Joel 1

Today’s Passage: Joel 1

The book of Joel opens not with a date or a king’s name but with a disaster that everyone in the land can see with their own eyes. Wave upon wave of locusts has come up over Judah and stripped it bare, and where there were vineyards and orchards and fields of grain there is now only ruined stubble and white, gnawed branches. The prophet stands in the middle of that devastation and begins to speak, and his first work is to make sure no one shrugs it off. He calls the old men to remember, the drunkards to sober up, the farmers to grieve, and the priests to mourn, because the very grain and wine needed for the offerings at the house of the LORD have been cut off. Then, gathering the whole community together, he tells them what this calamity is really about: the Day of the LORD is near. This chapter is a summons, an alarm rung over a people who had grown comfortable, calling them to fast and weep and cry out to God while there is still breath to do it.

As you read, hold this: When the harvest fails and the joy of the land dries up, the LORD is summoning a comfortable people to honest lament and a turning back to Him.

Joel 1:1–3 (BSB)

¹ This is the word of the LORD that came to Joel son of Pethuel: ² Hear this, O elders; and give ear, all who dwell in the land. Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your fathers? ³ Tell it to your children; let your children tell it to their children, and their children to the next generation.

Notice how the prophet begins, for it tells us how to hear everything that follows. What is about to be said is not Joel’s private opinion about the weather; it is the word of the LORD, and it comes with all the weight of heaven behind it. He calls first on the elders, the old men whose long memories reach back farthest, and asks them a searching question: have you ever, in all your years, or in anything your fathers told you, seen a thing like this? The question is meant to shake the people out of the notion that this is just another hard season that will pass. And then he does something a wise grandfather does with a great event: he tells them to hand it down. Tell your children, and have them tell theirs, so that the lesson of this day is not lost when the fields grow green again. Calamity has a way of teaching what comfort never could, and Joel does not want that teaching wasted.

Joel 1:4 (BSB)

⁴ What the devouring locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten; what the swarming locust has left, the young locust has eaten; and what the young locust has left, the destroying locust has eaten.

Here is the disaster itself, laid out in a single relentless line, and the very shape of the sentence makes you feel it. Wave after wave after wave, each one eating what the one before had spared, until nothing at all is left. Whatever the first swarm did not devour, the next finished, and what that one missed, the next took, until the land was picked clean to the ground. There is no pause for mercy in it, no corner overlooked. Joel means for us to feel the totality of the ruin, the way a thing you thought could never fail can be stripped away completely and leave you standing in an empty field. And already, without a word of explanation yet, the reader begins to sense that so complete a devastation is not a random accident. It has the look of something sent.

Joel 1:5–7 (BSB)

⁵ Wake up, you drunkards, and weep; wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine, for it has been cut off from your mouth. ⁶ For a nation has invaded My land, powerful and without number; its teeth are the teeth of a lion, and its fangs are the fangs of a lioness. ⁷ It has laid waste My grapevine and splintered My fig tree. It has stripped off the bark and thrown it away; the branches have turned white.

Joel starts his roll call of mourners with the drunkards, and there is a pointed mercy in that. He goes first to those most fast asleep in their pleasures, the ones who had drowned every worry in the cup, and he tells them the cup itself has run dry. Wake up and weep, he says, for the sweet wine you loved is gone. Sometimes it takes the loss of the very thing we lean on to make us lift our heads at last. Then Joel names the invader, and he calls the locusts a nation, powerful and beyond counting, with the teeth of a lion, for that is what they were to the land, an army no wall could stop. And hear the tenderness underneath the terror, for twice God calls it My land, My grapevine, My fig tree. What the locust stripped bare belonged to the LORD, and He speaks of the splintered fig tree and the whitened branches the way a man speaks of his own beloved garden laid waste.

Joel 1:8–10 (BSB)

⁸ Wail like a virgin dressed in sackcloth, grieving for the husband of her youth. ⁹ Grain and drink offerings have been cut off from the house of the LORD; the priests are in mourning, those who minister before the LORD. ¹⁰ The field is ruined; the land mourns. For the grain is destroyed, the new wine is dried up, and the oil fails.

Now Joel reaches for the deepest grief he can name, the sorrow of a young bride whose promised husband has been taken from her before the wedding, and he tells the whole land to mourn like that. This is no small vexation to be brushed aside; it is a bereavement, and it deserves honest tears. But see where the loss cuts the deepest. It is not only the empty table that grieves him but the empty altar. The grain and the wine that should have been carried up to the house of the LORD are gone, and so the daily worship of God’s people has faltered for want of an offering, and the priests themselves stand in mourning. When the land suffers, the sanctuary suffers, for the two were always bound together. The grain destroyed, the new wine dried up, the oil failing, the three great gifts all struck at once, and the very ground, Joel says, mourns like a living thing that has lost what it was made to bear.

Joel 1:11–12 (BSB)

¹¹ Be dismayed, O farmers, wail, O vinedressers, over the wheat and barley, because the harvest of the field has perished. ¹² The grapevine is dried up, and the fig tree is withered; the pomegranate, palm, and apple—all the trees of the orchard—are withered. Surely the joy of mankind has dried up.

The prophet turns next to the working people of the land, the farmers who had planted the wheat and barley and the vinedressers who had tended the vines, and he calls them to open grief, for the harvest they labored over has come to nothing. He walks us through the orchard tree by tree, the grapevine and the fig, the pomegranate and the palm and the apple, all of them withered, as if to say that no corner of the good and pleasant land has been spared. And then he lands on the saddest line of all: surely the joy of mankind has dried up. That is the heart of what has been lost. It was never only about food. The vineyards and the orchards were the gladness of ordinary life, the wine of the wedding and the shade of the fig tree and the sweetness of the fruit, and when they withered, joy itself withered with them. Joel wants his people to feel that emptiness fully, because a people who will not grieve what they have lost will never turn to the God who alone can restore it.

Joel 1:13–14 (BSB)

¹³ Put on sackcloth and lament, O priests; wail, O ministers of the altar. Come, spend the night in sackcloth, O ministers of my God, because the grain and drink offerings are withheld from the house of your God. ¹⁴ Consecrate a fast; proclaim a solemn assembly! Gather the elders and all the residents of the land to the house of the LORD your God, and cry out to the LORD.

Here the prophet’s summons rises to its point, and it is a call to worship of a very particular kind, the worship of a broken heart. He turns to the priests, the ministers of the altar, and tells them to put on sackcloth and to spend whole nights in mourning before God, for the offerings that were their daily joy have been withheld. And then, in verse fourteen, Joel gives the great command that this whole chapter has been driving toward. Consecrate a fast (קָדַשׁ) qādash, pronounced kah-DASH. Strong's H6942, to set apart, consecrate, make holy. The word Joel uses for the fast is a strong one. It does not mean simply to skip a few meals; it means to set the fast apart as something holy, to consecrate it, to declare a sacred time in which a whole people deliberately lay aside the ordinary business of life and turn their full attention to God. There is something bracing in this. Joel does not tell the people merely to feel bad about the locusts. He tells them to make a holy thing of their sorrow, to gather it up and carry it consciously and together into the presence of the LORD. Grief left to itself curdles into despair, but grief consecrated, offered up, laid before God in fasting and honest lament, becomes the very road back to Him. That is the mercy hidden in this hard chapter, that God gives His hurting people something holy to do with their pain. . Proclaim a solemn assembly. Gather everyone, the old and the young, the whole population of the land, and bring them together to the house of the LORD, and there do the one thing that answers a calamity like this: cry out to the LORD. This is the turn from despair to hope, though it does not look like hope yet. It is the discovery that when everything else has been stripped away, the door to God still stands open, and a people who will humble themselves and call on Him have not lost everything after all.

Joel 1:15–18 (BSB)

¹⁵ Alas for the day! For the Day of the LORD is near, and it will come as destruction from the Almighty. ¹⁶ Has not the food been cut off before our very eyes—joy and gladness from the house of our God? ¹⁷ The seeds lie shriveled beneath the clods; the storehouses are in ruins; the granaries are broken down, for the grain has withered away. ¹⁸ How the cattle groan! The herds wander in confusion because they have no pasture. Even the flocks of sheep are suffering.

Now Joel lifts his eyes from the ruined field to something far larger, and for the first time he names it: the Day of the LORD is near. The locust plague, terrible as it is, turns out to be a small foreshadowing of a greater reckoning, that day when the Almighty Himself comes to judge and to set right. Joel reads the present disaster as a warning tremor of that coming day, and he means for it to sober every heart. Then he lets his gaze travel back down again over all that has been lost, the food gone before their eyes, the joy and gladness of the house of God cut off, the very seed shriveled in the dry ground so that even next year’s hope has failed, the storehouses standing empty and broken. And he does not forget the animals. Listen to the cattle groaning and the herds wandering in confusion for want of pasture, the flocks of sheep suffering along with their masters. The whole creation, man and beast and field together, sighs under the weight of a broken world, and Joel will not let us look away from any of it.

Joel 1:19–20 (BSB)

¹⁹ To You, O LORD, I call, for fire has consumed the open pastures and flames have scorched all the trees of the field. ²⁰ Even the beasts of the field pant for You, for the streams of water have dried up, and fire has consumed the open pastures.

And now, at the very end of this chapter of ruin, comes the sound the whole thing has been reaching for, and it is beautiful. To You, O LORD, I call. Joel does not close in despair; he closes in prayer. The pastures are burned, the streams have dried, the trees are scorched, and there is nothing left to lean on, and precisely there, with empty hands, the prophet turns his face upward and cries out to God. This is the answer his whole summons has been pressing toward, that when everything a comfortable people trusted in has been taken away, the LORD Himself remains, and He may be called upon. And then Joel gives us one of the tenderest lines in all the prophets. Even the beasts of the field pant for You, he says, as a deer pants for the water it cannot find. If the very cattle in their dumb distress lift their thirst toward heaven, how much more should a people made in God’s image turn from their trouble and cry out to the One who alone can restore what was lost. That is where this dark chapter leaves us, not in the ashes, but on our knees before a God who is still there to be found.