Joel 1:1
Introduction
Woodlawn Baptist Church
January 18, 2004
Introduction
“The word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.”
As I begin a short series of messages from the book of Joel, I want to begin tonight by laying a foundation for the thoughts that will come later in the book. Very often it seems that as we study a book we get lost in the week-to-week analysis of the passages and fail to see the bigger picture, or the central theme of the book. For instance, we spent a lot of time in Hosea and saw many things as God worked in the lives of the Israelites, but if we failed to see the heart of God through it all loving His people, grieving over their sinfulness and repeatedly pleading with them to repent, then we missed the point.
If the prophecy of Hosea revealed the heart of God, then the prophecy of Joel reveals the hand of God, the hand that controls destiny, the hand that moves history. The Bible teaches us that behind the whole course of human history is God. The hinge on which history turns is spiritual – God’s Spirit at work among men, and you cannot rightly understand human events if you don’t first recognize that fact. You see, every one of us bases our thoughts, our decisions, our actions, and our ideas about God and life on a worldview. You may not be able to identify your worldview, and it may lack consistency, but your most basic assumptions about everything, from the origins of life to the way you live the one you’ve been given adheres to some system of thought.
If there is one great tragedy to be found in all our busyness, in our endless pursuit of entertainment and recreation, it has got to be that we spend far too little time thinking and developing a God-centered, or biblical worldview. Let me pause for just a moment and ask you this – what is a God-centered worldview? What is a biblical worldview? Simply put, to have a biblical worldview means that your thoughts and decisions and ideas about all of life are determined by what the Bible teaches. In other words, everything you do, say, or think has been filtered by the unchanging and perfect Word of God.
Now, I am confident that if I were to ask around the room, we would all say that we have biblical worldviews. But do we really? Does the Bible really shape our theology? Does it shape how we view biology? Does the Bible govern our economic decisions? How is it that we say we have a Biblical worldview, but so many believers place their well-being into the hands of secular psychologists? What about politics? Law? Government? All of those things may seem a little too far removed from your lives to really consider, so allow me to come closer to home.
The other night as we had prayer, we mentioned some very personal prayer requests. We prayed for sick relatives and friends. We prayed for our church body. We prayed for job situations and so forth. Does the Bible shape the way we view these situations? Let me see. Answer this for me: Is God sovereign over every area of your life? In other words, does God decree everything that happens in your life? If you say no, then you are saying that there are things that happen in this world that are beyond God’s ability to control, but if you say yes, then you are saying that God decrees even the bad things, the evil that occurs in this world. When we read about a young infant that has contracted some devastating disease, did God ordain that it should happen? When a husband looses his family in an auto accident, did God ordain that it should happen? When the terrorist attacks occurred, did God ordain that they should occur? When the earthquake hit in the Middle East, killing thousands a few weeks ago, did God ordain it?
This is important, because far too many of God’s people are wavering with uncertainty over this problem. Either God is sovereign or He is not, and when evil occurs, we too quickly try to pass the blame somewhere besides God. Allow me to read to you what one pastor has said that I agree with…
“…people who waver with uncertainty over the problem of God’s sovereignty in the matter of evil usually do not have a God-entranced worldview. For them, now God is sovereign, and now He is not. Now He is in control, and now He is not. Now, when things are going well, He is good and reliable, and when they go bad…maybe He’s not. Now He’s the supreme authority of the universe, and now He is in the dock with human prosecutors peppering Him with demands that He give an account of Himself.
But when a person settles it biblically, intellectually, and emotionally – that God has ultimate control of all things, including evil, and that this is gracious and precious beyond words – then a marvelous stability and depth come into that person’s life, and he develops a ‘God-entranced worldview.’”
Charles Spurgeon, the great preacher from the turn of the last century said,
“There is no attribute more comforting to His children than that of God’s sovereignty. Under the most adverse circumstances, in the most severe trials, they believe that sovereignty has ordained their afflictions, that sovereignty overrules them, and that sovereignty will sanctify them all. There is nothing for which the children ought to more earnestly contend to than the doctrine of their Master over all creation--the Kingship of God over all the works of His own hands--the Throne of God and His right to sit upon that throne...for it is God upon the Throne whom we trust.”
Folks, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that you believe and accept this doctrine of God’s sovereignty. God ordains the good that comes into your life, and He has ordained the bad, and when you accept that He has done both, then much of the uncertainty about life and our future will fade away, being replaced with a calm assurance that because God is in control of every event, you have absolutely nothing to fear. Not only do you need to accept God’s sovereignty in good and evil, you need to understand that there is no thing that God ordains that does not also have a purpose behind it, even if we can’t understand what that purpose is.
There are many who are quick to say that God allows things to happen for no particular purpose at all, and I have been guilty of saying it in the past, but I want to confess to you tonight that I was wrong. God does not decree that anything should happen for which He does not also have a purpose. I want you to look at a few Bible verses with me. First, let’s go to Job 1:21. Job said,
“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.”
What was Job saying? Simply this – that life belongs to God, and He can give it or take it as He pleases. We have no right to question God’s wisdom in the span of a person’s life. Whether a life lasts one hour or a full century, God has absolute rights over it. When Job made this statement about God, the Bible says that he didn’t sin in it. In other words, Job had a right view of the work of God. Deuteronomy 32:39 says,
“See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand.”
Remember in Job how Satan went to the Lord and had to get Divine permission to afflict Job? Those who try to blame Satan for the evil that is in the world still have to recognize that not one thing he does is done without God’s decree. In Job 2, Satan afflicted Job with terrible boils from head to toe. Job was so miserable that he took a piece of pottery and scraped his skin for relief. Satan may have carried out the act against one of God’s most faithful servants, but God decreed it to happen, and then in verse 9, Job’s wife told him,
“Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God, and die. But [Job] said to her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.”
Again, Job gave a correct assessment of the sovereignty of God. He recognized that life and death, disease and affliction, good and evil all come by the hand of God.
We could go on and on. Remember Joseph down in Egypt? He received ill-treatment at the hand of his brothers, was sold into slavery, framed for rape, thrown and forgotten in prison. If that were to happen to one of us today we might question the goodness or ability of God to control our circumstances, but Joseph said to his brothers,
“…ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring it to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.”
God determined that all those things would happen to Joseph, and He did so because His plan was to have the right man in the right place at the right time so that many people would be kept alive. We don’t always understand why God works the way He does, and the beautiful thing is that we don’t have to understand, we simply have to trust with simple childlike faith. So, whether it is a natural disaster, death, disease, or some other form of evil that occurs in the world, remember that it is God who ordains it all.
Even the animals carry out God’s bidding. 2 Kings 17:25 says that God sent lions into a group of people to kill them. In Daniel God shut the mouths of lions. God used a donkey to get one man’s attention, a group of bears to punish a group of young people, and a large fish to accomplish His will with another.
“This means that all calamities owing to animal life are ultimately in the control of God. He can see a pit bull break loose from his chain and attack a child; and He could, with one word, command that its mouth be shut. Similarly, He controls the invisible animal and plant life that wreaks havoc in the world: bacteria and viruses and parasites and thousands of microscopic beings that destroy health and life. If God can shut the mouth of a ravenous lion, then He can shut the mouth of a malaria-carrying mosquito and nullify the harmful effects of every other animal that kills.”
If you’re still not convinced that evil and calamity are decreed by God, then turn with me to Isaiah 45:5 with me. God said,
“I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: that they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”
What was God saying? He was saying that He is absolutely sovereign over all of life, even the bad. There isn’t one single thing that occurs on this earth that He hasn’t determined will happen. Spurgeon on another occasion was speaking about the sovereignty of God when he said,
“I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less that God wishes – that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its, orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens – that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their courses. The creeping of an aphid over the rosebud is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence – the fall of…leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche.”
God is in control of it all – good and bad, all for His eternal purposes. Many times, if not most times, we really don’t have the opportunity to get an explanation for the way God works. And that’s OK, because God doesn’t owe us anything – especially an explanation. God doesn’t have to give an account to us, and we are wrong to try to make Him answer for why He does certain things in our lives. God can do what He wants to do. I think that’s one of the reasons we are called upon to live lives of faith. It is easy to have faith when God is working in what we perceive to be our favor – when our health is good, when we have all the money we want, when the cars are running and when life’s conditions are favorable to us. However, when things go bad and evil does come upon us, it is then that we must exercise faith, because it is then that our faith is put to the test. You say you trust God – then trust Him when the rug is pulled from under your feet! When your circumstances are undesirable, then say that God is good and that He knows what He’s doing.
When you are able to look up and praise God for His sovereignty – when you are able to say that God is just as glorious when you are suffering as when you are on top of the world, then you have exercised faith, and then you are seeing God for who He really is.
As we study Joel’s writings in the weeks to come, we’re going to see how God devastated His people Israel with a natural disaster that He brought about with a great horde of insects. It was such a terrible event that no one alive could remember having seen anything like it, and the entire book of Joel is about God using the event to teach them a spiritual lesson. The lesson will simply be this: God is in control. He ordained the events of their day, and He has ordained the things that are still to come.
As we observe God’s hand at work, Joel is going to take us all the way to the Day of the Lord, a day the people of his day obviously knew about and were expecting. What is the Day of the Lord? It is a time when God will finally intervene in our world to establish His throne and execute judgment on the earth. It is a day when the sovereignty of God will be recognized and acknowledged by all the earth – saved or lost, and a day when that sovereignty will be exercised in judgment against those who refused to repent.
Here’s the thing though – God doesn’t want you to wait for that day! Today is the day to recognize the sovereignty of God! God is looking for those who will surrender to His absolute control of their lives with a glad willingness, with hearts of worship and desire for Him. God is looking for men and women who will give Him the glory that’s due His name in good times and bad, in times of blessing and prosperity and in times of suffering and affliction. God is looking for men and women like that right here in our church, and I wonder if you are one of them. It comes from a God-centered, biblical worldview: a view of life that recognizes that all of life must be patterned by God and His Word.
Folk, if you have a heart for the glory of God, and it is your desire to magnify His glory and seek His glory, then get into His Word and seek Him in prayer and settle this matter of God’s sovereignty over every part of life in your mind. The day is coming, and now is when the world needs believers who are absolutely settled on this issue of God’s sovereignty, and it is my prayer that you be one of them.
Works Cited:
Adapted from Stedman, Ray C. Joel: The Revelation of God’s Hand http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/c/1074204797-6065.html
Piper, John. Desiring God – Appendix 3 “Is God Less Glorious Because He Ordained That Evil Be?” (Multnomah Publishers: Sisters, OR) 2003
Spurgeon, C.H.
Genesis 50:20
Piper. op. cit.
Spurgeon, C.H. “God’s Providence,”
