Joel (Letter 29, Larry Crabb’s 66 Love Letters)

Wake up to desire, lose hope in yourself, and pray right for life.
When things to wrong in life we tend to ask:

• Why is this happening?
• What can I do about it?
• How can I persuade God to make things better?

Our typical conviction is that the good life is more about things going well than knowing God well.
God says, “Let every difficulty, big or little, reveal whether you are My faithful or My adulterous wife. Repent as necessary and surrender more fully to My plan. My plan is to make you fully alive with joy, meaning, and love.”

We need to get to where we say something like the following:

• No more false comfort in wine.
• No more false hope in good crops.
• No more false prayer that values blessings from You above relationship with You.

Book Name: JOEL: The Revelation of God’s Hand

Click here for entire Bible Summary from Ray Stedman

Genesis 6:3 – And the LORD said, “My Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt…”

And when God removes his Spirit – the controlling force of life – everything collapses. That is when catastrophe occurs and judgment strikes. And that is essentially the message of the book of Joel.

Back in World War II people talked about the coming of D-Day, and then V-J Day; they were looking forward to the end of the war, calling it the day.

God has a day, what He calls “the day of the Lord,” and it was given to Joel to describe this great day.

A locust horde had descended upon the land and devoured every living thing. Joel is simply pointing out that God’s hand is allowing catastrophes like this to occur to make people aware of the spiritual background to life. God wants to bless man but man will not lis
ten. That is the problem. And God shakes him up with something to make him listen.

God says, “Don’t try to fool me with your outside self. I’m not interested in that. Don’t bother with hypocritical attitudes and actions. They don’t impress me in the least. I want to see the heart rent.” That is the thing. God is utterly unimpressed by our hypocrisy. We may fool others. We can even fool ourselves. But we don’t fool him. Unless our heart is really rent before him, torn garments mean nothing.

Every moment that God deals with us in judgment, he is capturing our attention, waking us up. Through these difficult things, God in grace is simply saying to us, “Look and listen. Stop and wait. Pay attention now, so that you will be ready for the great things yet to come.”

There is truth from time to time in some of the words of the poets, you know. I always love these words by Robert Browning, but the words of Scripture give them a new meaning:
Grow old along with me.
The best is yet to be,
The last of life
for which the first was made

JOEL – David Jeremiah (Understanding the 66 Books of the Bible)

Key thought: The locust plague of Joel’s day was a divine judgment, foreshadowing the Day of the Lord which will bring destruction to the ungodly but blessings to God’s people.

Key Verse: Rend your heart, and not your garments; return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness; and He relents from doing harm. Joel 2:13

Key Action: Turn back to God from any and every sin, for He abundantly pardons and wonderfully restores.