Exposition on Joel - Introduction - 9

     In this introduction to the prophesy of Joel we have seen the difficulties scholars have had placing Joel’s ministry on a timeline: we’ve made a brief survey of the history of the Old Kingdom and the possible kings who reigned during the ministry of Joel. We’ve also considered God’s other prophets who might have ministered His Word at around the same time. And in addition to those topics we also considered several themes of the book, the major ones being: First, we see in Joel, as with nearly all the other prophets, that the threat of God’s imminent judgment demands the repentance of all peoples, a sort of contrition that in Joel’s day typically manifested itself in the rending of a nation’s heart and her true cry for mercy through prayer and fasting.—Secondly, the future Day of the Lord with its promises both of the deliverance of believers and the destruction of the wicked. And we discussed how Joel uses that Day to describe the day when God’s wrath will come upon Judah in invasion, desolation and finally, exile. But, just as the trusting Jew did some 2 ½ thousand years ago, we too can take heart in the comfort of being assured that all of God’s promises are being fulfilled and that they are yes and amen in Christ Jesus our Lord. So as you consider Joel’s prophesy, think of how the visible church relates to the nation of Israel. Do this so you don’t lose sight of the importance of his prophecy to us, and not just the future aspect of the DotL but the warnings of present temporal consequences for disobedience. The threat of judgment on and the call of repentance to Israel in that day might have very similar meaning for the visible church today. But don’t stop there; don’t meditate on the imperatives of the Law too long without preaching the indicatives of the gospel to yourself. Believers must finally reflect on the promise of deliverance that awaits us at the DotL, and remember that, as a believer you never suffer the damning face of God’s wrath. Perhaps at times you will feel the pressure of His Fatherly displeasure but He who is faithful will never forsake us because He forsook His Son on the cross. He who adopted us will never disown us because on the cross, He disowned Christ in our place. He who married us as a bride will never divorce us because Christ our husband suffered the divorce in our stead, on the cross. Yet His work was ratified in His resurrection, so that we too may look forward to that Great Day when our resurrected spirits will be united forever with the bodies that God will raise. So when you hear the threats of judgment and the call to repentance, do take them very seriously; hear the Law through the criticisms that Joel and the other prophets level at the nation Israel and also at the surrounding wicked nations and reflect on your own sin and the sin of the church, but know that you can’t use the application of the Law that condemns you in order to do what it asks. Trying to use the Law to do what it commands is a bit like trying to use a road sign as a map. If you are traveling to Chicago, the sign that says, “CHICAGO 1500 MILES” only lets you know how far off you are, it doesn’t give you the power or knowledge of how to get there. No, the power to obey is no where but in the gospel itself—the truth that Christ has obeyed perfectly and suffered the punishment for all our sins past, present and future, therein lies the power to be set free from sin. And even so, that only in part until we are completely rid of our personal wickedness and the very desire to sin at the time of our changing when we are finally and forever glorified.

Exposition on Joel - Introduction - 8

     Well, if at this point you’re still asking yourselves, “What does this really have to do with Joel?” Recall that I mentioned the confusion that may have occurred in the typical Jewish mind; as circumcised members of visible Israel, they largely didn’t expect God’s wrath to ever befall them, and they especially didn’t expect the judgment contained in the prophesy of the DotL to be directed toward them because it was a day where they all expected salvation. And that’s just like people today not resting their faith in what Christ has done, but rather in their baptism or their parent’s faith. I think I can rightly claim that confusion based on the topics that the New Testament writers had to address, and the manifest difficulties seen in that transition. So the discussion of this view of covenant signs and linage has to do with the Jewish expectation at the DotL. Joel had been sent, in part, to disabuse the people of their misinterpretation of that coming Day, a Day that Joel spends a great deal of time talking about. And I believe we’ve sufficiently covered that theme in Joel. Even though we will have given more time to the theme of the DotL, now we must consider what is like to be regarded as the main theme in Joel. Repentance appears to be the overarching theme, as it is in many of the prophets. Many times the prophets were instructed to call the nation to repentance and when it eventually occurred it would generally manifest in one primary outward aspect: The corporate expression of grief over the nation’s sins. And in the Old Covenant paradigm this grief was supposed to result in: individuals pleading for God’s covenant mercy through prayer and fasting.

Regarding this outward display of repentance, in addition to Joel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel all mention fasting, and part of Isaiah’s ministry was to criticize the nation’s misuse of the regulation of fasting and Joel was careful to call the people not just to an outward expression of repentance; not to rend their clothes alone, but more importantly, to rend their hearts—it’s a bit like when Jeremiah spoke of the Law being written not only on tablets of stone but upon our very hearts.

In the midst of all this talk of destruction which resulted from their lack of repentance, the one thing we can’t afford to forget is that, Joel gives us a glimmer of hope. In the context of promises made directly to the divided Jewish nation, Joel gave the people, and he gives all who are counted among God’s people a pledge that one day our suffering will be vindicated and that God will bring us peaceably through whatever wrath He may pour out upon the heads of the wicked. But in the end, and somehow to God’s glory, both justice and mercy will be done; justice for all those who have spurned God’s general call to believe, and mercy for all who do believe. We see this glimmer of hope beginning in chapter 2:18 &19 where the Lord is said to have pity on the people because of the jealousy He has for His Land, which is actually an allusion to the former promise God made to Abraham. Verses 19 and 20 God’s acts of mercy are described. In the passage from verse 21-27, God declares His plan to vindicate and restore that which is His, and He goes on to describe the way in which He will do it. And finally in verses 28 and 29, somewhat book-ended by the terrorizing aspect of the Day of the Lord, God promises the blessing of His Spirit, a blessing that we have seen come to pass at the Day of  Pentecost..

Exposition on Joel - Introduction - 7

     The confusion of covenant signage and familial lineage being equated with God’s favor, in part, was how the Jews had fallen into all sorts of race, class and gender based discrimination: non-Jews were necessarily thought of as godless. Of course, they generally were but were not all necessarily forsaken. Women were dependent on the covenant sign having been placed on the patriarch with whom they were associated. And the poor were oppressed as generally having reaped the slothfulness they had sown. The infirm, such as the leper, they were banished (and for good physical reason in a day of limited methods of quarantine) never being associated with God’s people, having been forsaken. But Jesus came and supped with prostitutes and tax collectors—the shunned. He spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well, and He healed the leper, all as expressions of the expansion of the scope of the Kingdom. Not that Jesus came to say that the road was no longer narrow, but that the variety of people called to travel that road is greater than anyone expected especially God’s Old Covenant people. So what was meant as an illustration, the peculiar people of God in an Old Kingdom bound by Old covenant rights and rituals, those people thought the illustration was the fulfillment; they thought it was the way things would always be. Instead of realizing that they were a picture or shadow or prefiguring of the Kingdom to come, they considered themselves with their customs and religious observances, to be the Kingdom of God fulfilled. So when they heard about the coming Day of Yahweh, the coming DotL. So they thought of that coming Day only as a day of salvation and deliverance for them, and a Day only of damnation and destruction for the gentile nations—the other kingdoms, the kingdoms of this world. So instead of allowing the people to continue in that delusion, Joel uses the image of the descending army to wreak as much havoc on the hearts of God’s own people as it would on God’s own Land. And he uses this imagery of what would be a relatively immediate fulfilled DotL as a foreshadowing of that distant future Day when not only will the unbelieving nations be judged, but the unbelieving Jewish nation would be judged as well. It was a warning not to misunderstand the coming Day of Yahweh where His judgment will transcend nations, even that nation He called His own. This was likely a hard pill for them to swallow, as were most of the words of God’s prophets.

The significance of the possible misinterpretation that the rank and file among the Jewish nation would have had about the covenant sign of circumcision is that they likely would have based their assurance on it. Not unlike the parallel misconstruing of the sign of baptism today. Maybe you haven’t, but I have met people who have been raised in “Christian” homes, who were baptized either as infants or early in life, but that is their only real tie to the historic faith. They have no genuine faith of their own, but they generally rest more on their baptism than on the cross, and they will usually say something like, “I know I should be in church but God understands, He’s forgiving, He knows none of us are perfect.” So many times that same person practically becomes a deist. He’s certainly no atheist, but when it comes right down to it, he’s no Christian either. He’s adopted the world’s philosophy of works religion. So that’s the interest we have in the possible misinterpretation on the application of the covenant sign—it can happen even today. That’s why I’ve chosen to belabor this point.

As for the right view of the application of the sign, in the New Covenant today, we baptize our babies into the membership of the visible church, with the full expectation that God will translate them one day into the membership of the invisible Church through regeneration, those in the Old Covenant were commanded to circumcise all their households into the membership of visible Israel. Just like we make the distinction between the visible and invisible Church today, the same distinction could have been made before the cross—visible Israel and invisible Israel. All the children of Abraham and their children and their servants were circumcised into visible covenant community membership, but the faith of the circumcised individual (be he an infant or an adult) is expected but not guaranteed. Just like the baptized baby who has been made a member of the visible church doesn’t have a guarantee of eventual faith. This is sort of a sad illustration but one I believe serves the purpose of accurately describing the scenario. A woman can have a child conceived in her womb and she rightly expects the eventual birth of the child, so it is anticipated but it’s not guaranteed. There is always the chance of miscarriage. We can only hope that, even in this fallen world, the miscarriage is the exception to the rule. We pray that the eventual full-term birth of that baby is ordinary. So it is with the one who is baptized in the New Covenant and the one who was circumcised in the Old, they are like that conceived child, and ordinarily they are reborn into true and genuine faith. But there is always that chance that they will eventually reject the gospel and fall away from the faith, and that is a miscarriage of the process.

Exposition on Joel - Introduction - 6

     The judgment that God was going to bring down on the people He called out of Egypt was neither unfounded nor arbitrary; it was rooted in the covenant. The meta-narrative of God’s story of redeeming the world, the big picture if you will, revolves around this covenantal language. We hear it first in Ex. 6:7, then in Lev. 26:12, and finally in Rev. 21:3. “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” Then if you look at Deut. 28 you see so clearly the covenantal blessings for obedience and curses upon disobedience. It’s in this environment that the prophets were chosen and sent by God—as both a mercy and a judgment. The prophets came to Israel and Judah in order to condemn the wicked among the nation; to condemn the wickedness of the nation. In our prophet’s specific ministry, Joel used the paradoxical image of the coming and future DotL as a catalyst for proclaiming both the immediate destruction of the people for their disobedience and the deliverance of the believing people because of God’s great covenantal faithfulness. Their deliverance had been foretold through the Seed of Abraham, David’s greater Son, and The Shoot who would rise up out of the stump of the tree (mentioned in Is. 11) that had been sheered off at its base in the captivity. The imagery of a future Day when Yahweh God would come and judge the wicked and deliver His people, was ingrained in the minds of most Jews in Joel’s day but what they hadn’t understood was that in the DotL, and all it’s foreshadowing lesser days of trouble, provision was made for the judgment of the nation’s own covenant unfaithfulness. So we see in Joel where the substantial Day, the eschatological Day, the Platonic ideal image of the DotL is predicted and foreshadowed in the form of warnings, the warnings of invasion, desolation and finally exile. We also see the shadow of this Day in Joel’s prediction of exile as a call for the nation to repent and the warnings of destruction and exile if they aren’t heeded. But Joel isn’t the only one of God’s messengers to tell of the coming deliverance and destruction in God’s Day of Judgment, His finally Day. The recapitulation or recurrent presentation of images such as the DotL occurs throughout the bible: and eventually brought them into the Promised Land, He made them peculiar and they were pilgrims for a time in the wilderness. That relationship was meant to depict an eternal one which God was making with the people of His choosing. A people who would be redeemed from out of the fallen world of sin, who would walk for a time as pilgrims, then who would be brought into the ultimate Promised Land which was foreshadowed in the Old Covenant People. But if you look at the Exodus as a foreshadowing of the future Day of Judgment, we see that the same event meant deliverance for the Jews, while it meant destruction for the hardened Egyptians. And the dispersion that resulted was predicted by John in Revelation as a shadow form of the final DotL. Through the darkness of the dispersion of the Jews after the destruction of the temple, the message of deliverance began to spread to the ends of the Earth. So, after darkness comes light; post tenebras lux, as recited by the Reformers. These examples might be seen as paradoxes (combining destruction for some and deliverance for others) just like the event Joel and others described as the DotL or the Day of Yahweh or the Day of Judgment. They occur in time as smaller events that point to the big event.

We have the great privilege and distinct pleasure of looking back at all the fulfillment of bible prophesies, except of course for the fulfillment of the great commission and Christ’s return in glory, and we must sympathize with the misunderstandings that occurred. There are several pretty good reasons why confusion plagued those who, in God’s providence, had to look forward, through the shadows, to substances which they foretold. Many of the Jews had mistakenly believed that their pedigree through the familial line of Abraham alone was their ticket to being the beneficiaries of God, regardless of their actions; they thought no one could take that from them. They believed, and thus rightly held in very high regard, that the ritual circumcision of an 8 day old child ensured that none of God’s wrath would finally be poured out on that individual (ex opere operato). But Paul in Romans 2:25-29 would later inform us that not all Israel are of Israel—it is our faith, which is the gracious gift of God that separates God’s children from the children of the Devil, not the application of a covenant sign alone. Likewise with the continuation of covenant signage, now by the covenant baptism of our infants into visible church membership, we as parents and other onlookers who partake in the grace mediated by that sacrament, fully expect God to later regenerate that baptized baby—He has set His mark on that little helpless and virtually unresponsive child who will ordinarily inherit genuine belief. But those who have tasted of the benefits of God through this nurturing, yet finally apostatize and fall away are the exception to the rule, thus are much more liable to God’s severe wrath because they tasted His grace first hand; consider 2 Pet. 2:1-3 where Peter tells of false teachers who tasted the very grace of God through what we call the covenant community, yet they forsook Christ and their trouble will be greater because of their exposure to the gospel and their failure to believe it.

Exposition on Joel - Introduction - 5

     We now have two major ideas in mind with regards to the “zeitgeist” of the temporal Jewish kingdom: One, that the prophets delivered their messages in the context of the covenant (with its blessings and curses) and two, that the Jewish people had largely misunderstood how God’s plan to create a people for Himself would be fulfilled in what we call the ecclesia or Church. They had it in their minds that in essence, to be loved by God and to live as His beneficiary was to be nationally Jewish. So in light of this misunderstanding three topics should be taken into consideration: the reason behind God’s judgment—the covenantal disobedience of the people, the means of the warnings Joel gives—the DotL. And third—the right way to view God’s faithfulness to His people and the right way to look at the application of the signs of the covenants: both circumcision in the Old and baptism in the New.

In Joel’s day the nation didn’t really believe that God’s wrath could come down upon them, not His chosen nation. They had forgotten the curses for disobedience in the Mosaic covenant and remembered only the blessings of the covenant made to Abraham their father. Kind of like the haughtiness of Harry Potter in the “Half Blood Prince”. Many of the people had in mind that, in order to become part of the elect people of God one had to become part of the physical nation of Israel; over the years, they had equated the two. They failed to see themselves as an illustration of something greater. But because of a lack of information, we must give them a pass. It is not likely that we would have understood it any better. Theirs was an age of shadows and types and things that only pointed forward to the fulfillment—Jesus Christ. Their misgivings were in large measure the result of some of the functions of the covenant: the exclusivity in the rituals and celebrations; the peculiarity of the dietary laws, the warnings against marrying foreigners. Their misinterpretation of those things contributed to a fallen understanding of those outside of the covenant, especially in their time but even after Christ came. The transition and understanding didn’t come easily. Christ had to be interpreted. And Paul in Eph. 2:11-22 helped reform the world’s understanding of the mystery that ALL nations would be brought into the commonwealth of Israel by their adoption through the blood of Christ. Before that, this idea of being loved and cared for and benefiting from the grace of God without first becoming a Jew (which in the Jew’s minds at the time meant being circumcised and keeping the other Mosaic Laws) was unthinkable. Paul informs us, just as Hosea prophesied, that the “uncircumcision” who were “not a people” have been made a people by being brought near to the commonwealth of Israel. Consider the Galatian heresy Paul had to deal with, it only happened because of this misunderstanding. Some influential people were teaching “another” gospel, one where of course the heretics admitted that one needed Christ’s sacrifice but that the person would also need to be physically circumcised and participate in a distinctly Old Covenant Jewish format of worship. Those false teachers in Galatia had fooled many to think that a proselyte still basically had to become a national Jew before becoming a disciple of the risen Christ. So in this misunderstanding of fulfilled Jewishness, the Galatians of Paul’s day were still in disbelief regarding the expansive nature of God’s mercy, that it included all tribes, tongues and peoples. The Jews in Joel’s day were likewise confused about the punishment of their people at the DotL. Part of Joel’s message was to remind them that faithless Jews too, along with the godless Gentile nations, would receive the brunt of God’s damning wrath.

Exposition on Joel - Introduction - 4

     But Jesus came and spoke But by the inspiration of God’s Spirit, Joel turns the Jewish expectation of the Day of the Lord upside-down—because of their heritage they thought of that coming Day only as a day of salvation and deliverance for them, and a Day only of damnation and destruction for the gentile nations. So instead of allowing the people to continue in that misconception, Joel uses the image of the descending army, a result of their covenant disobedience, to wreak as much havoc on their hearts as it would on the Land. And he uses this imagery as a foreshadowing of that future Day when not only will the unbelieving nations be judged, but the unbelieving Jewish nation as well. It was a warning not to misunderstand the coming Day of Yahweh where His judgment will transcend nations, even that nation He called His own. This was likely a hard pill for them to swallow, as were most of the words of God’s prophets, else why would they need to be sent, if there was no misconception about the nature of God and the nature of man?

     The NT gives us many example of the diversity of the DotL. From Romans 2:16 we hear that on that Day the secrets of men will be judged by Christ. But on that Day, the Day of the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, will also be a Day of final salvation for believers, even the Corinthian believers whose egregious sin Paul addressed (1 Cor. 1:4-9). And those who Paul suggested their bodies be delivered over to Satan, even that was so their souls would be delivered at The Day of the Lord (1 Cor. 5:5). According to Paul’s words later in his second letter to the church in Corinth, the Day of Yahweh will be a day where we will boast in one another’s good works (2 Cor. 1:14). And in Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians he describes the Day of the Lord as a day the coming of which, no one can foretell, a coming day that will likely surprise more people than it will catch waiting for it. Even Jesus mentions its mysteriousness as recorded for us in Mark 13:31. But that Day is not designed to distribute God’s wrath or displeasure to His elect, but only to those vessels for which that destruction has been measured out (1 Thess. 5). And in his instructions to Timothy, Paul speaks of a future Day whereby we will receive God’s mercy and crowns will be doled out (2 Tim. 1:18 and 4:8). Not only Paul, but Peter as well was inspired to describe this coming Day. In his second correspondence he reminds us of the justice that will be exacted on that Day. He also describes the scoffers and mockers that will characterize the end of this present age, but in the same breath he admonishes believers to wait patiently for this Day, for what will sadly be the Day of Judgment for many, is the Day of our salvation (2 Pet. 3). Lest we forget Jesus’ own comments on that Day: He warned, as recorded by Matthew in 7:22, that even some who called Him Lord would be forsaken in judgment on that final Day. And Christ instructed His disciples and us as well to keep the New Covenant Passover meal, that feast we call communion, until the Day of His return when He will supp once again in person with the extended group of OT and NT disciples which He calls His Church and His Bride (Mark 14:25). Christ also devised a couple parables describing both the immense pleasure and horrific terror that will be displayed on the DotL when He spoke of the 10 virgins and the 10 talents and how the unprepared virgins He never knew and the wicked and slothful servant would be cast into outer darkness (Matt. 25).

Exposition on Joel - Introduction - 3

     Several themes surface throughout the progress of Joel’s prophesy: the Day of the Lord and repentance. Then again, one could say that Joel’s style is really just characterized by variations on one theme—repentance. In chapter one he uses the drunkard, the priest, the invading army and later, the final Day of Judgment, all as means of calling the nation to corporate repentance. And in chapters 2 and 3 we see the promises of judgment and salvation finally meted out in the Day of the Lord: an eschatological final day which is depicted throughout redemptive history in lesser, but still terrible, days of destruction and deliverance. We observe one of the more prominent features of the promises and fulfillment to God’s beneficiaries in His Spirit: promised in Joel chapter 3 and fulfilled in Acts chapter 2. We can also observe the importance of the themes of the mourning and the lamenting of the sin of Judah; and of course a call to their repentance, which necessarily becomes a call to consecrate fasting and assembly in order to corporately lament the sins of the nation. In addition the mention of the mourning of the very land itself—the beasts of the field, the pastures, vineyards, the languishing olive groves and the gladness of the people having dried up along with the impoverishment of their physical resources.

Specifically regarding the Day of the Lord, Joel uses the term to describe 2 events: the recent torment on the land, an army described as locusts in chapter one, and the future and terrible Day wherein the evil nations will be judged in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, described in chapter 2. Unlike most of the other prophets, simply warning the people by predicting the actual futuristic nature of the coming Day of Yahweh or the Day of the Lord, in Joel it is more so the gasoline fueling the fire of His oracles. So significant is the concept of the DotL to Joel’s prophesy that it is strategically placed in every one of the four major subsections of the book, thus making it undeniable crucial to the idea God had for Joel to preach. The concept of that Day in the book of Joel follows a pattern similar to the OT prophecies of Christ coming: as we know today, Christ’s coming was to be two-fold: first in humiliation and second and finally in His coming in glory. The OT saint likely had confused the two due to their frequent compression, as they were often spoken of as though they were one future “coming”, and in like manner, the OT saint had likely confused the final deliverance that could be expected by believers at the DotL with the destruction that was to be expected at the DotL. So they were shocked to learn of their exile as a form of the punishment provided for in the context of the DotL. The notion of the Day of the Lord is more fully expressed in the New Testament where we get a more complete picture than that provided by any pre-Messianic prophesy. And such is the nature of prophesy in general, it normally follows this pattern: prophesy, then fulfillment, and then understanding. However, it can be demonstrated by our present concern in Joel that understanding is truly partial when we look at how the Jews in the OT thought of the Day of the Lord. After Joel’s prophesy and prior to the NT exposition of the concept, most Jews regarded the Day as being exclusively a day when the wrongs perpetrated against the people of Israel would be righted. But in Joel and in some NT passages we discover that unbelieving Jews (an unbelief manifest in gross and perpetual disobedience) will be judged in that Day along with the evildoers of other nations.

You see, in Joel’s day and even in Christ’s day, especially before Paul in Eph. 2:11-22 helped reform the world’s understanding of the mystery that ALL nations would be brought into the commonwealth of Israel via their adoption through the blood of the Ultimate and final Passover Lamb, Jesus of Nazareth, and all those (Israeli and gentile) unbelievers would receive God’s wrath on that final Day. The Jews believed that their pedigree through the familial line of Abraham alone was their ticket to being the beneficiaries of God, regardless of their actions; no one, they thought, could take that from them. They believed, and thus rightly held in very high regard, that the ritual circumcision of an 8 day old babe ensured that none of God’s wrath would finally be poured out on that individual. But Paul in Romans 2 would later inform us that not all Israel are of Israel—it is our faith, which is the very gift of God, proved by our good works that separates God’s children from the children of the Devil, not the application of a covenant sign alone. Likewise with the continuation of covenant signage, now by the covenant baptism of our infants into visible church membership, we as parents and other onlookers who partake in the grace mediated by that sacrament, fully expect God to later regenerate that baptized baby—He has set His mark on that little helpless and virtually unresponsive one who will ordinarily inherit genuine belief. But those who have tasted of the benefits of God through this nurturing, yet finally apostatize and fall away are the exception to the rule, thus are much more liable to God’s severe wrath because they tasted His grace first hand; consider 2 Pet. 2:1-3.