Theological Commentary: Click Here
Joel 3 looks
ahead to God’s final words with the world.
The world gathers against God.
God even asks if they are here to pay him back. God promises that whatever they have come to
do that God will return. The sky will
darken. It’s an apocalyptic vision of
war.
The cool point
comes out when we dig for the why. In
Joel 3:2-3, we learn why God has come.
The nations have traded His people.
They have scattered His people.
They have diluted them among the nations.
There are
many great travesties among humanity. We
lie. We cheat. We steal.
We are sexually immoral. We
kill. We murder. We can go down the Ten Commandments and then
turn to the book of Leviticus and find fault after fault among humanity. We are sinful.
Yet, this
isn’t the end. The sin is bad. The sin rips us away from relationship with
God. But that doesn’t summarize why God
is so upset. Our sin upsets God, but not
just because of the sin. Our sin upsets
God because of what it does to relationship.
Our sin upsets God because of what we do to one another.
Sin is
bad. Sin causes us to act
inappropriately. But the truly dark side
of side is what it does to relationships between human beings and God. Our sin rips us away from each other. Our sin rips us away from God. When we look at Joel 3, we can understand
that this great struggle with God is rooted in how we treat each other. When we sin, we destroy community. Eventually we destroy community so much that
God has to take extreme measures.
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