Introduction and a Call to Action: Sermon on Joel 1:1-12
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Thank you, worship team. Happy New Year! We are back in the Old Testament, and I want to introduce you to the prophet Joel. If you recall, the land of Israel is here.
This picture is of modern Israel, some 6000 miles away. [PAUSE]
This second picture is of ancient Israel, some 3000 years away. [PAUSE] We see the Southern and Northern Kingdoms and surrounding nations in it. You may recall that after King David came to King Solomon. When Solomon passed, his son Rehoboam reigned. He was harsh, and eleven northern tribes seceded. In 722 B.C., the superpower Assyria conquered the tribes in the North, and Assyria deported them for free labor. After decades, the Babylonians conquered the Assyrians. In 586 B.C., they conquered Judah, the Southern Kingdom, destroying the temple and carting off the people. Seventy years after exile, Israel returned to their homeland and began to rebuild. They rebuilt the temple, which we read about in Ezra. And they rebuilt the city walls, which we read about in Nehemiah. Although some debate the date of writing, many scholars think that Joel wrote the book during this period, putting it as early as five to four hundred B.C.
JOEL
Joel is an obscure book. It contains a few familiar verses. For example, in chapter 2, verse 13 it reads:
Rend your hearts and not your garments.
Return to the LORD your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love;
and he relents over disaster. (Joel 2:13, ESV)
This verse echoes Exodus, where God told Moses he was gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. The New Testament quoted Joel at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came upon the followers of Jesus. The apostle Peter said it was a fulfillment.
And it shall come to pass afterward,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.
Even on the male and female servants
in those days I will pour out my Spirit. (Joel 2:28–29, ESV)
In Romans, Paul quoted Joel chapter 2, verse 32, “Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved” (Joel 2:32, ESV). Joel writes about the Day of the LORD, repentance, grace, mercy, and lament. The first half of Joel is dark and gloomy, while the second is encouraging and hopeful for some. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s dive into the first twelve verses of the book.
SCRIPTURE
I am going to have __________ come up here to read for us. Stand in honor of God’s Word if you are able.
TEXT
The word of the LORD that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel:
Hear this, you elders;
give ear, all inhabitants of the land!
Has such a thing happened in your days,
or in the days of your fathers?
Tell your children of it,
and let your children tell their children,
and their children to another generation.
What the cutting locust left,
the swarming locust has eaten.
What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten,
and what the hopping locust left,
the destroying locust has eaten.
Awake, you drunkards, and weep,
and wail, all you drinkers of wine,
because of the sweet wine,
for it is cut off from your mouth.
For a nation has come up against my land,
powerful and beyond number;
its teeth are lions’ teeth,
and it has the fangs of a lioness.
It has laid waste my vine
and splintered my fig tree;
it has stripped off their bark and thrown it down;
their branches are made white.
Lament like a virgin wearing sackcloth
for the bridegroom of her youth.
The grain offering and the drink offering are cut off
from the house of the LORD.
The priests mourn,
the ministers of the LORD.
The fields are destroyed,
the ground mourns,
because the grain is destroyed,
the wine dries up,
the oil languishes.
Be ashamed, O tillers of the soil;
wail, O vinedressers,
for the wheat and the barley,
because the harvest of the field has perished.
The vine dries up;
the fig tree languishes.
Pomegranate, palm, and apple,
all the trees of the field are dried up,
and gladness dries up
from the children of man. (Joel 1:1–12, ESV)
PRAYER
Thank you. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for your Word. By your Spirit, bring comfort and conviction. Help us listen, learn, and, at appropriate times, lament; in Jesus’s name, we pray, amen. You may be seated.
STRUCTURE
A group of us studied Joel's book last year. We came up with the main idea:
“Return! For the day of the Lord will bring judgment and restoration.”
That is the point of the book. But what is the point of these twelve verses? For us to see that, we need to look closer. We can break our passage into two simple sections:
Vs. 1 A Divine Origin of Joel’s Message
Vss. 2–12 A Call to Action
God’s message to his people is:
As locusts destroy, be a listening, learning, and lamenting people.
Let me say that again for those taking notes: As locusts destroy, be a listening, learning, and lamenting people. To apply this to our day, we must dive into the context.
INTRODUCTION
Look at verse 1.
“The word of the LORD that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel” (Joel 1:1, ESV).
Verse 1 introduces the entire book. We don’t know much about Joel. The Bible only mentions his name here. Pethuel means “Vision of God,” and Joel means “Yahweh is God.” Pastors preach the Bible, but Joel was writing it. This is God’s vision, God’s message to his people. Like many of the other prophetic books, Joel begins letting us know that we are not reading a speech from a political hack, a lecture from a college professor, or a column from an editor. This is the Word of God.
LORD
When you see the name “LORD” capitalized, it is God’s unique name, Yahweh. The people of God were not to take his name in vain. They went so far as not even to pronounce it. They just spelled an abbreviation that we recognize as LORD with all caps.
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Who is he? He is the Creator of our Milky Way, this spiral galaxy 76 million light years away, NGC 2566, the estimated 100 billion to 2 trillion galaxies, and you. He cares for you. He sent messengers to speak to you, Joel’s audience, and us. God said in Joel’s day and does in our day. He speaks to us in his Word, the Bible, a book that is unlike any other.
LISTEN
Look at verse 2.
Hear this, you elders;
give ear, all inhabitants of the land!
Has such a thing happened in your days,
or in the days of your fathers? (Joel 1:2, ESV)
This is a rhetorical question. The answer is “No.” Such a thing has not happened. In verse 2, two verbs call God’s people to one action: listen. God wants his people to listen to him. As we come to 2025, will you listen to God? I have to commend a friend of mine I talked to recently. He plans to take time this year to seek the Lord on a three-month sabbatical. He wants a renewed sense of God’s will and conviction. Who better to listen to than God, who made us? He is worthy of our attention.
POETRY
As we read ancient Hebrew prophecies, they tend to be poetic. They don’t rhyme like our poems; they use parallelism. So, the commands to hear and give ear parallel. We see that hearing and giving an ear are both ways to listen. However, the lines differ in audience, broadening the application. The first addresses a narrow group called elders, and the second addresses all.
LAND
The second line mentions land. What land? I already showed you a picture of it.
God was talking about the Promised Land, Israel, to his people. He wanted all his people to be receptive when he spoke, to listen.
KIDS
I have six kids, two of whom are in college. Several of them are teenagers, and a few are younger. I invariably want them to listen to me as well. Yet, sometimes, it seems like I am talking to a wall. For example, I go grocery shopping, and they are supposed to put things away. Arriving, I ask them for help, and they don’t. I can get pretty frustrated. They generally pitch in.
WHEN I WAS A KID
Now, I didn’t when I was their age. I struggled to listen when I was a kid (my wife says I still do, but perhaps my hearing is going). I can recall my mom saying something like take the dog on a walk, get the pizza out of the oven, or pick up your shoes from the entryway as she headed out the door. I would say something like, “Sure, Mom! Or, Youbet.” But at the time, her voice was more like the Peanuts teacher talking to Charlie Brown, “wah-wah-wah-wah.” My mom would return to the house, and I would be in the same place when she left. If she asked me if I heard her, I could say yeah, but I wasn’t listening. I am sure she was frustrated. Maybe you can relate. We know God can. He wants his people to listen, and they struggle. Do you? As we think of 2025, what would it look like for you to improve your listening? How do we listen to the LORD? It takes time, attention, space, and God’s Word. This week, the pastors will go to a retreat center called “Stillwaters”; we will pray, seek the Lord, and talk about the coming year. Maybe you take some time to do a retreat this year. The pastors would love to talk to you if you want ideas or suggestions. God wants his people to listen.
LEARN
But that is not all. Look at verse 3.
“Tell your children of it,
and let your children tell their children,
and their children to another generation” (Joel 1:3, ESV).
We read in verse 3 that God wants these people to tell a message to the next generation. He wants his people to help the next generation learn. He desires that the message live on. This is where the MyCircle workshop relates. We don’t want to hide God and his Word. We want to share it. Here at our church, we do a pretty good job communicating with the next generation. We intentionally have a bible-saturated curriculum for kids in Children’s Church. We did a VBS last year that was smashing. We had an excellent kids element at our Christmas Mixer. Our youth group is fantastic. We invest our time, money, and energy in making it so. We want to see the good news about Jesus passed down to the next generation and our neighbors. We want to be a listening and learning community. What would it look like for you to be a part of that in 2025? [PAUSE]
LOCUSTS
God wants Joel’s audience to learn what? Glance at verse 4.
What the cutting locust left,
the swarming locust has eaten.
What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten,
and what the hopping locust left,
the destroying locust has eaten. (Joel 1:4, ESV)
God’s message refers to a natural disaster of catastrophic proportions. It was poetic and painful. They experienced a plague. Last year, I finished reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, Little House on the Prairie, to my youngest. In it, she recounts something that happened called the Grasshopper Plague of 1874. Rocky Mountain locusts swarmed some 2,000,000 square miles, devouring crops, and devastating the countryside. People starved, went bankrupt, and had to relocate to find work and food. Since then, it has happened a couple of other times and only ceased because farmers used insecticide and caused the extinction of this specific locust. In 1915, a swarm of locusts as large as 24 billion filled the skies in the Middle East (Graybill, John B. 1960. “Joel.” In Job–Malachi, edited by Carl F. H. Henry, 2:290. The Biblical Expositor. A. J. Holman Company.). In 1959, locusts in Ethiopia plagued the area for six weeks, consuming enough food to feed a million people for a year (Smith, James E. 1994. The Minor Prophets. Old Testament Survey Series. Joplin, MO: College Press.). Although some have read these locusts as metaphorical, most scholars think the locusts were literal. The different types, cutting, swarming, hopping, and destroying, represent the progressive stages of locust development. They had a voracious appetite, and the people faced a major fiasco. God didn’t want them to forget it.
CONNECTION
What trials have you faced? [PAUSE] Perhaps you have faced the loss of a loved one. Your health may have declined. Finances may be tight. Perhaps someone hurt you. It is good to acknowledge our challenges. But what do we do with them? How do we handle them in a godly, healthy way?
FRIEND
I have a friend who called me this week. He calls me regularly. He suffers in severe ways. Physically, he can’t leave his residence. He lives with chronic pain. He probably has more suffering than most. Yet, he is a person of faith. He tries to listen to God, but even that is hard. So, he called me asking for help. He asked me why all this was happening. We often go over what the Bible tells us. God disciplines his children. He uses pain and suffering to get our attention. He displays who he is in our lives by answering prayers. He moves in mysterious ways. But we also know this suffering is not a sign of punishment or abandonment. From Job, Joshua’s trials in Genesis, the man born blind in the gospels, and Jesus, we know that bad things happen to good people. Why does my friend suffer? God knows. Why does the audience in Joel suffer? The book of Joel helps us work through our understanding of suffering. God was speaking to these suffering people.
CONCLUSION
He wants them to listen, learn, and also to lament. Look at verse 5:
Awake, you drunkards, and weep,
and wail, all you drinkers of wine,
because of the sweet wine,
for it is cut off from your mouth. (Joel 1:5, ESV)
The drunkard doesn’t have alcohol for their addiction, nor does the pleasure drinker for refreshment or celebration. The locusts ate the grapes and leaves and decimated the vines. There would be no wine for them. There is no rain for the farmer of any produce. We will read that drought struck the land along with these insects.
VERSE 6
The reason for lamenting continues in verse 6:
For a nation has come up against my land,
powerful and beyond number;
its teeth are lions’ teeth,
and it has the fangs of a lioness.
It has laid waste my vine
and splintered my fig tree;
it has stripped off their bark and thrown it down;
their branches are made white. (Joel 1:6–7, ESV)
Over the centuries, people have compared locusts to lions in their looks and soldiers in their organization and destruction. This army wasted, splintered, stripped, and threw down the harvest.
VERSE 8
In verse 8, we read what this lament looks like.
“Lament like a virgin wearing sackcloth
for the bridegroom of her youth” (Joel 1:8, ESV).
The word picture is a bride in her dress heading to her wedding, and then her fiance is struck by a driver under the influence. His car ignites on fire. There is no escape for the young man in his prime. He is dead. The lament is a celebration morphing into a funeral. That is the kind of sadness God wants his people to marinate in. Why? What does lament teach? How does this relate to those of us who live in abundance? Let’s keep listening to their suffering.
VERSE 9
Jump to verse 9.
The grain offering and the drink offering are cut off
from the house of the LORD.
The priests mourn,
the ministers of the LORD. (Joel 1:9, ESV)
Offerings come naturally from the fruit of the land. If the land stopped bearing fruit, if a plague came, then there would be nothing for people to offer. And then, the priest and his family would starve. So, priests and ministers lament the lack of worship and sustenance.
VERSE 10
Not only that, look at verse 10.
“The fields are destroyed,
the ground mourns” (Joel 1:10a, ESV).
The ground laments, too. In Romans chapter 8, the creation groans for the day when God will reveal who the children of God are. When Cain killed his brother, Abel, his brother’s blood cried out from the ground. And here in Joel 1, we read that the soil mourns. Why? The same reason the priests, the drunkards, and everyone else mourn.
“Because the grain is destroyed,
the wine dries up,
the oil languishes” (Joel 1:10b, ESV).
This was horrible, and God desired his people to lament it.
LAMENTING
Suffering is real. And we need time in life to acknowledge it and lament. Do you have space in your mind to admit the hurt and pain you or others suffer? Do you permit yourself to grieve when it is appropriate? What should that look like? Ecclesiastes says there is a time for weeping and a time for laughing. I was with some friends on New Year’s Eve, and a few guys were laughing and laughing, saying it was so good to laugh. They were right. But sometimes, like a funeral, it is good to shed a tear. Do you? Do you let yourself grieve? Can you listen to others who suffer? Do you weep with those who weep? Or do you get impatient listening to complaints? Do you try to fix people, shut them up, or escape? I can at times. We can stretch ourselves to lament. Joel described a time in the history of Israel when it was appropriate for them to lament. It was not all the time, but there was a time.
VERSE 11
That said, there are different types of lament. Just like there are various types of suffering, look at verse 11.
“Be ashamed, O tillers of the soil;
wail, O vinedressers” (Joel 1:11a, ESV).
Why? Why should sufferers be ashamed and weep? The verse answers:
For the wheat and the barley,
because the harvest of the field has perished.
The vine dries up;
the fig tree languishes.
Pomegranate, palm, and apple,
all the trees of the field are dried up,
and gladness dries up
from the children of man. (Joel 1:11b–12, ESV)
This answer doesn’t seem to fit.
ASHAMED
A Hebrew dictionary defines “Ashamed” this way:
i.e., to have a painful feeling and emotional distress (sometimes to the point of despair), by having done something wrong, with an associative meaning of having the disapproval of those around them (Jdg 3:25; Jer 14:4), note: this wrong can refer to a social mistake, or a serious sin. (James Swanson, Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew (Old Testament) (Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997).)
In Hebrew, the word “Ashamed” sounds like the word “dries up,” which is used twice in verse 12. So, was Joel stretching with this word for a Hebrew rhyme? [PAUSE] I don’t entirely believe that is why he chose it. “Ashamed” connects to the idea of lamentation when we zoom out.
SIN
As we keep reading Joel, we see that the tragedy they were experiencing was partly a result of their own making. Why? What did they do wrong? Later in Joel, we read God called his people to return to him. [PAUSE] That would indicate they left him at some point. How do drought and plague result from leaving God? Remember, he made all the galaxies. He didn’t just speak the world into existence. He is still in control of every star, planet, and molecule. He can use nature to get our attention.
CURSES
We see the answer in Deuteronomy 28 through 30. In those three chapters, Moses brought God’s people to the edge of the Promised Land. He laid out God’s Laws and offered a blessing if they followed them and a curse if they didn’t. Here is part of the curse. Notice how the Creator will negatively impact the Land for their disobedience.
But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out.
The LORD will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me. The LORD will make the pestilence stick to you until he has consumed you off the land that you are entering to take possession of it. The LORD will strike you with wasting disease and with fever, inflammation and fiery heat, and with drought and with blight and with mildew. They shall pursue you until you perish. And the heavens over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you shall be iron. The LORD will make the rain of your land powder. From heaven dust shall come down on you until you are destroyed. (Deuteronomy 28:15–24, ESV)
God’s people faced drought and plague because they neglected God and his ways. He desired his people to be listening, learning, and, at this time, lamenting. Sometimes lamenting is grief over a tragedy, and other times sorrow for one’s sin. God wants our attention. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
GRACE
If you are suffering, God cares for you. He loves you. He allows people’s sins to impact us and get our attention. He brings judgment and justice. We can lose sight of God and become deaf to his voice. He wants our hearts. He is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. He allows people to run away like the prodigal son until the best time before he brings them back. God is patient, allowing injustice until all who will repent their sins turn to him. Suffering reminds us of the most significant suffering. The LORD wants us to remember the greatest injustice and tragedy embraced on our behalf to save us from our sins. What was that? Jesus came to Earth, lived a perfect life, died our death, and paid the penalty for our sins. Then, he rose victorious from the dead as a foreshadowing of our resurrection. Jesus is our hope, friends. This is the gospel we believe and remember in communion, which we will enjoy in a minute.
APPLICATION
As we conclude:
LISTEN: Are you listening to God? What does it look like for you to listen to him?
LEARN: What does it look like for you to communicate the truth to the next generation or those around you? What avenue can you explore to tell others about him? Could you teach Sunday School, write a note of encouragement, or pray for a hurting person?
LAMENT: Where have you seen tragedy or loss? What does it look like for you to grieve in healthy ways? Are there some things you brought on yourself? Do you need to go to God with sorrow for your sin and ask for forgiveness? And seek to move toward Godliness? He is loving, patient, and merciful. He welcomes you.
PRAYER
Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for sending your Son into this broken world to save us from sin. We have neglected you and hurt each other. We also have suffered hurt and loss. Help us not numb ourselves with a doom cycle of swiping and scrolling online, drinking and smoking our troubles away. Help us not bury ourselves in material things; buy and travel to ignore what you say. Give us ears to hear you. Help 2025 be a year where we follow you wherever you want. Guide us, direct us, and lead us. In Jesus’s name, we pray, amen. The ushers will come forward as the worship team leads us in song.* Use by permission. All rights reserved.
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