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Covering up the right and empowering the wrong is never a healthy action. Is it possible that we might agree on that in principle? We certainly find in the Bible that integrity and truth matter. 

At the risk of overgeneralization, many of the Bible’s prophets were there to deliver on God’s behalf the bad news. Humanity has managed to act without integrity at times. There were instances and prolonged patterns where corruption or blatant wrongdoing had won out.  

God was releasing in this case, the people of Judah, to pay the price in exile. The book we visit this week in the Bible is Joel. Yo*el in Hebrew, which means Yahweh is God.  

Though not technically apocalyptic in style, Joel’s visions and general prophecy are vivid. They are colorful and they are powerful. They give us hope, if we can help to reconstruct a world that is right-side-up in a universe that has sometimes seemed to go mad doing the opposite. 

Lest you think I’m trumping up these writings too much, check out verse thirteen of chapter one. Joel minces no words describing what happened in Israel once folks signed off on a life that was backwards from God’s intent. He says, “Put on sackcloth and lament, you priests; wail, you ministers of the altar. Come, pass the night in a sackcloth, you ministers of my God!”

He begins with swarms of locusts. I say swarms in the plural because he covers all the bases. This sounds even worse than life in South Georgia once you cross the “Gnat Line” and spend the rest of your days going “spppp….!!  spppp…!” all the time. 

We hear in verse four, “What the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten; what the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten; and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten.”

Joel describes what he describes here twice in the first two chapters. In either scenario, the result is the same: utter devastation, described in unmistakable terms. 

One in a vision that is brought on by these terrible sounding locusts. The other, at the might of a great and powerful army, in chapter two. Scholars believe that he’s giving the same prophecy twice, once in visionary form and the other he is serving straight up. 

A mighty army will march in and devastate everything, including the Temple that Solomon built and that hundreds of years of Jewish worshippers had held to be the dwelling place of God. Now, it will be ripped apart, a symbol of a nation that would be ripped apart. 

There are two things in Joel that we may hear more often than anything else. So often, that sooner or later we can’t help but take them to heart. First is this theme of The Day of the Lord. Second is a relentless call for them to return to the Lord. 

Yes, history will show that the kind of devastation Israel experienced at the hands of the conquesting Assyrians and Babylonians was terrible, much like Joel described it. They came in and overwhelmed Israel with their might, those humans from neighboring empires that God allowed to come in. 

But did God sound like a heavy-handed, judgmental type? Or might we picture something else at work here? In chapter two, we hear, “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.”

I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t hear a blood-thirsty God. God loves Creation as God’s own children. 

These are the sounds of a God who isn’t working to create more distance from us. This is a God who longs to draw us closer. Indeed, we hear that word used all through here that is woven right through the entire Old Testament, “return.” 

You want to return? You want peace? You want to dream of a different or better day ahead? It starts with this: shine a light on right. Don’t support wrong. 

Joel says that God won’t reward covering up right and empowering wrong. But when we get basic right-from-wrong straight, the invitation is wide open to return. To be near our God. To live in fellowship with our Creator who knows just how the world was designed to run.

DR. CHARLES QUALLS is senior pastor at Franklin Baptist Church. Contact him at 757-562-5135.