A Look At Joel (07/11/2021)

Park Meadows Church

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Well, good morning. It's been a morning.

00:10

Yes, please turn your Bible or Bibles to Joel chapter 1.

00:21

We're going to look at the book of Joel today. And bear with me as we get started on this thing.

00:54

I might be a little everywhere on this because there's a whole lot. And it was difficult to really kind of hone in on what's the message here but it's a lot of good stuff so maybe we'll get a good message out of it we'll see.

01:09

But why don't we start with a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, Lord, we just thank you for your word, we thank you that it's truth, and we just ask that you open it to us this morning.

01:20

Open our eyes, and let us receive of your Holy Spirit. A double portion of knowledge today.

01:29

Help us to prepare for the times ahead. And Lord we just ask that you give us understanding.

01:35

In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Okay, so we're gonna be in Joel chapter 1.

01:41

And a little bit in chapter 2. What's interesting about the book of Joel, it's a prophet.

01:54

It's writing this and he's writing it after some pretty devastating times have happened in the land of Judah.

02:05

They've had a, an incredible famine. And what

02:12

Joel does is he uses this famine, there's a couple of things he does he uses it to one, bring up the idea of judgment from the

02:21

Lord, but to also give hope that there is a way out from under this judgment.

02:29

And ultimately he uses it as a way to look forward to the end times, which we know that we're living in.

02:39

And, and he kind of uses this devastation of the locusts as a springboard into what the day of the

02:48

Lord will look like which meaning the day when Jesus comes back so I don't know that we'll get through all of that today for this

02:55

Sunday school but we'll see. And then again it could go super fast too.

03:02

I really don't know how this can go, we'll find out, could go super fast and we may end early. So let's just see what happens.

03:10

All right, starting with verse one, the word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel. Hear this ye old men and give ear all ye inhabitants of the land.

03:22

Had this been in your days or even in the days of your fathers. All right, I want to stop right there with verse two.

03:32

And I want us to notice that this is like a, a call to listen up.

03:38

He literally says, hear this, those first words he says, after he introduces himself.

03:45

And he says, has this happened in your land. All right, now, he's about to describe the, the famine that they've gone through the pestilence of the locusts that just utterly destroyed their crops, and it was a very devastating time for them.

03:59

He's about to destroy the, or he's about to, to describe the destruction. And he's saying, listen up, has this happened in your land, does this sound familiar?

04:09

Well, what I want us to do, because we know that everything that's in scripture is, especially in the

04:16

Old Testament is for us to use as end samples, and how we should live.

04:22

So I want us to ask ourselves the same question when we go through this chapter. Does this stuff sound familiar?

04:30

Okay. And does, does the feeling of what's going on in the land sound like something that's going on today?

04:39

So he says, tell your children of it and let your children tell their children and their children, another generation.

04:45

So the thing he's about to say is so important that it needs to be passed on from generation.

04:52

First, we need to hear it ourselves. We need to give it to our kids. And I think it's interesting that it says, let your children tell their children.

05:02

I know that I don't have grandchildren yet, but when

05:07

I have grandchildren, I'm going to want to tell them a lot of stuff. And it's going to be interesting for me to let my kids do all the telling, you know,

05:18

I'm not sure I'll be able to do that. I'm hoping that I will, but let is actually, it's an interesting word there because it's actually, it's in brackets as almost as if it's not really in there.

05:33

But it does show that your kids are supposed to pass this on, which means it's not just enough to tell your kids about Jesus.

05:43

And I think a lot of people do that. A lot of Christians, they tell people about Jesus. They tell people about his methodologies and tell people about, they tell their kids about, you know, everything that they've learned in scripture.

05:57

But I think there's a distinct lack of teaching our kids on how to teach their kids. There's a difference between learning and teaching.

06:06

And then there's a difference between teaching and teaching to teach. When I was in martial arts for a long time,

06:15

I began learning to teach martial arts. And I found out that was a very different thing.

06:22

It was a very different learning process than just learning the martial arts myself.

06:27

And it did a couple of things for me. One, it made me look at the art a little bit differently.

06:34

It made me look at it in a deeper sense. And then two, it helped me in areas that you wouldn't think are connected so much to something like a physical activity, like communication.

06:47

Learning how to communicate an idea and take it out of your mind, put it into someone else's mind.

06:53

That's one thing that's pretty difficult. But then after that,

06:59

I got to learn to teach other things. And when it came to being a dad, that's when

07:06

I reached a whole new level of learning myself. Because now I'm trying to teach my kids in such a way that when they grow up, they'll be able to teach as well.

07:16

And my Maddy Grace wants to be a teacher, you know. So I'm keenly aware that I'm not just teaching people.

07:23

I am now trying to teach teachers. And that's very different. Because now

07:29

I don't just have to be able to communicate a thought and bring it from my mind to someone else's.

07:35

I have to also communicate the methods for doing just that.

07:42

Like for taking thoughts and putting it in someone else. And so it's interesting to me, this verse, because the prophet literally tells us, don't just teach it to the kids, but prepare them to teach it to the next generation and the generation after them.

08:00

So you've got to give them the ability to teach as well. That will give you a whole new understanding of whatever it is you're learning.

08:08

I remember the first time I was exposed to the idea of learning to teach anything was in jiu -jitsu.

08:18

And I was trying to get my teaching certificate. And my sensei, who is the grandmaster of the whole world's

08:24

Shaolin jiu -jitsu system, he says, OK, David. And he's from the Bahamas.

08:30

He says, he asks me to describe a move.

08:35

OK. And the move he asked me to describe, I can't remember which one it was, but he named the move.

08:43

And I said, OK, sensei, well, when when someone punches, you do a wrist and joint move.

08:51

Which means to grab the wrist and the joint. It's just a grab. And he goes, hold on,

08:57

David. Who's punching? And I said, what do you mean, who's punching?

09:02

He said, you said someone punches. And I said, yeah.

09:08

And he said, why are you doing a move? We don't know why. And I said, because someone punched.

09:14

Who punched? And he said, context, it means a lot, David. Is this a friend?

09:22

Is this a foe? All of a sudden, it dictates how you respond.

09:28

And so I had to begin to learn not just to tell how to do something, but I had to tell within the context.

09:35

He wanted to know who was punching. He wanted to know which hand he was punching with. He wanted to know where his foot was placed when he was punched and punching.

09:43

I had to describe everything that was happening before I did anything, everything that was going to happen to me first.

09:50

And so when it comes to learning something like scripture, like we learn here in Joel chapter one, when

09:58

God tells us through his prophet Joel, don't just don't just learn it. Hear this, but teach it to your kids and let them teach it to their kids.

10:07

That that requires a lot of context, not just understanding the message in and of itself.

10:16

And so to give a little bit of context, that's why we started with what's just happened with Israel. They have gone through a pretty devastating time of a famine here.

10:29

OK, so that's all I really wanted to say about verse two. Did anybody want to add anything to that before we move on?

10:40

OK, so we're going to go on to that's actually verse two and verse three together. Verse four, that which the palmer worm hath left at the locust eaten and that which the locust had left at the canker worm eaten and that which the canker worm hath left at the caterpillar eaten.

11:02

Now, there are some other translations that call all of these locusts, but they give them they give them different names of the locusts.

11:10

They say like the flying locusts and then the hopping locusts and then the crawling locusts.

11:16

And there was another one. I can't remember what it is, but it's like just the squirming locusts.

11:22

I don't know. But there there were four kinds of locusts. And I listened to a very, very interesting comment, a commentary by J.

11:33

Vernon McGee, who compares the locusts when

11:39

Joel springboards into the future, which he'll do here in a minute and he starts talking about the end times.

11:46

He compares the locusts to the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It's really interesting. He says, if you really look at it, even a locust head has the same shape as a horse.

11:59

I googled that just to make sure and it kind of does maybe felt like a little bit of a stretch, but the same basic shape.

12:07

But he said that the there is the Italian word for locust actually means little horse, which

12:14

I thought was interesting. But anyway, so there are these four different kinds of locusts.

12:19

What we're seeing here is the punch. All right. This is this is where we're about to hear what's happening.

12:26

And before we can describe what we're supposed to do in response, we have to know what exactly is being done to us.

12:32

Right. Or in this case, Judah is about to have a recounting of what's being done to them.

12:37

Not just did one type of locust come in and they have a plague and destroy crops.

12:44

Whatever they would have left behind was eaten by the next plague and whatever they left behind was eaten by the next plague and the next plague after that.

12:52

So it literally left them utterly decimated. And he's really painting the picture there is that let's let's just see how bad our current state is.

13:04

It's it's devastation, absolute devastation. And so he then gives his first command, he says,

13:14

Awake ye drunkards and weep. And how and all you drinkers of wine because of the new wine for it is cut off from your mouth.

13:26

What's interesting is that the command here, we're going to see it for the next few verses, is that we are commanded to be mournful, to lament.

13:38

And this is a very different command than what the Lord has asked the children of Israel to do when coming before him in the past.

13:46

It's always been come before me joyful with praising and singing and and thanksgiving in your hearts. And right now,

13:52

God's saying, no, I want you sad. And we're about to see why. But take note of the fact that it's first talking to the drunkards.

14:04

All right. Because just a few verses down, we're going to see that he's also talking to the priests.

14:10

And that's going to be important. He hath laid my vine waste and barked my fig tree.

14:18

He hath made it clean bearing, cast it away. I think I skipped a verse here.

14:24

I sure did. Let's go to verse six. For a nation has come up upon my land strong and without number. Whose teeth are the teeth of a lion and he hath the cheek teeth of a great lion.

14:35

He hath laid my vine waste and barked my fig tree. He hath made it clean bear and cast it away.

14:41

The branches thereof are made white. Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth.

14:49

The meat offering and the drink offering is cut off from the house of the

14:54

Lord. The priests and the Lord's ministers mourn. OK, so there's some more description there, not of just the state of affairs, but also the the perpetrator.

15:09

Right. In this case, locusts who've come in and stripped everything bare. And I want us to notice that not only is there not only is there something that's happening.

15:21

There is a cause for what's happening. And. Ultimately.

15:30

The worst part of what's happening is found there in verse nine. The meat offering and the drink offering is cut off from the house of the

15:38

Lord. The priests, the Lord's ministers mourn. All right. Two things there. Now we see the priests mourning.

15:45

Who was mourning earlier? Who remembers who was mourning earlier? The drunkards.

15:51

Right. So we have a very diverse group here from the drunkards to the priests.

15:56

And what we see actually is that this devastation has affected absolutely everyone.

16:03

It's the full gamut, the full array. It's the entire economy in this scenario is just destroyed.

16:11

And everyone has cause to mourn from the guy who just lays around and drinks all day to the guy who's supposed to be serving

16:19

Lord in the temple. Everyone is devastated or should be devastated. It's interesting, though, that there is a call to mourn.

16:29

Why do people have to be told to mourn and lament if things are bad?

16:35

You'd think they'd come naturally. Right. Well, what we'll see is that there is a reason for this devastation.

16:42

The field is wasted and the land mourneth. For the corn is wasted.

16:48

The new wine is dried up. The oil languisheth. Did you see something else is mourning there?

16:58

In verse 10, what's mourning? The land. It's not just people.

17:04

Now the land is supposed to mourn. Let me pull up some notes here that I have here.

17:12

OK, so before we move on to what verse 10 is saying there,

17:17

I want to say one more thing about verse nine. It's affecting the entire economy. And the absolute worst thing that has happened.

17:27

Is that they can no longer give the offerings. There's no meat offering or drink offering.

17:35

It is cut off from the house of the Lord because there's nothing to offer. It's all gone now.

17:42

Why would the Lord let that happen? What do you guys think? Obviously, we want to be able to please the

17:52

Lord, and that's something that's supposed to be pleasing to Him, is to offer to Him. Why would

17:58

He cut that off? Nailed it.

18:09

Yeah, this is God basically saying, I don't want rituals. I want relationship.

18:16

And so He took away their ability to offer. Now, does it sound like, go back to my first question, does it sound like anything that's happening in our world today?

18:28

Are we losing freedoms? Are we having cancel culture come in and tell us, no, you can't talk about things that the

18:39

Lord told you to talk about. Maybe God's tired of us playing church.

18:47

Maybe He's tired of us saying, you know, I'm a Christian and here's what I stand for.

18:54

But really, that's just an outward thing that we do for show. A big part of the devastation has nothing to do with the economy so much as the fact that now they can't even play church here.

19:12

The people have been, they've been very wicked and they've been sinful.

19:21

And so God takes away their ability to even look like a church. You can't even pretend like you're a church at this point.

19:32

The field is wasted and the land mourneth, for the corn is wasted, the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth.

19:39

I mean, he's not pulling any punches here. It's just it's devastation upon devastation. But what's interesting is that the land mourneth.

19:47

Now I'm going to take a great big parenthetical. All right. We're going to stop for a second. We're going to put some parentheses around that, that the land mourns.

19:58

Here is a collection of verses. I just want you to listen to the common theme on all these verses.

20:04

All right. Numbers 35, 33. So you shall not pollute the land in which you are, for blood pollutes the land and no expiation can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it.

20:24

Ezekiel 36, 17. Son of man, when the house of Israel was living in their own land, they defiled it by their ways and their deeds.

20:33

Their way before me was like the uncleanness of a woman in her impurity. Ezekiel 36, 18.

20:40

Therefore, I poured out my wrath on them for the blood which they had shed on the land because they had defiled it with their idols.

20:50

Psalm 106, 38. And shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and their daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, killing babies.

21:01

And the land was polluted with the blood. Isaiah 24, 5.

21:09

The earth is also polluted by its inhabitants, for they transgressed laws, violated statutes, broke the everlasting covenant.

21:18

Jeremiah 16, 18. I will first doubly repay their iniquity and their sin because they have polluted my land.

21:25

They have filled my inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable idols and with their abominations.

21:32

Leviticus 18, 25. For the land has become defiled. Therefore, I have brought its punishment upon it.

21:39

So the land has spewed out its inhabitants. Leviticus 18, 27. For the men of the land who have been before you have done all these abominations, and the land has become defiled.

21:50

Second Kings 23, 10. And he also defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire of Moloch.

22:04

The high places. Second Kings 23, 13. The high places which were before Jerusalem, which were on the right of the

22:11

Mount of Destruction, which Solomon, the king of Israel, had built for Ashtoreth, the abomination of the

22:17

Sidonians, and the Chemosh, and the abomination of Moab. And for Milcom, the abomination of the sons of Ammon, the king defiled.

22:28

Jeremiah 2, 7. I brought you into the fruitful land to eat its fruit and its good things.

22:34

But you came and defiled my land, and my inheritance you made an abomination. Jeremiah 3, 1.

22:40

God says, if a husband divorces his wife and she goes from him and belongs to another man, will he still return to her?

22:48

Will not that land be completely polluted? But you are a harlot with many lovers, yet you turn to me, declares the

22:54

Lord. Jeremiah 3, 2. Lift up your eyes to the bare heights and see, where have you not been violated?

23:02

By the roads you have sat for them, like an Arab in the desert, and you have polluted a land with your harlotry and your wickedness.

23:10

Jeremiah 3, 9. Because of the lightness of her harlotry, she polluted the land and committed adultery with stones and trees.

23:18

All right, I'll stop there. That's a lot of verses. Yes, sir. That was

23:29

Leviticus 18 .25.

23:37

For the land has become defiled, therefore I have brought its punishment upon it, so the land has spewed out its inhabitants.

23:44

So what we see here is that people are very connected to the land.

23:58

It's something a lot of people don't really consider. I mean, in a time in which we can travel to just about any land we want, we don't feel connected to the land like the scripture indicates we are.

24:19

Now, this can be spun off into its very own false theology, right?

24:26

Like people worship the land and they make it seem as though the land is their God, and you have the tree huggers of the world that say that Mother Nature is mad at us.

24:35

It's not that Mother Nature is mad at us. It's that God gets mad at us. And God has connected us to the land.

24:43

He brings us into a land, and He lets us enjoy the land.

24:50

But like that one verse said, I brought you into the fruitful land to eat its fruits and its good things, but you came and defiled my land.

25:02

Isn't it interesting? It's God's land. And my inheritance, you made an abomination.

25:10

Now, obviously, we are joint heirs with Christ. So in a sense, if we are saved, we can call it our land as well.

25:20

But it belongs first to Him. And we see,

25:26

I think, the very first picture that we see of the land being affected by sin, obviously, is when man sinned against God and was cast out of the garden, right?

25:41

All of a sudden, death entered into the world. But the first real good look we get into it is when

25:46

Cain kills Abel. And God says that Abel's blood cries out to me from the earth, you see?

25:55

So what's interesting is that there is a connection here with our spiritual walk and with the state of the earth, the state of the land.

26:07

Which should come as no surprise because we know that by sin, death entered into all of creation, right?

26:15

That was by man's sin. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that our sin pollutes the earth.

26:22

It literally affects the land. It's quite obvious from all of the scripture that there is a physical manifestation of what can happen to the ground or to the earth that comes from a spiritual battle.

26:47

And so here we have a pretty incredible look at the devastation that just occurred is connected in some way to the spiritual wickedness that the

27:03

Israelites have had, or the people of Judah have had here. Ultimately, it's

27:12

God's judgment. And that's what Joel is bringing out. He's saying the reason why your land is messed up is that God is judging you for your sin.

27:21

The two are connected. Now, we still live in a land of plenty. We got a little taste of what it would be like to live in a land that doesn't have plenty during 2020.

27:32

It was like God said, hey, check this out. Go to the grocery store, you won't see anything on the shelves.

27:39

And we got just a little taste of it. And it didn't take us long to,

27:46

I think, forget it. You know, like now, you go to the grocery store, there's just abundance on the shelves again.

27:54

And we got to remember, we need to remember what that is. That's what Joel is asking these guys to do.

28:00

He said, hey, does this sound familiar? You just went through this, right? Don't forget it.

28:05

Teach it to your kids and your grandkids. Let them teach it to their grandkids and to the great -grands.

28:13

I mean, he doesn't just say your children's children. It's like, let's remember this for generations to come.

28:18

So we got to remember the judgment here. All right, so let's go on.

28:25

That was all from verse 10. That's where we are in Joel chapter 1. The field is wasted, the land mourneth for the corn is wasted.

28:32

The new wine is dried up and the oil languisheth. Anybody want to add anything to that before we move on?

28:41

Yes, sir. I haven't, I'll admit this.

28:53

He uses whatever he chooses. I think what stands out in my mind is the way he did it with the king.

29:08

Yes. This part is kind of under -appreciated.

29:18

Mm -hmm. But I think it'd be interesting to see what kind of incentive or what he'll be done to be punished by a king or a warrior.

29:31

Yep. You're taking away or like a king. Yeah, it's interesting if you think about it.

29:39

Yeah, you're right. When we think of judgment, we skip to some foreign people coming in and invading us, the enemy coming in and taking over, right?

29:54

Maybe outside interference with our economy, our elections, any of that stuff.

29:59

Like we think of other people doing this to us because there are plenty of examples throughout

30:07

Scripture where God used other nations to judge his people. But this came first, right?

30:15

What's interesting is he springboards from this into kind of a prophetic statement about the

30:22

Assyrians who do come in and wipe them out. And then ultimately we find out that Joel's prophetic statements throughout the whole book of Joel, they don't just stop with the

30:35

Assyrians because he talks about the day of the Lord. And he talks about the receiving of the

30:41

Holy Spirit, which it's actually quoted by Peter on the day of Pentecost.

30:47

He says, this is what the prophet Joel was talking about. When he talks about his spirit, the

30:53

Lord pouring out his spirit on his people. But we find out that that is not just a one time thing.

31:00

We obviously can still receive the Holy Spirit, right? And we'll actually try to touch on that before we run out of time today.

31:08

But yeah, this is an ongoing lesson for all the generations leading right up until the

31:16

Lord coming back. And the first thing that God does is he judges with the land.

31:24

And the next thing that he does is judges with other nations coming in. You even see that in Revelation, right?

31:30

You see that with, first look at the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

31:37

It starts with famine and pestilences. And then you have the battle of Armageddon and things of that nature, right?

31:46

And that's really interesting to go through all that with David who's been preaching about those things.

31:53

So yeah, this is like a first warning. It's a pretty bad one though because God literally affects their entire economy.

32:02

He takes away their ability to play church. And he calls for them to be sad about it, which is an interesting thing to me.

32:11

The only reason I can think of why they wouldn't already be sad about it is that they're not attuned to it like you just said.

32:17

They are underappreciating the fact that this is judgment and that the land with all of its famine and with pestilences, that is a judgment.

32:28

We're waiting for the armies to come and surround us. That's when we think, okay, now we're being judged. We've got to turn to God. But already we're being judged, and Joel is bringing that out.

32:38

That's a really good thought there. Thank you for that. So verse 11, be ye ashamed,

32:45

O ye husbandmen. Now the word ashamed there, I thought, because if you go through to, let's see, where is it?

32:59

If you go through to chapter 2, just hold your finger there, go to chapter 2, and skip on down to verse 27.

33:08

This is when the Lord is, after we've seen that there's a way to get out from under this judgment, we see in verse 27,

33:17

And ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your God, and none else in my people shall never be ashamed.

33:25

And so I thought, no, is this contradictory? Because God's saying, you'll never be ashamed, and at the same time,

33:30

He's commanding them, be ashamed. Well, as it turns out, these are two totally different words. Here in verse 27 of chapter 2, that means you'll never be disappointed.

33:44

You won't be ashamed. Similar to what Paul said, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, you won't be disappointed in that gospel.

33:52

It will not leave you looking like a fool. You will know that it is truth, and it's never going to disappoint.

34:04

That's what verse 27 of chapter 2 means, that word ashamed. In this verse, it actually means be dried up, like you are completely desolate, and recognize that you're desolate.

34:21

It's a different word for ashamed here. The word here is yabash.

34:29

I guess that's how you say it. I'm going to play it real quick. Oh, yabash, that's how you say that, yabash.

34:49

Yeah, it's almost like he's saying it twice. So it means to make dry, wither, be dry, become dry, be dried up, be withered, to exhibit dryness.

35:05

It's interesting because if he's telling them, this is like a command, be ye dried up, exhibit your dryness, it's as if God's saying, again, stop acting like everything's okay.

35:21

Stop acting like the world is bad, but the Christians have it right.

35:28

Don't act like my people are okay. You're not okay, you're dried up.

35:34

The land is being judged, and you're being judged through land because you're not okay. All right, so let's see.

35:43

Be ye ashamed or dried up,

35:50

O ye husbandmen. Howl, O ye vine dressers, for the wheat and for the barley because the harvest of the field is perished.

35:59

The vine is dried up, the fig tree languisheth, the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree.

36:06

Even all the trees of the field are withered because, now here's what's interesting to me.

36:12

This is the cause, because joy is withered away from the sons of men.

36:19

Now, when I was listening to J. Vernon McGee, it was interesting because he said, go to church and look at how many long faces there are.

36:27

Everyone's playing church, everybody's pretending like they're okay, and they're singing, and they're trying really hard to seem happy with all their songs and praises, but when it comes right down to it, there's not true joy there.

36:41

There's not joy from the Lord. There's backbiting, there's bitterness, there's gossip, there's a whole lot of discord.

36:53

There's taking advantage of each other. They don't look anything like what they're supposed to look like.

37:01

They just pretend like they're Christians. They go to church, and here I am, I'm a

37:06

Christian. I showed up, I did it, right? I think we're all guilty of that to some degree.

37:14

I know I am. Gird yourselves and lament, ye priests.

37:23

Howl, ye ministers of the altar. Come, lie all night in sackcloth, ye ministers of my God, for the meat offering and the drink offering is withholden from your house of your

37:33

God. You can't play church anymore. And it's interesting that the word there is that it's withholding.

37:40

It is held back. That is not just a coincidence that, no, you don't have it.

37:46

It's being held back from you. You cannot even play church right now. Okay, so sanctify ye a fast and call a solemn assembly.

37:57

Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land into the house of the Lord your God and cry unto the

38:03

Lord. This is where we begin seeing what are we supposed to do? We can't be talking about everything's okay and the world is going to pot while we're just trying to make it through and we're all right.

38:16

We can't pretend like we're all right. Things are not right with the Christians, right? And he says, so this time

38:25

I want you to come to me as a sad sinner, right? Come to me and let me see that you are not happy with the state of the church.

38:36

You're not happy with your own personal state. And then sanctify ye a fast.

38:44

Call a solemn assembly. That's interesting that he tells us to call an assembly. It means get together on this.

38:51

And to me, this is something that I have never really thought about in a long time because here's why.

38:58

When I first, my earliest memories of going to church, it was you can't, don't skip out on Sunday night or Wednesday night, right?

39:09

And there was this importance of you need to be coming together. But there was another teaching there that even though that was happening, that wasn't enough.

39:25

You still needed a personal relationship with God. And that's correct, right? It starts with a single individual.

39:33

But that doesn't mean that it's only about that individual either. We're supposed to be a body fitly joined together.

39:39

So there is an element of our personal walk that is dependent on the group walk of God's people.

39:48

So we're not supposed to forsake the assembly. There is an element there where we're supposed to come together.

39:55

And even when it comes time to lament and repent and come to the

40:03

Lord and say, I'm sorry, He doesn't want you to do it by yourself. It is a personal walk.

40:09

You are supposed to do that, but you're supposed to do it in such a way that you're bringing everybody else with you. Like we're all supposed to join together and with one accord say, we've messed up and we're sorry, please come and fix it.

40:29

The next verse, and I don't know, I only have a few more minutes, so I probably won't get through it all.

40:35

Alas, for the day of the Lord is at hand, and as a destruction from the

40:40

Almighty shall it come. The day of the Lord is at hand. This, some people take this to mean this is

40:49

God coming back. It can allude to that, right? But here's the real cool thing about it is it contrasts what day they're currently in.

41:01

The day of the Lord is at hand means it's coming, right? Which means it's not here yet.

41:09

If it's not here yet, what day are we in? We're in what's called the day of man. If you go to 1

41:16

Corinthians 4, 3, we get an allusion to what the day of man is.

41:25

And I could not have found this on my own in the amount of time I had to study it. This is something that I got from some commentary.

41:33

This, I believe, was the J. Vernon McGee commentary as well. Read a little bit of Spurgeon, a little Chuck Swindoll for everything.

41:40

So I got to give credit to a lot of this study for these guys, right? They came up with a lot of good stuff.

41:46

But here's what's interesting. 1 Corinthians 4, 3, But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you or of man's judgment.

41:55

Yea, I judge not mine own self. That seems like it's completely unrelated, detached from what we're talking about, right?

42:02

This is talking about man's judgment, right? But what's cool is if you look at the word judgment there and you do a word study on judgment for man's judgment, it's

42:15

Strong's number 2250. And I'm going to listen to how you say it real quick. Hemera.

42:25

That's how you say it. Hemera. Alright, now here's what it means. Get this. The day used of the natural day or the interval between sunrise and sunset is distinguished from and contrasted with the night.

42:41

That's what this word judgment means. Is that weird or what? It actually is talking about a day.

42:48

Now, why is it translated judgment? Well, we got to use the context, right?

42:54

And we're talking about man and his judgment. We're talking about the fact that man thinks he can fix all the problems.

43:02

So we are currently living in man's day, which is the age of which man thinks he's the answer to all the problems.

43:08

It's his judgment. You see? Does that sound familiar? Like, we're the ones who can fix global warming, as if it's a thing, or global cooling, because that's what it'll be called later.

43:21

Finally, we just settled on climate change, right? Because it's either global cooling or global warming. Let's call it climate change and we never have to change it again because it's going to change one way or the other.

43:30

But we can fix it. Man's the one that can fix the economy.

43:35

They have no clue what they're doing, right? It's becoming quite obvious. And so we vote for the next politician who promises that he can fix it, right?

43:50

We appeal to the highest court, man's court, Supreme Court, which used to appeal to God's word, doesn't anymore, right?

43:59

So we no longer appeal to the Lord, our God. We appeal to man.

44:05

So we live in the day of man's judgment. That's where we live, man's day, right?

44:14

We don't live in the Lord's day yet, but praise the Lord, it's coming, right? Now the bad news.

44:22

We tend to think when it comes, and a lot of the prophets, if you read some of the other prophets, some of the books of the prophets, a lot of the other prophets hone in on the day of the

44:31

Lord, right? And they say, this is awesome. This is when everything's going to get fixed. But if you look at the way that Joel describes the day of the

44:39

Lord, I don't know, are we going to get that far? We'll see. It may be in, it is, it's in chapter two.

44:49

If you go to when Joel describes the day of the Lord, it starts in darkness. And it's described as terrible.

44:58

It's hard. Which is, it perfectly lines up with how

45:04

God set up days to begin with. If you think about it in Genesis, the evening and the morning were the first day.

45:10

Started with the evening, went to morning. David and I have had coffee talks about this and how when man sinned, it messed everything up, including time.

45:17

Everything went from disorder to order, from evening to morning. And it pictured time put everything in order.

45:24

But once man sinned, we had the, was it the second law of thermodynamics came into play and now everything heads towards disorder.

45:32

And so now we say that the morning, the day starts in the morning and goes to evening.

45:38

It's kind of interesting, but we, we tend to think, all right, the day of the Lord's coming and it's all going to get better, but it doesn't get better first, it gets worse.

45:46

Right. That's, it's a very good picture of what things are to come in the, in the end days.

45:54

So I got to wrap it up here cause we're about out of time, but let me just bring your attention to we'll skip ahead to Joel chapter two real quick.

46:06

And we'll start with the first verse, blow you the trumpet in Zion and sound an alarm in my

46:11

Holy mountain. Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble for the day of the Lord cometh for it is nigh at hand.

46:19

The day of the Lord is coming and we're supposed to blow the trumpet. If you look in numbers, chapter 10, verse one through,

46:29

I can't remember the, the Israelites are commanded to make two trumpets of silver and they're supposed to be made out of a single piece of silver, which means they have to hammer them out.

46:40

All right. It's a solid piece of silver and they're supposed to have two trumpets. And these trumpets had two purposes.

46:45

One to call an assembly, get all the people together. I mean, they had a lot of people, so they had to have a way to call them all together.

46:52

And that's what the trumpet was for to, to sound an alarm. And so they are given all these instructions on how to use these trumpets to either get the people together or to say, troubles come in and start marching.

47:07

Right? So there were, there were certain sounds for war. There were certain sounds for gathering.

47:13

And here in Joel chapter two, we see a blow you a trumpet in Zion and sound an alarm in my

47:22

Holy mountain. But that, that only comes after he's already told us to make an assembly.

47:28

So not only does he say assemble together, he also says, sound the alarm. What does that tell us?

47:35

He wants us to sound the alarm together, unified. He wants us to not just, this isn't just, gather together and talk about how bad things are.

47:48

You got to gather together and start sounding the alarm and let people know things are bad.

47:54

And it's because of sin. Like this, this is what's happening. We've got to sound the alarm. We've got to let people know it's going to get worse.

48:02

You're going to have the Assyrian come and destroy you if you don't repent, which ultimately we see happen later on.

48:11

And verse two, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness.

48:17

As the morning spread upon the mountains, a great people and a strong, there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations.

48:29

That is the beginning of the day of the Lord. It starts in judgment. It starts with chaos with destruction.

48:40

And less, less this sound like this, this big, you know, scary and, and sad message.

48:49

I'll just want to end with this. The whole purpose of this is that God judges his people and praise the

48:57

Lord. He does that right. For those whom he loves, he also chastens, but then he also judges foreign nations and they get a very different kind of judgment.

49:04

And what you'll see, if you'll go home and study all of chapter two, you'll see that God lets us know that if we will repent and we will turn to him, then ultimately he will judge the other nations.

49:21

There is one last verse I want to share with you because we've kind of brought out this idea of we can't play church anymore.

49:30

Right? Let me see if I can find it real quick. I'll just do it like this.

49:43

I thought I had it where I can find it. It's Joel chapter two, verse 13. All right.

49:55

See if I can bring it up. I've got all these notes up. Joel 2, 13, and this is how we'll end and rend your heart and not your garments and turn into the

50:10

Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness and repented him of the evil.

50:18

Stop tearing the clothes and playing church and pretending like you are repenting and saying, this is how things are going to get better.

50:26

Start making the repenting one of the heart, rip your heart in two and make it a real relationship and things will get better.

50:37

But until you do that, they get worse. So anyway, that's, that's the message for this morning.

50:43

I guess we better hurry up and close in prayer because I'm going past time here. Heavenly father,

50:48

Lord, we just thank you so much for your word. We thank you for your mercy. We thank you for your patience.

50:57

You're far more patient than we could be with sin. And so we thank you that you have the job of being patient with sin.

51:05

Help us to rend our hearts, not our clothes. Help us to stop playing church and start being the church.

51:16

Or we ask that you help us to be the salt and light by gathering each other together and gathering those who may have not come to know you yet.

51:25

Sound the alarm, make it one of urgency because the enemy is upon us.

51:32

And if we don't already see that in this land, then we are blind or we love you. We thank you that you still give us time, but the times now it's in Jesus name.