A Nation in a Drunken Stupor

Joel 1:5-14

I’ve never been a drunkard, but I have in my youth and early adult years overindulged in adult beverages and found myself in an intoxicated stupor.  Not a fun thing, some people get very mean and others are less intimidated and are told later the foolish things they did.  As an adult, I’ve seen the results of alcohol on families, marriages, and careers and it often leaves a mess behind.  Early in my 3M career one of our supervisors who was hooked on alcohol found himself one morning in a ditch miles from home, and he had no recall of how he got there when he got there, or how long he had been there.  But that morning he took inventory, he loved his wife, and he had five daughters he was crazy about a good job, and it was all on the line because of the control that alcohol had on his life.  My friend made a decision that morning to never have another drink, and with God’s help to my knowledge he never has; the price of a drink was just too costly.

Joel is talking to a nation of drinkers, or as he states drunkards; for something terrible has taken place but in a drunken stupor they are clueless, that is until the wine is no longer.  Now it is time to face up to the devastation many a person has encountered waking from their stupor, and many a nation, my prayer is that the USA will soon awaken.  The grapevines and figs were two big crops and now war and the swarming locust have done great harm to their economy.  The people of Judah are called to a time of repentance, and they put on sackcloth, now sackcloth is a rough and uncomfortable fabric that irritated the skin, according to my HCSB Bible on page1483.  But sackcloth was their form of acknowledging they were in trouble, and only God could fix the problem, in the USA many in and outside of the church are still looking to government, and to men and women with no integrity to solve our problems.

As one reads verses 10-12 there is little to hope, all the natural resources are gone, the fields are destroyed, the new wine is gone, the olive oil has failed, and the wheat and barley have perished.  In fact, the grapevine is dead or dying, the fig tree also, and so are the date palms, the apples, and the pomegranate, all they looked to for food and income is gone.  The options of the future look grim, and whom do they run to, not the government, not men, but the only one who has the ability to fix the mess, and in the USA we are still in our drunken stupor looking to politicians.

Verse 13, 14, “Put on sackcloth and lament, O priests; wail, O ministers of the altar.  Go in; pass the night in sackcloth, O ministers of my God!  Because grain offering and drink offering are withheld from the house of your God.

Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly.  Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.”  The priest and the minister were to lead by example, and then go and gather the elders and the inhabitants to a solemn assembly in an expression of corporate confession before God.

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice