Downside Up

As most of you know, I’m a news junkie. Especially national and international news. Right now the 2024 presidential election is front and center on all the news feeds. The border crisis vies with the Ukrainian War for second place, while hovering ominously in the background is the growing threat from China, whether it’s Taiwan, the South Asia Sea, the theft of technology, espionage, or a potential economic collapse. And the primary public reaction to the last two is typically American: we go all ostrich and ignore it.

Americans have this bizarre notion that war is an anomaly, an unforgivable interruption in what ought to be an eternally peaceful and prosperous existence. Whenever they can get away with it, people everywhere have a strong tendency to hide their heads in the sand. And Americans have more excuse than most. We’ve been pretty prosperous and peaceful for a long time, compared to a lot of other places in the world. On the other hand, we’ve had a war in every generation. Our country began with the revolution, of course, and then the war of 1812. Thirty years later the Mexican-American War was followed rather closely by the Civil War, followed by the Spanish-American war, World War I, etc. etc. Even the Cold War wasn’t what you could really call peaceful. Remember the duck-and-cover air raids and the Cuban missile crisis? But we always forget. On 9/11, most people were really surprised. I wasn’t. Well, at the magnitude, yes. But Tom Clancy had recently written a best-seller with a jet flying into the Capitol building, and back before terrorism we had hijackings. And when I was a kid living in South America, there was an epidemic of bombing USIA binational centers all over the world. Ours was one of them. As a matter of fact, my Dad’s center was hit twice. Every generation has its enemies and its terrors.

But every time disaster strikes, whether it’s natural or man-made, our leaders shout, “Nothing like this has ever happened before!” We may mourn for her fallen and flock to our churches, we may call our stockbrokers with orders to sell. There’s a brief spurt of interest in fire-proofing - or flood-proofing - or chemical attack-proofing - our homes. Emergency rooms put new procedures in place. But you know what? it doesn’t last. People get tired of living at a peak of preparedness. And too many believe with Henry Ford that “History is bunk.” And so the next calamity is just as big a surprise as the one before.

That’s why no one really knows when Joel lived and wrote. Because every generation, in both Israel and Judah, had its own disaster - or two - and so Joel’s words were always applicable. No one really even knows who the invaders he was talking about were. In the first chapter of this book, a horrifying description of the destruction of the land by a mighty army of locusts: “What the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten, and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten.” [Joel 1:4]

Some scholars keep it simple, saying that Joel is only talking about a plague of locusts. But locusts came around periodically, it was hardly unheard of... so others say the locusts are a metaphor for a real invading army, maybe the Babylonians - who eventually did conquer the city of Jerusalem. Of course, it could have been the Assyrians rom the previous generation, who were even worse than the Babylonians. But whoever the enemy was, it was really scary. “A nation has invaded my land, powerful and innumerable; its teeth are lions’ teeth, and it has the fangs of a lioness...a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.” [Joel 1:6, 2-2]

Whichever kind of attack they had suffered, an army’s weapons crushing walls and buildings and people, or nature itself getting revenge on its occupiers, the prophet Joel had heard from God. This was, he proclaimed, the Day of the Lord, the day of reckoning, the day that the people would be judged and found wanting. And it’s worth our taking a second look at it, because the more we do the more we find there is to learn from it.

As I said at the beginning, we forget danger and disaster as quickly as possible. How many Californians are already planning to rebuild in the same fire-threatened territory? How many of New Orleans’ residents rebuilt eight feet below sea level? How many Judeans went right back to the same behavior that Joel told them was the cause of the devastation that surrounded them?

Now, America does not stand in the same relationship with God that Israel did. The covenant community is not the nation, but the church. And the church is worldwide. But whenever and wherever disaster befalls, God is in control, and it is always pleasing to God when we assume he is speaking to us. It is always appropriate to examine our consciences, to repent, and to ask for mercy. It is especially appropriate when our enemies call us godless.