[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason, and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching from God's Word you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to Him. If you're ever in the Madison, Alabama area, we'd love for you to worship with us on Sundays at 8:30 or 10:30am if you have any other questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, find
[email protected] Be sure to also check out our Bible study podcast, Madison Church of Christ Bible Studies. Thanks again for stopping by.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Have you ever been asleep in the middle of the night and I'm talking REM sleep, like deep sleep, and all of a sudden you got woken up by something very, very abruptly.
That's happened to me a lot lately. And the two that come to mind are these. The first one is, and y', all, I don't know if you've ever had this happen where you hear like, a really loud sound or sets of sounds. Well, this was the sound I heard at about, like 2 in the morning.
And so, of course, as I wake up, that strikes a lot of fear in me because my first thought was, well, that's the back door.
It's the sound of, like, someone trying to get in our back door. And so I had fear.
But I'll tell you kind of truthfully, a little bit of me or like the dad and the leader of the home in me was a little excited. I was like, this is my moment, you know?
You know, I've kind of thought, like, this day would come possibly, and I felt pretty prepared. And all those years of Wolfenstein and 007 have prepared me for this very moment, you know?
And so I grab what I need to grab and I start heading down the stairs. And I'm heading down the stairs. I so wish I had night vision goggles. But I'm heading downstairs and I go to the back door to look to see who was there. No one was there.
But then I looked in our living room and remembered that we had a birthday party that day and one of the cellophane balloons had gotten trapped around the fan and over and over again was hitting and slapping against the ceiling making that sound.
It was hard, of course, to go to bed after that, but maybe you've been woken up before to an alarm.
The other one that has happened more recently was the fire alarm going off in the middle of the night.
And when you wake up and find out the fire alarm's going off. Of course, you go to the stove, and I went to the stove to see if it was on, and it was not on.
And it wasn't really the fire alarm going off because there was a fire. And maybe you've had this happen. The fire alarm was going off as a warning to let me know that the battery was dying. And it couldn't let me know at 2 in the morning. It had to let me, you know, or two in the afternoon. It had to do it at two in the morning. And so I did what any good leader of their household would do. Knowing that the battery is dying and a very important thing, I reach up and just silence it.
And then eight hours later, I silence it. And eight hours later, since I'm not there, my kids get on a ladder and silence it.
And so over and over again, that alarm is silenced until eventually what happens is the battery dies and there's no more warnings.
I don't know if you've ever had that happen before where you've had alarms go off in the middle of the night.
Those things can be extremely frustrating, especially a fire alarm, because at that time, you don't want to go hunt down some batteries and climb up in the ceiling and fix it. It's easier to silence the alarm.
The reason why I give you that illustration, as I've been reading the Book of Joel this week, that's the imagery that kept coming to mind is an alarm.
And I think part of the reason why that imagery came to mind as we read the text today. That's literally what the Bible says.
Do you hear the alarm?
But what's also interesting is I think the way we tend to approach those alarms, oftentimes the way that you and I at times approach our own sin.
Like, maybe for some of us, an alarm is going off right now in our life. That's a warning, warning, danger, warning, danger.
And sometimes those alarms can be extremely frustrating. They can make us angry.
But if you think about it, that alarm going off in the middle of the night, while it is no doubt frustrating, the that alarm is also mercy letting me know that, hey, trouble could happen if you don't get this fixed. But I think the other thing that kind of came to mind with this is I think sometimes when those alarms go off, when those warning signs are very obvious in our life, we just silence them, and we silence them again, and we silence them again.
And the danger of, like, perpetual silence is that sometimes it can grow numb and sometimes it can dig Deeper.
If you were with us this past, I guess it was Wednesday or two Wednesdays before, in our prayer class, we were talking about that. One of the things Scripture says is that one thing we can do is we can allow Satan to have a room in our life.
Now, Satan can't make you do anything, but you can let him have a space.
And there was a guy that's a friend of mine that made a comment in that class that I absolutely loved. He said, you know what's interesting?
That room that sometimes we let Satan have is kind of like those squatters in big cities that they rent those spaces and they don't leave.
And the longer they are in that space, the harder it is to make them move.
The longer you keep something there in silence and silence and silence and silence, the harder it is to get it to move, to get it to go away.
And so as we think about those things, that's exactly what happens today in the book of Joel, that there's an alarm going off.
And as this alarm goes off, it's to raise their attention to the opportunity of God's mercy.
Now, before we get into that alarm and what kind of was to raise their attention, want to do a little bit of background? If you are a guest with us this morning, one of the things that we do every so often at Madison, this is the second time we've done this, is we pick a series that can really engage all of us, but especially our kids. And so we've made these little cards that Jason has put together that have facts about Joel. And we picked the minor prophets, but partly because they're not talked about.
But like we're going to talk about today, there's like a locust plague or there's somebody running away from God. You know, like, there's very interesting moments that happen. And when you hear minor prophet, don't hear minor as, like, unimportant. The reason why they're called minor prophets is because they give a very clear, a very direct and quick message.
They're not very long.
Some of you would probably love me to have a minor sermon. But anyway, they're called minor because they're short in length.
But let me tell you, this one today is very central, but it gets to the message quick.
And as you read this, one of the things that you're gonna see that kind of happens in the background is there's evidently a sin problem.
Now in the prophets, anytime there's a sin problem, usually what you have is the minor prophet or. Or the major prophet lets you know the specific sin that it is? This one doesn't do that because we don't know the exact time period of the prophet Joel. Some people like Bible Project, they believe it was Ezra Nehemiah time period. Part of the reason why is because it mentions Jerusalem and the temple, but it doesn't mention a king. But here's what we do know. Joel quotes five prophets, and here's why that's important. He is sitting down with, with pen and paper and he's reading all these other prophecies and letting them know, guys, the reason why you're experiencing this locust plague is because of all these warnings God has given here and here and here and here and here is to wake you up, stop silencing the alarm and the struggle they have, as you can kind of even see how he's explaining it to them. They're like, well, look around our land. Like we're losing profit, we're losing money, we have a locust problem. He's like, no, you don't have a locust problem, you got a sin problem.
And so what I want us to do is I want us to turn to Joel, chapter one, and we're gonna see God's warning and we're gonna see God's grace all work together. And so the first part, I call this a self inflicted plague, because that's what it is. We don't know the specific sin that was committed, but we know that there was a sin problem that they kept silencing.
And so this is what the text says as the introduction to the plague itself.
What the cutting locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust has left, the hopping locust has eaten. And what the hopping locust has eaten has left, the destroying locust has eaten. Now we're going to talk about the different postures of the locust and why they're a picture of our sin at times.
But just as like a fun thing, I looked up to see if we've had some locust plagues before. I'm familiar with one of them, and of course the one here in Joel.
But did you know there was actually a locust plague that happened in 1915? And here are pictures. And someone said they didn't have pictures back then even. Well, somebody asked me, they had pictures when you were a kid. I'm like, okay, wow. Yeah, in 1800s they had pictures. So this was a picture of the results of a locust plague that actually happened in the same region.
And so what would happen is with a locust plague is that one locust would dig a hole four inches deep and in that hole they would create a cone that would be up in the ground and it would have at least 100 baby locusts that are about to be born.
And when this locust plague happened, one of the things that they said happened is like within a square yard there would be 70,000 locust eggs.
And the problem with a locust, if you're in an area like this where there's vegetation, there's crops and things like that, you just. One locust in a 24 hour time period can take over 600 square feet.
So you multiply that by they said thousands of yards of locust eggs, you're talking about massive damage. And there was, and they said, one person quoted and said that they remembered that it was during the day about one and you couldn't see the sun. It was blackout because of that many locusts in the sky. Now that's terrible on so many levels. It's terrible to me because those of you that know me well know that I have a bird phobia. And this to me is like a bird and a bug had a baby. Like I would hate, hate. I would love to be a go on a locust hunt. But like that would be terrible to have to experience. But have you ever heard the sound?
Like the sound is a lot like you can feel the weight and hear the sound of what's actually happening around you.
The reason why God allows this, and we're going to talk about this in just a second, how God in his wrath will allow certain things, which is called the passive wrath of God. He will allow something like an ecological disaster to raise awareness, to get our attention before it's too late. That's what God is using with this locust plague as a picture of sin. And what sin can do.
But here's what it also shows us is the gradual work of sin.
You've probably said or you've heard people say, well, how in the world did I get here?
I can't believe something like that would happen to somebody like me.
Well, if you remember in the description of the plague it says that first the locust is just cutting, which is the locust was walking along the ground, then it was hopping, then it was flying.
It's a picture of sin at different levels. Sin sometimes just starts out walking and then it starts hopping around and then it's full out moving everywhere. This is a Picture of Psalm 1. Do you remember when the psalmist was writing to his son, he said, son, listen to my wisdom. Be careful where you stand. This is why I use it with youth a lot, but with all of us. Like, be careful who you stand with, he said, because then there's this progression. You start walking and then you move in. You see the progression.
Stand, walk, move in, the locusts walk, hop, fly. It's a picture of what happens with sin. It's this little path. Little by little. There was warning sign in the standing, there was warning signs in the walking, there was warning signs well before the moving in, there was warning signs in the walking, there was warning signs in the hopping, there was warning signs well before the flying. He's giving us a picture of the different levels of what sin does and its impact.
This came across my social media thread one day. And there's Babylon bee, which is satire, but then there's not the bee, which is supposed to be like actual news.
But this really was making me think of today's lesson, because some of you might be familiar with this guy. His name's Caleb Flynn. He's been on the news a lot lately.
He was somebody that he actually did well in American Idol.
He was a leader and a minister in his church.
He had a wife and kids, had a beautiful family.
But what we end up finding out is he murdered his wife. He was having an affair.
But there was this sin that was going on beneath the surface even before that sin.
And as it says there, sin was crouching at the door. But the statement that stuck out to me was this one, when it said, this sin never shows where it's taking you.
Say that again.
Sin never shows where it's taking you.
Sin's never like, hey, in like two years, this is going to ruin you.
In three years, you're going to lose your family.
Like, it doesn't do that. Sin never, ever paints that picture. And it says this. Just ask Caleb Flynn.
And so this is the warning says, blow a trumpet, Sound the alarm on my holy mountain. Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming. The day of the Lord is near.
If you study prophecy and scripture, there are three different theological levels in scripture of prophecy. Level one is the immediate danger. This is the locust plague. This is what you experience, like, right here, right now.
And that's the thing with prophecy. It's not just future. It's like, hey, like right now we're experiencing impacts of this. The next one is the imminent.
We're going to hear about armies that God is going to allow in Some believe this could have been the Assyrians. Some believe it could have been the Babylonians, the Romans. We don't know. It doesn't matter.
It's saying, hey, some other challenges are gonna happen, come your way. But also there's the, you know, ultimate one, which is the day of the Lord, when. When we. When God comes back, when. When Christ returns. These are three different levels. And what's interesting, in the book of Joel, we see all this and know this and hear this, but you also experience something else, and it's this. You get two different dimensions of the wrath of God. And this is what theologians call the passive wrath of God or the. The active wrath of God. The passive wrath of God is where God allows something to take place to maybe grab your attention.
It's not that he causes it. He allows it. In this case, it was an ecological disaster of. He's like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna let the Earth bring forth a bunch of locusts. I'm gonna allow it to happen. That's God's wrath. He didn't really have to. He just let the cosmos take care of it.
But then there are instances that are the active wrath of God, like he's intervening. We see these all throughout Scripture, and both are to raise our attention to what he's doing.
And so I want to ask you this question before we go any further. Do you think right now you have any locusts in your life? And you might think, well, listen, they're not that big of a deal. They're just kind of walking around. Well, those that walk around will eventually hop. Okay, and what hops eventually flies.
Do you have something like a warning signal going off that you've been silencing, something you've been ignoring?
I want to stop here for just a second and give what to me is already hopeful because the alarm is the mercy, the alarm is the hope. But number one, when those alarms go off, please understand, God's not trying to pay you back.
He's trying to win you back. He wants to get you back. We're going to talk about in a few weeks the prophet Hosea, which is an amazing picture of the relentless love of God.
Number two, until God is absolutely first in your heart and soul, nothing in your life is safe. Nothing.
And he will not be on stage with something else. He will not share a platform.
He can't. He won't.
Number three, you might think, well, I'm gonna try this. I'm gonna try to fix this area or tidy this Area up. Let me tell you, God has a ton of locusts. In fact, one of the things that a Bible Project podcast mentioned is that the intentionality of allowing something like locusts, because they multiply. He's like, I got a lot of these. I mean, you try this. Well, I got more stuff I could do. Okay. Like, I will do whatever it takes to get your attention.
But here's what I love. It says, yet even now. So they've lost things.
The land is barren economically. Things are not what they need to be.
It says, yet even now, declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, mourning, rendez your hearts and not your garments.
If you notice, at the very beginning, he says to give all your heart. And the reason why he has to say that is, do you think sometimes there's a tendency to give half of it or withhold a portion?
But the next part that he says is he purposefully picks fasting.
And fasting, if you know, is not just about removing something from your life, it's about replacing it.
It's not just. It's not penance.
It's not about trying to earn something. It's about saying, hey, this is a problem. I'm going to remove it and I'm going to put God in its place. And then he says, you're going to weep and mourn over it. Which sounds similar. Weeping has to do with the physical part of you, like the actual tears.
You know, the Bible. We talked about this with Ronnie the other night in class, that the Bible even talks about how, like, our sin can make us physically sick, not just spiritually. Mentally, it can make us physically sick.
It's the tears, but the mourning is the grief.
So it's not just enough to cry over it.
The other part is to grieve over it.
And God doesn't want us to grieve because he wants us to, like, ruminate and stay in some negative place. It's what I think Paul talks about when he says godly sorrow leads to repentance.
That once you've cried about it and you've really kind of thought about its impact, he says then this.
Give your heart, not your garment. He said, don't do that outward show anymore.
It's really interesting that the one group of people Jesus had the biggest problem with was the Pharisees, right?
So on the outside, man, they look awesome, but on the inside, they're filled with dead men's bones. CS Lewis in Mere Christianity, said that sometimes he was trying to illustrate how we like to, like, give God just something to fix up.
And so he illustrated, like, a room.
He said, when God comes into your life, he doesn't want to just paint over the blemishes. He doesn't want to put a nice lamp in the corner.
He doesn't want to get Chip and Joanna in to put a bunch of shiplap on the wall. Like, that's not what he has in mind when he comes into your life. He wants to tear the whole thing down and to build something absolutely brand new.
He doesn't think renovation. He doesn't think Kirkland's, like. He's thinking, I'm gonna knock the whole thing down, and I'm gonna make something absolutely new. New levels, new rooms.
And so, as you think about that, with answering the question, do I have locusts in my life right now, you might be okay with just little changes. God's not. And here's why. Because he has more in store for you. Maybe you've wanted just to paint over some stuff.
We had such a powerful confession this morning in the early service where someone specifically mentioned what they were struggling with. And here's what happened. They were specifically ministered to, but God is specifically going to do something about it.
But I also want us to understand that what's happening here is not just like a bent will.
When someone comes forward, it's not just, hey, I'm confessing the sin that happened when someone comes forward. What happens next is also just as important, which is repentance. You can conf. I know this sounds obvious, but we can confess without repenting. We can say, I did this, I got called, or whatever it is, but not turn from what we've done.
Well, how can I turn? Well, here's what gives us the motivation to turn. If you keep reading, in verse 13 of chapter 2, it says this. Return to the Lord your God. He's gracious, he's merciful, he's slow to anger, he's abounding in steadfast love. So he's saying, your understanding of why you can confess, why you can repent is not because you're so awesome and you're trying so hard, but because of how good he is.
We only learn to repent of sin. The more we immerse ourselves in the awesome love of God, the more we understand his love, the more we want to repent.
In verse 14 and 19, it says this.
Who knows? So this is God's response. Who knows? Like, God, like, if he'll turn and he might even relent, which means like what you experienced with Moses in the Book of Exodus, where he says, for now, I know, or, you know, I'll change my mind, or, I was gonna do this. Now I'm not gonna do this.
That he might leave a blessing behind.
The Lord answered and said to his people, behold, I'm sending you grain, wine, oil, and you'll be satisfied if you read that on the surface. Oh, man, God's given him a bunch of awesome stuff. Actually, that's what they had before the plague. Grain, wine, oil. And they were satisfied. That's kind of the point.
It's not that I'm just going to pour a bunch of stuff on your life. He's like, I want you to be satisfied with what I've given you. If you think about it, the root of what causes us to get in a mess like this truly is idols that are in our heart, things that we have not found satisfaction in, that God has already given us.
And so he says, listen, I'm going to give you what you've had before. Which is kind of interesting. It's kind of like a retroactive blessing. Because you read in verse 25, that's exactly what he says.
I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten the Hopper, the Destroyer, and the Cutter, my great army, which I sent among you.
It's this retroactive restoration that God is going to go back and make up for the things that sin destroyed in your heart, in your life, that begins with confession and repentance, ripping your heart, not your garments.
So you get to verse 28.
It says, and it will come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit on all of flesh. Do you see the hope in this Number one? The hope shows up in the locust.
We don't like it, but we need it. The hope shows up in the alarm. We don't like it, but we need it.
And then the hope shows up in the fact of how God will respond.
And guess what?
He gives us someone.
The Holy Spirit. You know what's really interesting? In Acts chapter two, when Peter is preaching on the day of Pentecost, you know what? He quotes this text.
So listen, you're about to do a great thing on this earth, that I'm giving you my spirit. I'm giving you the spirit to go with you. And when he calls him a gift, we take him at his words. And so he gives us that gift. And we see the church growing in a remarkable way.
Isn't it interesting that tucked away in the middle of this Text on judgment and sin and silencing alarms. God gives us the hope of the Spirit to come. I mean, that is so awesome that we get him even in the middle of this pain.
It's a picture of how God is so true to his promises, but it's also a reminder that God doesn't give us the Holy Spirit just so we sleep good at night. Because if you keep reading the text, it's to help the nations, that the reason why he gives us his spirit is to go witness to everybody else. It's like, if you do make some adjustments to your home, say you do paint some rooms, say you flip a house or, you know, you gut the place and you put in all this new stuff. When somebody comes over, what's the first thing you do?
You show them that, right? You're so excited about what's in there that you can't keep it to yourself. You have to tell other people.
And so then it says this in verse 16, the Lord roars from Zion and utters his voice from Jerusalem and the heavens and the earthquake. But the Lord is a refuge to his people, a stronghold to the people of Israel.
Now, this is an odd question, but I want you to think about it just for yourself for just a second.
If you literally heard the Lord roar and it started shaking the earth, how would you respond?
And you're like, well, I don't know. Well, here's the thing. The way you would respond is directly connected to where you're at in your relationship with God. Here's what I mean by that.
When I was growing up, my mom would say something, or dad say something like this, Andrew.
And that could mean one of two things. Okay?
That could mean, you better get yourself over here right now. You know, like that.
Like, oh, no, her roar is because I did something wrong, or the roar is comfort. I'm here. Does that make sense?
The context of how you hear the roar depends on either if you're walking away from God or walking to Him.
It's kind of like if you've ever watched the Chronicles of Narnia or read the books, or just, like me, just watch the movies. But in that, there's a line that I absolutely love where it says this about Aslan the lion.
He's not safe, but he's good.
God's not safe.
I'm grateful that he's not.
It's not always easy. It's not always fun, but he is good.
I had somebody after the early service this morning tell me about how lions actually attack, that they will roar, the male lion will roar, and they will run away from the male lion to the female lions, which are actually the ones that devour.
And they're all standing there. And technically he said, you should want to run to the lion, but when you run away from the lion, that's when they're dangerous. I was like, oh, man, that's awesome.
And that's what we're talking about. When you hear the roar, what is your posture? What are you feeling?
I'm telling you, you will be absolutely terrified if you're running away from him, but you will be absolutely comforted if you're running towards him.
And so I put some kind of, like, paradoxes here of places you might be in in life right now where there's something difficult but also good, something not safe, but good.
And you think about most of faith is not safe.
It's not picket fence fits within the walls of my 401k. Like, that's.
Faith is constantly in that between, hey, this doesn't. This is hard, this is difficult.
But also I can experience the goodness of God. Maybe right now you're afraid to have a conversation, but God is calling you to restoration, reconciliation. Excuse me. Number two, you have been afraid to confess a sin, but maybe God is calling you to freedom. Number three, you're afraid to step up in leadership, but maybe what God is wanting is to get you to serve more. Maybe you've been afraid to share your faith, but maybe God is calling you to join him on mission.
Maybe you're afraid of what being obedient would cost you, but maybe God is calling you towards faithfulness.
So as you think about that, this verse really stuck out to me. In verse 14, it says this. Multitudes and multitudes are in the valley of decision.
The day of the Lord is near.
So what we all have in common this morning is a few things.
All of us right now are in the valley of decision.
Where would you say, based on the decisions you're making right now, that your history is headed?
Where is your history heading? We're all in the valley of a decision right now.
This past week, one of my professors made a really interesting point at the end of class. He said, you know, I want you to think about when you offer the invitation at your churches that everybody in the room is needing to do one of two things.
He said, everybody in the room is either going to be on their way or should be on their way to give their lives to Christ in baptism, or they should be living out their baptism.
I want to say that again.
They're either making that decision to give their lives to Christ in their baptism baptism or maybe they're needing to better live out their baptism.
Maybe you're here today and you've never given your life to Christ.
You've never gone into the watery grave to have his spirit dwell within you.
Maybe there's some of you in this room that haven't been living out your baptism.
Romans 6 Remember what it said before he even describes baptism he's like listen, are you to keep on sinning that grace may abound?
He's saying listen, live out your baptism that maybe what you need to do is you need to choose to die to self to take up your cross every single day and follow him.
So maybe whatever it is that you have a need of today, maybe you're here that you need to walk towards your baptism or maybe maybe you're here today and you need to live it out whatever you have in need of please come while we stand and we sing the song.
