Bible Talks - Traditional Church (Sunday 8am)
The Day of The Lord
Sunday, 05 November 2006
‘Revelations’ – of what?
‘End of the world’ movies and TV shows are back in vogue again. Middle of last year, Channel 7 screened the mini-series ‘Revelations’ . Supposedly based around the last book of the Bible.
Here’s the plot of “Revelations,” more or less: A rebel nun with a seemingly bottomless travel budget searches the world with a sceptical Harvard astrophysicist, investigating bizarre phenomena and doing their best to prevent the coming of the Day of Judgement, the day of the lord.
One reviewer was smart enough to observe: “I’m no scripture expert, but my guess is it would take more than a nun and an ivy league Poindexter to thwart God’s plans – if such a thing were even possible.” Full marks to the reviewer! He must have read Joel! But it seems to me that none of the ‘judgement day’ movies or TV shows of recent years even get the basics right. They are always total ‘gloom and doom’ scenarios of the end of the world as we know it. None of them attempt to understand that God’s judgement and God’s love belong together.
So in Joel chapter 1 (and 2) we have God in judgement – and it’s horrific, it’s meant to scare the daylights out of us, it’s designed to have that effect. And yet we will still see God the saviour in the book of Joel.
Indeed – we cannot understand God’s salvation and what it means for us until we understand the horrors of the judgement.
Joel and the locusts.
We don’t know much at all about Joel, or even when he wrote this book that packs such a punch. But it actually doesn’t matter that much, because what Joel writes about could have happened at any point in the time when Israel was settled in the promised land.
Joel is writing to remind us of something. Look at v2-3. ‘Remember you elders, and tell it to your children and your children’s children.’ He is saying that he’s writing about something that future generations, like us, need to know about.
And he says, I want you to remember the locust plague – not something that springs to our mind perhaps, but it’s a powerful image, isn’t it? - One wave of locusts come and eat, what they leave another wave eats, what they leave the baby locusts eat. Even though we are city people, we’ve all seen the pictures of hundreds of hectares of farming land stripped bare and devastated by a plague of locusts.
I was near Dubbo once after a locust plague had gone through... it was an extraordinary sight. They had even eaten the paint off the shed walls! Anything that was standing still was eaten by them – hoses, the coating on the washing line, everything.
Joel goes on to say they are worse than an army (v6-7) “A nation has invaded my land, powerful and without number; it has the teeth of a lion, the fangs of a lioness. It has laid waste my vines and ruined my fig trees. It has stripped off their bark and thrown it away, leaving their branches white.” And further on in 2:3 “Before them, fire devours, behind them a flame blazes. Before them the land is like the garden of Eden, behind them, a desert waste— nothing escapes them.”
It’s a picture of total, utter devastation! You cannot see what the land was like after they have been through: So back in chapter 1, v 10-12 “The fields are ruined, the ground is dried up; the grain is destroyed, the new wine is dried up, the oil fails. Despair, you farmers, wail, you vine growers; grieve for the wheat and the barley, because the harvest of the field is destroyed. The vine is dried up and the fig tree is withered...”
Even in the era of pesticides today, an army of locusts is a horrifying sight.
The Day of The Lord and ‘natural’ disasters.
But in this plague, Joel sees something more. He sees the Day of the Lord. – v15 “Alas for that day! For the day of the Lord is near; it will come like destruction from the Almighty.”.
In our age, we are used to hearing about the laws of nature, and having scientific descriptions of why and how things happen in the natural world. And so we have a tendency to forget the God who stands behind nature. To forget the creator who has made the world the way he has, and uses that world he has created to bring about his purposes.
And so we tend to think how unlucky it is when a locust plague hits north western NSW... whereas it’s not really a matter of luck, it’s a matter of God that locust plagues come.
The bible is clear – God brings both the good times and the bad, times of plenty and times of lean.
He brings earthquakes, and bushfires and famine, just as he brings good harvests and full dams.
And he brings the locusts.
In the march of the locusts, you have the image of God’s day of judgement!
In the end, there are no such things as natural catastrophes – rather, there are God catastrophes. And in each and every tragedy of the world, you hear the blast of the trumpet heralding judgement day.
We saw it most powerfully in the tsunami last year, because in every disaster that strikes this world, we get warned once again that all is not well with the earth.
Disasters are declaring to us that things need to be put right, In the locust plague, the earthquake, the tsunami we see the hand of God warning us yet again.
It’s not a popular view, but God does send such events. He doesn’t just let them happen. This world isn’t like a giant clockwork mechanism, with God sitting back watching it run down. He is maker of the world and he is the one who directs it’s daily events.
Do you remember back in Deut 28, God made a deal with his people, that when they got into the Promised Land, if they obeyed him, and kept their side of the covenant he made with them, they would prosper and live in peace? But if they did not obey Him then he would send plagues upon them.
So the plague of locusts can only tell us one thing about the character of the people of Israel in the time of Joel: God is in judgement on the sinfulness of the people.
We’re not told in this book what kind of sinfulness they were up to. Other prophecies, like Amos, do, but not Joel.
True repentance.
But what we do see here is a great, profound call to repentance. In the face of the locust plague, in the face of the judgement of God, a call to repent.
v2 “Hear this”, “listen”, v5 “Wake up you drunkards! Wail all you drinkers of wine” Wake up! Joel is saying, and v11 “Despair you farmers” v13 “Put on sackcloth...”
The call to repentance is a call to genuine repentance.
Joel’s concern here is more than just repentance, it’s genuine repentance.
Look at v14 “Declare a holy fast; call a sacred assembly. Summon the elders and all who live in the land to the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.”
Joel himself in v19 calls out to the Lord, for the disaster that he sees coming all around him...
But look at the challenge of 2:12-14 “‘Even now,‘ declares the Lord, ‘return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.
Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity. Who knows? He may turn and have pity and leave behind a blessing— grain offerings and drink offerings for the Lord your God. ”
The challenge is for a repentance that is real, not just a formal ritual. In Joel’s day, the way you expressed your repentance was to come up to the assembly and rip your clothes to show how repentant you were! It was a slightly melodramatic little ritual... but Joel here is saying, forget ripping your clothes, rather rip your heart before God. With all your heart you are to return to the Lord, with the genuineness of a total commitment.
Not a half-hearted job, not just your clothes, but total and real.
Repentance is something that we take so lightly and so easily.
If you have watched ‘Supernanny’ at all, you will know that one of the techniques she uses to place a misbehaving child in a spot called the ‘naughty place’. After they have been there for a period, the parent is to get down to the child’s level, make eye contact, and ask the child to apologise, to say sorry, for what they have done. All good stuff, but when you see the smirk on many of the kids’ faces as they say ‘sorry’ you just know it’s not genuine, that they are just saying it to please the parent.
As a people, we are very good at doing that too. ‘Sorry’ is just another meaningless phrase like ‘How are you’, and ‘have a nice day’. It’s most often used as we toss it out to avoid conflict or disagreement, and we are often not even aware that we have said it.
That is the opposite to what Joel is speaking about here. He’s speaking about real repentance: Being aware that our sin is intolerable and genuinely desiring to turn away from it.
Do you think of your sin that way? As being intolerable to God? Do you feel weighed down by it?
It’s not a casual feeling of ‘sorry’, or a superficial turning over of a new leaf. It needs to be a real, fair dinkum realisation of how unacceptable and intolerable our sin is before God.
Have you ever stolen from someone?
Real repentance will mean you will return the money or item you have stolen, because repentance isn’t just feeling bad about something when it’s mentioned.
[Have you stolen CD’s by copying a friends or taping them? Destroy them and go and buy a copy.
Have you pirated software or a movie on DVD? Erase them and go and buy them. Doesn’t matter if you have finished using them... You’ve stolen the property and enjoyed the use of those items already, so go and pay for that use.]
Real repentance is to say: ‘what I have done is wrong, and I will do as much as I possibly can to correct that wrong’.
That is rending your heart and not just your garments. It’s doing something about the wrong, it’s turning back, it’s the humility that openly confesses my sinfulness, that faces up to it and says “I have done the wrong thing” . That says it openly, out loud in the quietness of your own room. But then goes on to fix the wrongs, that seeks to make amends with people whom you have hurt or wronged in another way.
Repentance and us.
That’s the kind of repentance that a locust plague does for you! Because we humans can be pretty thick and pretty stupid. When everything is going along OK, we convince ourselves that we can get away with stuff. That no one is going to notice. That we’re really not that bad after all, and God will understand...
But when you have a ‘locust plague’ or a tsunami. When you see the devastation of your life all around you. When you see the doctor and he tells you, ‘yes it’s cancer’. When your friend dies horribly in a car smash.
Ah! I really do need to get right with God, don’t I?
But it’s pretty stupid isn’t it? Waiting until your life starts to fall apart around you before you come to your senses. But if we won’t come to our senses in any other way, then God – in his mercy – will bring us to our senses by devastation.
It actually is a kind and loving thing for God to do, because he’s only calling us to do something which we should be doing anyway. It’s fair-dinkum repentance that God has in mind here. Repentance that actually changes our lives. And does so urgently – in the light of the ‘Day of the Lord’ that is coming... Joel senses that doesn’t he? In 2:14 “Who knows? He may turn and have pity and leave behind a blessing ” Do it now! Don’t wait until it’s too late...
2:16 underlines the urgency... suggesting that people should even leave their honeymoon to come together to repent, to get things sorted with the living God, who will one day (maybe soon) will bring the final day to be...
And so Joel calls together the whole community of God to do this repentance.
The elders in 1:2, the drunkards in v5, the farmers in v11, the priests in v13 – all of them coming together and pleading together before God for forgiveness!
We’ve lost that sense of being a community of God’s people. We are so focussed on being individuals... but sometimes it would be very helpful for us as a church community to come together and consider this.
The Bible says that we should confess our sins to one another (James 5:16). So perhaps there is a place for doing just that, perhaps in your Growth Groups... some serious, genuine confessing and repenting.
But I wonder what that would be like? If you all started telling each other what you have and are doing wrong, and asking for help and praying for each other’s forgiveness...Certainly would make for an interesting evening!
But perhaps there a place to begin that... if we actually spent some time with each other, dealing with our sinfulness, we might actually fix some things up... We need to ask ourselves at a deep level if there is not a place and time that we might actually do as the people of God, what we are called to do here in Joel. To call a solemn assembly, to gather together as a group of people and face up to the sinfulness of our lives, and the need to put things right?
Is that the message God is giving us from this word?
What I am convinced of is the need for us to sit down as a congregation and have a long, hard think about how we do confession and repentance in our life together on Sundays.
And what I am convinced of is that trite and careless reciting of written confessions from the book or screen is our equivalent of the tearing of clothes in Joel’s day – a routine and fairly meaningless ritual. And perhaps we need to change that somehow.
It is the difficulties and challenges in life that get you thinking. Thinking long and hard. Some of you are not old enough to have faced many difficulties in your lives, but other have, and are.
When Robyn was close to death in 1994 with a very serious, but undiagnosed condition, I did a lot of long, hard thinking. What was this existence really all about? Why was I here? Why was my wife going through all that she was (and still is)? What would Robyn’s death mean for me, and what unfinished business did we have – with each other and with God?
Situations like that have a great ability to focus the mind.
A fearful... but loving God.
But we need to clarify a last couple of things from this passage.
The repentance that Joel is urging here is not just to be fear of the impending disaster. We have a much better basis to build our repentance on than that. Look at 2:13 again: “Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.”
The God of this book, the one true God, is not a God who enjoys punishment, he is the God who extends mercy and forgiveness. Angry? Yes! But slow to anger!
You and I are quick to anger, we loose our temper with great ease, but God never loses his temper!
His anger is just and righteous.
But that’s only part of the picture. That verse also tells us that he is ‘abounding in love’. Indeed, it is because he loves the world, that he gets so angry with what we are doing to it.
It is because he loves us that he gets so angry with what we do to each other! When we lie, cheat, deceive, abuse and hurt each other, he gets angry with us, because we are doing the wrong thing.
It is his love that makes him angry, but it is also his love that also makes him gracious and compassionate.
And so we are urged to return to him and repent because is that the kind of God he is – gracious, compassionate, relenting from sending calamity and disaster upon us.
Certain forgiveness.
But note that our repenting does not automatically turn God’s hand of judgement away... v14 “who knows? He may have pity...”
But of course, we know a little bit more than Joel did, because we live this side of Jesus Christ. We know that if we repent, God will indeed forgive – because God has paid the penalty already.
When we were living and working in Mt Druitt, the State government declared one of it’s firearms amnesty’s. When people with illegal weapons could hand them in and not be punished for having them. Two streets away from where we were living, one man took four trailer loads of explosives and firearms down to Mt Druitt police station! The collection included rocket launchers (and rockets to match), C4 explosive, automatic and semi-automatic firearms, grenades and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
The Police said two things: 1. If his house had caught fire, the whole block would have probably gone with it. 2. If he had been caught before the amnesty, he would have faced enough charges to result in a jail sentence of three and half lifetimes!
He was a lucky man. He wasn’t caught and he owned up to it during an amnesty..
Remember, Joel is living in the time before the great amnesty of God has been declared. We are living in the time of the amnesty. It’s not that our repentance will lead to forgiveness, it’s that God’s Son has died – and that does lead to forgiveness.
God has declared an amnesty. His son has paid the penalty for all hoarders of explosives, indeed, for all sinners. And if we will now repent with all our heart. Not formally but genuinely. Not half-heartedly, but truly. If we will repent, we will surely be forgiven. But we must do it before the day of the Lord comes.
The next time you read of disasters and tragedies, remember Joel. And remember they are the trumpet blast of warning that our time is running short.
Turn back to God now.