The Minor Prophets: Joel

We kick off a new series on the Minor Prophets with the book of Joel, exploring how prophets function less as fortune-tellers and more as pattern readers—revealing what is already unfolding within a culture. 🔮

We walk through Joel’s vivid description of a locust-driven collapse, showing how it touches every layer of life—economy, worship, and joy—and how his call to repentance is not performative, but a true recalibration of the heart. 🦗 Along the way, we explore the “Day of the Lord” as a repeating pattern of disruption, repentance, and restoration, connecting Joel’s vision to Pentecost and to the cycles we still experience today. 🌿

Join us as we begin uncovering the timeless patterns hidden within these often-overlooked prophetic books. ✨

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Transcript

JR: [00:00:00] So in that way, the prophet isn't necessarily the guy who's telling you what's going to happen. He's the guy who's saying, this is happening right now. Like, this is going on right now. The wave hasn't hit yet, but it's coming.  

David: Okay, so I started studying for the minor prophets, and I'll already tell you up front, I'm getting way more out of it than I thought I would because I'm trying to pick out the patterns. 

You know, there's imagery in there, but I don't know. You have studied Joel a little bit. I've studied Joel, and so I'm excited to get this series kicked off with the minor prophets. 

JR: Yeah, I am too. I read, of course, I take Joel and I read the whole thing, which takes all of, what, 20 minutes so it's an easy book to read. But, yeah, I do the same thing. I'm thinking, I'm thinking in this in terms of patterns and what I wanna talk about, and I don't know, it's, it's easy to get bogged down. 

It probably took me two hours to get through it, where had just read it, like I said, what is it? Is it [00:01:00] four chapters or five? 

David: It's four. 

JR: Four chapters? Yeah, the four chapters. If I just sat down and read it, like I said, it doesn't take 15 minutes. But you know, I'm kind of underline stuff and making notes and so I don't know. 

We'll see if we can get through this without getting bogged down too much, zooming in too tight.  

But no, I thought Joel's a great place to start because it's one of those books that the pattern is obvious. I mean, he spells it out for you a little bit, but considering what we're doing and we always wanna find the pattern in things and we wanna point these things out, this is actually a really good one and a really easy one to start off with. 

It's almost like, that fairytale level where you can kind of say, yeah, here's the pattern, and now let's dig into each section of the pattern and see if we can pull out the imagery that Joel's trying to communicate. So, yeah, we'll give this a shot. 

David: Yeah. Part of the nature of reading the minor prophets, we say right off the bat is you have to actually go back to our episode on the genres of literature in the Bible. 

And, maybe I'll throw a [00:02:00] link in there to that episode because I think that will be helpful because you have to understand when you're reading the minor prophets in particular, and we'll get into, uh, what that is. 

But your brain thinks you're reading a narrative and it's very easy, very quickly to go, well, what is he talking about now? You know, wait, I thought we were talking about a locust invasion and now he's talking about something else. But they're all tied together. If you actually step back and understand the nature of Old Testament prophecy that you're reading, right? So that's probably one of the first warnings. Another one might just be to understand the nature of what a prophet is. And we've said this before, but again, what do you think is the main, I don't know what distinguishes, say, like an Old Testament prophet from what you might think of right off the bat of who a prophet is? 

JR: Yeah. I mean, the idea of a prophet you look back in ancient stories is just this idea of somebody who can see the future, somebody who can, [00:03:00] I'm trying to think of a good example. 

David: Maybe like a wizard almost? 

JR: Well, sure. Yeah, yeah. There's something magical about it. Or at the very least, somebody who God speaks to and says, Hey, this is what's about to happen. I'm going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. You get your people out, right? And so you think about it as this, yeah. This magical person who receives something from God and then warns the people. I think we've pointed out that we try to think of a prophet, less of a fortune teller and more of a pattern reader, right? You know, he's the guy in the room that's saying, you guys don't see it yet, but the trajectory that you guys are on, it leads somewhere and you're not gonna like it, right? And God's telling me this is about coming to the, we're about to lead into God's judgment. 

And so he's warning the people. 

David: Yeah, that's right. And even people who call themselves modern day prophets, they tend to focus on, God gave me special insights into the world and I'm going to reveal them to you. Which I think [00:04:00] that kind of taints to the idea of what a prophet is, because while that's a little bit true, I think you're right. 

It's more that this is a person who is close to God, who's reading the culture, and they're understanding what's about to unfold. Someone who's really good at reading the culture today can actually say, here's what's going to happen in the next five years, and if you remember what they said, or go back and listen to the podcast from five years ago, you, you think, oh yeah, that person was exactly right. 

That's a little closer to a prophet than kind of some of the mystical things that we may think of when we hear the word prophet, I think. 

JR: Yeah. Well, and that's how you get labeled a prophet. You make a estimate or you make a guess about what's coming, and then it actually happens. And then the society deems you a prophet, you know, and says, hey this guy was the prophetic voice, but it's exactly what you would is it's the guy who sees the pattern initially, right? 

In a lot of ways, prophets are just truth tellers to a culture that's kind of lying to themselves. And you [00:05:00] see this, 

You see this all over the place once you realize that. And so in a way, they don't introduce us to some new reality. They're just exposing the one that's already there. 

You talked about modern prophets. I think about a guy like Peter Zeihan, who, his big thing is he's the guy who's pointing out demographic collapse. So he takes all these countries and he's like, demographics in China are collapsing, and I'm telling you in 10 years it's gonna be unrecognizable. Their economy, you know, that they can't support the older people. 

And, the working class can't support the retirees. All those things that, that plays into, and yeah, I look at that guy, you know, it could be him, it could be whistleblowers, it could be kind of insiders. So in that way, the prophet isn't necessarily the guy who's telling you what's going to happen. He's the guy who's saying, this is happening right now. Like, this is going on right now. The wave hasn't hit yet, but it's coming.  

David: Yeah, I think that's a good insight is someone who is truly a prophet or [00:06:00] has this prophetic insight into the culture isn't telling you what's going to happen. I liked what you said. They're telling you what's already happening. Most people just haven't seen it yet. 

JR: Right. 

David: And so there's a bit of a causal relationship too that sometimes we can assign to prophets. 

Like, oh, well they're predicting the future and so now that's going to come to pass. And it's like, no, they're just reading the early signs and they're telling you what's inevitable. So the causality necessarily isn't there that sometimes we assign to a prophet, right? 

JR: Right. But it does, it takes a little bit of the mysticism away from it and not to, I don't wanna take away the idea that God speaks to these people in the Old Testament, but it does take away a little bit of the wizardry that we attribute to the modern idea of a prophet. 

David: Yeah. I guess the other thing we'll address real quick too is we're talking about the minor prophets and it maybe just bears a comment about why are they called minor. And the practical reason is because their books are much [00:07:00] shorter than Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah, which you can't just say, Hey, sit down and read Isaiah one day. 

JR: Right. 

David: That's an undertaking, right? But, but like you said, something like Joel, you can sit down and read in 20, 30 minutes really easy. And some of the others. So the length of their manuscript is really why they're called minor prophets. It doesn't mean that, you know, we think of minor leagues means they're less than and these aren't less than prophets. 

JR: Couldn't quite make it to the majors, right. 

David: Yeah, yeah. They couldn't, couldn't quite hit the Isaiah level, right? It just means that yeah. Their writings that were recorded were more concise and short. And so they were just kind of short form prophets that got recorded. And so we lumped them together as the minor prophets. So that's why we call 'em that. 

JR: Yeah, we should have labeled them the short prophets, but then all we would've done is then we just would've all been confused and thought they all looked like Zacchaeus or something. 

David: Yeah. And [00:08:00] Isaiah was like six five. Ezekiel was like a solid six four, right? He was a major dude. 

JR: Yeah. But I'm with you. 

The label is misleading, butthe cool thing is that there's really nothing minor about 'em. They're just, they're more compressed. And so in a lot of ways it's like comparing a parable to a longer narrative, right? So the minor prophets have that same weight. It's just distilled down to a shorter form. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: And so maybe you sacrifice, you could, you could say you sacrifice length of the story for depth in a lot of ways, because again, you jump into Joel, man, you're gonna get deep, real fast. You know, I'll hold off on that. But you jump, you're, you're jump right in the middle of it. 

David: Maybe Joel had a good editor, you know, who's like scratch, maybe Isaiah's like, no, don't edit my stuff. And, oh, come on, you know. 

JR: Yeah. 

David: Writing chapter 45, 46, you know? 

JR: Yeah, somebody told Joel the first 20 chapters about your upbringing and what it was like to live in Israel as a child. Just cut all [00:09:00] that stuff out. Just get to the good stuff. 

David: Yeah. Get to the good stuff. All right. So yeah, should we move on to Joel then? 

JR: Yeah, let's do it. 

David: So let's talk about, I don't know how we do this. I guess first of all, what do we know about Joel? And the quick answer is not much at all. In fact, verse, I'll just jump in here. Verse one says, "The word of the Lord that came to Joel, son of Pethuel." And that's pretty much what we know about Joel right there. 

JR: That's it. 

David: Yep. 

JR: He's the son of who? 

David: A guy named Pethuel. 

JR: Okay. And there's no other mention of Pethuel in the Bible? 

David: No. And the name Pethuel, I look this up means something like vision of God. So some people speculate maybe that his father was maybe a prophet, so maybe he comes from a line of prophets. And it makes sense, you know, it's like, um, I don't know. I, I just started watching, uh, this is a bad example, but Being Gordon Ramsey on Netflix. 

And so he never pushed his kids to [00:10:00] become cooks, but his fourth child, who's his daughter, wants to enroll in culinary school now. And so I thought, man, no pressure there. Right? 

JR: Yeah. I was about to say goodnight, but yeah, Joel's dad didn't even get a book deal. So, Joel's shining.  

David: So the point is like Joel may have grown up an environment of someone who was close to God. Maybe he walked around in the fields with his father, and his father was pointing out patterns to him, right? And so by the time Joel is like 15 or 20 years old, Joel could probably see things clearer than most people around him. 

If there's this correlation between maybe his dad's name Pethuel, which kind of means vision of God. Maybe he grew up around it. That's the point. 

JR: Okay. No, that's cool. Alright. 

David: A couple more things and then we'll jump into it. Most people also identify that he is an early prophet and probably sometime 830 BC to 800 BC. And the reason is, is because he doesn't mention a king. Like some [00:11:00] of the other minor prophets will say I'm prophesying during, yeah, in the reign of Joash or something like that, you know? 

And so we go, okay, yeah, we know when this guy was. It's probably directed to Judah of the Southern Kingdom. But the other interesting point that I'll point out is that Amos seems to quote Joel, which would means that they were probably contemporaries. There's a section in Amos Joel 3:16 and Amos 1:2 are almost word for word identical. 

And we know when Amos wrote his manuscript or was prophesying, right? And so that's another interesting tie in that give people a clue about when Joel might have been prophesying, been acting as a prophet of Israel, is that Amos seems to quote Joel word for word. 

JR: Okay. So how do we know that Amos quotes Joel and not vice versa? 

David: Yeah. Well, Amos, we have a little bit better idea of when Amos acted as a prophet. And I'd have to get into the details, but Joel [00:12:00] seems to be referencing events that had already happened. So in other words, they happened before Amos was around, but Amos was probably a contemporary, someone had recorded Joel's prophecies, and Amos at least seems to borrow, I think he comes around, 25, 50 years later is the best estimate. 

But there is that interesting tie in, which kind of gives you some insight too, of, you know, these prophets weren't just loners in the wilderness. They probably, there was some interacting with each other and even they were writing them down so that someone like Amos is actually able to read the book of Joel of what we have, right? So that's kind of interesting too. 

JR: But it's also kinda like the judges that we think of it as just after one judge comes to the next judge. 

But, it was probably territory, you know, different communities had different judges, and I would assume this is the same thing that Amos and Joel may have been prophesying at the same time. 

Whereas we 

David: could have been. 

JR: tend to look at it like kings, you know, after [00:13:00] the reign of this guy came, this guy, and that's not really exactly correct. 

David: Yeah. It wasn't like there was only one prophet at a time, you know? And then they had to elect another one. That wasn't it at all. In fact, it's interesting, some of my other research on the future episodes we're gonna do on these, they're actually people who are contemporaries of Isaiah and they're even talking about Isaiah or they're saying, my buddy Ezekiel, but they had the big following. 

So, but still there were these interactions with prophets, right? 

JR: Okay. But it's actually kind of cool that we don't get much context about Joel's life, exactly when it was, or under the reign of so and so. And I think it's neat because after reading Joel, you really see that Joel's kind of a timeless voice, right? That he's not just about a particular moment in Israel. It's about a pattern that shows up again and again. So in that way, it kind of forces us to focus less on exactly when did this happen. Right? And more on, where do we see this happening now? Which I think [00:14:00] is kind of a cool aside, for the fact that we don't know exactly when this happened. 

David: No, that's true and it helps us get over that rational- historical mindset that we sometimes get bogged down into is that we have to prove when Joel prophesied and where he was from and who his family was. And it, Joel's telling you right off the bat, that's not important. Listen to what I'm saying because that's timeless, right? 

JR: Yeah. You almost wonder if it's intentional. 

David: Yeah. It could be 

JR: Yeah. 

David: His editor cut all that out. 

JR: Right. Good editor. There you go. 

David: Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right, so that's probably enough background unless you have anything else you wanna chime in with. 

JR: No, we don't know anything, so. 

David: I got as much as Joel told us. Right, exactly. Alright, so the story of Joel I'm fascinated by the way Joel starts out, but so that our listeners can dive in with us, let's have them listen to Joel chapter one verses two through 12, and then we'll use that as the launch point. 

Okay.[00:15:00]  
 

JR: Okay. 

Joel 1:2-12 
 

AI Winston: Here this you elders. Listen, all who live in the land. Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your ancestors? Tell it to your children and let your children tell it to their children and their children to the next generation. 

What the locusts swarm has left, the great locusts have eaten. What the great locusts have left, the young locusts have eaten. What the young locusts have left, other locusts have eaten. Wake up you drunkards and weep. Wail, all you drinkers of wine, wail, because of the new wine for it, has been snatched from your lips. A nation has invaded my land, a mighty army without number. It has the teeth of a lion, the fangs of a lioness. 

It has laid waste my vines and ruined my fig trees. It has stripped off their bark and thrown it away, leaving their branches white. Mourn like a virgin in sackcloth, grieving for the betrothed of her youth. Grain [00:16:00] offerings and drink offerings are cut off from the house of the Lord. The priests are in mourning those who minister before the Lord. 

The fields are ruined. The ground is dried up, the grain is destroyed. The new wine is dried up. The olive oil fails. Despair, you farmers, wail you vine growers. Grieve for the wheat and the barley because the harvest of the field is destroyed. The vine is dried up and the fig tree is withered. The pomegranate, the palm, and the apple tree, all the trees of the field are dried up. Surely the people's joy is withered away.  

David: All right. So the first thing you hear maybe is how it jumps right in to what's going on, right? And I love the phrase, hear this, you elders tell this to your children and let their children tell it to their children and is like, has anything like this ever happened in your days? 

Right. So it just jumps right in and we don't really know what [00:17:00] until the next couple of verses. And when I read this 

JR: are you talking about here? 

David: Yeah. Which is almost like a narrative way of getting you on the edge of your seats. It's like, what the heck happened? Right? 

JR: No, it's kind of cool. Yeah. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: 'Cause it does, it. It's got a good hook. 

David: Have you ever seen, you know, there's disaster movies. 

I was thinking, I think it's called The Day After Tomorrow. Where global warming happens, the earth floods and people are trapped in New York City. Do you remember that? So that's just one of many disaster movies. But I was thinking of the book of Joel, I almost think Joel is more the type of movie that starts after the disaster, right? 

JR: Yeah. He starts in the wasteland and then through the narrative, goes back and explains what happened. 

David: Exactly. Yeah. I think there was a movie called After Earth Will Smith. It was pre Slap Will Smith. 

JR: Right. 

David: But, I think he was in it and 

JR: liked him. 

David: Yeah, back when he wasn't the villain. But that's the way that movie started. If I [00:18:00] remember correctly, that it starts in the wasteland and you're left wondering, as the movie begins, you're left wondering, oh, what the heck happened here? I'm guessing they're going to explain that. But if you keep that in mind, I think it actually helps frame Joel as a book that really draws you in immediately. I don't know how you read all that, but that's how I read that. 

JR: No, it starts off Mad Max. You know, you're like, you see all this craziness and chaos and you're like, are they gonna explain this? I don't even think they ever explain it in Mad Max. I'm sure there's some kind of reference to it, The Book of Eli, you know, where it's just Denzel Washington walking through the Wasteland wilderness and then they go back and explain it. 

But yeah, I, I kinda like how he starts out. 'cause it does, it starts out right in the middle of, it drops you right in the middle of chaos. Which I think is kind of, it's kind of cool because that's exactly how collapse feels when you're in the middle of it, right? 

You don't get this warning label. It just, it, it happens. And we'll see this as we discover the [00:19:00] patterns, but it kind of happens. There's all these little things going on, but when the floor falls out, the 2008 financial collapse, when it happens, it happens in like a day. All the things led up to it. But when there's a collapse, man, it's fast. 

And so, I don't know, it feels more like a lived experience when Joel talks about it this way because you're just right in the middle of it. And so, I don't know if that was intentional, but that is the way chaos, that is the way a collapse feels. 

David: It's also a great example of what we, what I think you brought up earlier, which is this idea that prophets, Joel doesn't say, Hey, repent, or God's gonna send a locust swarm. Right? 

JR: Right. 

David: The locust swarm happened. 

JR: Right. 

David: Crops are devastated, people are ruined. And then Joel comes on the scene and says, listen to me. Here's how we're going to respond, right? But it is that, it kind of goes away from that idea of the prophet is someone who predicts what's going to happen, and if that was Joel's role, [00:20:00] he failed miserably because. 

JR: Right. I don't know if there's a, yeah, a first Joel where he warned everybody about it before it happened, but we don't have that history. 

Yeah. So in a lot of ways he's kinda like the guy, you know, the 2008 financial collapse, I just mentioned it. That's one of those things that happened and everybody's saying, Hey, what's going on? What's happening? And there's some kind of vague voices about, well, there was too much lending, but there was never really a satisfactory answer. And then it was probably a couple years after it that I read a book that I was like, oh, this makes sense. You know, the lending and the, what is it? The AAA mortgage ratings were actually, you know, I won't get into all that, but when somebody explains it to you after the fact, then you can see it clearly. And that's kind of what Joel's doing here. It's like it's already happened. Everybody's walking around with their hands up in the air saying, what's going on? Why can't we stop this? And Joel's coming in and say, I'll tell you exactly what happened. Here's how we got here. 

David: Yeah. Wasn't there a movie? [00:21:00] Actually, I, I was gonna interrupt you, but wasn't there a movie about the people who actually figured out the collapse was happening before? The Big Short. That's what, that's what I was trying to remember. Yeah. 

JR: Yeah, yeah. 

David: Yeah, there's a bit of, 

JR: a fascinating one. 

David: yeah. 

JR: Yeah. if those guys would've warned us instead of just placing, hedging their bets, you know, and making millions of dollars off of gambling that the housing market was gonna collapse. Yeah. That would've been nice. 

David: But maybe there's a little bit of that hindsight too, of thinking, no, these guy, when everyone else was confused, these guys made sense of what happened. And maybe that's a little bit of the role of Joel here. Everyone's scratching their heads going, where do we go from here? And Joel comes in and says, let's talk this through. 

You know me and God pretty tight. You know, maybe it runs in my family, but let's walk through this together and figure out where we go from here. 

JR: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that's cool. 

David: Alright, so obviously what happens is a locust swarm, and [00:22:00] actually I used AI to create this video, and I'll throw it up if you're on Spotify or YouTube, but you know, it pans out to this, this devastated field with just locust picking everything that's left right, utter devastation. So that's the image that I have of Joel's talking here, verse three and four and five, and it's just panning out to just devastated crops, right? 

JR: Yeah. 

David: And all that plays into that. So now you have a lot of interesting ideas of what the locusts mean, but maybe we'll save that for later. But do you want to talk any more about the locust? 

JR: Yeah, but I can't talk about the pattern. Are we saving that for later? 

David: I would say, I'd say save it for later, but. 

JR: No. Well, what I, what I will say is that. Obviously this isn't just four different types of bugs, right? It's four waves of something. And so something cuts, something multiplies, something consumes something, finishes the job, right? You can kind of pick up on that anyway. So yes, it's [00:23:00] Joel's pointing out this layered collapse. Nothing gets left behind, right? 

David: Yeah. 

JR: So again, we'll get into in the patterns a little bit later, but he's clearly at the, just on the face of it, he's not talking about four different types of bugs. He's talking about a layered collapse. And so we'll get into what those layers mean. But I was thinking earlier about the locust. 

You know, we really don't, I don't know, I haven't heard of, is there still a locust, are there locust swarms that destroy crops in the Midwest anymore? I mean, I know it happened in the fifties, sixties. I don't know if there's some technology that kind of prevents that, but it's something we're obviously a little bit disconnected from. A) not being farmers and B) that I haven't really heard about that in recent history. 

David: So I did look this up. This is really interesting. 

JR: Ahh, 

David: Not so much in the United States, but in Australia in 2000, okay, so not that long ago. 

JR: Okay. 

David: In Australia, Australia lost an estimated 500 billion of crops [00:24:00] to a locust invasion. 

JR: That's nuts. 

David: And that's modern day. I know if you're young, that feels like a long time ago.  

JR: Yeah. Oh no. Have you seen the Australia, I don't know what it is about Australia. Have you seen the mouse invasion in Australia? 

David: No. 

JR: one that's 

David: mouse invasion. 

JR: Yeah, just say mouse epidemic in Australia and it is bananas. They're walking through the fields at night and they're, the ground is just moving and they go into barns and they're dumping over millions and millions of mice in buckets and they're eating all the grain. 

Yeah, no, it's worth checking out. 

Yeah. Bit of a rabbit trail. So I guess there are modern epidemics of these mice or locusts or something wiping out complete crops, but 15 billion, that's a lot of wheat down under there that's gone. 

David: Yeah. But I think it does help to I don't know. We talk about a locus invasion maybe as something that's biblical, right? That means like, oh wow, that doesn't happen anymore. But it is interesting to know that actually it does, even though we're pretty insulated [00:25:00] from it. I don't know if we have modern technology that if we see a locust invasion starting, we can like crop dust and spray or something like that and it kills 'em all. 

So we may not have the massive ones, but there are parts of the world that still have some of these invasions. And what's interesting then is the next couple of verses I think are super fascinating because it actually starts to describe the, you might say, the religious and the economic impact. 

For example, verse five, now when I first read this, I was like, well, that's kind of weird, but you know, wake up, you drunkards, right? He just says, wake up, you drunkards and weep; wail, you drinkers of wine. And it's like, well, why is he picking on those people? Right? But it says because, the new wine for it has been snatched from your lips. 

What is he talking about there? Well, the vineyards have been devastated. 

JR: Right. But again, it's in the middle, in the middle of chaos. Who's, I mean, I guess there would be people that kind of drink their sorrows away when your entire life's work has been consumed by [00:26:00] locusts, figuratively. But again, we're starting out in the middle of this awful thing going on that people are just walking around saying, how did we get here? But in the middle of that, some of them are kind of just drunkards and are off in the corner saying, look, if we're all gonna die, at least I'm gonna die happy. You know? 

David: Yeah, yeah. 

JR: They're just passed out. But anyway, no, this is cool because it's less about, alcoholic consumption and more about awareness, right? It's a picture of people that are kind of just numbed out by this collapse, and they're just unable to see what's actually happening around them. So that's the way I kind of viewed the drunkard there. 

David: Yeah. The way I thought about it was it's like, okay, now the wine industry is devastated, right? We might say it that way, and then kind of as a jab you might say, well, all you drunkards out there, you know you're gonna have a tough year next year. 'cause there's not gonna be any wine around, right? So it's something, it's something like that. 

It's kind of a little jab. But what he's pointing out is, yeah, here's an entire industry that's gone. And then he [00:27:00] says verse seven. He says, "It has laid waste to my vines. It has ruined my fig trees." Okay, figs. Now there's another staple in the ancient world, right? And so he's not just saying, oh my fig tree out back is gone. He's saying this entire crop throughout Southern Judah is gone, wiped out. 

JR: Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So olive trees, fig trees, grapes. I mean, that's, 

David: Yeah. 

JR: That's the crops over there, right? 

David: Yeah, yeah. So to me, he's kind of framing the economic impact. The fig tree's gone, the olive, you know, olive oil's gonna skyrocket in price, we would say today. Right? 

JR: Yeah. 

David: There's gonna be supply chain issues, right? And then he moves on and he says in verse nine, I like how he progresses and says grain offerings and drink offerings are cut off from the house of the Lord. 

The priests are in mourning. Okay? So what he talking about there? Well, again, the Old Testament system of offering grain and wine, right? Oil, bread, all these things [00:28:00] are offerings. All that stuff becomes scarce now. So that affects the religious system, right? 

JR: Right. Yeah. So the religious might look at economic collapse and say, well, you guys had that coming. But what he's pointing out is that, look, everybody's gonna be affected by this. It's gonna start with the economy. It's gonna hurt your pocketbook. And then exactly what you said he progresses onto religion. 

He, he says, worship is gonna be disrupted. And it's not just a religious issue, right. It's a sign that the entire ordering principle of the culture, it's all breaking down, you know, from top to bottom. And so he is kind of layering it out like that. That's cool. 

David: Yeah. And then he wraps up by saying, "despair, you, farmers wail, you wine growers," which is kind of restating because the harvest of the field is destroyed. And then certainly the people's joy is withered away. So he's kind of covering all these things. The vineyards are devastated, the religious institutions, economic impact, which makes [00:29:00] me think of, you don't have to think too far back of, you know, COVID there was some reaction to say, oh, no big deal. We just gotta stay home for a while, right? Until you start actually things start opening back up and you started to try to order things and it's like, ah, we don't have that. 

You know, and you're like, what are you talking about? Right. Yeah. 

JR: Supply chain, that's where that term got injected into common parlance, right? We all know what that is now. 

David: We all know what a supply chain is. And even, not too long ago. I think they were full of it, but we asked someone, why can't we get this? And I'm like, ah, supply chain, you know, COVID. And we're like, come on. That was years ago.  

JR: Yeah, now it's a get out of jail free card. 

David: Now it's a get outta jail free card. But it's that same thing, right? If you understand the domino's falling of the supply chain, it's the same thing Joel's talking about here in these handful of verses. 

JR: Yeah. He's basically describing a supply chain issue. Right. He's like, look, I know you already know. I mean, the fields are [00:30:00] desolate, so everybody already knows this is gonna be a tough year. But he's, what he's, he's laying out the different layers and saying, not only is it gonna be a tough year, it's gonna be impossible for the vineyard owners. 

It's gonna be impossible for all these other aspirate and layers of the economy. And then he moves on to the religious, which obviously was important at the time. He's like, this is gonna affect our religious structure. And it is. He kind of, again, I'm, I think I'm gonna hold onto that idea of layered collapse. 

'cause I think there's something to that term he's describing a layered collapse. 

David: Yeah, and he is describing the aftermath of it, right? The locusts are gone and the people are going, what do we do now? And Joel's response is, first of all, you have to come to grips with how this is going to affect every aspect of your life for the next year or two. 

JR: Yeah. No, that's cool. Because there are probably people that once the locust leave are probably thinking, thank goodness that's over. Joel's like, no, no. This is just the beginning 

And there's that type of [00:31:00] thing that happens in society, you know, I'm trying to think of a good example, but yeah. That kind of a, whew, I'm glad we're done with that. 

And you're like, you have no idea the devastation that this, this has caused, and we're only at the beginning of how this is gonna play out in our society. 

David: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really interesting. Okay, so I guess we moved the story along 'cause we have a lot to talk about. 

So the next section is a call to lamentation. Okay. Now this is where I think we talked about at the beginning. This is where we may want the narrative to continue, but that's not really how prophecies are written out. Right? Joel is saying, here's how we need to respond. So. For brevity's sake, let's move on to Joel chapter two. 

And let's have people listen to Joel chapter two verses 12 through 17. And then we can talk about this idea of repentance. 

Joel 2:12-17 
 

AI Winston: Even now, declares the Lord. Return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning. Render your heart and not [00:32:00] your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity. Who knows? He may turn and relent and leave behind a blessing. 

Grain offerings and drink offerings for the Lord your God. Blow the trumpet in Zion. Declare a holy fast. Call a sacred assembly. Gather the people, consecrate the assembly. Bring together the elders. Gather the children, those nursing at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room and the bride her chamber. 

Let the priests who minister before the Lord weep between the portico and the altar. Let them say, spare your people. Lord, do not make your inheritance and object of scorn a by word among the nations. Why should they say among the peoples, where is their God? 

JR: Okay, so this is clearly about lamentation or repentance, right? Maybe a good place to start is to say that repentance here isn't about [00:33:00] groveling, right? It's about recalibration. And that's what he's pointing out. It's turning around and saying, we're off course. We need to realigned with the reality before it gets any worse, right? It's less about emotion and it's more about direction. Like where are we headed, right? And what's sustainable. 

David: Yeah, that's right. I think you're right because I don't know, my opinion is, I think we moderns have maybe an issue with this idea of repentance because our first reaction, especially with something like a locust swarm, it's like, well, I didn't do anything wrong. Right. 

JR: Not my fault, right? 

David: But that's not, I, I like your idea of recalibration because that's not really what Joel, now he does point out some things that are going on that could be straightened up, right? But it's more about a societal recalibration. And I was thinking about that idea that you don't recalibrate your life or you don't reorient your aim, you might say at a personal level, when things are going really well. You do [00:34:00] that when something bad happens, 

JR: Sure. Yeah. 

David: Well that's the idea of repentance. 

And you may say, well, you know, you maybe get a bad diagnosis or maybe your marriage falls apart or you'll lose your job. And you can say, well, what's there to repent of? I didn't do anything wrong. But you're missing the window and a key idea of what repentance is, which is now is the perfect time to realign and actually evaluate. 

Maybe you did do something wrong and you aren't aware of it, right. 

JR: Yeah. Well, yeah. So in that case, repentance is less about feeling bad, and it's more about turning around, it's more about reorienting. And again, it could be your fault, maybe it's not, but it's recognizing that everything's gonna be different and I have to move forward differently than what previously worked, maybe. 

David: Yeah, that's right. No matter what's happened, it's like I have to do something differently here. 

JR: Yeah, I, I remember, gosh, this is gonna show my age. I remember when the planes hit the Twin Towers. I was working at the phone company. And so [00:35:00] I was just a lineman that crawled under houses and installed phone lines, right? And when that happened of course I'm watching it. Every house I go to, I'm watching it. 

I'm telling them about it, or they already know about it. And so they were all inviting me in saying, Hey, do you want any updates? And I'm like, yeah. So we all watched the TV for a little bit and of course, saw the towers fall eventually. Anyway, it was kind of interesting because it bothered me so much and I, I was like, man, what does this mean? And so we didn't have cell phones at the time, and so I was a phone guy. So I go to outside to a pedestal and I clip onto somebody's line, and I call our dad long distance, which is a huge no no, right? But I was just too torn up, man. I had to talk to somebody. And so I called dad I said, Hey, you know, what is going on? And I remember, man very clearly, on the other end of the phone, he just said, goes, well, everything's gonna be different after this. And I remember thinking, well, what, what do you mean, you know, what does that mean? You know? And it was just kind of this, [00:36:00] it was a recognition that. Society was gonna have to recalibrate it. 

Now, maybe on a real practical level, you could say something like, well yeah, you have to take your shoes off now to get on an airplane. Or we put doors on the cockpit or something. But what he was saying was something bigger he is, he was basically saying things are going to be different moving forward. And I just remember that man. 'cause it was just, it just sunk in. And I think that's kind of what Joel means. That's not a great example of what I would call repentance. But repentance is something like, recognize your part in it and even if you didn't have a part in it directly, recognize that you're gonna have to be part of the answer. 

You're gonna have to readjust to move forward, so everybody can move forward, right? 

David: Yeah. So Joel really engages in repentance and it, to kind of tell the story a little bit is after he talks about this locust swarm, he says, " Alas for that day. For the Day of the Lord is near." Now we're gonna talk about the Day of the Lord because that becomes a major theme in Joel later. 

But he said it will [00:37:00] come like destruction from the Almighty. So then he starts talking about this idea of what it means to repent. Now there's a section in here that's really interesting chapter two verses one through 11, before the section we just listened to. But it's part of the whole repentance narrative. 

He actually recast this locust army almost in mythic terms is what I would say. And then it ends in 2:11 where he says, "the Lord thunders at the head of his army." He's talking about the locust swarm here. "His forces are beyond number and mighty is the army that obeys his command. The Day of the Lord is great. It is dreadful. Who can endure it?" 

So I thought that was super interesting that we have this terrible thing that happens. And Joel in the middle of talking about repentance, he's doing something here, right? He's recasting, and I had to read this two or three times. He's actually recasting saying the Lord is at the head of his army that just led through this, right? 

What do you do with that? What do you do with, it's [00:38:00] almost saying like, God is leading the charge of this hurricane that's about to barrel down and hit the east coast, right? You go, we'll that's not gonna play well, right? 

JR: Yeah, 

David: But what do you, I don't know. 

Have you thought about that? What do you think's going on here? 

JR: No, I, I actually like that verse, you know, and it's, it's a little bit uncomfortable, but what he's saying is even the chaos isn't random, right? He's saying that not necessarily that God is causing the evil, but he absolutely uses disruption to wake his people up, right? 

And once you understant that, and this is what Joel's doing, it reframes what disaster from what we might see as a meaningless act of suffering, right? And he's changing it to something what I don't know, a meaningful interruption maybe. So instead of recognizing it as, again, a storm comes, a tornado comes, it's easy to look at the destruction and say, that was so pointless. 

You know, our house is gone. But Joel's reframing it and saying, let's see how [00:39:00] God is using this to wake us up, to bring us together as society to help each other build. And, and so it really does, it kind of reframes it to something meaningful as opposed to meaningless. 

David: Yeah, I like what you're saying. He's trying to get meaning. He's trying to see the meaning in an event where people says, this is pointless. What does this mean? Right. 

JR: Right. 

David: But he also does it in a way that I think makes us very uncomfortable because, I don't know, in our rational, scientific mindset, this reductionist thinking, I think we see a disaster today and we go, well, we know why that happened. You know, there was a low pressure system out in the Atlantic and the warm waters, and so I can tell you exactly why it happened, and Joel's like 10 levels deeper than that, right? He's like, no, no, no, you're giving me the scientific explanation of what happened, but what's really happening here? 

And I don't know. I think that's what he's doing with this idea of suddenly reframing this locus swarm [00:40:00] as God leading an army. 

JR: Yeah. Well, you saw this in the man, what was the year? The New Orleans flood, you know, when the levies broke. 

David: Oh, Katrina. 

JR: Katrina. Right. You know, you saw that during Katrina. There were some people out there, and yes, it's a little bit tone deaf to sort of say, well, you know, we are talking about New Orleans, we are talking about drunkenness and, Bourbon Street and all these things. 

And it's like, yeah, God's judgment finally came. And of course, that went over like 

David: Yeah. You just sound like a, 

JR: know. 

David: you sound like the, 

JR: huge jerk. 

David: religious fanatic yeah, pointing the finger at everyone else. 

JR: Right, and in fairness, I don't think that was people saying, Hey, look, this is not just a meaningless catastrophe. There's meaning behind it. This is a, a little bit more of a, you got what you were, you know, it came a little bit, came across not a little bit, a lot judgmental. And so, of course, it didn't land well. 

But, yeah, you're right. What Joel's doing is saying, [00:41:00] I know this looks meaningless, but let's see if we can pull meaning out of it, because God's using this disaster to wake us up and to go back to the tornado. I can tell you, 'cause I'm in Tennessee and we have lots of tornadoes and there is, after the aftermath, once we're all standing in our yards and there's trees everywhere, there is a period of community where everybody, you know, some guy just drives up with a chainsaw and we start working on my house, a total stranger. 

And there's that kind of the community coming together. And if you talk to any neighborhood or community that goes through something like this, this is how they describe the aftermath a little bit. And so maybe it could be seen as, look, we're drawing meaning out of something that seemed random and meaningless. 

David: And in those moments, actually the materialistic reductionistic explanation doesn't give you much meaning. It doesn't help that the weatherman says, well, here's why this tornado happened, that that doesn't gimme any [00:42:00] meaning. Yeah. 

JR: Yeah. 

David: That sheds no perspective on looking forward. Now where do I go from here, right? 

JR: Right, right. 

David: Yeah. So, yeah, it's actually, that's interesting because I think today we have lost some of this role because maybe it's done poorly. Like you said about the people who are like, well, God's judging New Orleans, right? Instead of that prophetic role that says, people are looking for meaning and let's try to, let's try to extract some meaning out of this and find a way forward. 

JR: Yeah. No, and I think it's 'cause we've lost our prophetic voices. 

David: Mm-hmm. 

JR: I mean, we just don't have that anymore. I guess on smaller levels, I'm sure that pastors play that role a little bit, but like you said, I, I think we get stunned by the meaningless of situations and maybe, I don't know, maybe we just don't care to find the meaning sometimes. Maybe there's a certain amount of us that are just the drunkards that are like, you know what, this is all meaningless. I'm just gonna go get hammered, you know what I mean? It's like I can't make any sense of it, and so I'm not gonna try, and at least Joel and [00:43:00] the prophetic voice is saying, let's try to pull some meaning out of this. 

David: That's an interesting image of reframing the idea of the drunkard, right? It's the person who doesn't even attempt to find meaning in what just happened. I'm just gonna go get hammered. It's like, well, okay, let me know how that goes for you, right? 

JR: Yeah. That's right. Let's see if your, plight gets any easier. 

David: Yeah. No, that's interesting. 

Alright, so before we leave this section about repentance, there is this verse that you and I both said, it just jumped out to us, but Joel 2:13, you heard it read, but "wrend your heart and not your garments." Right? "Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love." 

Those are very common words in the Old Testament. "And he relents from sending calamity." Now, it's interesting to me that after he just pictured God as the head of this army that caused devastation, right? He actually says, look, return to God because he's gracious and compassionate, 

JR: Yeah. Yeah. 

David: Right? 

JR: Well, [00:44:00] I just love, this line because it's just such a direct shot at Performative Religion. 

David: Hmm. 

JR: You know, just act broken, actually be broken because you're broken. You know what I mean? And that's what Joel's saying, like let the external match the internal, is what he's pointing out here. 

David: Yeah, that's right. And you could say that the pagan religions at the time were actually guilty of performing the right ritual to appease the God. 

JR: Right. 

David: Right? And so if a locust storm happened, like what I know of locust storms is like it went through Judah and probably went on, depending the direction, maybe Egypt or maybe the other way into Persia or something like that. 

But the pagans around them would have responded in this way that says, okay, what's, we must have got the ritual wrong, so what do we need to do to actually go through and make amends with the God, right? 

JR: Yeah. 

David: And what's interesting here is, that's what I'm taking from this is Joel says, you know, no, no, no, like render your heart [00:45:00] and not your garments. 

I, I like what you said, like he's not looking for performative religious ritual here in this case. 

JR: Right. 

David: He's looking for true repentance. 

JR: Yeah. Well, I told myself I wasn't gonna keep bringing up the Odyssey, but that's Odysseus. I mean, well, all through the Odyssey, not just Odysseus, but all the characters are constantly saying, here's the sacrifice we need to make. As soon as you get there, find a bull, find the best calf, sacrifice it, you know? 

David: Yeah. 

JR: Yes, it's very performative and you're exactly right. I didn't even think about that as far as contrasting with the pagan world. But he's saying, yeah, let's let our insides match the performance that the pagans are doing. Let's do the same thing, except let's make it your heart, as opposed to this fake ripping clothes, which I never quite understood, by the way. I know that something biblical about it. Ripping the clothes. 

David: Oh sure. 

JR: The sackcloth and ashes. I don't know. It's funny 'cause that really does seem performative. If I saw somebody today ripping the clothes, [00:46:00] I'd be like, what? Come on. What are you doing? 

David: Yeah. 

JR: That's just nonsense. 

David: That's a decent shirt. You could have just given it to me. You have to rip it, right? 

JR: Yeah. Goodwill won't even take it now. Thanks a lot. 

David: Yeah. You've ruined it. 

JR: Yeah. 

David: Maybe it's something like that though is the ripping of some, ripping your clothes? It's like, I'm actually costing myself something. I don't know. You know? 

JR: Yeah, I suppose I, I'm sure there's something legit to it, but. 

David: We won't go down that rabbit trail.. 

JR: I've heard stories before about, you know, you pay mourners at somebody's funeral, know, they're hot. Yeah. You hear stories like that and it's just funny because I guess it just reminds you that we don't think we're that performative as people, but then you hear things like that and there's a million other examples. 

You're like, yeah, a lot of things are us doing something on the outside that we think is expected by other people. 

Something terrible happened. Let me try to conjure up some tears, because that's what everybody expects and you feel like you [00:47:00] feel this performative pressure to, I don't know, meet the moment. 

And I don't know, Joel's just looking at that and saying, yeah, that's all nonsense. Let's work on the heart and let's wrend that and then move on from there, because that's where transformation happens. 

David: Well that may even tie back to the idea when said in the first chapter. What, he said like, more new priests because of the grain offering and the wine offering. Maybe he's addressing this idea of the priests are going, look, how do we even, lament to God, we don't even have the proper sacrifices. And Joel's like, 

JR: Yeah. 

David: Like, no, no, no. Those are secondary, right? Those are things that need to match the interior and if what we have right now to offer God is our hearts right, we can figure out the performative stuff later 'cause there is a role for the right sacrifice, right? We talk about all the time about the proper sacrifice. 

So there is a role, but it has to align with what's going on inside. And maybe Joel is addressing this idea where even the religious class is saying, look, we don't even know how [00:48:00] to appease God right now. We don't have anything to offer. 

JR: Yeah, that's cool you say that because what Joel I think is doing, and what we're gonna find out in these next verses is that he seems to be shifting. You know, where the priests are saying, how can we even have the proper sacrifices? 

We don't have, there's no grain, like you said, and Joel seems to use that and pivot into these next verses where he is saying, he moves on about God's not gonna be in the temple, or God doesn't need the temple. Those types of thoughts. And so, yeah, I think he's kind of using this to kind of change the shift of the way people view religion in general in his time. 

David: Yeah, I think so. I think it's common throughout a lot of the Old Testament where people get overly fixated on the ritual, without really paying attention to the, what, the heart, for lack of a better word, behind it. 

JR: Yeah. 

David: It's just this continual calling back to say, look, the ritual doesn't matter if the heart doesn't match. [00:49:00] And let's not throw the ritual out, right? Because 

JR: Yeah. 

David: I guess I speak from some experience, 'cause I'm being drawn more back into ritual because for a while there we were, I say we collectively, but you know, we were being drawn into churches where like ritual was viewed as a bad thing, right? 

JR: Yeah. Because the outsider doesn't know exactly what to do. 

David: Yeah. So, I don't know. That's interesting too, because he's not throwing the ritual out. He's actually saying, look, it comes second but it has to align with what's actually going with transformation happening within you. And then the ritual has meaning and the ritual has value. Something like that. 

JR: Okay. And so, I don't know if you have anything else to say about this, but these next verses, be looking for that shift. 'cause that's what he's gonna talk about. He's, he's basically saying exactly what you said is that there's gonna be a shift. It's not about the necessarily the rituals, but let's get these layered in the right order, and then we can move forward. 

David: Actually, let's let people listen to verses 28 through 32 of Joel chapter two. [00:50:00] 'cause this is a key section of Joel. 

Joel 2:28-32 
 

AI Winston: And afterward, I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams. Your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit. In those days, I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. 

The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the Lord has said, even among the survivors whom the Lord calls. 

David: Alright, so that section is really about the Day of the Lord and that phrase, the Day of the Lord, is a key theme in Joel, and it's actually restated throughout scripture, but this day of the Lord, you had some interesting thoughts about why this actually naturally follows this idea of repentance and everything we just [00:51:00] talked about. 

So kick us off with this idea of what is this Day of the Lord?  

JR: Well, I'll let you talk specifically about the term day of the Lord, but Yeah, but what I was saying is that I had never thought about that the previous line about the performance of rendering your clothes, performative religion, and he's saying again, like you said, he's not saying that we're doing away with ritual, but he says he is reorienting it and saying, let's get it in the right priority. Our priorities are out of whack. And right now your priority is how do we perform these rituals when we don't have the proper grain or the whatever, right? And he's saying, let's get the priorities straight. Let's flip this upside down and let's make sure our heart is right. 

And then as the crops rebuild and as we reorient, we can bring the proper sacrifices into line. But the main thing is your heart. And so he is kind of doing this New Testament flip, you know, the way we view the New Testament, he's like Jimi Hendrix, man. He's way before in his time, [00:52:00] right? And so he's saying, let's get this oriented, right? And we have to orient our hearts toward God first, and then the sacrifices will follow. 

David: And that starts to get that idea of, God's Spirit will fall on people, which he doesn't talk about a temple and the proper sacrifice, right? He's talking all of a sudden about the spirit of God falling on his people, which. 

JR: Yeah. 

David: Is talked about some, but you're right, it is very much pointing forward to something that will happen in the future. And I guess in that way, he is being a little bit prophetic in the way that we said he wasn't. 

JR: Legit prophetic. Yeah. 

David: This is the legit part right here. No. So there's this idea of the Day of the Lord throughout the Old Testament, that's other prophets talk about as well. But then it really comes to the forefront in the New Testament. 

And it's this idea that the Day of the Lord is kind of a code phrase for restoration and blessing for those who repent. And you really see this come to the forefront in the Book of Acts in Pentecost, right? Because Joel is talking about [00:53:00] your sons and daughters will prophesy, right? The Spirit will fall on them. 

And that's easy in hindsight to look back and go, oh, well he was talking about Pentecost, but this is something that Joel is 800 years before Pentecost happens. 

JR: Right, right. Yeah. 

David: So that's a pretty good call. 

JR: No, yeah. No, that's, Nostradamus level. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: Seriously though, it's cool because what he's doing is, like you said before the New Testament, he's making this shift location to people. And that's a big deal in the Old Testament. 'cause it was all about the location, the location of the tabernacle, 

David: A temple. Yeah. Mm-hmm. 

JR: Right? And so he's kind of saying, listen man, the sacred isn't locked in a building anymore. And he's saying it's carried out in human lives and your sons and daughters are gonna prophesy. And this changes everything about how the world works, right? 

But also, this is another cool thought is that it also, it also means the responsibility [00:54:00] shifts, right? You don't go somewhere to find God. You don't go to the temple to find God. You become a carrier of the presence of God. You don't go to the temple to find it anymore. That really is a radical upending of the way the Old Testament Israelites viewed their interaction with God. 

David: Yeah, that's right. He's talking about something happening beyond the temple, right? God's Spirit is falling everywhere. And it is interesting because Peter actually starts quoting Joel Peter, the Apostle Peter in the New Testament. He actually starts quoting Joel because he, he immediately puts together this thing that's unfolding in front of him, right? 

Pentecost, where Jesus has died. He's risen. He says, wait in Jerusalem, right? And then he ascends and disappears and Jesus says, wait for something to happen. Well, this thing that happens is they're in the upper room praying one day, and all of a sudden the New Testament description, right, tongues of fire descend. 

Right. They all start prophesying. They all start [00:55:00] speaking in different languages. And Peter, immediately it's interesting, connects this to Joel. He's like, holy cow. That guy Joel was right, right?  

JR: He nailed it. 

David: He told us exactly what was going to happen here. And so I That's pretty neat. That's pretty cool. 

JR: Yeah, no, I think that's, great. But I just, I think something that's missed through this is that recognize that the responsibility also shifts. 

' Cause I think that's, I think that's key. You know, it's not on the priest anymore, which, again, through the New Testament lens, we look at that and say, yeah, we don't have to go to a priest to ask him to or to you sacrifices and things like that. But one thing I think we miss is that means the responsibility is on you. Not the priest. Not the prophet, not the judge. 

And so a lot of times I think we like to accept the New Testament proposal of God's love and it's available to anyone. We don't always count the cost and say, okay, that means the responsibility is on me to accept or reject. And so [00:56:00] I just see a lot of that in society. The God is, I think we talked about this, touched on a little bit about the universalist that sort of says, yeah, we're all going to heaven. 

We're all getting a trophy. And I think that ignores exactly what Joel's saying is yes, it shifted from the priest to us individuals, but recognize the responsibility also shifts. 

David: Yeah. It's almost a response to maybe, you know, you said the universal is, it's like the people who say, well, God is everywhere. It's like, okay, yeah, fair enough. Are you connecting with him everywhere? 

JR: Right? 

David: You know, is everywhere transforming your life? Right. Are you taking that responsibility seriously? And it's not just a clever quip to say, well, you know, God's everywhere. Well, okay, fair enough. 

JR: excuse of why I don't go to church or whatever. You know, why I don't have a faith community or anything. 

David: Yeah. Or I don't need, I don't need organized religion. Yeah. 

JR: Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 

David: God's in nature. It's like, okay, well, tell me about your last nature walk and how you experienced the divine. And [00:57:00] look, if you did, okay, good for you. Right. But, but you're right. It's not a way just to slough off the responsibility. It's actually the added responsibility. I think it's a good point. That's right. 

All right, so one more thing I'll say about the Day of the Lord is this is one of these concepts throughout the Bible that Joel is saying, he's pointing to the coming Messiah, and he's pointing to this idea of Pentecost. But the idea of the Day of the Lord is also, it's kind of this fractal pattern, right? 

Because the Day of the Lord signifies a key turning point where God responds with blessing because his people have repented. So it's not just this event that happened in the New Testament, it's event that happened before that it also culminated in the coming Messiah and Pentecost, but it's also something that will happen again in the future. 

Right? And so that's an important thing to understand about the Day of the Lord. 

JR: Well, we've talked about fractals before [00:58:00] that you can look at it on an individual level, you can look at it on a society level, you can look at it on a kingdom level, and it does, it repeats up. And especially in this one, I think it's interesting because Joel, is talking to the people that are right in front of him, the people that are going through this chaos, the people that are in the middle of this collapse. But in this fascinating way, he's also, like you said, he's ramping up the prophecy. He doesn't clarify 800 years from now, but that ends up what's happening. 

He's saying that in the future, in other words, this pattern is going to replicate larger and larger and larger. And in the future, your sons and daughters are gonna prophesy. And so he's actually pointing to this fractal pattern that you and I talk about this. I don't know, we tend to, when chaos happens, we tend to think that that happened in a vacuum. And when it comes to our lives and society and the health scares and all the things that we see this pattern emerge, what we see is that it was happening the whole time. In other words, you don't just [00:59:00] come home and your wife announces that she wants a divorce. Right? There are a million things that went ignored that lead up to this collapse. Again, the announcement is shocking. I mean, that punches you in the face and you're like, where did that come from? But what Joel is doing when he lays out the fractal nature of this pattern, he's saying that when the end comes. Be prepared to look in the mirror and recognize all the little things that you ignored leading up to this. So in a way, I guess I'm trying to kind of verbalize that what he's dealing with is something so much bigger than his audience at the time that are right in front of him that are dealing with this. Whether it's a literal locust storm or whether it's just their societies collapsing. What he's basically making the argument for is this is gonna continue happening. You're gonna see this, pattern over and over and over.  

David: Okay, so the Day of the Lord is a pattern that he's identified and it's a [01:00:00] pattern that will culminate, but it's a pattern that continues. And the pattern, maybe this is it, I don't, the pattern is that catastrophe paves the way for repentance and God's blessing. 

And when God blesses, you are experiencing a day of the Lord. And when you start to, okay, so when you start to like push that up, then the result of pushing that forward and up is something like Pentecost. And when we keep pushing that forward, that's going to be something like the Day of the Lord is going to be, the second coming of Christ. Right. And the establishment of God's kingdom. So there's a pattern there, I think. And the pattern is it's ushered in by chaos, right? Because the restoration of order, gosh, maybe I'm getting off the restoration of order is a result of chaos. And so it goes back to some of the other things we've said where when God's kingdom has come, it's not going to be because [01:01:00] life on earth here is so great, right? 

That we just like moves smoothly into this heavenly bliss. No, it's actually going to be because of this chaos that's happening on earth and God intervenes and those who repent. That's the pattern, right? 

JR: Yep. Yep. 

David: Right. Something new happens. Right? So that's the pattern that Joel picked up on, I think. 

JR: Right. No, I think you nailed it, that the Day of the Lord isn't just one future event, it's a pattern, right? There are smaller ends of the world. I won't call 'em Days of the Lord, smaller ends of the world, that point to a final one. And that's what he's trying to capture. 

And we've seen this before. We just never recognized it, you know? It shows up in our personal lives. It shows up in nations, same patterns, different scale. And to go back, you know, I mentioned the, your wife doesn't come home out of nowhere and wants a divorce. It's, the pattern is things feel stable. And then small issues are ignored. [01:02:00] Then tension builds, and then eventually something breaks. But the collapse itself feels sudden, right? But it wasn't, there was a pattern there the whole time. Sometimes you're too distracted to see it. Sometimes we're willfully blind to it. But what Joel's saying here is that judgment's coming, and if you're awake, you'll realize it. And in that way, every small collapse is a practice or a warning for the final one. And that's how he's trying to kind of ramp that up, or at least that's the way I see it. That's the way he's trying to build up to this day of the Lord. 

David: Yeah. And part of the day the Lord involves judgment, which we talked about a couple episodes ago, but it also explains then the pattern of Joel chapter three and four, which can seem a bit disconnected because all of a sudden we'll hit this real quick and then we'll look at the pattern a little closer. But Joel chapter three is all about the nations being judged. 

So all of a sudden Joel starts talking about judgment on this nation and judgment on that nation. It's like, well, where did that come from? I thought Joel was calling the [01:03:00] people to repent. Well, when you see the pattern, the Day of the Lord sparks a time of judgment for those who have what not aligned themselves with God. 

So he says in verse one, "In those days, and at that time when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem," okay, so there's the restoration. "I will gather all nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehosaphat. And there I will put them on trial for what they did to my inheritance." Okay, now that's, that seems disconnected with the whole locus invasion unless you recognize the pattern that Joel's picked up on. 

JR: Yeah. This is confirmation of the pattern. 

David: Right. 

JR: You know what I mean? That he's expanding the scope and it seems like it's outta nowhere. You're like, wait, when did this happen, right? But it's not just Israel anymore. Right? He's saying the pattern will expand out to the ordering of the world, right? 

The, the entire world can be ordered by this pattern, basically. No nation is outside of this pattern and so you're right. He kind of turns [01:04:00] it up real quick. Those verses are actually confirming the pattern that we were talking about. At least I think it makes it obvious because no longer he is talking about, Israel is talking about this is the way the entire world can be ordered. 

David: Yeah. And the judgment part then is those who resist that reordering are going to be judged, right? That's another way of saying that because 

JR: Right. 

David: It's not just this feel good, I'm going to restore order and everything's gonna be hunky dory. There are always, let's put it this way, there's always at least a warning to those who wanna resist that, and there always will be. 

JR: Yeah, yeah, 

David: Right? And so that's where the Day of the Lord then sparks renewal on one hand, but also judgment by its very nature, right? By its very nature, it sparks renewal and judgment. 

JR: Yeah. And so in that way, I think Joel is saying that every collapse is also an invitation. 

It's just that not everyone hears it. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: And that's another good way to reframe [01:05:00] collapse, or calamity or the locust. It's a great way to reframe it. 

David: Yeah, that's right. And that makes sense, then, when he gets to verse 18 of chapter three, he says, "In that day, the mountains will drip new wine and the hills will flow with milk." I like that image too, because what is he talking about there? The land being restored, right? Which I think again, is that okay, so I think what he's doing is he's giving them a vision of what it looks like to rebuild, but also he's also giving them a vision of the ultimate coming of God's kingdom, right? Does that make sense? Because he started out talking about how, look, the vineyards are devastated. The farmers have nothing, but then he says in that day, the mountains will drip new wine. Right. And the hills will flow with milk. I never really understood that imagery.  

JR: Yeah, how do the hills flow with milk. I mean, I get the mountains. 

David: The ravines of Judah will run with water. So the whole thing is like a restoration of the land. 

JR: Yeah. [01:06:00] The land being a metaphor for the broader culture, right? 

David: Yeah.  

JR: I mean once we get ourselves aligned properly, because again, it's like, well, how can they make the water run if the water's run dry? How can we make that happen? I understand how we can plant vineyards and plant new crops, but where does the water come from? 

It just comes from God. We can't do a rain dance. And so what he's saying is that when you align yourself properly, that nature itself will actually come into alignment with you. It's you aligning yourself with the natural reality. And so that's where nature seems to just give forth her bounty now.  

David: No, I, that makes sense actually. I like that because on a micro scale, you know, when you tend your garden, nature will provide a bounty for you. 

JR: Yeah. 

David: Right? 

JR: Yeah. But you have to tend the garden. 

David: But that same nature can take over all your plant beds and flowers and, you know, nature can also turn on you when you're not tending it well. 

JR: is, is a testament to that. [01:07:00] Yeah, if you ignore it, man, it's just gonna get overrun with weeds and all this other stuff. Yeah, that's the natural tendency of nature. But when you align yourself with it, she's gonna pour out the fruit, the harvest, it's all gonna, 

David: Yeah. 

JR: I don't wanna say fall in your lap, but Yeah. 

Prosperity's right behind it. 

David: Yeah, that's right. 

So we've walked now through Joel and I, hope that people understand, or I hope that people can see now that when you see this pattern we've been talking about, and it's really the pattern of the Day of the Lord, that's why that phrase is important. It actually explains everything that Joel writes. 

So these sections in Joel that seem disconnected or why did he just switch here? Joel's actually talking through the pattern and once you get the pattern, you go, I got it. I got what he's saying now. And it makes sense. Right? 

JR: Right. Okay. So what is the pattern? 

David: Well again, the pattern is, yeah. Okay. So the pattern is just 

JR: the shorthand, you 

David: the shorthand. 

JR: it, 

David: Alright, so the shorthand is just this, the pattern is there's a pattern of cultural decline that leads to [01:08:00] chaos. That leads to an opportunity for repentance and intervention is going to lead to restoration and judgment, you might say. 

Now I said a lot of words there, but, but that's the pattern. Things start to go south. Chaos happens and chaos actually prevents a perfect opportunity to realign yourself, right? And when we realign ourself, then we actually unlock some of the blessing of God. We actually usher in a day of the Lord in a fractal sense, and that day of the Lord will bring blessing to those who align with it, and judgment for those who don't, and there will be a restoration of the land. 

That's the pattern. I guess that's the best way I know how to say it. 

JR: No, that's it. That's exactly it. Now we can get into each one of those categories. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: It's important to say that it kind of starts with, you can say prosperity, it starts with comfort. You know, it's like we settle into the comfortable life and that's when chaos usually hits. And then again you [01:09:00] have the opportunity to reinvent, to come outta that chaos and find something new and restore and align yourself properly moving forward. But, it's just so interesting because we see that pattern everywhere. We see that pattern in social media. It starts as a connection, right? It starts as a good thing. It's like, Hey, I can connect with my old friends from high school that, you know, something genuinely good, right? But then over time, it shifts and distraction creeps in. And Now, you know, we talk about anxiety, social media, anxiety, and then the fragmentation that we've got this group over here on what's, what's Blue Sky and then this group over here on X, right? 

So it fragments, it didn't collapse all at once. It erodes in layers, which is why Joel lays it out like that. But that's the kind of pattern that Joel's tapping into. And it can be social media, it can be, I talked about the 2008 financial collapse. It can be a health scare like you talked about. 

It can be COVID. You see this pattern everywhere. You see the [01:10:00] chaos, the reinvention, the restoration. And when you recognize that you can then be the voice like Joel, where you say, okay, here's where we're at right now. Like, I don't know what you think about our current political state, and we're not gonna get off on this rabbit trail. 

But you can look at the current political climate and say, man, we're fragmented. We're all over the place. There is no left talking to the right. How do we move forward? But you can see where you're at in this pattern, and then you can start to say, okay, what's the next step? 

David: Yeah. 

JR: We need to align ourselves properly. 

We need to, in this case, we need to actually communicate and we can restore and move forward. But if we don't do that, it's just gonna, that's the locus, you know? That's where we're gonna finally have complete devastation. There's nothing that's gonna be left. 

David: Yeah. Now let's talk about the locust because you have said before that there's a pattern in the locust and to, to be fair, like scholars don't really, understand what each description actually means. [01:11:00] They're kind of guessing. But you had said that, how did you say it? You said there's four distinct waves, and that much is obvious, right? But yeah. How do you see that playing out? 'cause you know, we don't have locust swarms today, but how do you see that playing out in culture today? 

JR: Yeah, I don't know if I was projecting, you know, kind of my modern sensibility on what these words actually mean, but I was just sitting in church one morning and kind of zooming in on these different types of locusts. 

And again, we said it earlier, it's obvious we're talking about four different waves, but I just thought it was interesting that it starts with the devouring and these are the people that what undercut the social structure, the accepted morality of the time. And so they're undercutting, they're kind of devouring something. 

They're cutting. There are people, cynical people that like to cut societal institutions down. Right? They're the critic. And so it starts off with that. 

David: You might say they're the ones that are intentionally trying to break cultural [01:12:00] rules. 

JR: right. 

David: Right. 

JR: That's right. 

David: Okay. 

JR: Yeah. And then I think it's interesting, it's followed up by the flying locust, and this is our fairytale view that the way we view things, when you have something that's flying, these are the upper, these are the higher people in society. These would be, I, you call 'em athletes, you call 'em influencers, you call 'em celebrities, however you wanna see it. 

These are the flying locusts. And so the guy comes in, he undercuts society. That's picked up by the celebrities in our culture. You know, they try to normalize it and man, you see this in Hollywood, they're always trying to normalize the next, the next kind of edge case of something that they're trying to pick up and carry forward, right? 

And then it follows up with the creeping locust, which are the ground dwellers, which I looked at as sort of, that's the common man. You know, once Hollywood normalizes it, it's gonna trickle down until kind of the average blue collar guy accepts it as normal. And once that happens, the destruction is [01:13:00] complete. 

We've now completely taken something that was morally wrong to society, and now we've normalized it. And then I even thought about the destructive locus at the end. It's almost like those are the ones that go back and rewrite history and say, well, that was never really a thing. The truth is it's always been accepted this way. And now you have a complete dismantling of any moral code. And this happens issue by issue. It completely gets taken out of our society and it's rewritten. I could be wrong about that, but that's the way I saw it. At least it holds to the idea of the pattern that Joel's laying out. 

David: It is definitely an interesting pattern because it'd be hard to argue against that that's not how things happen today. The third locust is sometimes described as the young locust, which is this picture of, as a locust swarm moves through, they're laying eggs, right? 

And so it's almost like you see the wave pass and you go, okay, that's over with. And it's like, no, no, no. The worst is [01:14:00] about to happen because all these eggs are going to hatch and whatever's left is going to be devoured. I like your pattern because that's almost like the next generation that grows up in, in the rules that have been broken. 

And so the next generation then comes and says, well, that's just the way things are. And that's where you get this tension between older generations who are like, man, you know what the heck's going on? And the younger generation that goes, no, this is just the way things are, right? 

JR: Right. I can't, you can't drink water out of a tap. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: I mean, you're just gonna kill yourself. 

David: Out of a hose, what are you talking about? 

JR: Yeah. Right. And the older generation is griping that, that's, yeah, we drank out of the hose and we're just fine. There was no such thing as bottled water and blah, 

blah, blah, right? Old man screaming at the clouds. 

David: I grew up on hose water. Yep. 

JR: Yeah, exactly. But you're right. Maybe that's a better way to see the ground locust, the canker worm, that it's better understanding to say it's the next generation that births. And then again, the moral code's [01:15:00] completely destroyed. 

David: Well, okay. So it's interesting. You look at something like cigarette smoking, okay? When you go back and look at some of the sixties and maybe fifties, sixties era movies, right? Everyone's smoking a cigarette. You know, the doctor looking at you doing surgery is smoking a cigarette, right? It's like, 

JR: right. Yeah. There were ads for doctor recommended cigarettes. 

David: yeah. And, and so 

JR: smoke, right? 

David: Doctors, nine out of 10 doctors recommend this cigarette, right? Yeah. But that's the, that was the reality, right? And so first of all, there was this kind of, this what? This new thing, cigarette smoking, right? Hollywood gets ahold of it and they normalize it, and then it filters down to the generation that watched that movie to where almost everyone smoked. 

It was the cool thing to do, right? 

JR: Smoking on airplanes, right? 

David: And then you had people who were trying to say, Hey, actually this isn't healthy. And there was some initial pushback to that. Right? Now that's interesting example because [01:16:00] that's come full circle because now, now it's like you don't wanna smoke cigarettes, what kinda low life are you? 

You know what I mean? It's like young people today don't smoke. Now they vape. Like you can't see them through a cloud of smoke, but they don't smoke cigarettes because that's not cool anymore. 

JR: They almost look at smoking. Yeah. They look at smoking like, yeah, sure. Everybody knows this. How can you not have known this? 

David: Right, yeah. 

JR: And when you're looking back generationally, it's like, well, nobody told us it was bad. I mean, we are probably in the middle where it was kind of tapering off and whatever. It was a little bit of a rebellious streak. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: But you kind of knew that you don't wanna be the guy who smokes a pack a day for 40 years. That's a bad road to go down. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: But yeah, now it's just almost just like, yeah, how did, people not know this? But again, going back, it's like, yeah, people didn't know It was just normalized. And so that's not really necessarily a moral, something moral that's been swept under the rug that we ignore now. But it's a great example of something that's gone full [01:17:00] cycle that we now look back and say, surely this was completely obvious. 

David: Yeah, that's right. So that's a bit of like, I don't know, that's a small pattern. Just the idea of what does the locust represent. And that quickly also, I like that idea 'cause it moves us beyond, well was he talking about a literal locust invasion, which he probably was, right? But there's something, even though we might not have a locust problem today, we can actually see something in the pattern. 

And that's what I like about that example that you brought up. Alright, so that's the locust. The one thing I'll say is I think the pattern also answers the question of, okay, so why is the chaos necessary, right? Why did it take a locust devastation? And I think once you understand the pattern, to me this is something jumped out at me, is because that's what actually prompts repentance. 

Because I'm thinking even on a personal level, it's like, man, if I [01:18:00] get a promotion at work and my marriage is going great and my kid just got into the college of their choice, that's not the time where I go, man, I need to reorient my life, right? That's not the time. 

JR: Yeah, sure. 

David: The time is when you go to the doctor and you get a bit of a health scare, to use that example from earlier. That actually prompts you to say I might need to rethink things here, and that's why the chaos is necessary. That's what I'm trying to say. 

JR: Absolutely, well, chaos exposes what's broken. I mean, go back a couple episodes to the Wise Man and the foolish man building their houses. They both look perfectly fine when there's no rain, but chaos exposes what's broken. I mean, it reorients it. 

David: Yeah, yeah. 

JR: If we let it, right? And then restoration builds something new, but it's never exactly what was there before, right? The goal isn't to go back, it's to move forward and orient yourself properly and rightly. 

And so, yeah, chaos exposes the holes [01:19:00] in the roof or exposes the foundation you know, when you're talking about the wise and the foolish builder, that's exactly what that story's about. 

David: That's true. Yeah, that's exactly right. Chaos is the event that actually tests the structure of the house you built, right? Not the nice sunny day. Yeah. 

JR: Right. Yeah. And so you end up seeing this same arc after every major disruption. You know, something breaks, people reassess, and then something new gets built. But it's never quite the same as before. And so, yeah, that's just completely the pattern. But yeah, that's why chaos is necessary. 

David: Yeah. And when you understand that, then, whether it's a tornado or a hurricane or a war, or COVID, right? That can help actually answer the question of why did this happen? Well, the chaos, if you orient yourself properly, the chaos can actually help you re-aim. And therefore, the chaos is actually the prompting event, and that's the meaning in the chaos. 

And, and that's a [01:20:00] different way to think about things than we think about it today. 

JR: Yeah. It completely changes the way you look at it, and that's what Joel's trying to do. I think that's interesting. That's really to summarize this whole thing, that's exactly what Joel's trying to do. He's trying to find meaning in a meaningless situation. And he's saying, look, if you understand the pattern, look, we do this, we talk about you and I, we talk about the end of the world, right? 

And we're not talking about that a meteor's gonna hit. We're talking about societal collapse, right? And according to Joel, the good news is that collapse isn't necessarily the end. It can be rebuilt rightly. We just have to see that way and respond to it. And so the good news is every time you and I talk about collapse, it's like, well, this is an opportunity. 

And you can see this in yeah, technology, you know, technology, disruptive technology that comes along. AI, we talked about that. It's like, what are we gonna do? Well, I'm not saying it's all gonna be roses, but it's definitely chaos. Chaos is coming. If we [01:21:00] orient ourselves correctly, we can navigate it and something new can come out of it. Now, maybe the new is that we're guided by our robot overlords, or maybe we can actually make something more productive and, 

David: Yeah. 

JR: you know, actual functional. But it is an opportunity to reorient properly and have something new. It's just something different from before. 

David: And the last thing I'll say about this idea of the Day of the Lord is, I think you had mentioned it earlier, is the Day of the Lord is not just pointing back to say, we can recapture the old days, right? It's actually pointing to something greater. So I like that idea too, of, it's not only, hey, we'll rebuild, I think of like every chaos that happens now the city that affected always has that slogan and I get it. You know, it's like Boston Strong, right? Or Nashville Strong or Tampa Strong, something like that. And I get that, but there's this idea that we'll rebuild, but the Day of the Lord actually offers something better. We can actually [01:22:00] improve. We can actually move forward to something that's going to be better. Right? 

JR: Yeah. 

David: yeah, 

JR: sense to go to the Louisiana thing, the New Orleans thing, it's like, why would we rebuild the levies the same height that they were before the storm.  

David: Yeah. 

JR: You know what I mean? 

David: Yeah. 

JR: And so it's like, no, we'd reorient it and there was argument and pointing fingers afterward, but whatever. Everybody agreed, let's build the levees a little bit stronger and a little bit higher this time, right? And that's really a great example of how you take chaos and actually improve and orient yourself better with nature, because obviously the waves are higher than the levee in that instance. 

David: Or a lot higher. You build them a lot higher, not just a little. 

JR: Yeah. Yeah. 

David: We added a whole foot. Yes, 

JR: would've done. 

David: That's right. 

JR: Yep. Just another layer of bricks. This should be just fine, right? But that's funny, that's a great example of improving as opposed to just 

David: Yeah. 

JR: getting back to the way things were. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: And just, it's funny 'cause you meet people like that, it's like, man, I [01:23:00] wish I could just, I wish we could just go back to the eighties before all this, whatever calamity you wanna point to before all this internet nonsense, right? And it's like, well, the 80s are gone man. That's the rear view. How are we gonna integrate what we have in this technology and how do we move forward with that? Because you're just wasting your time saying, I wish things were the way that's, it's not quite the drunkard, but it's almost like the guy, the willful blindness burying your head in the sand. And it's the guy that, again, his wife gives the divorce, and I wish we could just go back to when we were first married. Well, a lot's happened since then, man. 

David: Yeah, 

JR: You better figure out how to orient yourself fast or else she's walking out the door and it's all destroyed, you know? 

But, yeah, improve. 

David: Yeah. I like actually that image of the drunkard. The person who just feels sorry for themselves and wants to go back to the past. 

JR: Yeah. What's to numb the pain. 

David: That's not gonna fix any. 

JR: No, there's a lot more to that than, than what we're 

David: yeah. 

JR: touching on, but 

David: Man, there's a [01:24:00] lot more, 

JR: this. 

David: is exactly what I was gonna say and just, you know, so this is the first episode of the Minor Prophets series, and gosh, it's another one where I just, there's so much we didn't even get to, but I hope that what we've done is laid out a pattern and once you see the pattern, because that's what prophets do, right? 

That's what Joel's doing here, man, it does, it infuses meaning into a chaotic event and points a way forward. That's really what the pattern is. 

JR: Right. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I just love how Joel reorients the chaos and says, let's find meaning in it. 'cause if you just don't find any meaning in it, then you just throw your hands up and do nothing. You know? 'cause this is only gonna happen. 

David: You're the drunkard, right? 

JR: Yeah. Yeah, drunkard. That's a key part to this, I think. 

David: That's it. 

JR: Yeah, you're at least gonna be the person in the fairytale that says, but what can I do? 

David: Exactly. Yeah. 

JR: But what else could I have done? You know, that's the drunkard, that's what Joel's trying to say. Don't be like [01:25:00] that. We can take this and move forward and yeah, this was a great one to start with. And I know we probably went a little bit long on some of these things, but like you said, I could have gone deeper on a dozen different points but in the sake of trying to keep this under four hours, it's like, okay, well let's just, hit the highlights. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: And invite the listener to go read Joel and pull all that stuff out for themselves. 'Cause it's all there, man. You can't miss it once you see the pattern. 

David: And once you start reading 'em this way then it's easier and easier to read another minor prophet and go, okay, I think I'm picking the pattern up right away. So we did this at another series, but we're going to do Hosea next episode. And so if you're a listener and reading, like I'd encourage you go read Joel and then go read Hosea and see what you pick up before we talk about it. 

JR: Yeah. Yeah. And let's pick up the conversation, man. Let's leave comments. We'd love to hear from you. We've talked about leaving it on our YouTube channel. That's probably the best place to have a discussion. But if there's something we missed, and I know there is, man, [01:26:00] point it out to us and let's talk about it because there is a whole lot here packed into these four chapters. 

David: There's four little chapters. Yep. I love it. 

JR: Yep. 15 minutes, but wow, you probably spent 15 years deciphering it all. There we go. Okay. 

David: Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe so you won't miss a single episode. Check the show notes for links and ways to connect, whether that's joining our Facebook group, signing up for the newsletter, or reaching out to us directly. And for more articles and resources, visit navigating in ancient faith.com.