The Tav Blog

Joel

Name means The Lord is God

Main Idea(s)

God uses a disaster of locusts and perhaps a few other things to get the attention of Judah over her sins.  He call them to repent.  When they repent, he blesses them.  There is a greater blessing, and greater judgment coming.

Day of the Lord – 1:15, 2:1, 2:11, 2:31, 3:14

Target: Judah

Time Period

• We don’t know
• Possibly the same time as Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, which would place it in the reign of Jeroboam II
• Between books of Hosea and Amos, which are the same time period – see Amos 4:6-10

Famous verses and fragments

2:13, 2:25, 2:28-32, 3:14

Notes

Chapters 1-2:11 The Total Disaster of the Day of the Lord

• What nation is this about?
• Is it a judgment for sin?
• V 8 – Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth
• V 9 – Bad enough that the House of the Lord is not offering
• Priests, elders – Corporate repentance, fast, solemn assembly because of the Day of the Lord
• No crops, animals dying
• Locusts or men in Chapter 2?

Chapter 2:12-17 A Call to Repentance

• Intensity
• Corporate and individual repentance
• Everyone must come, even those recently married
• V 17 – Priests appeal to the Lord for His honor

Chapter 2:18-27 Mercy Given

• Blessings of Food, Water, for man and beast
• V 20 – Assyrians?
• Restoring the losses from the locusts
• So that we might know God

Chapters 2:28-3:21 The Greater Day of the Lord Revealed – the Judgment of the Nations

• Quoted in NT
  • Ac 2:16-21
  • Spirit on all flesh
  • V 30-31 – God changes the order of things
  • Christ will come to save Jew and Gentile alike
• 3:1 – Bring the exiles of Judah and Jerusalem – the people of God
• 3:2 – Valley of Blessing (2Chr 20) or Judgment?
• 3:3-13 He judges the sins of the nations
  • 3-6 Note the sins
  • 7-8 Judgment
  • 9-13 They try to fight God
• 3:14 – God is deciding about the nations – the Day of the Lord
• 3:15 – God is changing things: there will be a final judgment
• 3:16 – God saves his own people, but not the heathen. The land will be holy, and they will know that the Lord is God.
• V 21 – Salvation “And I have declared their blood innocent, That I did not declare innocent, And Jehovah is dwelling in Zion!”