A Promise of Restoration : Part 2

Missed Part 1? Listen here! A Promise of Restoration: Part 2 Joel 2:18-27 Another Outcome (that results from God’s promise of restoration) is, The Assurance of Protection             In verse 20 God says, “But I will remove far from you the northern army [literally, northerner] and will drive him away into a barren and desolate land, with his face toward the eastern sea and his back toward the western sea; his stench will come up, and his foul odor will rise, because he has done [great] things.” In other words, God is saying, “I will protect you.”             It is possible that Joel is still referring to the locust plague here, but it is also surely more than that. For one thing, locust swarms usually came into Israel from the south or southeast, from the dry desert regions. The term northerner is never used elsewhere to describe locusts, nor does the Scripture ever refer to the locust performing “great things”. Neither would locusts perish in a desolate land because they would keep on flying. More likely, God is speaking of enemy armies.              Enemy armies usually entered God’s land from the north because of the major trade routes there. Those routes generally followed flat terrain and ready access to water. So, a northern army would be invading the land of Israel and Judah. This phrase, northern army, is a recurrent theme used in the prophetic books to describe God’s judgment. In Ezekiel, the turbulent whirlwind comes from the north, revealing the LORD and a message of destruction to the prophet Ezekiel. Through Jeremiah, the LORD declared, “Out of the north the evil will be unleashed on all the inhabitants of the land.”             Miraculous deliverances are part of God’s modus operandi and part of Israel’s history. One of them is the account of Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, recorded in Isaiah 36 and 37. Threatening Israel with a great army, he was so confident in his ability that his army commander actually taunted the leaders of Israel. But godly King Hezekiah and the people cried out to God for His protection. That very night the angel of the Lord killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers. Not only that but when Sennacherib returned home, two of his sons assassinated him. For the time being, the northern threat was eliminated.             If there is another “northerner” yet in the future, and that seems likely, the army described in the final chapter of Joel may be the same army described in Daniel 11:40 and Zechariah 14:2. Some commentators liken the four kinds of locusts in verse 25 to the four major kingdoms that Daniel spoke of in his interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream: the Babylonians, the Medes and Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans.             Daniel wrote, “And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever, just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. A great God has made known to the king what shall be after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation sure.” God’s protection will be assured!             The defeat of God’s enemies will be total. The stench of their dead bodies will be stifling and sickening. Revelation 19 issues a call to the carrion-eaters to come and consume the corpses of those who will fight against King Jesus and the armies of Heaven that follow Him. One can hardly imagine the horror of such a scene.             As one