All right, Book of Joel is where we start tonight. And normally when I start into a book, I give a sort of an overview or introduction that involves some historical background. It's a little bit hard to do with the Book of Joel for reasons I'll talk about here in just a little bit. But let me say this about sort of the overview of the book. Joel's an interesting book. It's only three chapters long, but it covers a vast span of history. in a prophetic way. And the basic method of the book of Joel is to take an event that happened in Joel's own day, which was a locust swarm that came upon the nation there, and to use the devastation that that wrought and the fact that that was a judgment from God as a picture of the day of the Lord that would come at the end time. the picture of a tribulation time that was yet to come. So in the beginning of the book we're talking about this locust swarm that comes down upon the nation and is God's judgment upon them. As we get on into chapters two and three, it extends the picture all the way out to the end of this age and into this time that we call the day of the Lord. And we'll talk a lot more later about exactly what the day of the Lord is. Basically, it's the time that God has set apart for judgment at the end of this age and then carrying on into the millennial kingdom. But the reason it's hard to give a historical background for Joel is because we don't know exactly who he was or when he wrote. And that is debated quite a bit. Joel was a very common name. in the Old Testament. As a matter of fact, it's one of the most common. There are more than a dozen people in the Old Testament named Joel. And most of them are very minor figures that we don't know much about at all. This particular Joel, all we know for sure about him as far as biographical information is that he is the son of Pethuel and that God had him write this prophecy. That's it. tell us a lot about himself. It's not like the last book we looked at, Hosea, where the whole book is set up by Hosea's own personal problems, his own personal relationship with his faithless wife. With Joel, we don't know anything about him at all, really. Some have guessed that he was the son of Samuel, because Samuel did have a son named Joel. There are a couple of problems with that. One is that it says very plainly here that he is the son of in the first verse. And of course, some people have argued that that may have just been a different name for Samuel. But the other bigger problem is that when we read the story of Samuel and his sons, it makes it pretty clear that his sons were very corrupt. And so it's unlikely that God would have used them to write prophecy. It's probably just sort of an anonymous figure. And you have a certain amount of that in the Scripture, you know, these figures that are not known too much out of one particular job that called them to do. As a matter of fact, there are quite a few people in Scripture that do something or other that matters to a great deal in the circumstances to which they were called, and we're not even given their name. We have a lot of these people that are just called a certain man or something like that. And Joel, his name we know, his name means Jehovah is God. And so you can see why that was such a common name for somebody who was a devout Jew, that would be a very fitting sort of name, to say that Jehovah, the strong one, is God, that he is the, or excuse me, that Jehovah, the one who, remember what the name Jehovah meant, is I am that I am. The name El, there at the end of the name, meant the mighty one. So basically what it does is to draw those two names together and make sure we understand that they are a single God. And that was an important part of the Jewish faith from very early on. They were instructed that the Lord thy God is one God, not multiple gods like some of the other nations worshiped. Well, the historical background of the book is a little difficult. And we have to place a guess at when it is. And the best guess we have is that probably he prophesied around the same time as Elisha and during the reign of a king named Joash, or Jehoash, and we'll talk about him here in just a little bit. But we don't really know that for sure and there are people who have guessed at the time of his writing over a span of about 500 years. Some people think he was maybe the very first of the writing prophets and I don't think he was quite the first. I think he probably was one of the first ones. There are some others that are very early on, and it's hard to tell for sure. Some people put him right around the same time as maybe Jeremiah and Ezekiel, right before they go into captivity in Babylon. And some even have him actually come back from Babylon after the captivity. And we don't really know for sure. But there are a few good reasons to think that he may be one of the very earliest of the prophets. One is that we don't have any mention of Babylon or Assyria in this book at all. I should mention this, Joel writes to the southern kingdom, he's a prophet to Judah, doesn't really address the north at all. He's a prophet to Judah, and of course the major feature of pretty much every other prophet that addresses Judah is either that they are going into captivity in Babylon or that they have come out of captivity in Babylon. And Joel doesn't mention that at all. He doesn't have any reference to their captivity at all. He skips right over that to end time prophecy. All the time. That's a good question. When were the locusts there? That would be a very difficult thing to pin down because The locust swarms were very, very common, and the one that occurred at this time evidently was one of the most intense ones that they ever had. But there were enough locust swarms over the history of that land that you can't really pin it down from that. It was sort of like asking when a particular flood came. Floods come so often that it's hard to tell, and it doesn't really necessarily stand out in historical writings. And there's also the question of how widespread this locust swarm was, whether it was all over the Middle East, or whether it was just Judah, or maybe just right in the area where Joel was, it doesn't quite indicate the full extent of it. So you can't really tell from that, and we just sort of have to guess. Now we think that probably it's pretty early because he doesn't mention Babylon or Assyria. And interestingly enough, he doesn't to any great extent address specific sins. In Hosea we had a lot of that, didn't we? We had a catalog of specific things that they had done. He doesn't really talk about idolatry, and we've talked about that some here before. It was a while before full-on idolatry really took hold in the southern kingdom to a great extent David and Solomon's reign. Solomon himself, of course, was an idol worshiper. But the kingdom as a whole didn't seem to descend into idolatry to nearly extent the northern kingdom did. And the reason for that, I think, is pretty clear. In the northern kingdom, the whole thing was founded on idolatry. The very first king set up golden calves and false worship centers to keep the people from going back to Jerusalem. In the southern kingdom, you actually had a fair number of kings who were godly kings. and tried to turn the people back to God. And so you didn't have as much idolatry. It was present for sure, but it wasn't as widespread as it was in the North, and it wasn't as big a problem at first. It took a while for that really to come into full bloom. And so we think it's maybe early because of that. The reason why there's a strong suspicion that it happened specifically during the reign of this one particular king has to do with the fact, and we're going to talk a little bit about this story, that the king in question became king when he was just seven years old because of very curious circumstances that we're going to talk about here a little bit. And for a while he did not serve as king, because he's just a child. He's officially king, but he has a regent who is really running things. And the interesting thing about the book of Joel is that it makes no reference at all to the king, which is unusual. Most of these books of prophecy blame the king. We saw a lot of that in Hosea, didn't we, about how the big part of the problem was that they had demanded kings and they had chosen their own kings instead of letting God pick the king for them. Well in Joel we don't talk about the king at all. And so that is a hint maybe that the time of the writing would be around this period when though Judah technically had a king, they weren't really being ruled by a king. The man who was Joash's regent, who was the man who was effectively ruling Israel for a time, this is a whole interesting story in itself, was the high priest, Jehoiada. which is, if you know anything about the importance in the Bible of the distinction between the high priest and the king, that the king was supposed to be the ruler, the high priest was supposed to handle religious matters. Well here we have a time for a while where we have a high priest who is not actually the king but he is effectively ruling the people for several years. And so we have here the priest mentioned. Now I want to get back into the book of 2 Chronicles a little bit before we start really getting into the text of Joel and talk a little bit about this whole circumstance. It connects with some events we talked about before when we were looking at the book of Hosea. And I told you when we started Hosea that these minor prophets are are sort of in chronological order, but not quite, right? And you have them essentially sort of groups that are, the groups are in chronological order. Well, if I'm right, and not just me, but a lot of most conservative scholars at least hold to the idea that Joel is a very early book, if that's the case, then Joel probably was written before Hosea was. And if you remember part of the background of the book of Hosea, part of what was going on there was that God named that first child that Hosea and Gomer had, Jezreel. You remember that? And it meant to scatter. And the idea was that God said he was going to avenge the house of Jehu, the blood of Jezreel. And what Jehu had done, if you remember the story, he was the only king in the north that God ever commissioned an anointing for him. All those northern kings effectively were rebels and the kings in the south were in the house of David and so they got the anointing. But Jehu was the one who God gave an anointing and He gave him not just an anointing but a commission and his commission was to destroy the house of Ahab. And apparently the reason for that was that Ahab had sort of reintroduced Baal worship into the nation. The nation of course had people who had worshipped Baal for quite a long time but when Samuel was the judge at the time he won that great battle against the Philistines he made them commit to ending their worship of Baal. And it seems like maybe they did that because for quite a long time after that you find no mention of Baal in the Bible. But Ahab marries this woman named Jezebel, and she is a Baal worshiper here. Her father is a king, and his name is Ethbaal. So he has Baal right in his name, right? And you know where this is going. And they introduce this Baal worship into the northern kingdom. Now, after Ahab was gone, God sent this man Jehu to defeat the house of Baal, or the house of Ahab, because of their Baal worship. And Ahab had his capital, and his sons had their capital, or at least their prominent place of residence at Jezreel, which was kind of unusual. Most of the northern kings resided in Samaria, but Ahab set up shop in Jezreel. And Jehu went down there and killed the king of Israel, and killed all the sons, all those who were in line to become king of Israel so he could become king. But the thing he did also was that he killed the King of the South at the same time. He happened to be up there visiting with the King of the North. And that was a thing he shouldn't have done. Although, interestingly enough here in the book of 2 Chronicles, it says that it was of God that he did that. But that's one of those things that gets a little complicated about understanding the will of God, because we know all through the Scripture God used even wicked people to bring about judgments, and they weren't necessarily justified in bringing...well, we have that with the Babylonian captivity. The Babylonians weren't godly in coming down and defeating Israel. God used them to do that, but they still got their punishment. You have the same thing with a man like Judas, for example, right? Nobody would argue that Judas was a godly man or that he was doing the will of God. And yet we're told Peter preached on the day of Pentecost that Christ was delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. So God's able to work through all these sort of wicked people to do this. Anyway, the aftermath of that is this. Jehu is not satisfied to conquer the northern Canaan. He's not satisfied to destroy the house of Ahab, take over in the north. He makes a run at trying to destroy all the royal seed of the south as well. He apparently wants to try to unify the nation under himself, which God did not warrant him to do. And politics get into the thing as they are want to do, right? What's going on at this time is that as he is trying to He has destroyed all the royal house of the north and has taken that kingdom. He wants to take the kingdom in the south and he actually has managed to kill the king of the south. And this lady named Athaliah gets into the mix. Athaliah was the mother of the king that Jehu had killed. She is the mother of the king of Judah that has just been killed. She is also, you're going to have to have your scorecards for this, you can't tell the players without a scorecard, right? She is also the sister of Ahab, who was the king in the north. They had, because you know how politics, kingdoms intermarry so they can get their connections with one another and try to make peace. Her father was Omri who was also the father of Ahab, king of the north. And so we have this Baal worshiper introduced into the southern kingdom and they're going to have trouble with her. That's why God actually, even though He didn't tell Jehu to kill Ahaziah, He allowed him to be killed because Ahaziah was leading the people into ungodliness. His mother was a male worshiper. And so Athaliah, seeing her opportunity with her son dead, now think about the kind of woman this is. Her son has died, who is the king, and her response is to kill everybody else who could possibly be in the royal line. So she could be the queen and have the kingdom for herself. Yeah, that's exactly the kind of woman she is. And she almost succeeded. Now, think about this. God had made a covenant with David and promised him that his seed would sit on the throne. And this woman is trying to destroy his seed. And she got very close. she killed all of them but one. And so here in 2 Chronicles 22 verse 10 it says, "...but when Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the seed royal of the house of Judah. But Jehoshabiath, the daughter of the king, took Joash the son of Ahaziah and stole him from among the king's sons that were slain and put him and his nurse in a bedchamber." It's really hard to keep straight. Everybody is here, right? This woman who takes Joash, the son of Ahaziah, this young child, is the king's sister. So that would make her the aunt of this little boy. You see why she would want to preserve him. It would also, barring the presence of another another wife that Ahaziah's father might have had would make her the daughter of Athaliah. Yeah, right. That's right. This is Athaliah's grandson that she fully intended to kill so that she could have the throne for herself. She is really something special. She has been called all down through the ages, bloody Athaliah. No, she was Jezebel's mother-in-law. So yeah, they're a wild bunch. Not mother-in-law, sister-in-law. She would have been her sister-in-law. So they're all connected together in a lot of wickedness here. Anyway, this woman Jehoshabiat is her daughter, probably, and the sister of Ahaziah the king, she saves her nephew from being murdered by his grandmother. Now, are we all up to speed on this so far? It's pretty wild what happens here. Now, if that's not confusing enough, she wants to take him and hide him, she does, She's the daughter of King Jehoram, makes her Ahaziah's sister. She is also, as it happens, the wife of Jehoiada, the high priest. Which is kind of an unusual thing, too, because we have evidently a marriage in between different tribes here. The tribe of Levi and Judah were ordinarily kept separate, but she married into the tribe of Levi and is married to the high priest. and they hide him. Now, for six years, Athaliah reigns as the queen. And this is an unusual time, and I talked about this before when we started the book of Hosea. For the most part, the southern kingdom had a fairly regular transition of power from father to son, and not a lot of coups and revolutions and things like this, although even in cases sometimes where well, we'll see this happens later on, where a king gets killed because of his disobedience or because of his wickedness, they still would put his son on the throne because they respected the line of David. But this is the rare situation where they have for six years, the kingdom does not have a son of David on the throne while she reigns. And that's maybe part of the background for a book like Joel where we don't have any mention of a king. And like I said, in his very young years, he's seven years old when they finally bring him out of hiding. and pop the surprise on Athaliah. This is very dramatic stuff, right? You can make a movie out of this. Athaliah has no idea that this kid is still alive, and she thinks she's established herself as the queen. And all of a sudden, understandably, the people didn't like her very much because she ruled like the kind of person she was. And when somebody pops up and says, we've got a son of David, a real honest to goodness son of David here that we've been hiding for seven years, all the people are ready to put Him on the throne. And they do. Jehoiada brings Him out of hiding. And Athaliah hears all this noise, they take Him down to the temple and they start to get ready to crown Him as king and Jehoiada starts actually getting the army ready. It's an interesting thing for a priest to do, right? He's got his Levites under arms ready to fight because this is kind of a special situation. Verse 12 says, chapter 23 verse 12, Now when Athaliah heard the noise of the people running and praising the king, she came to the people into the house of the Lord. And she looked, and behold, the king stood at his pillar at the entering in. That would be the seven-year-old king here that's being put on the throne. And the princes and the trumpets by the king and all the people of the land rejoiced and sounded with trumpets. Also the singers with instruments of music and such as taught to sing praise. And this next, the reason I read that whole verse is because this next sentence has always amazed me and it shows you the power of wicked people to project their wickedness on others. Then Athaliah rent her clothes and said, treason, treason. After all this, she has the She has the gall to accuse them of committing treason, you know, after she had had all those, the royal seed killed. So the Middle Ages has nothing on the Old Testament? No, the Middle Ages had nothing new. I mean, they got all their ideas from all this sort of thing. Anyway, they took her outside, they killed her, they get rid of her, and they have this revival. Joash, this young boy, is the king, technically at seven years old, but Jehoiada the priest is actually running things until Joash reaches a certain age. And so that's why we think perhaps Joel may have been written during this time period because at this time there's not really a king ruling for a period of, well, yeah, and while he was hidden. And then there's a period of time where Jehoiada is really running things until he gets a little older. So there's quite a number of years where there's not a king effectively ruling the people. There is a priest, and we do have references to the priest in the book of Joel. As it turned out, Jehoiada did a really good job. He led or attempted to lead a revival. At this time the priesthood had gotten very wicked and very corrupt and were really abusing the people. And Jehoiada tried to reform all that and clean it all up. He made a covenant with the people and the king that they should be the Lord's people, it says there in verse 16. all the wickedness they had endured unto Athali, he tries to get things straightened out. He begins to attempt to repair the temple. And down there in chapter 24 we find that Joash, while Jehoiada was alive, took it upon himself to try to repair the temple. And he had problems with some of the priests because when they would take up money to try to repair the temple, the priests evidently were pocketing the money. And so we have this famous story where they take a chest and bore a hole in it outside so people can put, they have to have a sort of a lockbox, I guess, to keep the priests out of the money. And anyway, the strange thing that happens is this. This man, Joash, was a godly king as long as the priest Jehoiada lived. But what you find out is that all he was ever doing apparently was being Jehoiada's puppet because after Jehoiada died, Joash stops being a good king and allows the nation to turn back to idolatry. verse 17 of chapter 24 says, Now after the death of Jehoiada came the princes of Judah and made obeisance to the king. Then the king hearkened unto them, and they left the house of the Lord God of their fathers and served groves and idols. And wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem for their trespass. Yet he sent prophets to them to bring them again unto the Lord, and they testified against them, but they would not give ear. And so that's It's really kind of a sad story what you find this man as long as he had Jehoiada apparently was a very good man. And as long as Jehoiada was around the people respected him enough that they wouldn't turn against him and Joash kept the people in line. But when Jehoiada was gone, Joash didn't have enough spine, I guess, or enough influence to keep the people turned the right direction. And what this shows you is, and this is important for the book of Joel, is that even at times when Israel had a good man as their leader, in this case it wasn't a king, it was this priest Jehoiada, even when they had a good man there was always this undercurrent underneath that always wanted to go back to idolatry. Even when they had these great revivals, I think I mentioned this here before, if you look at the revival they had in Josiah's day it looks like a wonderful thing on the surface, but if you read the book of Jeremiah you find that the hearts of the people were never really in it. They followed what the king told them to do. But they didn't desire it. Their heart was always turned toward idolatry. And for a little while here, they had a priest and a king teaming together who were strong enough to keep the nation from turning openly to idolatry. But as soon as that priest is gone, they turn to their idols. And what that tells us is that always this nation had this rottenness in it. and we find this in the book of Joel. There's not a specific sin to any great extent mentioned in the book of Joel, but the backdrop of it is that the people's hearts aren't really right with God, and that there's a judgment coming because of this. And so here in the book of Joel, that's the background of this locust swarm. In Joel chapter one, verse one, it says, 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. Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers? Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.'" And he's talking about this swarm of insects that we'll talk about here in a minute. Now, like I said, those swarms were common, and frankly, Agriculture was very much at the mercy of insects until fairly modern times, until we've learned to develop pesticides that can protect us from that sort of thing. But all throughout history, agriculture has been very much at the mercy of these kind of swarms that could destroy a field in a day. That's exactly what it is. And that's sort of the basis of the whole book, is that what we have here at the beginning I should probably say this, some people think that the insect swarm is a picture or a figure of an army that comes. I don't think that's right. From the way it reads it appears to be an actual insect swarm, but what it was was a judgment from God. And the whole basis of the book is that that judgment from God ought to be a lesson to people to watch for the great judgment that's coming at the end, the day of the Lord. And of course the day of the Lord will make this insect swarm look like nothing at all. But that's what this is, it's a warning. And I think that's a pretty important thing for the modern world to understand because it's very difficult to get people these days to believe that anything at all could be a judgment from God. People don't believe God could judge them, right? I mean, to most people who think of themselves as sophisticated modern people, to even suggest that the COVID pandemic is in any way a judgment from God, they find it offensive. But if you take seriously the idea that God is omniscient and omnipotent, then He knew this was coming, and He has the power to stop it if He wants, and yet He has chosen to permit it. Now you can say the same thing about a lot of things. If you begin to suggest that earthquakes and hurricanes and things like that are judgments from God, then you'll be very much insulted these days, right? Yeah, that's right. The sort of modern theology has gotten rid of the idea of the wrath of God. They try to get rid of it all they can. and teach that there is no judgment of God, but if you take the judgment out, you take the holiness out. And it just won't work, right? Because the problem is, all kinds of sin and unrighteousness, it's not that God just capriciously said, you can do this and you can't do that, or you have to do this, and so on, and if you don't, I'll punish you. The problem is that if you do those things, it ruins everything. Sin has ruined everything, hasn't it? I don't think most people appreciate how much a mess sin makes of human life, even if God didn't bring any judgment on it. It makes everything miserable in the end, doesn't it? And if you want to test that proposition, just think how wonderful the world would be if everybody just lived the way the Bible says. I mean, if everybody just kept the Ten Commandments, how much nicer would the world be? It'd make it a very pleasant place to live, wouldn't it? But sin ruins everything. And the sort of modern movement that says everything goes and you can just live any way you want, what they're essentially doing is giving people permission to ruin their own lives and destroy themselves. And there's no love in that. The love chapter in the Bible, 1 Corinthians chapter 13, there's one verse in there that most, or one part of a verse there that most of the modern the allusions leave out, and it's verse 6, because what it says there is that charity rejoiceth not in iniquity. That is, you can't have pleasure in someone who's living in sin. And if you love them, you want to help them get out of that, because they're going to destroy themselves with their sin and make themselves miserable. And so that's the idea there. People who say that God will never judge, well, they've forgotten that God is holy. And that's not on our part to be hateful or judgmental. We fall under God's judgment too if it's not for His grace. That's the whole message of the gospel is that Jesus Christ has come to die in our place, suffer the wrath of God for us. That's all we've got to preach. And we have to be careful about this sort of thing that we don't get holier than thou and stand up on our soapbox and proclaim how wicked everybody else is in comparison to us. Now, our message is a message of grace that in view of this prophecy of judgment that's coming, that people need to avail themselves of the opportunity that God has given the way of escape in Jesus Christ, if they'll believe on Him. And that's the idea here is that what we've got is a warning shot. I've said since the pandemic started, you have to wonder if it's a warning shot. that God fires a shot over the bowels, because there's something much worse coming. Now, if you read what the Scripture says about the tribulation period that is on the horizon somewhere, we don't know how far off, but it's hard to think sometimes that it could be very far off, then this COVID pandemic is a little bit of nothing in comparison to that. Yeah, in one place and then another place it's a fourth. Yeah, so if you, well, yeah, right, it's you take out, the fourth is first, so if you take out a fourth of the population, that leaves 75%. If you take out another third, that's half the population within just those two plagues. And the thing is, I mean, if you want to see the difference between now and then, everything that has gone on in the last almost two years with the pandemic has been geared toward people trying to stay alive. And that day death will flee from them and they'll want to die. So you can't imagine the magnitude or the difference between this and that. And I think the same thing could be said about this locust plague and what happens during the book of Revelation. As bad as this swarm of insects is, it is a mild thing. If you read the book of Revelation it would just be one little piece of what happens during that time on a much greater scale. And he says at this time it's something they've never seen. Now that's the thing about judgment. One of the great mistakes of the human race, and we can't ever quite seem to get over it, is that sometimes we mistake God's forbearance for His favor. That is, sometimes just that He hasn't dropped the hatchet on us yet, we assume that that must mean He's pleased with us. And we forget that what it really is is just His mercy, His grace, His long-suffering. Because He's not willing that any should perish and He gives men time to repent. It's true in the lives of nations, it's true in the lives of individuals, isn't it? I mean, how many people do you know that as long as they've got a pretty decent job and a house to live in and something to drive and enough money to take a vacation once in a while and have a little fun. They assume everything must be right between them and God. And you just can't get past that without some conviction from the Holy Spirit, can you? That's the only way that you can really get a person's attention in that condition. And we have this condition that we're in right now in the human race that for all the complaining we do, our generation has had it better than just about anybody that's ever come before us, haven't we? I mean if you look back at the material prosperity that has come upon this nation since World War II, we've had a good run of it, haven't we? Minor downturns notwithstanding. Altogether, we live much more comfortably than people did Honestly, even 30 or 40 years ago, don't we? We have an easier time of it for the most part. And the truth is that in spite of all the complaints from certain quarters, prosperity is rising around the world. Poverty has been decreasing for quite a long time. We're on a pretty good roll. And it's easy for people to assume, well, it's just always going to be this way. It's not always going to be this way. At some point, the bottom falls out. Now, if you have any inkling of what's going on in this world, you can see this coming. And, you know, I think people are just so shortsighted about the possibilities of what can come in this world. We have great debates about climate change and things like that. And I think sometimes we miss some of the bigger point. I mean, if I were in a position that some folks are now trying to push the use of electric cars and things like that, I think I would make my case not so much about climate change but on the fact that sooner or later we're going to run out of oil. Right? That there's only so much out there, you know? And we don't know how much of it we can get, we don't know how long that will be. But if God allows the world to stand, eventually we're going to run out. Now let me say this, I have to wonder sometimes if the evidence that that sort of thing is running out may be part of God's plan, He put enough here to fulfill whatever plans He had. And it may be the fact that that time is possibly drawing near is indicated by the fact that we are, who knows the truth about this because they keep changing the prediction, but there are some people who say at the current usage we may run out of oil in less than 50 years. So people that are living now will see that time. And we don't seem to have a lot of real good options to replace that. I mean, so far, there's no real evidence that renewable resources can actually provide the energy we would need to maintain the standard of living we've come to expect. Probably the only way to do it is nuclear, and there's a lot of people who are going to be very unhappy with that. But I expect when you start turning the lights off, they'll come around, as people tend to do. But these are things that ought to get attention, you know, that things are going to run out. There are today five times as many people on the earth as there were a hundred years ago. Yeah, and a hundred years ago there were more people on the earth than there had ever been before that. So in order to be able to feed that population, It's no wonder we talk about times of famine, is it? It's no wonder we talk about in the book of Revelation we have apparently armies fighting on horseback, well if you run out of oil. And you have times of famine if you can't feed the population. We have It is, it's actually impossible to feed the amount of people we have on the earth today without the use of phosphorus and fertilizers. We're running out of phosphorus. The US supplies of phosphate rock that they make phosphorus from may run out within 30 years. There is a lot of it in Africa, which is interesting. 75 to 85% of the phosphate rock deposits in the world are in a place in Africa that is either part of southern Morocco or the northern part of western Sahara, depending on who you believe is correct, and a civil war over there. and they're fighting. Well, what you can see happening, what I'm saying is it's not hard to see how things can change dramatically to the conditions you see in the tribulation in a very short period of time because honestly what's going to happen at some point if you start running out of fertilizer and people start going hungry is that all these nations that have turned against colonialism are going to get colonial in a real hurry. And there's going to be a war over that place, right? You have to be foolish not to see that coming. And who wouldn't believe that a nation like China or Russia would just attempt to take control of that place if they're able to do so, you know? So what I'm saying is things can go south in a real hurry, and we're not that far from it. It could happen very quickly. I mean, just in a matter of a few years, conditions could be changed dramatically on this earth. And yet people still seem to be pretty much blind to it. We just sort of drift and think that things will always be like they are now. Well, that was the problem in Israel. They're just sort of drifting along, thinking things are always going to be okay. And then one day, on the horizon, there's a swarm of locusts. And they've got their fields planted. They've made investments. They've got settled down. We'll notice in this passage here that it's not just a wheat crop, but they've got vineyards. They've got orchards of trees. those things are long-term investments that you plan to be in a particular spot for many years. And you think about that man Jesus talked about in the New Testament that was going to pull down his barns and build greater because he was ready to make an investment of things that would last for a long time. But he said, thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee. And we never know how close the judgment of God might be. This is why we have a book like Joel to give us a wake-up call. And he says there in verse 4, "...that which the palmer worm hath left hath the locust eaten, and that which the locust hath left hath the canker worm eaten, and that which the canker worm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten." And there's a Great deal of debate about exactly what all those words meant about palmer worms and canker worms and locusts and so on. Some people hold that that's four different development stages of the same insect. Some people hold it's four different insects. Some people think it's four different names for a locust and it's just being poetic here. I don't know if it makes much difference. The point is that everything got eaten up, right? That's the idea is that there are these successive waves and you can imagine how this goes. One wave comes through and everybody thinks, well, that's pretty bad, but we've still got something left here. And then another comes through and another comes through and another comes through until everything is gone. And I don't know if you've ever seen any pictures of what locusts can do to a piece of land, but they can, absolutely lay it bare in a matter of hours. Just devour everything on it. And imagine that you're living in that day when you don't have... Can't go to the grocery store. Yeah, you don't just go to the grocery store and you don't have canned goods, you know, that you can get by on for the winter. If this year's crop doesn't come in, you're in real trouble. And can you imagine having that crop out in the field and it looks good, and in a day, it's gone. And what are you going to eat? There's nothing left. And if something happens and that crop fails, then they're wiped out for that year. And there's even more to it than that that we'll get to. I don't even know if we'll get to that tonight, but the implications of this get even further down. But what do you do now? I mean, I don't know that any of us in America in this age have ever been quite that desolate, have we? Because we've always had, in our age, we've always had insurance. We've had government programs. I don't think so. I mean, it may have in certain parts of the country, in the Dust Bowl and places like that, but not quite on a nationwide basis. I mean, that's the thing. And the other thing about the Depression is that In the Depression, there were still a lot more people now that were in agriculture, but there were a lot of other fields that were still going. I mean, you know, at the worst of the Depression, I think you had 37% unemployment, but that still means 67% of the people were working. Yeah, you know, and of course, there were still a lot of crops out in California. There's the famous migration from the plains out to California to try to pick fruit and things like that. Of course, there wasn't enough work for all of them, but at least there were still bread lines and soup lines and things like this. If the whole nation is overrun, there's no bread lines. There's nobody who can show charity to anybody else because there's nothing left. And that appears to be the state. I mean they've just got in a state of total destitution. We typically think of winter being the hungry time, but it wasn't spring. It was spring because you've eaten through all the harvest, but nothing's come in yet. And we don't know, you know, you get the impression that, well, we don't know exactly what time of year this was, but you're looking at maybe a whole year with no hope of growing anything. And even further than that, as we'll see here, Maybe not even tonight. That'll be the teaser for next time. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about to you. What do you do? Because you've got to raise that crop to have seed. I mean, you've got to have some seed you save back for next year. There's nothing there, yeah. There's nobody that can help. And the first particular group of people he warns is interesting. Here in verse 5 he says, "'Awake, ye drunkards!' and weep and howl. All ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine, for it is cut off from your mouth. Yeah, well, because the thing about the drunkards is that they're probably not occupied in much else anyway, right? And they're just sort of waiting around for the fat of the land to fall into their mouths, so to speak. And what are they going to do now? The seal locusts don't just take off the wheat, they take out the vineyards. There's no grapes. And they have given themselves, and you know how a drunkard gets, they get to the point where this dominates their whole life. Yeah. And all of a sudden they're just, they're just cut off. There is nothing. There's not going to be any new wine this year. nothing to put up, nothing to drink. And sometimes that's what God does to take a nation away from its sin. And this, by the way, is about the only sin that's actually mentioned in the book is drunkenness, interestingly enough, being a drunkard. But sometimes God takes away the means with which you might sin. And that's how He gets you back on the right path. And there's no way now to dull their senses. That's right. That's right. That's the classic response to times like this is that people get drunk, or in our modern times they use drugs to try to dull the sense of the judgment. He says you're not going to have that. You're not going to have anything to dull the judgment. There's actually a little bit of a picture of Christ there because if you remember when Christ was on the cross he refused to take that gall that would have that would have numbed the pain because it was important that he suffer the full wrath of God. And that's what he says about this judgment here, you're going to have the full wrath of God. You can't drink it away. He goes on in verse six and says, for a nation has come up upon my land, strong and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a line, and he hath the cheek teeth of a great line. And this apparently is a poetic way of referring to the locust. they're a nation without number. A locust has teeth, they're very, very small, but if you look at them under a microscope, they bear a resemblance to a lion's teeth. And that's how they're able to gnaw all this stuff down and chew it all up, they can just destroy the whole thing. And he says, that's what I've sent upon you. Now, this is, well, maybe I'll just say this and finish for tonight. This should not have been an unexpected thing for them. because God had told them this would happen. Now the people should have known that God had locusts in His arsenal, right? Because if you look back at how God released them from their captivity in Egypt, one of the plagues that God sent upon the land was the plague of locusts. And God had told them back in, let's turn back here to Deuteronomy chapter 28, Just before they go into the land, God has the covenant read over to them again. And here in chapter 27 and 28, He gives them a whole series of blessings and cursings. It says if they'll obey Him, they'll be blessed in the land, but if they don't, they'll be cursed in the land. And within all that series of cursings, he starts to tell them about locusts. And so he begins to prophesy about not just the locusts, but let me, there's a few passages in here I want to read. It says down here in verse 37, and thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword among all nations, whether the Lord shall lead thee. Thou shalt carry much seed out into the field, and shalt gather but little in, for the locust shall consume it. Thou shalt plant vineyards and dress them, but shalt neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes, for the worm shall eat them. Thou shalt have olive trees throughout all thy coast, but thou shalt not anoint thyself with the oil, for thine olive shall cast his fruit. Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them, for they shall go into captivity, all thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locust consume." He told them the locusts are coming. And he said, you'll put your seed in the field, but you will gather little in, for the locusts shall take it. Plant vineyards, but the worms shall get them. You'll have olive trees, but the olive will cast its fruit. And all thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locusts consume. Now what do we have going on here in the book of Joel? We have all these locusts come and verse 7, he hath laid my vine waste, he barked my fig tree, he hath made it clean bare and cast it away. The branches thereof are made white. He says that all the different trees they've got, the fig tree and the vine that they have, have all been run down. As we come down later in this first chapter, it says in verse 10, the field is wasted, the land mourneth, for the corn is wasted. The new wine is dried up. In verse 12 it says, the vine is dried up, the fig tree languisheth, the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, the apple tree, even all the trees of the field are withered, because joy is withered away from the sons of men. Now, if God wanted to, He could have put down a great big, I told you so, right here, couldn't He? He said, if you didn't obey me, I told you this was gonna happen. And then here it is. It happens. That's something the world needs to wake up to today, and they don't seem to want to listen, isn't it? And the church has been saying for years and years and years, this is coming. And the world says it's not coming. Well, one day it's going to come. And that's really the message of this book. You think it's not going to come, but someday the judgment of God is going to fall upon this world. Don't worry about what people say. When you've said it's coming, it has to come. Yes, in 2 Peter. But that's exactly what he says. And that's the passage where he actually talks about the only reason judgment hasn't come yet is because he's long-suffering, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. And so that's really the message of the book of Joel. This time is coming. as one of the very earliest of the prophets is prophesying of something very far off. He goes from maybe 800-something B.C. all the way up to events that haven't happened yet. And that's the scope of this book. That's what we'll be talking about as we go through it. We'll stop there for tonight. Lord willing, we'll pick up next time around verse 8.