God’s Ardent Pursuit of Us
Ash Wednesday 2026
Joel calls on trumpets to sound an alarm on God’s holy mountain and for the people to tremble in terror “for the day of the Lord is coming, it is close at hand”.
This phrase “Day of the Lord” recurs all through prophetic Scripture to describe events when God appears in a powerful way to confront evil and save his people. As the prophets look back on their people’s history, they identify particularly striking manifestations of God as a “Day of the Lord”. They appeal to these memories of God’s faithfulness as evidence of hope that in the present as in the past, God will, once again, defeat evil and bring salvation.
Joel follows this prophetic trend of drawing on the past as he heralds a coming “Day of the Lord”. If you’re wondering why he calls on his people to tremble in terror even as God is on his way to save them, you are following. There is an incongruity at the very heart of his prophecy, and wrestling with this tension yields insights into God’s ardent desire for reconciliation with humanity, regardless of what we have done or left undone.
While our first reaction might be to dismiss passages that liken God to a cavalry charging his own people, stay with me as I unpack why I find assurance of God’s love and compassion here, and why I find in this prophecy such a fitting start to Lent.
Joel was among the later prophets who wrote after Israel’s return from Babylonian Exile, and he references a multitude of earlier prophets from Amos to Zephania. What sets him apart from these predecessors is that he never accuses Israel of any specific sin.
His focus is on announcing that God’s judgment is near, but he never says why. Perhaps he doesn’t name specifics because other prophets already had. Or perhaps he doesn’t identify transgressions because he is more interested in dwelling on God’s nature and what it might look like to begin healing our relationship with him, however ashamed or estranged we may feel. In any case, the lack of specificity allows for a broad range of applications, including in our time.
The book is short—a mere three chapters—comprising poems that are powerful, puzzling, and rooted in earlier Scripture. Joel turns to Exodus and the prophets to make sense of the tragedies of his day, and in reflecting on God’s long history of faithfulness, he finds hope.
The first two chapters feature parallel poems. In the first, a swarm of locust has devastated Israel, recalling a long-ago “Day of the Lord” directed against Egypt, when Moses sought to free his people from enslavement. The eighth plague brought grasshoppers that
“covered the surface of the whole land, so that the land was black, and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees… in all the land of Egypt” (Ex 10:15).
The difference is that in Joel’s time, God sends the locusts against his own people.
The second poem mirrors the first by prophesying a ‘Day of the Lord’ that is to come. What initially appears to be another wave of locusts on the horizon soon shifts through an array of cataclysmic images.
Joel begins,
The Day of the Lord will be
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and thick darkness!
Like blackness spread upon the mountains
a great and powerful army comes;
Poetry allows for nuances and layers of meaning that translations can obscure. Where we have “blackness upon the mountains”, the Hebrew has darkness at dawn’s early light. While surely daybreak is a form of darkness, it is a darkness whose hours are numbered. A darkness on the cusp of dissipating.
For Joel, this darkness represents an imminent invasion. The Hebrew word translated “army” can simply mean “people”. In verses omitted from our lesson, the impending danger is said to be “like war horses, as with the rumbling of chariots, like warriors, like armies, like soldiers” suggesting that we are in the realm of metaphor that might apply to any number of threats. All we know is that that a powerful force is encroaching, and this is no foreign aggressor, but rather God himself is at the helm of the charge against his own people.
Richard Dawkins, a scientist and public intellectual known for his irreverent critique of religious belief writes, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it,” and describes him as a vindictive, bloodthirsty, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Truth be told, I often hear from Episcopalians who find themselves somewhere in this same camp, intent to draw clear lines between they perceive as the wrathful God of the Old Testament versus the gentle and forgiving God of the New. I hear widespread discomfort with depictions of God that are too intense. Modern sensibilities prefer a tamer God.
But cherry-picking parts of Scripture that appeal to us while rejecting others runs a real risk of making God into our own image. When we limit God to what we can make sense of, we stop short of encountering him in manifestations that are unsettling, yet hold transformative potential.
When we come across Biblical depictions of God that don’t fit with our views of him, I urge you to dig in deeper rather than dismissing them out of hand. The Bible is an entire library written in very different settings across a stretch of about 1500 years, and we are wise to be wary about generalizations. In fact, we find in the OT internal critiques of earlier interpretations of God’s nature and will. In quickly dismissing aspects of the OT God, we are in danger both of anti-Semitism and of missing out on glimpses of his glory. Jesus continually interprets Hebrew Scripture to reveal God’s nature. If we are to grow in our knowledge and love of God, we might reconsider what we initially find foreign and jarring.
Joel sees God as sweeping in with power to save his people from self-destruction. The imagery is echoed in John Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person'd God.” For those of us who are not keen on the military metaphor, I would argue that the range of incongruous metaphors from locusts to darkness to cavalries suggests that the particular images are not essential to Joel’s message. What is crucial is the assertion that when we turn from God, he pursues us ardently, and he does not give up.
In Joel’s words,
“Yet even now, says the Lord,
return to me with all your heart”
“Yet even now” suggests even after all this time that you’ve turned your back, even after all that you have done that has grieved him, even now, he longs for connection. Joel emphasizes that this invitation to return is rooted in God’s graciousness and mercy.
Even as we feel overwhelmed by regrets and resist being seen as we truly are, God won’t let us be. Through his prophet he calls us surrender to him and to give up those things that are self-destructive and feed our illusions of self-sufficiency.
Today as we embark communally on a season of turning with fear and trembling to look candidly at our personal and societal transgressions, we pray for mercy as our defenses that hold God at bay crumble. And while the prospect of surveying ourselves is terrifying, take courage, beloved community, for the day of the Lord is near. We turn with Joel to Exodus and the prophets to make sense of the tragedies of our day, and in reflecting on God’s long history of faithfulness, we finds hope. Hope that God continues to counter evil and bring salvation.