant, not just of Jerusalem and Judah, but of all people who find hope on that mountain where Christ himself was crucified.
Doug McMasters: That's a wonderful message of Joel, isn't it?
Doug McMasters: It's sobering, even shocking, but it is wonderfully full of salvation as much as it is of judgment.
Doug McMasters: So let's pray together.
Doug McMasters: Father, thank you for your word.
Doug McMasters: As we read these little books, we find them so full of truth about you and understanding, about life and Lord.
Doug McMasters: Though we may not have all of our answers the buzz of questions still running fervently through our head you give us enough to know what to do when trouble comes.
Doug McMasters: Lord, I pray that it might be helpful for us, in the midst of our difficulties and challenges, to know that we can look to you and that we know how to come before you with humility, with remembering, with repentance, with hope.
Doug McMasters: But we also realize that we are at the crossroads of an eternal day in which all people will be brought before a holy God and there's only one thing that will be in view.
Doug McMasters: Have they come to the Lord Jesus Christ, have they been received by grace, or will they face that day with the foreboding, terrifying words depart from me, you evildoers.
Doug McMasters: I never knew you, and so, lord, help us as your people.
Doug McMasters: I never knew you, and so, lord, help us as your people, not only to learn lessons for ourselves, but to speak a lesson to our generation, just like Joel told us to do, to remember these things and to bring them into generation after generation until you close the days by the day of the Lord.
Doug McMasters: And we pray this in Christ's name.
Doug McMasters: Amen, all right.