Joel 2: The Locust Cometh

Over the past few weeks at church, I've been drawn several times towards the book of Joel, and specifically chapter 2. Not a hugely well-known passage, but I think it's got a good and powerful message, and it's one that I'm going to try to draw out briefly here.

Joel's one of the minor prophets - his book isn't very long at all, and it's not very wide-ranging in subject matter (it deals mostly with a major locust swarm, likely one that really did ravage Israel some time in the centuries before Christ), but he has a lot to tell us. In structure, the chapter breaks into four main sections.

1-11: The Army of the Lord
The first section is, frankly, terrifying. It opens with a trumpet call sounding the alarm as a vast army appears on the horizon and sweeps across the land. We're told that the land goes from Eden-like paradise to a desert waste when they pass by, and they're compared to fire, cavalry, chariots, warriors and thieves - basically a laundry list of the scariest things the people of Israel had to worry about.

In verse 10 we're shown that this army is affecting even the heavens, as the sun and moon are darkened and the stars no longer shine: this may be a reference to the locusts being thick enough to block out the sky, but there's probably also some symbolic meaning there. The sun and moon being affected is a very rare occurrence in the Bible, and the only two occasions that I can immediately think of are Joshua's victory over the Amorites in Joshua 10, and Jesus' death - both of them times when God's presence in this world is very keenly felt. The message here is that this event is not normal - God is involved.

That idea is then strengthened in verse 11, as it becomes clear that this army of locusts is that of the Lord himself. At that point, all hope seems lost. If God himself has turned his army against Israel, who will stand? As the end of verse 11 puts it, "The day of the Lord is great; it is dreadful."

12-17: The People Turn Back
So, what can the people of God do when faced with this terrible judgement? The answer is given straight away in verse 12: they must return to him. Not in a big showy way ("rend your heart, not your garments"), but "with all your heart". The promise is immediate, that God "relents from sending calamity".

Joel immediately launches into a passage here describing what the people must do to carry out this command, and it's fitting that he draws a parallel with the first section. Again, we start with a trumpet call, but instead of an alarm this one is a declaration of a fast. As the locusts gathered to destroy the land, so are the people to gather to pray for it. And it's everyone: the elders, the children, the babies, brides and grooms, people and priests. No-one is too far gone to turn back, no-one so good that they don't need to.

The last parallel in this section is possibly the most moving. Where God thundered at the head of his army in verse 11, his priests respond in verse 17, pleading with God to spare his people. Even the place where they do it is important: they stand "between the portico and the altar", which means that they are at the entrance to the Temple. They stand where they can be seen by both God and the people, in the gap between God's judgement and the judged.

18-27: Blessings in the Body
Exactly as he promised, God hears the cry of his people! He promises not just grain and oil, but also wine, and not just any wine but new wine. The obvious reference here is Jesus talking about new wine in new wineskins, but it goes much deeper than that: grain, oil and new wine are the three things listed in several different places in the OT as being the firstfruits of the land, a sign of blessing (Numbers 18:12, Deuteronomy 7:13, and others).

That's not where God's blessings end, though. He also promises to drive the locusts into the sea, to make the pastures green and to send the rains. Even the wild animals get to enjoy it - God's blessing is not only on the people, but also the land.

What's more, God promises to make good the damage that his judgement has done, in his promise to repay the years the locust has eaten. Verse 25's four different words for "locust" are apparently a bit difficult to translate, judging by the footnotes, but the point here is that all the damage is going to be reversed; in as many ways as God has judged his people, so is he going to bless them.

28-32: Blessings in the Spirit
Lastly, Joel makes it clear that God isn't just going to bless his people materially, but he is also going to pour out his Spirit upon them. Visions and dreams are prophesied for the whole community; much as everyone was to pray for deliverance, so everyone will be blessed in greater knowledge of the Lord.

Notice the parallels here, too, between the destruction of the locusts and the blessings of the Spirit. The signs that the people will witness will include blood and fire and billows of smoke, much like the imagery used to describe the locusts but now wonderfully turned around to herald the coming King. The sun and moon were darkened by the locust swarm as it came to destroy; now they will dim as the Lord approaches in power. And where verse 11 asked of the day of the Lord, "who can endure it?", verse 32 answers joyfully that "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved".

So where does that leave us, as a modern-day people of God? Well, the chapter has four main messages for us. We are to know God as our King and take him seriously, because while he is good and kind, he is also the judge of all the earth. We are to turn to him, as there is nothing else in this world that can save us. We are to trust him for our needs, because he has promised that we will be filled. And we are to stand in the power of the Spirit, ready to work for his glory and look for his return.

Not a bad message for a minor prophet, eh?

Deuteronomy 11: A New Land

(OK, really? Two full years without an update after one post's worth of content? That didn't go well. I think the key problem was with trying to do too much. So instead of tying myself down to any schedule here, I'm going to change the idea of the blog — it's now just for things that occurred to me during my usual daily Bible studying, as and when I spot them. I'll continue to tag posts appropriately, but don't expect one post to flow directly to the next.)

Deuteronomy 11 contains the following exhortation to the Israelites, as Moses tells them to obey God's laws once they move into the Promised Land:

The land you are entering to take over is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot as in a vegetable garden.

But the land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven.

It is a land the LORD your God cares for; the eyes of the LORD your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end.

A great little bit, that. Notice a couple of things here: First, the land the Israelites are entering is easier than Egypt. Before, they had to work hard just to get water onto their crops; now, God will just provide it for them.

This ties in really nicely with Eden. One of the results of the Fall was God saying to Adam "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life." And here's God reversing some of that curse, saying that he's going to make things easier for his people because they're coming into a closer relationship with him.

Secondly, the Promised Land is unknown. The Israelites have lived in Egypt for over 400 years, then wandered in a desert for another 40. Not one among them has ever raised crops without having to irrigate the ground, and now God's going to do it for them — this concept is utterly alien to them, and they would never have thought of it themselves.

God is like that in all sorts of ways. He is constantly wanting to give us new things, things that will bless us and help us to live our lives for him. And yet we constantly cling tenaciously to the old ways of doing things, the comfortable ways. God is right there, saying "look, I've got this for you! It's easier! You'll love it!" And there we are, wanting to work in our own strength, unable to realise the power of what God has waiting for us.

How long are we going to keep irrigating our vegetable gardens by foot? God has a whole land of fruitful crops for us, and he's going to do the watering.

Mark 1: And We're Off!

So, where to start? I have an entire Bible stretching away in front of me — over 750,000 words in 1,189 chapters. That's quite a lot.

It makes sense, though, to start with the person who's at the centre of the whole thing: Jesus. We find out about him from the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And of those, the earliest (not to mention shortest) is Mark. So that's where we're going to start.

Mark 1

There's many things you can say about this passage, but the one that comes to mind immediately is "Wow. That's fast." In the very first verse, Mark tells us who he's going to be writing about, and he doesn't mince his words:

The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Within the next seven verses, he's set the scene. Its a clever device — in the same way that John the Baptist prepared his audience for the coming of Jesus, Mark gets us ready as well. By the end of this section, we've learnt that the coming Jesus is going to be powerful, and that he's going to be baptising people with the Holy Spirit. Mark doesn't go into detail about who the Holy Spirit is, but as we already know that John's baptism was "repentance for the forgiveness of sins", we know to expect something pretty special.

Immediately, Jesus turns up, and within five more verses he's been baptised (including heaven being torn open — clearly one for the theatrics) and has vanished off into the desert again. I love the way Mark is so carefree about tossing off details left and right; not only is Jesus in the desert for well over a month, surrounded by wild animals, he's also being tempted by Satan. And Mark gives it no fanfare at all, attaching no great meaning to it. The tone is businesslike; it's "this is what happened, so you should hear about it".

Seven more verses, and Jesus is back from the desert, in Galilee, and has gained four disciples, all of whom drop everything that they were doing (quite literally — Simon and Andrew leave their fishing nets, James and John leave their father, apparently without so much as a second thought) and follow him. Once again, it's the amazing in terms of the mundane. Would you follow someone and devote your life to him just because he asked you to? Unlikely. And yet, these four fishermen — almost certainly down-to-earth and unflappable men, because you have to be when you're trying to haul a big net of fish into a rickety little boat in the middle of a small sea — simply down tools and follow him. Clearly, there's something special about this man.

That image is reinforced with the next two verses. Now we see Jesus in a synagogue, teaching people. That in itself isn't unusual, of course. What is strange is that he teaches "as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law". So not only does he cause the sky to be torn open, not only can he make fishermen follow him with barely a word, but he has authority over the most learned people around.

Mark can't keep us thinking about that for too long, though, because we've got more to see. In what's left of the chapter, he rapidly reports three incredible miracles, all of which underline forcefully the authority that we've already seen. Jesus is shown to have authority over demons, over fevers, and over leprosy (and over an unspecified number of other illnesses). Things even start to spiral out of control — Jesus makes it very clear twice (and possibly three times, depending on exactly how you interpret verse 25) that no-one was to say anything about the wonderful things he was doing, presumably in an attempt to at least slightly slow down the tide of people he was generating.

In the midst of all this, we get a brief moment of silence, in the form of verse 35. Jesus takes the opportunity to go off somewhere by himself and pray. It's a simple moment, but very telling Jesus isn't doing this off his own bat. He needs stillness and prayer, because he needs his Father. This section is paired nicely with the bit that follows it:

Jesus replied, Let us go somewhere else — to the nearby villages — so that I can preach there also. That is why I have come.

So, having taken a mere 45 verses to do it, Mark has told us a vast amount. We know who Jesus is and who he has come from — he's the Son of God, the one who will fulfil God's prophecies. We know he has massive authority, over people, teachers of the law, demons and illnesses. And we know what he's doing here — he's going to preach the good news of God.

That's a lot for one man to do, and I don't think it's coincidence that Mark has set it down in so little space. He wants us to be knocked back by this, to expect something extraordinary. He's expecting us to ask "If he can do this, what else is he going to do?"

Mark's got 15 more chapters in which to answer that. It's going to be quite a trip.

Hello, good evening and welcome.

Welcome to Teacakes of Eternal Life, the blog for people who like semi-regular updates of Biblical interpretation. As I'm sure you've already worked out, the title is based on Jesus's description of himself as the "bread of life"; if Christians are going to grow in their knowledge of Jesus, they're going to need a steady diet of this bread. How do we do that? By reading God's Word to us, in the form of the Bible.

Problem with that is, the Bible's rather big. If you're going to try to take it all in at once (just as if you were going to try to eat an entire cow), it's going to be difficult and unpleasant, both for you and for those around you. (Not to mention for the cow.)

So how do we get round this? Well, one of the best ways is by breaking the Bible down into smaller chunks, which both make it easier to manage and ensure our dependence on God. If we set ourselves up with a regular intake of the Bible, we put ourselves onto a path of learning more of God's character, his actions and his promises — and, in turn, that means we get a better handle on what he wants us to do in our lives.

I don't mind admitting that I have been monumentally awful at doing this over the past few years, and this blog is for my own benefit as much as for anyone else's. My aim is to write short, readable chunks of analysis for specific Biblical passages, dealing with no more than one chapter at a time. Getting into a habit of reading, thinking about and (hopefully) understanding the Bible in this way should pay dividends for me, and if I can build up an archive of my thoughts here, it will serve as a good resource for the future.

What's more, it should be good for discussion. I've deliberately set up commenting to be as easy as possible here (anonymous comments are both allowed and unmoderated), so if you have anything to say about the conclusions I come to, please let me know. The idea is to try to get my own thinking straight on the issues that are brought up, and there's no greater potential pool of resource to tap for this than the Internet.

So, in conclusion - thanks for coming, and I hope you enjoy the blog as it grows!