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.