Joel 2:1-3 - Homiletics

The purposes for which a trumpet was blown and an alarm sounded.

I. THE PARTICULAR PURPOSE ON THIS OCCASION .

II. THE PLACE WHERE THE WARNING WAS GIVEN .

III. THE PRIESTS WHO WERE TO SOUND THE ALARM . We are informed in Numbers 10:8 that it was the "sons of Aaron, the priests," that were to blow with the trumpets, either in sounding the alarm of war, or convening an assembly of the people, or for the journeying of the camps. Similar is the duty of the ministers of religion.

IV. THE PERSONS TO WHOM THE WARNING IS ADDRESSED . They are all the inhabitants of the land without exception, for all more or less add their quota to the national sin, share consequently in the national danger.

V. THE PECULIARITIES OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES SO VIVIDLY PICTURED BY THE PROPHET . While the peculiar circumstances of the visitation which the prophet portrays intensify the approaching disaster, they at the same time emphasize his preceding exhortation. In this picture of the prophet we have

The description represents that day as a day of darkness and, by way of gradation, of gloominess, that is, of still greater darkness; as a day of clouds and of densely dark clouds; as the morning gray, the darkest hour between midnight and dawn, spread upon the mountains. The locust-people that made it so were great in number and great in strength, unequalled in the past and unparalleled in the future, through all the rolling years of many generations. The destruction was terrible in the extreme, as if a devouring fire went before them and a burning flame followed them. The havoc they made reduced a garden to a desert, and Eden itself to a wilderness; in a word, it was unescapable.