If we truly have hearts that trust in God – if we truly want to join in with the faith-filled worldview of the prophet Joel – let us wait on God and believe that that even now he is both willing and able to forgive us, to save us, and to save our world.
Category Archives: Sermons and Lessons
Why Does God Send the Locust Plague in Joel?
Does Joel see God punishing Israel’s sin through the natural disasters such as the locust plague described in chapters 1 and 2? Perhaps (he has the right), but God likely has multiple purposes in a disaster. Whether we are sinful or righteous, our response to disaster ought to be the same: turn to Yahweh.
God’s Unreasonable Love, Our Unreasonable Faith – An Easter Sermon
God’s love for us is unreasonable – it is not based on reasons but merely on God’s sovereign decision. The resurrection of Jesus is also unreasonable in that it lies beyond the realm of reason either to prove or disprove. This is why it is the perfect demonstration of God’s unreasonable love. It is also why our unreasonable faith in the resurrection is the perfect human response to God’s unreasonable love.
The Book of Job and the Problem of Suffering
The biblical Book of Job addresses the problem of suffering in a way that is superior to the way moderns tend to talk about it in three ways: (1) it never questions God’s sovereignty; (2) it recognizes our human tendency to assume that God’s righteous judgments will be intelligible and relatively immediate; (3) it emphasizes the role of dialogue (including especially dialogue with God) as the path of resolution for the problem of suffering.
The Structure and Message of Psalm 2
Psalm 2 is a celebration of the unquestionable supremacy of God and his Messiah over all the rebellious forces of humanity. Not only is this the message of the Psalm’s content, it is even embedded in the Psalm’s concentric structure.
Shaken in a Sieve – Amos 9:8-10
Amos reaffirms that the judgment that is coming will be a targeted one rather than an indiscriminate one. God will shake the world as if in a sieve. A righteous remnant will be preserved. The wicked, however, in particular those who are convinced that nothing bad will happen to them, will perish.
The Sinful Kingdom – Amos 9:5-8
God alone is sovereign. This means (1) that there is no point in trying to appeal to other deities, and (2) that God is the God of the whole world. This means that when God’s covenant people become no different in their conduct from the nations of the world, they cease to be in any substantial way unique and are nothing more than just another “sinful kingdom.”
The Inescapable Judgment – Amos 9:1-4
Amos 9:1-4 recapitulates many themes from earlier in the book of Amos for climactic effect and even intensifies these themes. Amos says that a fate worse than death is coming for the Israelites, and this fate is absolutely inescapable.
A Famine of the Words of the LORD – Amos 8:11-13
You might think food and water are what sustain your life, but in fact it is the Word of the LORD that created those things and provides them to you, just as the Word of the LORD created and sustains us. The worst kind of famine, then, is where God is no longer speaking into your life, or where we find ourselves no longer sensitive to his voice.
Trying to Live Without God is Disastrous – Amos 8:8-10
Yahweh is not only the Creator but the sustainer of all that is. To try to live without the Creator while holding onto the creation is folly. In the same way, to try to hold onto peace and joy without source of all peace and joy is folly. Humans were created to be joyful, but when we displace God from the throne of our life, joy goes with him. It can be no other way, because he alone is the source of all joy.
Bite-Sized Exegesis 