Exposition on Joel -33- 2:13b-14

God calls for the people’s return because He is gracious and merciful. We always forget how good the Good News is. If we are told to forgive, we ask how many times I must. If we are told to give people good things when they deserve bad, we call it injustice. If we are asked to be generous, we consider it unbalanced. God is not like us, He is gracious and He gave us an alien righteousness and gave Christ our sin. He is merciful; He withholds even His fatherly displeasure toward His children when we sin against Him repeatedly. His justice is navigated by His desire to show mercy. Somehow in His divine purposes He found it to be a deficient display of His glory to only show contempt toward His deserving creatures. He decided instead to display His glory more fully in the presentation of His longsuffering covenant faithfulness—and we become the beneficiaries of His purposes because He has decided to be slow in showing His anger and quick to show us His steadfast love. When we begin to take all this grace for granted; when we just go on day to day without having God’s wrath poured out on us, we begin to think we are getting what we deserve. The truth is, His hand holds back His anger because of what He did in Christ. As Peter puts it, He has not come yet in His glory (the DotL) because all those who will repent and receive the His mercy, according to His foreknowledge, have not yet done so. So He waits. And it is a holy and just waiting; His justice and His mercy are not pitted one against another; He is not internally conflicted as we are. So they are called to return to Him because, who knows, He may decide to relent of this disaster His has planned for the covenantal disobedience of His children. We must first recognize that He is justified in punishing them in such a way as He determines. They are His as individuals and as a community, so He can do whatever He wants. But how can God change His mind? He is the same yesterday, today and forever. What does it mean that He would decide to do something different than He previously imagined? Is that what He is saying? What doctrine of God’s foreknowledge and providence is to be extrapolated from this text? This is not a predictive statement Joel is making here. It is not as though God is saying to the people, “I have seen your future and you are going to be destroyed, but if you repent then I will change that future”. No, God has given them a choice, and from their perspective and ours, this is an “if/then” scenario; if they repent, then God will leave a blessing instead of a curse. The negative implication being, if they do not return, then God will destroy them. Of course God knows their future and He knows that they will return in the way that satisfies His desires because He has given them the capacity for it. So they will not be utterly destroyed but a remnant will survive His punishment and eventually be restored to the Land. This is in fact, anthropomorphic language. God stutters to speak to us so we understand; He humbles His speech the way a professor of physics would bow to speak of planets and stars to his 8 year old. Facts about His intentions are mediated through our language and how we would understand it—in terms of how men would deal with the situation. So this is not a theological presentation on Joel’s part, one to be used to wrongfully develop some “Molinistic”, “Middle Knowledge”, or “Open Theology” approach to God’s knowledge of future things and His providence over His creatures. God is here, from our perspective, giving the people a choice: “return and experience blessing.” Or, “continue in your apathy and I will curse you to the uttermost.”
Joel goes on to describe what it would look like if God’s changed His mind. Instead of the army leaving a desolate wilderness in its path, God said He would leave in His path a grain and drink offering. Couldn’t Joel have as easily said that He will leave behind the blessing of a fruitful vine and flourishing fig tree, or that He would make the pomegranate, palm and apple prove bountiful? He could have said that God may relent and remove the locust but he didn’t. Why didn’t Joel say, God may yet relent and destroy the invading army? Why is this significant? The removal of the grain and drink offering was a two-fold terror for them. The food products were removed because of the destruction of produce by the invading army and the fact that they would not be able to offer up the prescribed sacrifices meant in their minds that God’s just wrath would not be appeased and it would come down on them all the more strongly.