The Day of the Lord

Why should they say among the peoples, where is your God? Then the Lord became jealous for His land and had pity on His people. The Lord answered and said to His people, behold, I am sending to you grain, wine, and oil, and you will be satisfied and will no more make you a reproach among the nations. I will remove the northern army far from you and drive him into the parched and desolate land, his vanguard into the Eastern Sea, and his rearguard into the Western Sea, the stench and foul smell of him shall rise, for he has done great things.

Fear not, O land. Be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things. Fear not, you beasts of the field, for the pastures of the wilderness are green, and the tree bears its fruit. The fig tree and vine give their full yield. Be glad, oh children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God, for He has given the early rain for your vindication.

He has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the later rain as before. The threshing floors shall be full of grain. The vats shall overflow with wine and oil. I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you. You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, who has dealt wondrously with you, and my people shall never again be put to shame.

You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel and that I am the Lord your God, and there is none else, and my people shall never again be put to shame. The Lord will pour out His spirit, and it shall come to pass afterwards, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. The old men shall dream dreams, and the young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants, in those days, I will pour out my Spirit. And I will show wonders in the heavens and on earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke.

The sun shall turn to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls. Back in February, congregation, I had the privilege of leading you in worship and preaching. And I took the study that morning from the book of Hosea. It's a long time ago.

I don't expect anyone to remember it. But before I began that study on Hosea, I told a story about the fact that near where we lived in Narrabri, a lot of crows were getting killed. And I don't know whether you remember that story. I'll just fill you in for those who don't remember. Crows were getting killed.

The RSPCA did some tests, and they found that they were getting killed by motorbikes. The story was that when crows feed on roadkill, they post a lookout crow. And lookout crows can call out "car, car," but they can't call out "bike, bike." Okay? So the point I made was that the Old Testament minor prophets especially, but all the prophets in the Old Testament, were like God's lookout crows.

Okay? So this morning, we're going to look at another lookout crow whose name is Joel. And we're going to range right through that prophecy of Joel. So I'd like to ask you to keep your Bible open. We're going to go back into chapter one and then right through that passage which we've just read from the second chapter.

The question, brothers and sisters in Christ, is, does God have anything to do with disasters? With droughts, floods, fires? More broadly speaking, the question is, where is God when calamity strikes? Maybe someone who knew that you're a Christian asked you a question about that after some devastating flood or after maybe a fire took some human lives. We could think of some of the tragedies that have happened in our lifetime.

Twin Towers in New York, Bali bombings, the Bali nightclub bombings, or more recently, where was God in the Bondi beach massacre? There are two extreme views amongst Christians, brothers and sisters. When hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in the US, and some of you may remember that clearly, there were some popular TV preachers who had a ready answer, and they were not hesitant in telling the American public their answers. Pat Robertson said that New Orleans was struck by hurricane Katrina because God was punishing that wicked city. Jerry Falwell claimed it was because of the abortionists and the gays and the lesbians, and he went so far as to say, I point the finger in their faces and say, you helped this happen.

And so if someone had asked these TV preachers, where was God in hurricane Katrina? They would have said, God sent that disaster as a judgment on America for its godlessness. That's one extreme, congregation. The other extreme is this: when the city of Christchurch was devastated by an earthquake, it wrecked the Anglican cathedral in the middle of the city. And when folk asked why God allowed that to happen, the dean of the cathedral had an answer.

He said quite publicly, he said it on the news, he said, God had nothing to do with this earthquake in Christchurch. It was a purely natural phenomenon. You know, congregation, I'd like to ask Falwell and Robertson how they can be so sure that they know the mind of God. When people say that, the reality is that none of us, not even Falwell and Robertson, have an inside line to the providence of God, knowing why He does things. But I'd also like to ask the dean of Christchurch Cathedral why he doesn't believe Amos 3:6.

You see, that verse reads, if a calamity occurs in a city, has not the Lord done it? The prophet Joel was also dealing with a natural disaster, a huge disaster. It's a locust plague. And I guess where you live at the Gold Coast, living in cities, it's hard to imagine how disastrous a locust plague is. Well, let me tell you about a time when we drove through a locust plague in Northern Victoria.

We were coming back. We'd been on holidays, and we were driving back to Geelong. I was at the theological college in Geelong at the time, and I still remember very clearly to this day how we had, there's the picture, a locust plague that's in Northern Victoria. And we drove through that kind of locust plague. And I remember it so clearly because we had to stop every twenty minutes and scrape the dead locusts off our front windscreen with a scraper, splattered there and more and more impeding our view. The devastation it caused for the farmers was absolutely horrendous.

Have a look back in chapter one, verse four, at how Joel described such a locust plague. In chapter one, you just flick back to that. And in verse four, it says, what the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten. What the hopping locust has left, the destroying locust has eaten.

In verses two and three, he implies that it was a plague like had never been seen before. It hadn't happened in the days of their parents or in the days of their grandparents, and the children would still be telling their grandchildren and their great grandkids about it later on. And I can imagine that people in Judah were asking the question, where is God in this disaster? Joel spells out the results of that in chapter one, how it just devastated the communities of Judah. Let me point out a couple of other verses.

Verse seven, the vines and the fig trees are ruined. Verse ten, the fields are ruined and the crops are destroyed. It's a scene of utter destruction as fields and orchards are just stripped totally bare. And then look how he sums it up in verse twelve. Gladness dries up from the children of man.

It's a terrible disaster. And in times like that, people often say, is the end of the world coming? It seems like it. Maybe they were saying that in Joel's days, because Joel links this disaster of the locusts to the day of the Lord. Verse 15 of chapter one.

Alas, for the day of the Lord, for the day of the Lord is near. At the same time, brothers and sisters, Joel is not only concerned about this natural calamity that Judah has just endured. He's particularly concerned about an even worse disaster that's coming. The problem with Joel is that we're not quite sure where to date him. We know that quite precisely with some prophets, but not with Joel. Some argue that he belongs with Haggai and Malachi after the Babylonian exile.

And they believe that the worst disaster that Joel is talking about is actually the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. I tend to side, you can make up your own mind about that. Do a little bit of homework and sort it out. Google it. Check some commentaries.

But I tend to side with those who link Joel to Amos and Hosea. And so that would put him in Judah about the time of king Joash. Joash started off as a good king, and then he turned against the Lord his God. That would make the worst disaster that Joel is talking about the conquest of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. It's something we know that happened because of Judah's sin and the idolatry of that nation.

It's why God destroyed Jerusalem and took the nation captive. Uncertainty about the date of Joel doesn't detract, though, from his message, does it? Our text in chapter two speaks of God thundering at the head of His army in verse eleven. And he tells us that that huge army can't be counted and that this army comes in obedience to God's command. And then we once again get Joel talking about it in terms of the day of the Lord.

Have a look again at verse eleven, the last part of it. For the day of the Lord is great and very awesome. Who can endure it? In fact, congregation, Joel describes this worst disaster in terms of the coming of an army of locusts. Go back to the second half of verse three of this second chapter, and he tells them that ahead of the army, the land is like the Garden of Eden.

Beautiful. Everything's growing. It's flourishing, but behind them is a desert wasteland. So the point that Joel is making is that just as the locusts devoured every green thing in their path and left the wilderness behind, so this coming army of Babylonians is going to follow a scorched earth policy, destroying everything in sight. It's as if, brothers and sisters, Joel is saying, you thought that locust plague was bad.

You ain't seen nothing yet. You're wondering whether God was in the locust plague, whether He had anything to do with it. Well, the greater disaster that's coming is definitely His doing. The day of the Lord is great. It's dreadful.

Who can endure it? I wonder whether this morning, friends, you can see the connection that Joel is making. He's basically saying that natural disasters are linked to the coming day of the Lord. And we know from the rest of the Bible that ultimately, the day of the Lord is judgment day. So what the Bible is really doing for us here in the book of Joel is drawing lines from the present into the future.

And so in a sense, every natural disaster, flood, fire, famine, Bondi massacre, is a reminder that judgment day is coming. They're temporal judgments of God here and now. They come because we live in a fallen world that is in rebellion against God Almighty. But friends, that doesn't mean we can blame certain disasters on certain sins, as if the abortionists and the homosexuals were responsible for hurricane Katrina. Falwell and Robertson were wrong.

We don't have that kind of insight into the mind of God that allows us to draw those conclusions. But what we can say is this: God's judgment does fall on a sinful and broken world. Let me show you this morning how we can make that connection here in our text. It's not only that Joel speaks of natural disasters in terms of the day of the Lord. We can make the link between disasters and the end of the ages for another reason.

And precisely because that's what Joel does in chapter two. Verse 30, at the end of the chapter that was read for us, talks about the wonders in heaven and on earth. Verse 31, the sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the day of the Lord. And we know from the book of Revelation that that's the way it's pictured there. In fact, in the book of Revelation, in chapter nine, John the author uses Joel's imagery of locusts as God's destroying agents.

So every natural disaster ought to be a reminder to us that Jesus is returning. Judgment day is coming. Not surprisingly then, we find that Joel takes an unexpected change of tack. What follows is not an explanation of natural disasters. In fact, Joel really doesn't belabour the point about why God is allowing that to happen.

It's obvious that there's somehow the outworking of sin and human rebelliousness, but Joel has surprisingly little to say about Judah's waywardness and their idolatry. Some of the other minor prophets are far, far more outspoken about that, far more vocal about it. It's almost as if, you know, Joel doesn't want to waste time heaping up guilt on people who are already feeling bad. And so what he does instead is he simply calls them to turn back to God. Twice in Joel, these natural disasters are linked to a trumpet call.

Notice how chapter two begins. Blow the trumpet in Zion. Sound the alarm on my holy hill. Later in the same chapter, verse 15, blow the trumpet in Zion, declare a holy fast. And in our text in this chapter, the reason for sounding out that alarm is spelled out loud and clear.

There must be repentance. So twice in verses 11 to 13, that's especially our focus this morning, verses eleven and thirteen, twice in those verses, Judah is called to change direction. They're called to return to the Lord, and the clear implication is they are not walking with the Lord. So these great calamities are God's call to repentance. Natural disasters are a trumpet call.

And isn't that precisely, friends, the line that Jesus took when it came to disasters? Turn with me a moment to Luke's gospel and to chapter 13. There on some occasion, someone asked Jesus why certain disasters had happened. A couple of tragedies, and people clearly wanted to know where was God in those tragedies and natural disasters. So Jesus avoids both of those two extremes.

He avoids the extreme of saying that you can link every disaster to someone's specific sin, but he also avoids the other extreme of saying that it's got nothing to do with God. Let me read the first five verses of Luke 13. There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with his sacrifices. And he answered them, do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered in this way? No.

I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the Tower of Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No. I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. You get the point, congregation?

You see that Jesus does exactly the same thing as Joel does. He gives us a proper understanding of disasters and natural calamities. They ought to serve as a call to repentance. Every calamity is a call to repentance. But friends, I want to point out one thing about the repentance.

It's got to be true repentance. Because according to Joel, there's also repentance that's just going through the motions. Repentance that's not genuine. And so he tells them in our text passage, those verses in chapter two, rend your hearts and not your garments. You see, you and I can go through the motions of repentance that have nothing to do with a real return to the Lord.

This morning, we made a prayer of confession based on Psalm 130. You can go through the motions and read that, and yet read it in such a way that it makes no difference in your heart, no difference in your relationship with God. Going through the motions. I had a friend, when I was working in the factory, a guy who went, he was Roman Catholic, but he went to Mass about four or five times a week. If you had the chance, he'd go every day, but he used to swear like a trooper.

And I said to him on one occasion, I said to him, Gus, why do you swear so much? You know, you're claiming to be a Christian, but your language is just so colourful that people must wonder how you can be a Christian and speak the way you do. He said, well, I do that so that when I go to confession, I can tell the priest some sins, you know, not make it look like I'm being a goody goody. And I said to him, so what does the priest tell you to do about your swearing? And he said, oh, he tells me to say five Hail Marys.

That's not true repentance. That's just a show. I came across another example, a story of the famous baseball player, Yankee baseball player, who after many years got caught out. And the story goes that his greed had caused him to gamble on some of the games in which he himself played, and he affected the outcome. And when he got caught out, he said sorry.

But he went a little bit further and he produced some autographed baseball bats that had his name on them and the word sorry, and sold them for $300 each. That was a show. It wasn't genuine, a very profitable show, I might add. But Joel wants to see a genuine humbling of oneself before God, a true change of heart, rending of the heart not the garments, a heartfelt love and devotion to the Lord, a turning away from their idolatry, a weeping and mourning and fasting that is genuine. In other words, a change for this nation of Judah that is bent on idolatry constantly.

So friends, how do we apply this today in our situation? Well, I want to say repentance is for all of us. I've come across Christians who sometimes have the idea that you repent when you first become a Christian. You turn your back on the life you once lived, but once you've done that once, you don't ever have to do it again. No.

There is a daily repentance that is needed from all of us. Every day again, I fall short. I'm sure if you're honest with yourself, you'll be able to say that. Every day you experience that you fail the Lord and fall short of His standard of perfection. And what God wants from us is more than just some little ritual in church on a Sunday morning, some sort of outward show.

We too need to return to the Lord with all our heart, which is what Joel wants from his people. But friends, something more is needed from us as Christians. Here, Joel has an insight that others in Judah lacked. Guided by God's Spirit, as God's spokesperson, or as God's lookout crow if you like, he issues a call of repentance to others. It's he who sounds the trumpet blast in the face of natural and national disasters.

And I want to say this morning to us as we're gathered here that we ought to do the same. See, we are here in church this morning. We know so much more clearly than Joel ever did that people need to repent and turn to Jesus. And in times of tragedy and disasters, you have a special opportunity to tell them that. In those moments, unbelievers around us will very naturally ask, why did that happen?

They may even ask you, where is the God you believe in in those things? Think back to the COVID years. Why did we go through those horrible lockdowns? Why did we have the floods and the fires afterwards? Why were there the crashing into the Twin Towers?

Why was there the Bondi massacre? There are questions that people grapple with, and we've got the answers. We can give that trumpet blast. What an opportunity to say to people, God is simply reminding us of the final judgment that is coming. And friends, it works.

It works. C. S. Lewis once made the point that God especially uses tragedies and disasters to turn people around. The way C. S.

Lewis put it was, God speaks into our pleasures, but He yells into our pain. He's trying to get our attention. My brother was telling me that after the Bondi massacre, they had two families join their church. Why did they join?

Because someone at work who was a Christian, or somewhere in the other case someone in their family, had told them, this is a sign of the coming judgment. You need to be ready. There's a greater judgment coming, the day when Jesus returns. And before that great and terrible day comes, you need to deal with your relationship with the Lord God. They did, and they came to church.

They were integrated into the church. I'm impressed, congregation, with the gentleness with which Joel deals with these matters. He's firm. He's unwavering, but he's not exactly what I would call a fire and brimstone preacher. Some of the other minor prophets definitely are, and I think I understand why.

It seems to me that Joel has a wonderful grasp of the character of God. It's all grounded in who God is. That's important for us. When we think of God's role in disasters, you see it's very tempting for us to see God as just an angry God. Joel sees God rather as a father who is lovingly disciplining his children.

This is no fickle angry god who sends the locusts because he just loves to see the damage that they do. No. This is a God who wants what's best for His people. He wants them to make that change of direction for their own good and to return to Him. British preacher Sinclair Ferguson tells the story of seeing a man who killed his own son.

The man's son ran out into the street, a busy traffic street, and his father yelled at him to come back immediately. But the boy, you see, was not used to obeying his father. He'd been allowed to go his own way, disobeying his father constantly. And so when he ran out into the street in defiance of his dad, he was hit by a car despite his father yelling at him. When the crunch came, that father was powerless to save the lad from killing himself, but it was really the father who killed the child by his failure to discipline him.

The point is God is not like that, congregation. God's character is involved in natural calamities. In that horrible locust plague, it's God disciplining His people as a father, preventing them from destroying themselves by their idolatry and lawlessness. And even in that terrible event of the Babylonian captivity, God is working in love. God is still disciplining them. We call it tough love, don't we?

It's preparing us and shaping a faithful remnant to come out of the exile and serve Him. So friends, is God angry when natural calamity strikes? Well, I'd want to say yes. God is angered by all sin and all human rebellion, and you can never avoid the biblical teaching of God's wrath. But that doesn't mean that you and I can see into the mind of God.

It doesn't allow us to equate a certain tragedy with certain sins. And both Falwell and Robertson were not being careful enough when it came to their explanation about hurricane Katrina. Do you notice how Joel mentions God's anger in verse 13 in our text? Notice how he mentions God's anger. He says that God is slow to anger.

Slow to anger. Actually, you know, God is never anywhere in the Bible defined by anger. That's why we need to be very careful when we assign calamities to God's anger. Yes, there is a general sense in which every tragedy, every human tragedy, takes us back to Genesis chapter three and the fall. We're living in a broken world, part of God's curse on creation because of human sinfulness.

So while we as God's people should always be very cautious, this is also an area where you and I should not shrink back. I think there are too many Christians who pussyfoot around when it comes to God's anger and God's judgment. I want to talk about God's anger. The Bible doesn't avoid it because we know what our problem is, and if we know what our problem is, that's when we'll look for answers. If we don't understand the problem, we'll misunderstand the answer. The gospel of Jesus only makes sense against the background of the fall and God's curse on man and on creation.

For Joel, the stress really falls on the loving qualities of God. Joel, in fact, mentions five qualities of God, and only one of them is anger. And even that's turned into a positive because God says He is slow to anger. And those five qualities are repeated again and again in the Bible. We find them echoed in Psalm 103 about our sins being removed as far as the East is from the West.

Joel says, God is gracious. In other words, He gives us what we haven't deserved. He says, God is compassionate. In other words, He doesn't give us the punishment we've deserved. That's why the picture that follows is of a restored creation after the brokenness of the plague and after the exile.

Joel says, God is abounding in love. And then Joel uses a special Hebrew word that means God's covenant keeping love, the word, and it's a beautiful word, loving kindness, that is the very heart of God's relationship with His people, His agape love of the New Testament, His unconditional love. And then finally, Joel adds in that list of five qualities about God, that this God relents from evil, from sending calamity. And then I think of the series that Ben took on the story of Jonah calling Nineveh to repent. And what did we read at the end?

God relented of the judgment that He was going to send on Nineveh. He didn't send the disaster. And so Joel is a prophet, and he's always best remembered for his pictures of the locusts. But more importantly, congregation, this natural disaster of locusts is put in the context of the day of the Lord.

And at the end of chapter two, there's one more reference to the day of the Lord, and it's a reference that we as New Testament Christians know so very well. Have a look at verse 28. It's the Pentecost prophecy, isn't it? Afterwards, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. You see what Joel is doing?

He's taking us to the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and it's because of Jesus and His work on the cross that God is slow to anger. It's because of Jesus that God is gracious and compassionate. It's because of Jesus that God abounds in loving kindness and that God relents from evil. You see, brothers and sisters, that means whenever people talk about natural disasters and natural calamities, you and I can do what Joel did, and we can do it in the power of God's Spirit poured out at Pentecost. To say to people, you think that's bad, just wait to see what's coming.

It's going to be far worse because there's going to be this great cataclysmic upheaval when Jesus returns. And this earth is going to be totally destroyed by fire. But if you change your direction in life, if you put your trust in Jesus, then it's going to be a wonderful outcome because it's going to be the beginning of a glorious new creation in which we'll share with Jesus in glory forever and ever. Amen. Let me lead us in prayer.

Our Father, we thank you again this morning how very practical your word is. It addresses the issues of the Bali bombing, the New York Towers, the Bondi massacre, the floods and the fires and the famines and the droughts, the COVID lockdown and so much more beside. And even our little personal tragedies, Lord, the times when we're laid aside by illness, the times when things in our life go pear shaped. You remind us, Father, that you are disciplining us and showing us that we need to be ready for that great end time judgment that will take place and that we need to have our life hid with you in Christ. Thank you, Father, for the saving work of Jesus on the cross.

It means not only the forgiveness of sins, but also the rescue from that great judgment that is yet to come. Thank you that we may look forward to life in glory with you. We pray that through Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose name we say together, amen.