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.