“Just wait until your father gets home!” Is this a good thing or a bad thing? By and large, the connotation sounds more ominous. The phrase generally makes us think that we are in big, big trouble and that the consequences of our actions will be made real when dad gets home. Granted, the phrase can be the reminder to wait for something good. “We’re all going out for pizza tonight!” “When? Is it time to go?” “Just wait until your father gets home.” Yet by and large the scary meaning is more readily familiar. There’s a phrase throughout Scripture that we find discussed several times in the Minor Prophets and here in the book of Joel. “The Day of the Lord” generally evokes a sense of fear due to impending judgment and punishment. In Joel and elsewhere, it sounds like inevitable doom. Joel 2:31 even calls it “the great and dreadful day of the Lord.” The dreadful and rightfully frightening descriptions can paint our understanding of “the Day of the Lord” when it is used in the New Testament. The New Testament writers often assume we’re better versed in the Old Testament prophets than we actually are. The Day of the Lord is something to take really seriously, for it is consequential. Yet the catch is that the Day of the Lord is also good news to the Christian! Even when Peter quotes Joel 2 in his Pentecost sermon in Acts 2 he’s saying, “The good part is here! The Spirit is being poured out on us!” Flip back to Joel 1 and see the imagery that the prophet gives of the horrible locust incident. The repetition is there, that the swarm of locusts, the great locusts, the young locusts, the other locusts have eaten everything away. There was no escape from the locusts. No hiding. No way out. Israel was starved in famine, not from drought, but because the locusts ate everything. Where do you turn? The Prophets like Joel and others that we will cover this summer would say when the day of the Lord comes, there’s nowhere to hide and nowhere else to turn. We face God. How does that feel? It’s not a “chummy” moment of the Jesus who is cool with anything and everything we do (the prophets are a useful correction to that mindset in our day!). Nor is it absolute hopelessness. In Joel and others, the hope in facing the day of the Lord is a posture of heart that is repentant and fully desiring to align with God. The day of the Lord is something to treat with fearful reverence, but not terror. We are to draw near to God, because we can only face the day of the Lord if we are with the Lord. So “rend your hearts and not your garments” for the Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. (Joel 2:13) And in Christ we are promised that what we lost to the locust years will be restored (Joel 2:25). The “day of the Lord” sounds rather promising if we are with our Lord Jesus Christ. But we need to do the hard work of the heart work to be prepared, no other strength will avail us other than Christ’s. - Pastor Steven