Is Joel's Message Relevant Today?

Ever read the Book of Joel? A terrible swarm of locusts had come through the land destroying everything in its wake. There is an interesting question at the beginning of chapter 1. Joel asks this interesting question before making any comment: "Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers?" The answer to this rhetorical question, of course, was that such an event had not happened in their lifetimes or even during their fathers' lifetimes. Joel was pressing his audience to ponder the reason for this monumental disaster. As they took the time to think through the locust swarm and the damage left behind and whether anything like it had happened in the past, they no doubt would have remembered the locust plague in Egypt that was poured out on a people that did not honor and love God. Frightening to look around your disaster and think, "This is similar to when God poured out His wrath on His enemies."

Listen to the damage done: "the fields are destroyed...the grain is destroyed, the wine is dried up, the oil languished...the harvest of the field has perished. The vine dries up; the fig tree languishes." (1:10-12).

This was a calamity of such proportions that they should be asking themselves why it happened. God's judgment of physical destruction of the land came as a result of the people's lack of fidelity to their God. Consider 1:13, "[G]rain offering and drink offering are withheld from the house of your God." Is this a relevant message to our age? Do people need to hear the Joel's call to repentance?

First we are given the directive: return to God. Hear God's urging, "'Yet even now,' declares the Lord, 'return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments'" (2:12-13a). Second we are given a description of God which engenders sinners to return to Him: "Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love" (v13b). The end of the chapter assures the people of the result of repentance, "And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (v.32).

And so we see salvation history continue: God's judgment on men's sin and His offer to save them based in something extrinsic, or outside of, themselves. Men sitting in the rubble and ruin of their own "accomplishments," contrasted with their salvation being based in God's character and on the basis of calling on His name (not their own name or their own accomplishments). New Testament assures us that 2:32 was actually foreshadowing Jesus, "[I]f you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9).

It is on the basis of this ancient message of a God who saves that we fellowship together!