Yet Even Now

The Availability of Redemption in Chaos

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Imagine standing in the green fields of farm you own. You have work this ground with your own hands, You are teaching your children to work in the same way your father and mother taught you to work it. Imagine looking out at the crops and knowing that you turned that soil, you planted the seeds, you’ve tended the vines and the trees. It’s all coming to fruition. What’s more there’s fruitful plants all over your land you didn’t even have to plant, an abundance of green, brimming with life and potential. All you labored for and all you didn’t is going to bear fruit if you can only make it to spring.

You look out over the horizon, the sun is setting the clouds are wispy pastels, but there’s a dark cloud moving toward you on the horizon. Praise the Lord you think, surely he is going to bless us with rain. It’s fast approaching, nerves set in, a storm that fast must be powerful. As it gets closer it looms larger than you imagined. You begin to lose sigh of the son, but strangely you don’t hear thunder… but you hear something. A buzzing sound? Within minutes of seeing the cloud on the horizon you begin desperately to get your animals to the stalls and your family inside, and you can only watch from the relative safety of your cracked shutters as all that green you were surrounded by, all the labor you have given and time you have sacrificed, all that beauty and potential, is devoured, by a plague of locust.

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The Day of the Lord Comes

This is where we find ourselves when we embark into the book of Job. Chapter 1 reveals that there has been a devastating plague. Joel gave a warning that went unheeded, and now…something worse than locust is coming.

Joel may be a small book but he doesn’t bring a small message. His first chapter is about the past for the people of Israel but the second chapter is focused on the present. The Day of the Lord is at hand. It’s on the horizon, the plague is in the past but what is coming will make the locust look like a golden age. And it is his duty as it is mine today to tell his people the truth about what is to come.

Read with me starting in chapter 2 verse 1.

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
    sound the alarm on my holy hill.

Let all who live in the land tremble,
    for the day of the Lord is coming.
It is close at hand—
²     a day of darkness and gloom,
    a day of clouds and blackness.
Like dawn spreading across the mountains
    a large and mighty army comes,
such as never was in ancient times
    nor ever will be in ages to come.

³ Before them fire devours,
    behind them a flame blazes.
Before them the land is like the garden of Eden,
    behind them, a desert waste—
    nothing escapes them.

(and I encourage you to go read through verse 11!)

And who could be expected to stand before all of that? Who could endure such awesome indescribable power and destruction. Can you face armies? Can you break the darkening clouds with light? No. For we are small. And this is a small book, for a small people.

This prophecy of Joel is not merely for the people of Israel.

How do we know?

He speaks in the present tense. He commands in the present tense. That is not just a rhetorical choice or literary happenstance.

God is speaking to us right now through Joel. He has looked at the past in chapter one, the future lies in chapter three and it is the present then and now which stands before us in chapter two.

The Day of the Lord is still near, it comes for us all, because we are sinners. We are unjust and unworthy. It comes for the world, because God cannot abides its wickedness. It comes for Israel for she is a harlot in the words of Hosea, going after other gods. The Day of the Lord comes for the church because at the end of days we will find that our pews were filled with chaff. It is coming for you, and you will not be able to stand before the God of armies who turns the moon to blood and blots out the stars in the sky, whose weapons are nations, the earth itself, and the even the heavens beyond what we have ever even seen. Every man woman and child will bow their knees before the day of the Lord for who can endure its coming?

But then we turn to Verse 12

Word of Salvation

Take a deep breath, for in verse 12 we are given a phrase that changes everything. We are given a word of salvation.

Look at that last section. The army is at the gates. they stand ready outside the city. They’re coming over the walls. and lest you forget this is not the army of Satan whom we know will be defeated, but God’s army ready to enact his justice when and where he pleases empowered by an indomitable spirit of the living God. The moon is blood. The mountains crumble and the stars no longer have strength to shine.

YET EVEN NOW. With that tiny utterance, there is hope. With that one phrase our entire perspective changes.

The locust may have eaten up everything in your life. You may have watched as it all has come crashing down, everything you’ve worked for swept away in an instance, devoured by forces outside of your control, or forces you opened the gates of your life to. You may look out toward your future and see nothing but black clouds, covering even the mountains. You may be mired in hopelessness so deep you don’t know how you’ll get up tomorrow morning. There may be an army of anger, depression, anxiety and fear looming large outside your gates. Or it may very well be the justice of God, the consequences which have followed you at a distance in your unfaithfulness that are now ready to pounce.

YET EVEN NOW. There is no situation you are in that the Lord cannot reach into and change. That phrase stretches across 3000 years of human history and reaches into the circumstances of your life, today. The army was at the gates of Israel but Joel says EVEN NOW.

Today, know that yet even now, there can be salvation for you, salvation unto eternity or perhaps from those sins which have ensnared you or your family.

No matter where you are or what you’re doing today, yet even now, he can save you.

But what must we do to take advantage of those sweet words, of that faint glimmer of change in the face of such ominous predictions?

Return with Your Heart

Verse 12 continues, return to me, with all your heart with fasting, with weeping, and mourning, and rend your HEARTS, not your garments.

Return to me. The call of the father to the prodigal. The call of God to Israel for forty years in the desert and for centuries of Judges, kings and prophets. The call of God to the Jews who crucified our Lord made flesh and the gentiles who knew him not. Return to me. The call that rings out from Acts to Revelation and which resonates in countless churches week after week, for each and every one of us. Return to me.

Yet even now. Return to me. It is not too late, though it may soon be, for the day of the Lord is drawing near. So there is no time to waste.

Return, With all your heart.

What is the sacrifice the Lord requires? Not bulls, nor rivers of oil, but a broken and contrite heart.

Yet still more With fasting, with weeping with mourning.

Why should we return with mourning and weeping? Can’t we come rejoicing?

No. Not yet. Because when we turn from the darkness, when we turn from that army of deserved destruction, when we finally turn toward the light, it should burn our hearts, pierce us with the truth that we don’t deserve what we are turning to and in fact deserve what we are turning from.

The light of God, the heart of God should make you weep and mourn for the fool you’ve been. It reveals all the ways you’ve rejected him, and this doesn’t just happen at your first commitment to Jesus Christ. Just as the Israelites turned again and again to idols and lesser things so will we, but we may return. And we are allowed to mourn, expected to mourn, for that is the appropriate response when your heart has been unfaithful, when you’ve indulged thoughts that have led you astray, and company that influences you to sin.

It is a good response because God is a God of restoration, a God who intervenes, he’s the God who turns mourning to dancing, who says blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

He is ready to comfort you, his arms are open and waiting if you will only…

Rend your hearts.

Tear up the hardness of your hearts, cast off the lies you once used to hide your heart from God’s piercing gaze, because he’s the God who makes beautiful things out of broken pieces, who makes a useful pot from the shattered remains of mere earthen vessels, who raises up what has fallen and resurrects what has died, making it a new creation.

And yet even now he can do it for you. It is not too late to rend your heart before the Lord, whether it be for the first time or the 70th, or the 700th time.

But you dare not make the mistake of rending your garments and not your heart. Don’t dare to make an outward show of your grief and contrition only to go home and sin in secret. Don’t come weeping and confessing if in your heart you still love your sin. If you still cling desperately to your fear and your worry. For such jesting, for such playacting, will not turn the wrath of the Lord.

Only the true brokenness of our hearts has any chance to do that, and it is not because of who we are and what we can or can’t do, but who God is.

Verse 13. Return to the Lord, for he is gracious and merciful slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and he relents over disaster.

If you were still wondering why you should turn, why you should come with mourning, rending your heart, this is why. God is gracious to you. He is merciful to you. He is slow to anger. He loves you. He will relent over disaster. He will hear your prayers, he will recognize a faithful and sincere heart turning to him.

You need not doubt. For these words are not my words, but the way God describes himself. In Exodus, while Moses is in the midst of the clouds on Mount Sinai preparing to receive God’s holy and perfect law God says to him, In Exodus 34:6-10

6 The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.” 8 And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped. 9 And he said, “If now I have found favor in your sight, O Lord, please let the Lord go in the midst of us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.”

10 And he said, “Behold, I am making a covenant. Before all your people I will do marvels, such as have not been created in all the earth or in any nation. And all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the Lord, for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you.

The God of Moses is my God. He will not spare the guilty, but he will forgive them, if yet even now, you will turn to him, and he will make a covenant with you, sealed in the blood of our savior Jesus, that he will do such marvels with you as have not been created in all the earth or any nation. But there is no time to waste.

In verses 15-16 Joel is calling an assembly, all the people the young and the old, there is no time to waste. Joel isn’t having everyone check their calendars and finding a good day to fit mourning and repentance between little league and bible study fellowship. There is not even enough time to finish your wedding, and that should tell you just how urgent it is.

You can imagine the reaction of the bride and her mother if some crazy prophet burst into the wedding chapel while Daddy is walking the bride down the aisle, letting them know there is no time. No one I know would dare do that without some Holy Spirit guidance let me tell you. But there is so little time that between the porch and the altar you must drop everything you’re doing and turn to God, right now.

As he said at the beginning the day of the Lord is near. Near to us all. Darkness, destruction, the End, yet God is a God of restoration. The people of Israel watched their livelihoods be destroyed by a plague of locust reminiscent of Egypt. How could an Israelite see locust and not recognize the judgement of God on hard hearts? How can we?

Yet God is a God of restoration.

Joel 2:25 I will restore to you the years that the locust have taken.

And this is our final encouragement. The nudge that should push you over the edge toward whatever kind of repentance God is laying on your heart today. It is not too late for you, for yet even now God can reach into your life, into any situation and change it forever. Yet even now if you will rend your heart and repent. You have permission to mourn, you have permission to humble yourself before an almighty God. And now he says. I will restore to you the years that the locust have taken.

He doesn’t just welcome you with open arms he gives back everything you’ve lost and more. Time is our most limited resource, and many of us may be feeling like we’ve wasted too much of ours. There’s no coming back. How can I repay the time I have spent on my own selfish ambition, how can I redeem the months, the years of anxiety that have prevented me from doing the good I know God has called me to? How can I come back from years of apathy, from years of sitting on a pew contributing nothing to the kingdom from being an unfruitful branch on the vine, a cursable fig tree?

You can’t.

YET EVEN NOW. God will restore those years to you.

He will show you that he wastes NOTHING. Everything you’ve lost can be given back to you but this time it will be from the hand of God, redeemed, restored, and renewed.

There is nothing the locust, the curse, your sin, your circumstances, your choices can take away from you that God can’t restore.

Nothing.

So what are you going to tell God right now? The Day of the Lord is on the horizon, so from what do you need to repent? What do you need to trust God to restore? There’s no time to waste. Rend your heart before God this very hour, and see your life made new.