NOTES for Joe 1:10-20

The calamity that the prophet Joel mourns at the beginning of the first chapter of his book is not merely a historical event or an ecological catastrophe. For him, as a believer, everything takes place before the face of God and can be understood only in the context of people's relationship with God. The locust invasion and its devastating consequences therefore become for the prophet a reason to turn to God in penitential prayer. Human helplessness before the forces of nature is thus understood as a consequence of people's separation from God, of their unfaithfulness to Him. This may equally be applied to all human suffering.

There is a particular aspect to Joel's call to fasting and prayer that is distinctive to him. He attaches exceptional importance to maintaining the Temple sacrifices; this fact is one of the grounds for counting Joel among the ministers of the Temple and regarding him as a Temple prophet. For him, all life is centred on the Temple, the spiritual centre of the world. Prophets who were not ministers of the Temple do not place such emphasis on worship; even the priest Ezekiel does not give it first place. But for Joel, the service performed in the Temple is the chief expression of people's faithfulness to God. That is precisely why the cessation of sacrifices, caused by the devastation of the land, is so terrible to the prophet.

The age in which the prophet Joel lived was marked by people's almost complete indifference to faith. Only the Temple ritual still survived in some form, but for most people even this had ceased to be communion with the Living God. The prophet regards the dominance of religious indifference and the utter neglect of the Lord's commandments as the main cause of the terrible calamity. And this calamity is such that it brings to an end even the last thing that connected the people with God—the Temple sacrifices—so that the whole of human life now finds itself cut off from its source. As the Lord Jesus Christ would say four centuries later: ‘From the one who does not have, even what he thinks he has will be taken away.’

Yet the prophet sees this vast devastation itself as a portent, a prophecy of the coming Day of the Lord. The increase of sin in the days of the prophet Joel reaches its logical conclusion in the cessation of worship of God in the Temple. In the same way, everything that people consider, if not permissible, then at least more or less tolerable, will take on its fully developed form on that terrible Day of Visitation. On that Day, all the consequences of people's moral choices will become plain, including those we do not recognise or do not want to recognise. It is precisely in this that the devastation of Israel becomes a herald of God's coming Judgement.