Daily Thoughts from Joel: How Should We Mourn? (1:13-20)

Put on sackcloth and lament, O priests; wail, O ministers of the altar.  Go in, pass the night in sackcloth, O ministers of my God!  Because grain offering and drink offering are withheld from the house of your God.   

Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly.  Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the LORD your God, and cry out to the LORD.

Alas for the day!  For the day of the LORD is near, and as destruction from the Almighty it comes.  Is not the food cut off before our eyes, joy and gladness from the house of our God?

The seed shrivels under the clods; the storehouses are desolate; the granaries are torn down because the grain has dried up.  How the beasts groan!  The herds of cattle are perplexed because there is no pasture for them; even the flocks of sheep suffer.

To you, O LORD, I call.  For fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and flame has burned all the trees of the field.  Even the beasts of the field pant for you because the water brooks are dried up, and fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.  (Joel 1:13-20 ESV)

Though the people of Israel are naturally, without any prompting, mourning the terrible destruction wrought by the locusts, Joel is calling them to a more particular mourning, from the leadership down.  There is a need to mourn before Yahweh, to call for national fasting and to cry out to Yahweh at His temple.  This is a mourning of repentance and acknowledgement that Israel’s sin has brought this upon her.  Joel himself exemplifies it by calling on Yahweh himself.

The seriousness of this situation is marked by the “Alas” and that Joel describes this as the “day of Yahweh” being near.  The Day of Yahweh is a day of judgment as Yahweh cleans house to bring in His kingdom.  There are and have been multiple days of Yahweh when limited judgment and limited kingdom building was done, and there is an ultimate Day of Yahweh when everyone on earth will be finally judged and His kingdom will fully come to earth and rule forever.  This is one of those multiple days of Yahweh that portends the ultimate one.

When we stray from God as believers we have the confidence that there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).  But because God loves us He will discipline us and no discipline for the moment is enjoyable (Hebrews 12).  It is for our good that He disciplines us and the evidence that it is accomplishing its purpose is our repentant mourning.  We’re not only sad for the downturn in our lives but for the sin that led to it.  We do love God and don’t want to rebel against Him.

The locust plague is a direct discipline from God.  Joel has revealed it as such.  But there may also be a kind of passive discipline that occurs in our lives, no less from the loving hand of our Father, that is the natural consequence of unwise choices.  One may think of the American penchant for entertainment in the form of TV, movies, game consoles, etc., and make a case that it is keeping us from more important deeds and consequently making for more effete people.  This is but one example of disciplines/consequences we may face and that are more easily passed off than locust plagues.  The kind of direct intervention by God, like a locust plague, is necessarily more devastating because we are more hardened to acknowledging our rebellion.