A scroll from Joel: look forward!


The speaker over these 5 weeks has been me, Joel, a man who lived 3500 years ago in the land of Israel! I lived during a national crisis when locusts devoured our crops and affected everyone in the land.
And so there are some parallels with life in your day in the Huntingdon area living through Covid19 and the resulting financial crisis. I thought it would be good to share 5 lessons that we had to learn in our day that might be helpful in yours. I’ve summed them up as follows…

  1. Look around. Survey the damage. Take a long, hard look at what has happened.
  2. Look down. Mourn and weep and wail for the devastation that has come. Financial, emotional, even the toll on human life itself.
  3. Look up. Let this crisis make you think about the important things of life and death. May it point you back to God.
  4. Look out. Days of natural disasters can point us forward to the bigger day when God comes in judgement, when no-one who is unforgiven will be spared. So turn back to God through Jesus.

And today’s message, week 5 is this. Look Forward. Look forward to the good days that are to come.

God promised us that beyond the locust plague there would be a wonderful future for those who turn back to God. A day of renewal, a day of freedom, a day of victory.

And sure enough after the locusts, the crops grew back, and there was a wonderful agricultural restoration. But that was nothing compared to the wonderful spiritual restoration which came a few days after Jesus Christ rose from the dead and went up to heaven.

In fulfilment of promises in my book- Joel chapter 2, God poured out his Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, and there was a wonderful restoration of God’s people. People from all over the world found new life in Jesus Christ, something that you can enjoy today.

I’m sure that good times will come beyond the coronavirus. So look forward. You may need to get used to a new normal, and it won’t all be easy straight away. But as the Queen put it in her national broadcast: “We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again”. LOOK FORWARD.

But there will still be illness. There will still be death. There will still be difficulties in this world. But there is a wonderful new world that God is preparing. A wonderful new city of safety and security. God’s city. And it’s a certainty beyond death for all who put their trust in Jesus Christ. So heed the lessons of my book- you can read it in full in the Old Testament.

Look around (survey the damage), Look down (mourn and weep for the rebellion against God that has brought it on), Look up (reorient your lives to God and his son Jesus), Look out (because if you ignore Jesus Christ, it will be too late) and Look forward (once you have asked Jesus for rescue, you can look forward to the restoration that God will bring - partially in this life, and fully in the city of God where God himself will wipe away every tear from people’s eyes).