Exposition on Joel - 10 - Verses 1-3

     In verses 1-3 we find Joel’s introduction and call on the people to hear the Word of the Lord. This entire chapter and the 1^st part of chapter 2 have to do mainly with the destruction coming on Judah and the call for the people to lament its effects. Verses 2-3 give Joel’s hearers and us as well, a call to remember the destructive force of locusts from the plague that occurred in the Exodus. Joel is setting the people up to compare their present suffering through invasion to the desolations of the past. They are what can be referred to as a “call to communal lamentation”. It can be difficult to distinguish this type of lamentation from that of a funeral song or some sort of elegy, but the two verses contain several key elements as pointed out by Stuart (239). Joel commands the people to recall their recent history and to memorialize this event.

In v. 2 Joel calls the elders and in fact all of the people to see the uniqueness of this event. The reason being is that people become complacent and unhurried when events occur on a regular basis, regardless of their intensity.  As much difficulty as the periodic swarm of locusts would have caused, even that they had gotten used to—most likely and most appropriately marking their invasions up to the nature of things. But when an unusually strong calamity is sent their way, the people’s sensibilities tremble, such as it is with this invading army in verse 6. It seems to be the opposite in our day.  We try to shrug off the big stuff and we tend to get hung up on the small things. Many of us actually spend a lot of time trying either to avoid or cover up the discomforts that intrude into our lives. Symptoms of it can be seen in the way we entertain ourselves. Many of us lose ourselves in movies and television almost like a drug, one that helps us forget about life’s larger troubles, even if only momentarily. We also try to shrug off the big stuff in less benign ways, consider the way we try to ignore death as a reality.  The way we talk about it and even some of the burial customs we embrace are actually symptoms of our desire to disengage from reality when it bites. Our technological advances have given us such control over our circumstances that even the smallest discomfort or disruption will frequently send us into a spiral of anxiety. Just to be sure, I’m not suggesting that these intrusions on our comfort like death or chronic pain or relational angst are necessarily judgments God has sent to call us to repentance like the invasion in Joel was intended, but I mention them just to highlight the fact that the Judeans had taken the common things for granted. Joel makes it a point to remind them that this particular invasion and its effects are anything but common. It’s a bit like the Californians who have gotten used to the occasional tremor. Joel is telling the people that this is not tremor; it is as though he asks them, “has an earth quake of this magnitude happened in your recent history?” The answer to this rhetorical question posed in verse 2 is obviously, no.

In v. 3 Joel also calls on the people to tell their children about this day of trouble. This verse could be a Hebraism whereby the audience is being asked to remember and being asked to tell their entire household to remember these events, whether they are present or future. It reminds me of Joshua 4 when God brought the people across the Jordan and commanded that 12 stones be piled up as a memorial. God wanted His people and their children to remember it so every time they saw that “monument” they could point to it and say to their children, “see there, these stones were put there to cause us to remember the day when God did…” In a similar way, Joel calls the people to stack stones as it were, to remember this day when the Lord your God, in His terrible justice, sent an army to punish the nation. Little did the hearers of Joel’s oracle know they would likely be reminding their children and their grand children, who would be born in a land other than their own. Perhaps if they were lucky, their great, great grand children would be born in Judah (70 years later) after the return of the remnant. They could finally hear of this invading army while the people sat once again in Abraham’s Land.