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Devotional thoughts (Monday through Thursday mornings) from the pastor of Exeter Presbyterian Church in Exeter, NH // Sunday Worship 10:30am // 73 Winter Street

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Joel 3

There is a time beyond discipline. The discipline of the Lord is so important for us in this age of confusion. We so easily move off of the good pathway and turn from our God. Because He loves us, He calls us back to Himself. This frequently takes the form of some measure of disciplinary suffering. Our trials are not a sign that the Lord hates us. On the contrary, He disciplines those He loves. Yet there is a time beyond discipline coming, because there is an age beyond this age of confusion.

The final Day of the Lord will be a Valley of Jehoshaphat. This name means “Jehovah has judged.” It is the same as the Valley of Decision mentioned later. This is not a place of our decision, but of the Lord’s determinations in judgment. In that day, the nations shall be judged. Christ speaks of this in Matthew 25 as a separation of the sheep and the goats. The key point of evidence is what you did “to the least of these my brothers.” What is done to them is said to be done to Christ. This is just what the risen Lord says to Saul on the road to Damascus when He asks him, “Why do you persecute me?” Saul was persecuting the church, but this was an attack against the Lord. In the Old Testament context, an attack against Israel was an attack against her God. As this passage applies to us today, we need to make the covenantal translation that the New Testament authors make: The new Israel is the church. If people imprison the Lord’s children and sell them for their own pleasures, there is One who will make His decisions on these matters, and His day will be a day of life and death determinations.

If this is what “Israel” means in today’s use of this passage, what are we to understand about these other nations that are mentioned which were once enemies of the Lord’s people? They stand for the world outside of the covenant community of the church. God will bring judgment upon them. The case against them is clear. They have stolen from God’s people and have treated them like objects that could be sold. What they have done will come upon their own heads, for a final Day of Judgment will bring about a complete separation of the Lord’s Israel and her enemies.

This Day of the Lord will involve a call to war on the part of the enemies of the Lord. They will come forth in all their pride and power, but they will be coming to their own destruction. Their evil is great, and the Lord will judge them. Just as the Day of the Lord was near for Israel in the locust/army catastrophe that had come upon them in the days of Joel, the Day of the Lord will be near upon the whole earth when God comes in final judgment. The cosmic signs of the coming of Christ and the age of resurrection are to be a signal of both ultimate curse and ultimate blessing. What is our hope in that day? Our hope is in the Lord’s eternal decision for His people. That decision sent His Son forth to accomplish our redemption when He first came to atone for our sins. That same eternal decision assures us that He will always be a refuge for His people. The Lord is more than a crutch. A crutch is not enough for us. We need a solid mountain on which to stand.

This plan of God for the salvation of His beloved Israel through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ will bring great glory to His Name when what has been spoken by the prophets is fully accomplished at the return of the Savior. God dwells in the heavenly Zion, the holy mountain beyond this creation, the Jerusalem that is above. That Israel is growing day by day in this age of gathering, though we cannot really see it. Scoffers doubt its very existence, and all of us join in this doubting from time to time. But God’s electing decision does not ebb and flow based on our doubts. Whether we doubt or not, heaven is. The age of resurrection will be a place of the greatest provision and celebration as the stream of the presence of the Lord brings life everywhere. The Lord will dwell with us in His eternal Zion.

The New Testament tells us that it is in God that we live and move and have our being. We experience that now in the creation of which we are most aware. We have spent centuries understanding the biology, chemistry, astronomy, and physics of this creation. Yet God is bigger than this earth that cartographers traverse and record, and that astronauts have even gazed at from afar. When our bodies finish their years here and rest in a small plot of land, we yet have existence, and we are still in God, though not anywhere that could be located on a map. This need not mean that we go to a place with no physical reality.

Christ has physical reality. He was on earth in His resurrection body, and He still has that same body with visible wounds and the capability to eat. He sits at the right hand of the Father. Is it so hard for us to believe that such a place exists, of which it could be said for those who have gone to be with Him, in Him they live and move and have their being? Must we insist that the only possibility of physical and spiritual existence is in a place that we can find and measure?

When the Day of the Lord comes to this earth, there will be an end of one age and the beginning of a new eternal one. The Lord will come from that other place on the other end of Jacob’s ladder, together with myriad angels, and multitudes of human beings. The coming of this glorious team will overwhelm the current created order and, by the plan and power of God, there will be a new heavens and a new earth fit for a renewed population of immortal beings. On that day, it will still be the case, that in Him we will live and move and have our being. For the new Israel, the age of discipline will finally yield to the age of perfect delight.

posted by Pastor Magee @ 6:00 AM

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