Amanda Grace of Ark of Grace Ministries in a video, today, April the eighth, the day of a solar eclipse, pulled in almost every historical and contemporary event during this time to prove that God was bringing judgement on those Americans who don’t repent. Well, He just might! Including those who add words to Scripture when teaching others.
Grace used some texts from Joel to teach her message and as I listened to her reading Scripture, I was surprised. She was reading Joel chapter 1:5-6 and as she read verse 6, she read, “’For a pagan and hostile nation” has invaded my land. I couldn’t remember God telling Joel that a “pagan and hostile nation” was coming against Israel. I was certain that God’s description depicted locusts. The description speaks of those who strip the branches, who ruin the grain, destroy the wheat and the barley, they leap, they climb on the wall like solders, they bring darkness. All of this is a description of a horrible plague of locusts And God does name them in the first part of chapter one, and also when He turns with compassion to Israel:
Then I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust and the gnawing locust, My great army which I sent among you.
So, the message turns political. It is a pagan people coming across our Southern border she says. They are mostly men who are of a military age she states and they belong to dark groups. Well. Yes. Some. But many are desperate families. And they are probably not going to climb on our walls and climb through the windows as insects do.
And if God judges us it will not be because we have broken a national covenant with God, as Grace states. It will be because we have, first of all, rejected the offering, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, His work of redemption. We also are failing because of our eager reach for power and position—we are called to humbleness in our walk.
And then there is the many words of the prophets. For instance, in Amos, chapter two, God’s judgement comes because of idolatry, sexual sin, lack of care for the needy and because we “turn aside the way of the humble.”
But Joel does take a turn forward moving past locusts to those days when God will pour out His Spirit on all of His people—the days of Messiah, the Redeemer. “And it will come about that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered.” Whatever sin, whatever wrong, there stands the cross.
