The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh
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Scripture: Joel 1–3 (with Acts 2:14–21 and Romans 10:13)
Before this session, read the short book of Joel in full, all three chapters, and watch how a plague of insects swells, in the prophet’s hands, into the great and terrible day of the LORD. Then read Acts 2:14–21, where Peter stands up at Pentecost and declares, “this is what was spoken about through the prophet Joel,” and Romans 10:13, where Paul makes Joel’s promise the open door of the gospel to all who call. Keep your Bible open, and ask: how does the LORD turn a ruined harvest into a window onto the last days, and onto the gift of His Spirit?
After all of this I will pour out my Spirit on all kinds of people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy.
(Joel 2:28)
When the Locusts Came
Joel begins not with a vision or a genealogy but with a catastrophe so total that the prophet can hardly find words large enough for it. What the gazam-locust left the ‘arbeh-locust consumed, what the ‘arbeh-locust left the yeleq-locust consumed, and what the yeleq-locust left the hasil-locust consumed! (1:4). Four waves of devouring insects, named one after another, each finishing what the last had begun, until there is nothing green left in the land. Anyone who has seen footage of a true locust swarm knows the horror of it: a living cloud that settles on a region and lifts off a few hours later having eaten the standing crop, the leaves off the trees, the bark, the very harvest out of the people’s mouths. Joel has lived through such a day, and he summons the whole nation to mourn it.
He calls them by groups, and the calling is almost liturgical in its rhythm. The drunkards are to wake and weep, because the vineyards are stripped and the sweet wine has been taken from them (1:5). The farmers are to be distressed and the vinedressers to wail, because the wheat and the barley are gone and the harvest of the field has perished (1:11). And the priests, the ministers of the altar, are to put on sackcloth and lament through the night, because no one brings grain offerings or drink offerings to the temple of your God anymore (1:13). That last loss is the one Joel feels most keenly. It is bad enough that the people are hungry; worse, to him, is that the devastation has reached all the way to the altar, so that the daily offerings to the LORD have simply stopped. When the locust has eaten everything, even the worship of God falls silent for lack of grain to bring.
We may be tempted to hurry past a chapter about agricultural disaster as something remote from us, but Joel will not let us. For he reads the plague not as a random misfortune of weather and biology, but as a word from God: a summons, a wake-up call delivered on six million wings. Has anything like this ever happened in your whole life or in the lifetime of your ancestors? he asks (1:2). And his answer is that such a thing is not merely a thing to survive and rebuild after, but a thing to learn from, a smaller judgment sent to wake a sleeping people before a far greater one arrives. The locusts are a sermon. And the text of the sermon is the phrase that now begins to sound, and will sound through the whole book like a tolling bell.
The Day of the LORD Is Near
How awful that day will be! For the day of the LORD is near; it will come as destruction from the Divine Destroyer (1:15). Here it is, the great phrase that ties the whole Book of the Twelve together, sounding now at full volume. (The NET’s Divine Destroyer catches a Hebrew wordplay: destruction, shod, comes from Shaddai, the Almighty.) We met the phrase in the introduction to this volume: yom YHWH, the LORD’s own Day, the day of His decisive coming, double-edged, terror for the impenitent and salvation for the remnant, and working always on two horizons at once. Joel is the prophet of the day of the LORD above all the others, and in his hands the locust plague becomes a living parable of that Day. What the locusts did to the fields, the Day will do to the proud and secure: strip them bare, leave them nothing to stand on.
In chapter two the imagery swells from insects to an army, and the line between the two blurs on purpose. It will be a day of dreadful darkness, a day of foreboding storm clouds, like blackness spread over the mountains. It is a huge and powerful army … there has never been anything like it ever before (2:2). The locust swarm and the invading army become a single advancing terror, the LORD’s own army marching at His word, before which the earth quakes and the sky reverberates and the sun and moon grow dark (2:10). And Joel poses the question the whole Day forces upon every hearer: Yes, the day of the LORD is awesome and very terrifying—who can survive it? (2:11). Who can stand when that Day dawns? Who can face the coming of God Himself in judgment? The question hangs in the air, and on its honest answer everything depends, for no one can survive it on his own, no one can stand, no flesh can endure the unshielded coming of the holy God.
We should hold both horizons of that Day before us, for Joel sees them folded together the way the prophets always do. The locust day was a real day of the LORD, a true visitation within history, a judgment the people lived through and rebuilt after. The fall of empires, the great upheavals of the ages, are days of the LORD too, real reckonings in time. But behind and beyond them all rises the last and greatest Day, the final visitation when the Lord comes to judge the living and the dead; and every smaller Day is a rehearsal of it, a true scale model of the reckoning at the end. This is why Joel can slide so easily from a plague of insects to the darkening of the sun and the shaking of the heavens: he is looking at the near hill and the far mountain at once. And it means his question falls on us as surely as on his hearers: the great Day is still coming, and who can survive it? is ours to answer.
This is the law doing its proper and necessary work, and we must let it do that work before we hurry to comfort. The day of the LORD is not a bogey to be explained away; it is the announcement that God will not leave the world forever as it is, that there is a reckoning, that the holy God is coming and the unholy cannot survive His coming. Joel makes us feel the terror of it precisely so that the mercy, when it comes, will be heard as mercy and not as our due. A gospel offered to people who have never trembled at the Day is a cure offered to those who do not know they are sick. So Joel lets the army advance and the darkness fall and the question stand: who can survive it? And then, into that terror, the LORD Himself speaks a word no one in the path of that army could have expected.
Tear Your Hearts, Not Just Your Garments
“Yet even now,” the LORD says, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning. Tear your hearts, not just your garments!” Return to the LORD your God (2:12–13). The army is advancing, the Day is near, the question who can survive it? still rings, and the answer the LORD gives is not flee but return. Shuv: come back to Me. The door of escape from the day of the LORD is not a bunker but a homecoming. And the turning He asks is no mere performance. In that culture a man tore his clothes as a public sign of grief and repentance, and it was easy enough to rip a robe while leaving the heart whole. The LORD cuts straight through the gesture. The Hebrew says it bluntly, tear your hearts and not your garments; tear open the heart itself; let the contrition be inward and real, not a show staged for the neighbors. He has never been impressed by torn cloth over an untorn heart.
But notice with great care the reason the LORD gives for turning, because everything in the right ordering of repentance hangs on it. He does not say, return, so that I may become gracious to you. He says, Return to the LORD your God, for he is merciful and compassionate, slow to anger and boundless in loyal love, often relenting from calamitous punishment (2:13). The motive for repentance is not to make God kind; it is that God is already kind. Joel reaches here for the oldest confession of God’s character in all of Scripture, the words the LORD spoke to Moses on the mountain, and he sets that gracious character forward as the very ground of the call to return. Boundless in loyal love is hesed again, the steadfast covenant love we met all through Hosea. We do not tear our hearts in order to earn a mercy that is uncertain; we tear them because the God we are turning to has already revealed Himself as overflowing with mercy. The kindness of God, Paul would later write, is the thing that leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4). Return, Joel says, because He is the kind of God worth returning to.
It is worth lingering on the words Joel reaches for, because they are the most precious self-description God ever gave. When Moses asked to see the glory of the LORD, what God showed him was not raw power or blinding light but a character, proclaimed aloud: The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness, keeping loyal love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin (Exodus 34:6–7). That proclamation became the heartbeat of Israel’s confession, echoed again and again across the Old Testament, and Joel stakes the whole call to repentance upon it. The glory of God, it turns out, is chiefly His mercy. So when Joel says return … for he is merciful and compassionate, he is not offering a hopeful guess about how God might react; he is appealing to the very name God spoke over Moses on the mountain. We turn toward a God whose deepest glory is His readiness to forgive.
This is the difference between two repentances that can look identical from the outside. One turns to God in terror, trying to appease a deity it is not sure will relent, hoping its tears might tip the scales; that repentance is finally a work, a bargain, a morning cloud. The other turns to God because it has heard that He is merciful and compassionate, and casts itself on that revealed kindness with empty hands; and that repentance, contrition joined to faith, is the work of God’s word in the heart. Joel calls for the second. Who knows? Perhaps he will be compassionate and grant a reprieve, and leave blessing in his wake, he adds (2:14), not as a despairing maybe, but as the humble hope of a heart that knows it deserves nothing and has heard that God gives anyway. Blow the trumpet, he cries; gather the people, the elders, the nursing infants, even the bride and groom from their chamber; let the priests weep between the vestibule and the altar and plead, Have pity, O LORD, on your people (2:15–17). When the Day is near, the gathered, heart-torn, mercy-pleading congregation is the safest place on earth.
I Will Make Up for the Years
And the LORD answers. The whole book turns on a single verse of response: Then the LORD became zealous for his land; he had compassion on his people (2:18). The God who sent the locusts and marshaled the army now turns, at the cry of His people, to zeal for them and compassion toward them. He promises to drive the invader away, to send again the grain and the fresh wine and the olive oil, to make the pastures green and the trees bear and the vats overflow. Citizens of Zion, rejoice! Be glad because of what the LORD your God has done! (2:23). The mourning of chapter one is answered, point for point, with rejoicing.
At the center of the promise stands one of the most tender lines in all the prophets: I will make up for the years that the ‘arbeh-locust consumed your crops (2:25). The Hebrew verb is the language of repayment, of making whole what was lost; older translations rendered it restore. Sit with that. It is not merely that the LORD will end the plague and let the people start over from scratch; He will make up for the years, give back what was devoured, redeem the wasted seasons, make good the ruined harvests as though they had never been lost. There is no human power that can do this. We cannot get back a wasted year; time runs only one way, and what the locust eats is gone. But God can. He can take the squandered, locust-eaten years of a life (the years lost to sin, to addiction, to folly, to sheer wandering) and so weave them into His purpose that even the wasted time is redeemed and made to serve. This is the gospel’s astonishing economy: the LORD does not merely forgive the ruin, He makes up for the years the ruin cost. No believer’s past is finally wasted in the hands of a God who restores what the locust ate.
Every congregation has people who need that promise the way they need air. The man who gave his best years to the bottle and woke at sixty to the wreckage; the woman who spent two decades chasing what the world swore would satisfy and has only locust-eaten fields to show for it; the believer haunted by wasted Sundays, squandered gifts, relationships ruined past repair. To all of them Joel’s God says: I will make up for the years. He does not promise it will be as though the locusts never came, for the scars are real, but He promises that not even the wasted seasons will be finally lost, that He can take the ruined years and fold them into a story of grace so that even they come to serve His purpose. And the last and fullest restoration waits at the resurrection, when these locust-eaten bodies are raised imperishable and every lost year is swallowed up in a life that has no end. The God who restores the years has all eternity in which to do it.
And the promise rises to a refrain that is the true end of all God’s restoring: You will have plenty to eat, and your hunger will be fully satisfied; you will praise the name of the LORD your God, who has acted wondrously in your behalf. My people will never again be put to shame. You will be convinced that I am in the midst of Israel. I am the LORD your God; there is no other. My people will never again be put to shame (2:26–27). Twice over, my people will never again be put to shame. The deepest restoration is not the full barn but the restored relationship: to know that the LORD is in the midst of His people, that He is their God and there is no other, and that they will never again be put to shame. The locust took the harvest; sin takes our confidence to stand before God. And the LORD promises to give both back: the harvest, and, far more, a people who will never be ashamed, because their God is in the midst of them.
I Will Pour Out My Spirit
And now Joel’s prophecy lifts off the ground of his own century altogether and reaches forward to the morning that would change the world. After all of this I will pour out my Spirit on all kinds of people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your elderly will have revelatory dreams; your young men will see prophetic visions. Even on male and female servants I will pour out my Spirit in those days (2:28–29). The Hebrew says on all flesh; the NET’s all kinds of people draws out what Joel goes on to spell out, and Peter at Pentecost renders it on all people (Acts 2:17). In the old covenant the Spirit of God came upon particular people for particular tasks: a Moses, a David, a prophet here and a judge there, anointed for an office. But Joel sees a day when the Spirit will be poured out upon all flesh, like water flooding a parched field, not trickled onto a chosen few but poured out on the whole people of God.
There had been a moment, long before, when this very hope flickered. Out in the wilderness, when the burden of leading the people grew too heavy for Moses and the Spirit rested on seventy elders so that they prophesied, a young man ran to report that two others were prophesying back in the camp; and when Joshua urged Moses to stop them, Moses answered with a longing that reached centuries past himself: I wish that all the LORD’s people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them! (Numbers 11:29). Moses wished it; Joel saw it promised; Pentecost delivered it. What had been the rare endowment of the few (the Spirit upon a Moses, an elder, a prophet) became in the last days the common birthright of the whole people of God. Moses’ wistful I wish is answered in every believer who has received the Spirit of Christ. The thing the greatest prophet of the old covenant could only wish for, the least Christian now possesses.
And mark whom the outpouring reaches, because Joel is careful to name them: sons and daughters, the elderly and the young men, and, most strikingly in that world, the male and female servants, the lowest in the household, the ones with no standing. The Spirit will fall on all of them alike. The gift will not be the private possession of a priestly elite or a prophetic guild; it will be the common inheritance of every believer, the slave girl as much as the elder, the young as much as the old. This is part of what the church has called the priesthood of all believers: in Christ every baptized Christian has the Spirit, knows the Lord, and stands as God’s own. We must be careful here not to hear what Joel does not say: he is not promising that every believer will receive private visions to steer his life, or that each of us is now a freelance prophet with fresh revelations. The point is not a flood of new messages but the gift of the one Spirit to the whole people, the Spirit who takes the finished word of God and presses it home to every heart, high and low alike.
And here a peculiarly Lutheran caution earns its keep, for there have always been those who hear I will pour out my Spirit and go looking for the Spirit apart from the word: in raw feeling, in ecstatic experience, in an inner voice that bypasses the Scriptures and the preached gospel. Luther fought this error all his life (see SA III.8) and gave its devotees a blunt name, the enthusiasts; in Against the Heavenly Prophets he mocked one of them as having swallowed the Holy Spirit feathers and all. But notice how the promise was actually fulfilled. When the Spirit fell at Pentecost, He did not produce a roomful of people lost in private raptures; He produced Peter, standing up to preach the crucified and risen Lord Jesus from the open Scriptures, so that about three thousand heard the word, were pierced to the heart, and were baptized. The Spirit poured out on all flesh comes clothed in the word and the water and the bread and the cup; He works through the gospel preached and the sacraments administered, not around them (AC V). We do not go hunting the Spirit in the weather of our own hearts. We find Him where He has promised to be: in the means of grace, pressing Christ upon us.
For that is precisely what Peter said the outpouring proved. On the day of Pentecost, when the violent wind and the tongues of fire came and the bystanders mocked the disciples as drunk, Peter stood up and answered the charge with Joel: But this is what was spoken about through the prophet Joel: “And in the last days it will be,” God says, “that I will pour out my Spirit on all people” (Acts 2:16–17). This is what was spoken. The age Joel foresaw had dawned; the last days had begun; and the proof was that the exalted Lord Jesus, raised and ascended, had received the promised Spirit from the Father and poured Him out upon His people (Acts 2:33). Pentecost is the public sign that Christ reigns. The Spirit on all flesh is the gift of the ascended King, and every Christian who believes the gospel has received Him.
Everyone Who Calls
Joel’s vision of that Day carries cosmic signs with it: I will produce portents both in the sky and on the earth … The sunlight will be turned to darkness and the moon to the color of blood, before the day of the LORD comes (2:30–31). These are the signs of the Day’s two horizons folded together. They may include the darkness that fell over the land at the cross (the text does not require that identification, but it fits the pattern Peter announces), and they surely mark the upheavals that attend the whole age between the advents and the final shaking of the heavens at the end. The point of the signs is not to fuel speculation about dates but to mark the seriousness of the hour: the great and terrible Day is real, and it is coming. And then, set against all that terror, comes the promise that is the open door of the entire gospel.
It will so happen that everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be delivered (2:32). After the locusts, after the army, after the darkened sun and the question who can survive it?, here is the answer, and it could not be simpler or wider. Not everyone who is worthy, not everyone who has kept the law, not everyone who belongs to the right nation, but everyone who calls on the name of the LORD. The Day that no one can survive turns out to have a single open door, and it is wide enough for anyone who will simply call out to God for rescue. The trembling sinner who has nothing to bring but his cry is delivered, on the spot, by calling on the name of the LORD.
And the everyone is wider than Joel’s first hearers could have dreamed, for it leaps clean over the wall between Israel and the nations. At Pentecost the Spirit fell and the disciples spoke in the languages of every land under heaven, so that Parthians and Medes and Elamites and visitors from Rome each heard about the great deeds of God in their own language, a deliberate sign that the gospel was bursting the bounds of one nation and one language to go out to all. Paul makes the point explicit: For there is no distinction between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all, who richly blesses all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Romans 10:12–13). The door is not cracked open for a favored few; it is flung wide for all flesh, exactly as the Spirit was poured out on all flesh. No one is shut out of Joel’s everyone except the one who will not call.
And the New Testament does something with this verse that we must not miss, for it touches the very deity of Christ. When Paul takes up Joel’s promise in Romans, he writes, For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Romans 10:13), and the Lord he means is unmistakably the Lord Jesus, on whom he has just said we must call, confessing Him as Lord and believing God raised Him from the dead (10:9). Joel said call on the name of the LORD, and the name was YHWH, the unspeakable covenant name of God Himself. Paul reads it of the Lord Jesus without a moment’s hesitation, because to call on the Lord Jesus is to call on YHWH, for the Lord Jesus is YHWH in the flesh, the eternal Son who shares the one divine name and nature with the Father. The apostle would never have applied the sacred Name to a creature. The open door of Joel’s gospel is the name of the Lord Jesus, and to cry to Him for rescue is to call on the very God who poured out His Spirit and will judge the world. Everyone who calls on that name, Jew or Gentile, slave or free, old or young, will be delivered.
The Valley of Decision
The last chapter turns to the other edge of the Day: the judgment of the nations that have trampled the people of God. The LORD declares that He will gather all the nations down into a valley He names Jehoshaphat, which means the LORD judges, and there He will sit in judgment over them for what they have done to His inheritance (3:1–2, 12). Joel calls it by another name too: Crowds, great crowds are in the valley of decision, for the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision! (3:14). It is the great assize, the final reckoning, when the long patience of God toward the proud and the cruel comes at last to its end and the Judge takes His seat.
We should handle that phrase valley of decision with care, because our ears, trained by a certain kind of preaching, may hear it as the place where sinners decide for God, the great altar call of history. But that is not Joel’s meaning. The Hebrew pictures the sharp threshing sledge that cuts and separates, and the decision in view is God’s, not man’s: it is the valley where the LORD renders His decisive verdict, where He sits to judge and separates the nations as a farmer separates the wheat from the chaff. The crowds are not gathered there to make up their minds; they are gathered to hear His. This matters, because the gospel never rests our salvation on the strength of our own deciding. The Day belongs to the LORD; the verdict is His; and our only safety on it is not the firmness of a choice we once made but the name we have called upon, the name of the One who decided, before the foundation of the world, to be our refuge.
But for His own people the very same Day is not terror but shelter. In the middle of the judgment of the nations the LORD turns and says, The LORD roars from Zion; from Jerusalem his voice bellows out. The heavens and the earth shake. But the LORD is a refuge for his people; he is a stronghold for the citizens of Israel (3:16). There is the double edge of the Day in a single verse: the same roar that terrifies the nations is the refuge of His people; the same shaking that topples the proud is the safety of those who have called on His name. The Day that no one can survive is, for the one hidden in the LORD, the day his Refuge and Stronghold comes to gather him home. Judgment and refuge are not two Days but one, divided only by whether a man has called on the name of the LORD.
And Joel ends where the whole Bible ends, with a vision of restored and overflowing life. On that day the mountains will drip with sweet wine, and the hills will flow with milk … A spring will flow out from the temple of the LORD (3:18). The land that the locust had stripped to bare dirt now runs with wine and milk, and a spring flows out from the very house of God to water it all. Read canonically, that spring fittingly directs us forward. We will meet a fountain again before this volume is done, when Zechariah sees a fountain opened up … to cleanse them from sin and impurity (Zechariah 13:1): the cleansing opened by the death of Christ, which Holy Baptism, the washing God Himself appointed, has delivered to us personally. And at the end of the Scriptures John sees the river of the water of life … pouring out from the throne of God and of the Lamb (Revelation 22:1). Joel’s last word is that the LORD dwells in Zion with His people forever. The book that opened with a devoured land closes with a spring that never runs dry.
Gathering the Threads
Joel takes a single national disaster, a plague of locusts that ate a harvest, and through it teaches the whole Church to read every smaller judgment as a herald of the great Day, and the great Day itself as the hinge of all history. The day of the LORD is near; it is awesome and very terrifying; and no one can survive it on his own. That is the law, and Joel will not let us evade it. But into the path of that advancing Day the LORD speaks His return to me, and grounds the call not in our terror but in His own revealed kindness: tear your hearts … for he is merciful and compassionate. To the people who return He promises to make up for the very years the locust ate, to dwell in their midst, and to leave them never again put to shame. And then He lifts the curtain on the age to come: His Spirit poured out on all flesh, on sons and daughters and servants alike, fulfilled at Pentecost when the risen Lord Jesus sent the Spirit through the preached word; and the door of the Day thrown wide: everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be delivered.
And all of it is the things concerning Himself. The Spirit Joel saw poured out is the Spirit of the ascended Christ, the gift of Pentecost, the seal of the last days. The name on which everyone who calls is delivered is, Paul tells us plainly, the name of the Lord Jesus, who is YHWH come in the flesh, so that the cosmic Day no one can survive has a single open door, and the door is a Person, and the Person is the One we call Lord. The fountain Zechariah will see is the cleansing opened for our sin by Christ’s death, and it was delivered to us in our Baptism. Joel hands the trembling sinner the only thing that can save him on the great and terrible Day, and it costs nothing and is offered to everyone: call on the name of the LORD, and you will be delivered. The locusts have eaten much; but the LORD makes up for the years, pours out His Spirit, and keeps every soul that calls upon Him.
For Discussion
These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.
Joel reads a plague of locusts not as random misfortune but as a summons, a smaller judgment sent to wake a sleeping people before a greater one (1:2–15). How does Joel teach us to read hard providences? What is the danger of treating such things as mere bad luck with no word from God in them?
Yes, the day of the LORD is awesome and very terrifying—who can survive it? (2:11). Why must the law be allowed to do this work, to make us feel that no one can stand, before the gospel can be heard as gospel? What happens to grace when it is offered to people who have never trembled at the Day?
Tear your hearts, not just your garments! Return to the LORD your God, for he is merciful and compassionate (2:12–13). Why does it matter so much that we turn to God because He is already gracious, rather than turning in order to make Him gracious? How do these two repentances, identical from the outside, differ at the root?
I will make up for the years that the ‘arbeh-locust consumed your crops (2:25). What does it mean that God makes up for wasted years, not merely forgives them? Where do we most need to hear that no past is finally wasted in the hands of the God who restores what the locust ate?
Joel promises the Spirit poured out on all kinds of people (literally, all flesh) (2:28), fulfilled at Pentecost not in private raptures but in Peter preaching Christ from the open Scriptures (Acts 2:16–17). How does this guard us against seeking the Spirit apart from the word? Why is it good news that the Spirit comes to us in the means of grace rather than in the weather of our own hearts?
Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be delivered (2:32), and Paul reads that name as the name of the Lord Jesus (Romans 10:13). What does it mean for the deity of Christ that the apostle applies the covenant Name to Him? How wide is the everyone, and who is shut out of it except those who will not call?
Looking Ahead
From Joel we turn to the herdsman of Tekoa. In the next session, “Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters,” we open Amos, a layman called from following the flock and tending sycamore figs to thunder against the comfortable injustice of the northern kingdom at the height of its prosperity. Amos saw clearly what a fat and religious society could not see about itself: that its busy worship and its trampling of the poor could not stand together before a holy God. And he gave us one of the great cries of the prophets: Justice must flow like torrents of water, righteous actions like a stream that never dries up (5:24). We will hear him circle the nations with his oracles of doom and then bring the circle down, shockingly, upon Israel herself; and we will learn from him that the justice and righteousness God seeks are the fruit of faith, never its substitute, and never a religion got up to cover a heart that despises mercy.
Before the next session, read Amos 1–6: the oracles against the surrounding nations that tighten, oracle by oracle, into a verdict on Israel herself, and the great call for justice to flow like torrents of water. Watch how Amos exposes a worship that is scrupulous about ritual and ruthless toward the poor. Ask what it means that the God who desires mercy and not sacrifice will not accept the songs of those who trample the needy.
Closing Prayer
Almighty and most merciful God, You are merciful and compassionate, slow to anger and boundless in loyal love, and You have taught us that the day of the LORD is awesome and very terrifying, and that no one can survive it on his own. We confess that we could not stand before Your coming for one moment on the strength of anything in ourselves. Tear our hearts, we pray, and not just our garments; turn us to You with all our heart; and let us turn not in terror but in trust, because You are the kind of God worth turning to.
We bless You that into the path of that terrible Day You set a single open door, and that everyone who calls on Your name will be delivered, and that the name on which we call is the name of Your Son, our Lord Jesus, raised and exalted, who has poured out Your Spirit upon all flesh. Make up to us, we pray, the years the locust has eaten; dwell in the midst of Your people; and let us never again be put to shame. Send Your Spirit to us still where You have promised to give Him, in Your word and at Your table, that He may press Christ upon our hearts and keep us calling on Your name until the great and terrible Day dawns as our hope and not our dread; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.