The Book of Joel: Intro Continued

All right, good morning folks.

Continuing the Introduction to Joel

We're gonna continue with our study on Joel this morning. We're gonna continue digging in. What we try to do with these first two groups,.

At least, of the study, is to really get a lot of information into our heads so that when we go into it verse by verse, we'll have an understanding of certain things. This morning, we're gonna try to finish the introduction and we're gonna get into some of the structure and maybe even some of the theme of the book of Joel.

So here we have that complicated mix around Joel. Well, like I said, we're gonna try to unmix all of that. Let's continue on wrapping the book of Joel. You guys ready to do this with me?

All right.

We ended our last class with our friend Calvin and the position that he took as far as the dating was concerned. And his comment was this, as there is no certainty, it is better to leave the time in which he taught Undecided, meaning Joel.

And as we shall see, this is no great importance. Not to know the time of Hosea would be to the readers a great loss, for there are many parts which couldn't be explained without the knowledge of the history.

But as to Joel, there's less need for this, for the importance of his doctrine is evident, though his time be obscured and uncertain. So we will leave this concern now and we'll move on to bigger and better things.

All right, just a quick refresher from last week. Okay, so what did we cover? We covered who Joel and his father were. We found that we really don't know for sure. It's possible that Joel's dad was known by the group, that's why he mentioned it, but we really don't know much about them.

We discovered that Joel has only mentioned one other place in scripture, and that is where he's quoted in Acts 2 .16 by Peter Pentecost. And we know this is an extremely important verse, and we will definitely be digging into that as we go.

We also looked at the fact that there were 13 other Joels in scripture, but found none of these to be the Joel that we're talking about or that we're interested in here in this study. We also found that Pethuel, Joel's father, I kind of mentioned this already, is not mentioned again in scripture either.

So they're both kind of an enigma. We found that Joel does not use any of the customary dating formulas. We went through this as we were trying to discover what time period he might've written in, but he does use some indirect ones.

And we went through a lot of those. We went through quite a list of the indirect items. The things that he doesn't cite is like kings, kingdoms. He doesn't cite events or happenings. These we could have used to help us date Joel.

He didn't give us that. But as I said, there were a number of indirect items that we were able to look at. All right, we said this. Let's see, I jumped ahead of myself. Some of the indirect items though, before we jump onto the next one that I have here, his keen interest in Jerusalem, that was important.

His understanding of the functions of the temple, that was important. His apparent relationship with his audience. You guys have read the book of Joel. You know that there seems to be a good understanding of his audience, the people that he's speaking to.

Then we see here, we looked at the meaning of the name of Joel, the Lord is God. And the meaning of his father's name, Pethuel, vision of God. We also looked at the Bible scholars' opinion in dating the book of Joel.

We found that they didn't agree all the time. There were a number of dating sequences that they came up with. Two of the names I quoted were Edward J. Young and R .K. Harris, and yes, John Calvin. John Calvin has his take.

And we found that when we went through his quote, that even though he has his take on it, he believes that the dating is not important. Then we looked at some of the parallel verses between Joel and Amos.

These are very important too. And you could see the tie-in between the two. We'll actually look at some verses again today, a lot of verses, so bear with me, where you're gonna see some comparisons. We looked at Joel's placement in the canon.

We looked at the Messaronic texts, the Vulgate, the Septuagint. We also looked at some of the periods that the minor prophets were believed to have been written in. We noticed that Joel's specific ministry is not defined and that Joel does not declare a specific sin.

And then finally, as I said, we ended up with the quote from Calvin, which suggests that it is less necessary to determine and understand the dating. Here, we're gonna look at, in general, what most scholars have said about the Book of Joel.

The Book of Joel is prophetic in nature. And I'm gonna do a cursory look at that in a couple of minutes. We, it's kind of an obvious, but we need to bring it out. It's part of the Book of the 12. If you remember, Brother Lawrence did a whole thing on the Book of 12.

The Book of 12 is the 12 minor prophets, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. In the Hebrew Bible, this is one book. It's called the Book of 12.

The last book of the Nevi 'im, the second main division of the Jewish Tanakh. Now, I wanna just bring out a point here that we've heard before, and I'm gonna mention it again. The fact that they're called minor prophets doesn't make their writing minor.

It's just they're smaller in length. Their message is just as worthy as the longer prophets. Okay, the other item that I wanna talk about, and we'll get into this a little deeper too, is the fact that it's written in a poetic style.

This is very important because we need to understand this.

As we read it.

It doesn't read necessarily like the other books in the Bible. Joel is almost entirely poetic. Some would say it is entirely poetic. Some of the best poetry ever written is Hebraic poetry. I have listened to some of it, although I don't understand Hebrew.

To listen to some of it in the Hebrew tongue is beautiful. It's really something. About 35 of the Old Testament is poetic in nature. The prevalent ones, for instance, are the prophets and Psalms. However, this is better heard in the original text.

We miss it when we're reading it in English. We miss a lot of the items that would be clearly picked up if we heard it in Hebrew. Hebrew poetry is not a poetry that's like our poetry. It's not one of these rhythm type of poetries.

Instead, it's based on structure of the text with a meter and a rhythm. So there's more involved. It's more complicated. And as I said, it's really quite beautiful to hear. A really interesting book that you might wanna read on this, I got partially through it.

That's most of my books are partially through, is a book by J .P. Folkelman. And the book is titled Reading Biblical Poetry. And a very simple title. I should have remembered that, but it's got some really amazing things.

So I recommend reading that. Okay, the next item I wanna talk about is the imagery. And we'll get more into this probably next week. We'll look at a little bit of it today. The imagery, the linguistic parallels, repetition, keywords, alliteration, simile, and metaphors.

These are all in the Book of Joel. I am a terrible English student. I had to look these up.

You know, shame on me.

I wish I'd known these. But the alliteration, these are repetitions of the same initial sound that are adjacent to each other or near the words in a particular phrase or something of that nature. This is a literary device that can be seen and heard often in Hebraic and Aramaic and Greek languages.

Again, we're gonna miss a lot of this because we're not reading it from the original. An example of an alliteration is, alliteration attracts attention, that bomp, bomp, bomp, and the starting with the ah sound.

Simile, simile speaking, not really. Simile, these are figures of speech in which a comparison is made between two seemingly unlike items. For instance, one of the ones in Joel is the appearance of horses and like war horses they run.

Metaphors, this is an interesting one. I had to think about this because we're dealing with locust. Is it locust? Is it an army? Is it locust and an army?

What is it?

There's clearly a metaphor here, but it's a different type of metaphor. Metaphor is a figures of speech in which comparison is made between two seemingly unlike things, such as the locust and the human army.

I did some digging on this and listen to this. It's a rather lengthy quote. So forgive me, but it's from the book of Joel, A Prophet Between Calamity and Hope by Elie Assis. Forgive me if I pronounced that name wrong.

Assis says this, in recent research, scholars tend to view metaphor in what Richard Black, Richard and Black define as interactional view. According to this view, the metaphorical statement contains two meanings that are dynamic.

They interact so that the meaning is created through the interaction. These observations regarding the nature of metaphor may support my reading of Joel. This is why metaphor is important. It seems to me that the scholars who explained the question of whether or not the locust are a metaphor operating within the sub vision or sub view of thus, it gets a little bit wordy here, of thus their question was whether or not the locust can be substituted for a human enemy.

However, it is possible to examine through a different understanding of metaphor if we speak of the interactional view, the two meanings can function within the text simultaneously. All right, all that to say, in other words, Joel's use of locusts in his writing can be both intended to be actual locusts and it can be intended to be actual army and it can be intended to be both at the same time.

Now, when we get into the word by word, you'll understand more why this is a question and I think it's an important one. Okay, so these indicate clearly that Joel is not an easy book, nor is a lot of the prophets easy books to unravel and to understand.

It's not a mere literal interpretation. Okay, so I said before, I wanted to look at a cursory look at what is a prophet. Why do I do this? Well, we're talking about the prophet Joel. So I want us all to have at least a basic understanding of what a prophet is.

Okay, so generally speaking, a prophet is someone who is the mouthpiece of God. He speaks for God. He's God's voice. He stands between God and man to communicate to man the word of God, okay? When the prophet spoke as the mouthpiece, he was inspired and without error.

That's important. This is another interesting truth. The prophet retains his own will, mind and thoughts as he speaks for God. God would put his words into his mouth and some verses you can look up on this, Deuteronomy 18, 18, Jeremiah 1, 9.

Why do I say that? Well, because as we look through the various things in scripture, you have Luke who wrote from one perspective. You had Matthew who wrote from another perspective. You have Amos who writes from a perspective.

Jeremiah who writes from... Some of their own, who they are comes through, but it's still the truth. God uses them, who they are to speak his truth. A prophet was God's servant, Zechariah 1, 6 and messenger 2nd Chronicles 36, 15.

Prophecy falls into three categories if you're generally speaking concerning the destiny of Israel, the messianic prophecies and the eschological prophecies. The term law and prophets refer to the writings of the Old Testament divided into two categories.

The law is the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and the prophets are all the rest. Okay, so real quick, this I just found interesting. This is the Hebrew. Transliteration would be Nabi or Navi, depending on if you're Ashkenazi or Sephardic.

And that's a root meaning of to bubble forth as from a fountain. That actually, we see that type of thought throughout scripture as well. Bubble forth as from a fountain, hence to utter. Yeah, that's exactly the verse I was thinking of.

No, no, not at all.

I didn't put it in here, so I'm glad you brought it up. A spokesman, speaker or prophet and a good verse to look at is Psalm 45, 1. Navi is the first and most general use of the word prophet. The second one, and this comes into play with Samuel.

It's another word and it's translated Rohe or Roeh, meaning seer. And it begins to be used in 1 Samuel 1, 9 through 9, 9 and it occurs seven times throughout Samuel. And then afterwards is another word translated Hosea, and that's also seer, like Hosea, can you see?

Well, that's how I remember it anyway. All right, and that's 2 Samuel 24, 11. That's where that was employed and also in 1 Chronicles 29, 29. All of these words are used. Samuel the seer, Rohe, Nathan the prophet, Navi, Gad the seer, Hosea, forgive my pronunciations.

Okay, I have to take a drink of water. So here are some of the linguistic parallels in the New Testament and Old Testament texts. We're gonna take a lot of time on these, forgive me, but I think they're important.

We have quite a few. Joel, I'm not gonna read them, but we will look at them. Now, these are not the whole list. These are just some of the ones that I chose out. And what we're doing is we're comparing Joel, of various verses in Joel with some of the other scripture.

So you can see there's quite a few here alone, and I can give this list to anybody who wants it. And of course, don't forget the one we already looked at earlier in the last class was the Joel 2, 28 through 32, which is related to Acts 2, 16, 21.

So let's look at these. All right, for a nation has come up against my land, powerful and beyond number. Its teeth are a lion's teeth and its fangs of a lioness. Then you have Joel 2, 4. Their appearance is like the appearance of horses and like war horses they run.

All right, so look at this in relation to Revelation 9, seven through eight. In appearance, the locusts were like horses prepared for battle and their heads were what looked like crowns of gold. We're gonna remember that by the way, because we're gonna look at a picture later if we get to it, that analogy there.

Their faces were like human faces, their hair like women's hair, and their teeth were like lion's teeth. See the comparison? See the obvious things there? Lion's teeth, war horses, locusts. This is the Lord's army.

Now I point this out because we need to remember this when we get deeper into some of these verses. All right, Joel 1, 15. Alas for the day, for the day of the Lord is near and as destruction from the Almighty it comes.

Isaiah 13, 6. Wait for the day of the Lord is near as destruction from the Almighty it comes. I put the footnote in here because I thought this was interesting. The Hebrew word for destruction and Almighty sound almost alike.

This is where we miss out a lot not knowing the original languages. Ezekiel 30, two through three. Sons of man, prophecies and say thus says the Lord God, well, alas for the day. For the day is near. The day of the Lord is near.

It will come, I mean, it will be a day of clouds, a time of doom for nations. Again, the day of the Lord is near. This is judgment. And we'll find that out later on more. But notice again, the similarities in the verses.

Joel 2, 1, blow the trumpet in Zion, sound an alarm on my holy mountain. Let all inhabitants of the land tremble for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near. And then Zephaniah 1, 14 through 16. The day of the Lord is near and hastened fast.

The sound of the day of the Lord is bitter. The mighty man cries aloud there. A day of wrath is that day, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blasts and battle cries against the fortified cities, against the lofty battlement.

Imagine that trumpet blast. It's actually a shofar. And this was used to communicate, not only from, let's say, town to town or mountain to mountain. When I say town to town, I mean family to family. It was for emergencies.

It was for gathering together. But that sound, and I'm not gonna play it today, but in one of the classes, we'll be playing the sound of that shofar, the trumpet. It's a call that they even use today in the temple.

All right, so what do we got? The day of the Lord is near. Again, that same theme, and it's to be feared. This isn't gonna be a happy, happy day. It's to be feared. The Lord, fear the Lord and be ready.

And I put trumpet on that because we wanna remember trumpet. Okay, Joel 2, one through two, blow a trumpet in Zion. Sound an alarm on my holy mountain. Let all inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is near.

Coming, it is near. A day of darkness, gloom, a day of thick clouds, clouds of thick darkness. Like blackness, there is spread upon the mountains, a great and powerful people, their like has never been before, nor will be again after them through the years of generation.

And then in Amos, woe to you who desire the day of the Lord. Why would you have the day of the Lord? It is dark and not light, as if a man fled from a lion and a bear met him or went into a house and leaned his hand against the wall and a serpent bit him.

Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light and gloom with no brightness in it. Okay, the day of the Lord is coming again, that same theme, darkness and gloom. This is judgment, okay? Darkness and not light, the Lord's judgment, day of the Lord.

And again, all of these verses are Joel being compared with verses throughout scripture. The Lord uttered his voice before his armies for his camp is exceedingly great. He who executes his word is powerful for the day of the Lord is great and very awesome.

Who can endure it? And then we have in Malachi 3 .2. But who can endure the day of his coming and who can stand when he appears for he is like a refiner, finer's fire and fuller's soap. The day of the Lord, who can endure it?

No one in and of themselves, not one. And again, we're talking about the Lord's army. Joel 2 .14, who knows whether he will not turn and relent and leave a blessing behind him, a grain offering and a drink offering for the Lord, your God, Jonah 3 .9.

Who knows, God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish. Okay, here's this other idea of repentance, turning around, but in this case, we're talking about God. Now, we know God doesn't change his mind.

This is all part of his plan. Who knows what may God turn and relent. God's mercy for the righteous in Christ Jesus. Joel 2 .20 and 21, I will remove the Northern far from you and drive him into parched and desolate land, his vineyards into the Eastern Sea and his rear guard into the Western Sea.

The stench and foul smell of him will rise for he has done great things. Fear not, O land, be glad and rejoice for the Lord has done great things. Psalm 126, two through three. Then our mouth will be filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy.

Then they said among the nations, the Lord has done great things for them. The Lord has done great things for us. We are glad. Okay, this aspect here, the Lord doing these great things, the Lord God Almighty, our joy is in the Lord.

These great things, these restorations. Joel 2 .27, you shall know that I am in the midst of Israel and that I am the Lord your God and there is none else. And my people shall never again be put to shame.

And then Isaiah 45 .5, I am the Lord and there is no other besides me. There is no God. I equip you though you do not know me. Ezekiel 36 .11, and I will multiply on you, O man and beast and they shall multiply and be fruitful.

And I will cause you to be inhabited as in former times and will do more good to you than ever before. Then you will know that I am the Lord. I am the Lord your God. God is with us. This is restoration, okay?

And we'll understand this as we get into some of the other things, but I'm sure a lot of this resonates with you folks who have done your Bible studies in throughout the years, this restoration by God.

Joel 2 .31, the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before that great and awesome day of the Lord comes. Matthew 24 .29, but immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light and the stars will fall from the sky and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

Amos 2 .20, but in those days after the tribulation, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light. Revelation 6 .12, I looked when he broke the sixth seal and there was a great earthquake and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair and the whole moon became like blood.

And then Ezekiel 32 .8, all the shining lights in the heavens, I will darken over you and we'll set darkness on your land, declares the Lord. The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give light, the judgment of the nations, sun and moon, et cetera.

We're almost done with this part. Joel 2 .32, and it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, there shall be those who escape as the Lord said and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls.

All right, what verse in Romans does this go along with? For everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved, Romans 10 .13. All those who call on the name of the Lord will be saved, God's amazing grace.

Joel 3 .1, behold in those days at that time when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, Psalm 126 .1, when the Lord restores fortunes of Zion, we are like those who dream. Restoration, God's glory.

This is all about God's glory as a matter of fact. Okay, so we're finally done with those verses. Did you survive? I need a drink of water again. All right, so I wanna look at some things regarding the locust invasion and the armies.

We kind of talked about this a minute ago. I still have time. When we talked about metaphor. But just very simply, scholars are divided on what this metaphor of the locust really is. They're divided on whether it's a human army or an apocalyptic army or just locust.

On the day of the Lord.

And we will talk about this more as we get in there. I know I keep saying that, but again, remember this is, I'm trying to give you a lot of data and a lot of information so that when we get into the verse by verse, I'm hoping you'll recall it and I'm hoping I'll recall it too.

All right, other treat this invasion as merely a locust invasion. And these are prevalent by the way in the area where Joel was. Still others declared the invasion as both. Okay, let's jump into another idea here.

And this is something that Brother Lawrence taught us. The chiastic pattern of Joel is clearly a pattern here. It's an A, B, C, B, A pattern. In the center of it, God acts for his people. Chapter two, 10 through 32.

This is the heart of the message. God acting for his people. He's acting, yes, for his people, but it also is glory to him. And then on the two ends, on the outer ends, we have an introduction where all has been taken away.

Everything has been taken away as we read that beginning part of Joel where that locust has destroyed everything. All has been taken away. But then in the end, there's a conclusion, all is restored. And we'll talk about what that means.

And in the central part of this, you have judgment of Israel and the nation. And that's chapter one, four through two, nine. And then you have judgment of all nations. And that's chapter three, one through 15.

So we have God's glory and God's acting for his people as a central idea. We have the judgment on both sides. We have Israel being judged. We have the Goyim being judged. We have everyone being judged.

We have everything being wiped away, but we have everything being restored. In a nutshell, that's Joel. All right, the following sentences and clauses, these are phrases that I want us to remember also.

Let me catch up with my notes.

Because I have some things in here. I don't wanna leave out.

First one is fasting. We've been talking about this lately, haven't we? In light of this pandemic. The next one is trumpet. And I kind of suggested that earlier, but these are important items as we start reading through the book of Joel.

The next one is great things. Valley of Jehoshaphat. We will get into this one a little more deeply as well. And then the sun and the moon and the darkness that occurs. This is another item that breaks up these sections in Joel.

The fast, the consecration of a fast, the proclamation and proclaiming of a solemn assembly. This is something we'll see in Joel. It's a must. The blowing of the trumpet in Zion, the blowing of the trumpet to gather the people, the blowing of the trumpet as a warning, the blowing of the trumpet as a signal.

Great things, the Lord has done great things. We see this in Joel quite prevalently. The Valley of Jehoshaphat. That's actually the Valley of Doom or the Valley of Judgment.

We'll look at that.

And then of course, the sun and the moon growing dark and the stars losing their brightness. This sentence occurs along with the Lord uttering his voice, which is the sound of a divine advent, if you will, a judgment.

And there is slight variations of this as we saw in various other verses. And then finally, the day of the Lord. We'll take some time to talk about this a little bit more, but the day of the Lord is a very prevalent piece in Joel.

And we'll see all of these a little more closely as we dig into the verse by verse. Okay, regarding the day of the Lord, this is also how this one breaks up. So I'm gonna just click all these through here.

I think I have one more.

Okay. I don't know if you can see the highlighting here. So this is the way the day of the Lord plugs into this. As I said, Hebrew literature is amazing. Hebrew poetry is amazing. They have all these word plays, all these things that they do to emphasize.

And we see that here, Joel's addressing Israel. And then what do we hear about? The day of the Lord. We have Joel mediating between Israel and God. And then what do we hear about? The day of the Lord.

We have God makes a universal statement of a redeemer. He blows, the trumpet is blown in Zion. Joel speaks to Zion. God makes a universal statement of his outpouring of his Holy Spirit. Then what do we see?

The day of the Lord. Joel addresses everyone. What do we see? The day of the Lord. God makes a universal statement of his dwelling in Zion. The day of the Lord is very important here. Very important. The divisions of the book of Joel and the placement of the phrase, the day of the Lord, it's a special expression, designating God's dreadful intention in the course of his redeeming history.

It's a day that isn't to be jollied about. And it's not a joyous day in a sense, it's a fearful day. It's a day of great magnitude. It's a day when the Lord triumphs over his enemies. He puts all the enemies under his feet.

It's specifically used to denote judgment. And we kind of already suggested that. It brings destruction for the wicked and the enemies of God's people. And we'll look more closely at this as we go. I still have time, right?

I can't see the clock. All right, we got it. Five minutes? All right, we got to at least go through this quickly. Hopefully it works.

It's not working.

No, it's supposed to play a video. You're supposed to be able to see what they look like. It worked when I was at home, but all right. Anyway, so this is our friendly locust. He's not a very attractive person, but there's some really interesting things that we need to know about locusts, okay?

This is a heavy duty imagery in Joel. And locust, it's actually, it's a member of no particular species per se. It's actually a grasshopper on steroids. It's a grasshopper that has hulked out, for those of you who know the metaphor there.

Is that a metaphor?

I don't know.

I'm mixing my metaphors. They're a species of grasshopper and they exhibit a morphing when they gather together, believe it or not. Their physical makeup as they, they're typically solidary loners, okay?

But when they start getting together, their body chemistry actually rubbing against each other and being together actually morphs them into this mega uber locust. And I have all the scientific stuff here.

I don't think I'm gonna read it, but there's actually a phase that they go through. This tends to happen when there's a lot of rain or such and they start gathering to get food and things like that. As they actually rub up against each other, a chemical reaction happens in their body and they become all of a sudden best buddies.

Social distancing is no social distancing allowed. In fact, they get so close that they start to swarm. They actually just become such a great swarm that they cover everything. The insect, as it bumps, this is what causes this change.

This swarming also is brought about by that. During the succession of generations, they actually will change shape and color. And they become like a bold yellow or green. And this is interesting because of the way we read the verse in Revelations.

Their nature becomes much more aggressive and they start to eat everything. They can cover, let's see, I'm looking for here. Large swarms of locusts can completely strip the foliage and stems of plants, excuse me, such as forbs and grasses.

This species consumes a variety of plants. It's not just one type of plant they like. They have no specific diet. They will eat the dry plants. They will eat the new plants. They will eat the seed. They will eat everything.

They just devour it. One adult can eat its own weight in food every day. Now, if you do the math, that's quite a lot. The desert locust is probably the best known species. That's the one we're actually talking about when we talk about Joel.

The massive swarms can travel as much as 100 miles a day. That covers a lot of ground. And as they're rubbing together, the contact increases serotonin levels and they get more and more aggressive. The normally shy and sedentary insect becomes a social animal, if you will.

All right, and here we have, this is actually a cave painting of a locust. They've been around a long time. I'm sorry, it's not a cave. It's actually an ancient tomb. And here's another, notice how compact they become.

And you can almost see the idea of them covering the sun. Now, if you look at that head, you could kind of say it looks like a horse's head,.

In a way.

It has kind of a shape of a horse with maybe a battle gear on it, right? This goes along with the Revelations 9, and the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle. And their heads were as were crowns like gold and their faces were as faces of men.

I'm gonna end it here for now. I wish I could have played the video for you because it just shows you the massiveness of the locust and what damage they can do. Next week, I hope to finish up the imagery and get into some of the verse by verse.

I hope this has been informative. I hope it's been information that you're going to take and we'll apply this as we get through the different verses in the Book of Joel.

Let's pray.