Joel 2:12-14. Therefore also now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to Me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning: and rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth Him of the evil. Who knoweth if He will return and repent, and leave a blessing behind Him; even a meat offering and a drink offering unto the Lord your God?
We know next to nothing about Joel, but he was a prophet in Judah, probably during the reign of Joash while he was a child. His voice, crying in the historical wilderness, was conveying the word of God. And the word of God endures for ever. The beginning of the prophecy is nothing but sin and judgement, but the end is restoration. And what comes between them is nothing but the free, sovereign grace of God and a call to repentance. “Repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby a sinner out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavour after, new obedience” (Shorter Catechism, Ans 87). God is commanding sinners everywhere to repent. That call will hang over the lost to all eternity as a source of eternal misery. But here we have repentance with a promise of blessing attached to it. This is the repentance the Lord’s people need all their days. Repentance is a life-long experience. It is the people of God that are called here to turn to Him in repentance.
1. What is repentance? It is something the Lord’s people find they need all their days because of their constant failure to follow the Lord fully. The Lord generally keeps His people from scandalous outward falls. But the Lord at times says to them: But I have something against thee, that thou hast left thy first love. Though everyone thinks we are as devoted as ever, they know sometimes that they have left their first love – their prayers are hollow; they lack trust and devotion. This becomes more and more sinful and they realise they need repentance.
“Turn ye even to Me with all your heart”. It is an inward change. Sin is a turning away from God. All sin is saying to God: Depart from us. It is an evil thing, as well as bitter. The call to repent is a call to return again to God, that He would become again the reality to us that He ought to be – to let God be God and you just be His creature. It is taking our right place before Him in humble acknowledgement and thankful remembrance of His holiness. The emphasis is on the heart: “Turn ye even to Me with all your heart . . . and rend your heart and not your garments”. It is so easy for us to confess our sins before God – something we say every time we pray or even ask a blessing on our food. But God looks on the heart. It is the love of the heart that God requires from His people, and the turning of the heart. God’s people desire truth in the inward parts. True repentance takes to do with the heart. We need a broken heart. We are not to be satisfied to have a day of confession of sin, but we need God to bless the means to us and give a broken heart.
We are to turn with weeping, fasting and mourning. Fasting is abstaining from anything that comes between us and returning to God. Real fasting is abstaining from sin. Weeping is perhaps the quieter expressing of sorrow and mourning a more intense expression. But we are to sorrow over our sins, with godly sorrow. Yes, we are sorry for ourselves – which is never excluded in the Bible – but we must be brought on to be sorry for our sins. “Rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God.” That is the emphasis – that we would turn from our sins to God, that God would become a reality to us again.
2. Encouragement in the revelation God gives of Himself. in God’s own name. He is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth Him of the evil”. We often look to ourselves for some encouragement to hope that the Lord might come and bless us. But the great encouragement for sinners to draw near to God is in His revelation of Himself: “Gracious and merciful . . .”. That is the revelation we have through Christ Jesus. When we look at God in Christ we see a God of infinite holiness and inflexible justice that would not withhold the sword from His own Son.
But we also see that God is merciful, gracious, slow to anger and of great kindness. God is not hiding or compromising His holiness when He reveals His graciousness. That is what makes it so precious to the penitent sinner. This is God’s love expressed towards His people in a saving manner: God choosing to deal graciously and mercifully with sinners deserving His wrath and curse. That is where all blessing comes from, where the saving grace of repentance comes from.
He is slow to anger. He does not cut sinners off as soon as they sin, but He gives space for repentance. He is of great kindness. God’s grace is not a cold thing; His whole heart is in receiving the penitent.
And He repents of the evil. When a man repents, there is a change of will, but when God repents He wills a change. The evil threatened for sin is turned aside. This is the encouragement penitent sinners have. God revealed in Christ is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth Him of the evil. If we desire repentance, let us not be looking to ourselves but to the revelation He has given of Himself, and let us plead for mercy for His name’s sake. That is a very prevailing argument.
3. Encouragement in the hope this revelation holds out to sinners. “Who knoweth if He will return and repent?” We often read expressions such as “Who knoweth?”, “It may be”, “Who can tell?” They seem like straws, but how often such expressions have been used by God to keep poor sinners’ heads above water. He has revealed Himself as a God of mercy, and who can tell if He will have mercy on me? That is often where hope begins and where hope is restored. Let us not despise that hope, however feeble it is. Yet it discourages presumption. We cannot come as though we have a right, and yet there is this hope – the hope that the Lord will leave a blessing behind Him.
Joel mentions a particular blessing here – a meat offering and a drink offering. The previous chapter mentions how the crops were destroyed. These offerings of flour and wine were offered to express how they were to be used for the glory of God and how the people were dependent on Him. But if there were no crops, there could be no meat or drink offering.
But this hope is that God would bless us in such a way that we would be able to give Him the glory and honour that is due to His name. We can only give Him what He gives us. But glorifying God is in response to the blessing He gives us. The response of grace is devotion to the glory of God, presenting ourselves as a sacrifice. This hope is a great encouragement to a penitent sinner, even a feeble hope. Hope is a great encourager of repentance. “We know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him . . . And every man that hath this hope in him, purifieth himself even as He is pure.” We are looking forward in providence to remembering Christ’s death. What a good thing it would be if we would come in this state of renewed penitence! Not that penitence deserves a blessing, but this is what God has enjoined. The more humble we are, the lower we lie at the footstool of mercy and the more likely that we get a blessing. There is a luxury in lying low at the footstool of a sin-pardoning God. “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.”
1A hearer’s notes of the sermon preached on the Thursday morning of the Glasgow communion season in April 2009.
The mercy of God should ever be both the foundation of our hopes and the fountain of our joy in everything wherein we have to do with Him.
Hypocrisy is the high road to apostasy.
Matthew Henry