Joel. God Wants To Give His Mercy And Grace, And To Pour Out His Love On All People. Series

Joel. God wants to give his mercy and grace, and to pour out his love on all people.

The book of Joel, the third of our minor prophets is a short read. This book of three chapters, is about God confronting and defeating evil.

The name Joel while being a short name contains a lot of meaning; from Hebrew it means “Yahweh is God,” in English it translates to “The Lord is God.” Joel’s name itself is a declaration of who his God is.

As a prophet Joel was ringing a warning that ‘The Day of The Lord’ was coming and it wasn’t going to be a picnic, he was speaking forth that God is sovereign and God is calling people to repentance because he wanted to bless them.

There’s a bit of debate about when the book was written as there’s no solid historical pointer because no kings or recorded events apart for a plague of locusts are mentioned. It is thought that it was most likely written after the Babylonian exile between 500 and 400 BC, because Joel mentions the Temple and priests but not a king. Also, because he did mention the Temple which is in Jerusalem, it is believed he lived in Judah, the southern kingdom of the two kingdoms that made up the original Israel.

Joel is addressing the people of Judah, these people had no king, they were now part of the Persian empire, having been allowed to return to Judah by the Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great, in 538BC, but with no local king, the Temple High Priest had oversight of the nation. So, Joel’s audience lived under Persian imperial control, with religious leaders as local authority. Knowing this makes Joel’s call to repentance and reliance on God important as Judah had no political power, only spiritual responsibility. Why, because God wanted to bless his people. Sounds a little like most of us I think, no political power but we are spiritually responsible for ourselves, as parents we are spiritually responsible for our families until they are adults and for those of us in ministry we have a degree of spiritual responsibility for those we minister to, no pressure.

(Here I walked out having put a GOD sign on the cross at the back of the platform, still talking on the microphone as an illustration.) So, Joel, a bit like I mentioned about Hosea addressing Israel, the northern kingdom in last weeks message and giving them a good slapping …Joel is letting the people of Judah know they are not where they should be in God’s eyes. As such they need to repent, which basically means change direction and head back to God. (back to the God sign). They had just had a devastating locust plague which Joel points out, was a heads up on their need to repent, and he warns them that the “Day of the Lord” is coming. The Day of the Lord can mean a few things, judgement by God, the coming of the Messiah, the last of all days among them.

But for now back to locusts and a plague of locusts: One female lays between 240-300 eggs in its lifetime. A pair of locusts in the right growing conditions can become 10 million in as little as 6-8 months, four or five generations. A plague of 80 million locusts can consume enough food to feed 35 thousand people in one day, a bit over three and a half Tawa’s full of people, now that’s a fair swag of tucker.

From 2019-2022 The most recent major locust swarm affected East Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. It was described as the worst outbreak in decades. Here are the key figures:

• Average swarm size: About 80 million locusts in a single swarm.

• Largest swarms: Some swarms during this outbreak were estimated to contain up to 10 billion locusts, stretching over hundreds of kilometres. [blog.entom...logist.net] That’s by my calculations 125 times the average of 80 million

• Scale of the outbreak: The plague caused over $1.3 billion in crop damage across 23 countries, threatening food security for millions. [agrilifeto...y.tamu.edu]

So from that description we can determine that crops good, locusts bad, plague of locusts really bad and in Joel’s case take the recent bad locust plague as a warning. This was a crisis, there was famine, this resulted in an economic disaster, no food for man or beast, means no markets, no income to buy the food that didn’t exist, just no food, unless you were near a fishing port. The nation of Judah had been through and was in a time of deep dire dookie. This was as Joel described, to be seen as a time of divine judgement, like the eight plague of Egypt in the time of Moses, and resulted in Joel speaking up and calling the people to repentance. How many people live their lives in a famine, not knowing, not living as God would have them live, Joel calls Judah to repentance.