There comes a time of emergency in a land when God’s hotline is open not only to holy priests but also to others of the opposite kind, as in Nineveh. When Nineveh’s king called a sudden national fast at Prophet Jonah’s threatening ultimatum of disaster, it was not exclusive to holy priests. By the way, there was none in that Gentile land of total sinners.
In Joel 1:5, the prophet makes such a crucial call to national prayers after consecutive swarms of curious locusts (cankerworms and caterpillars) had invaded the land, wasting much harvest and triggering economic disaster.
Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth (Joel 1:5).
The call in that verse was specific first to drunkards, and then to drinkers. Those are different categories of relation to drinks. The word translated “drunkards” is the Hebrew shikkowr, which describes intoxication, or those who are in that state as a habit. Those are not usually the ones we expect in the front rows of our clean churches, let alone allow them to desecrate our strategic prayers at such crucial times as a national prayer convocation in the face of divine judgment. Yet Joel calls them also to join the national fast to seek God’s reprieve from the economic devastation that had come upon the land through the invasions of the locusts. Didn’t Joel ever read his Bible, that God does not hear the prayers of a sinner? (John 9:31). I thought he would have stopped at calling the priests (Joel 1:13; 2:17).
The second category that the prophet calls to the emergency prayers are the more noble social class of ‘drinkers,’ who relate with wine as recreation, as at a banquet, or who merely imbibe it for its pleasures. The Hebrew word translated “drinkers” is shathah.
If I called such a fast, I would be expecting holy priests and some of the eminent ‘drinkers’ in the land, not ‘drunkards.’ But Joel says, to the extent that the locust invasion had touched everyone, drunkards and drinkers, the time had come for everyone to seek the Lord. He probably recalled the hasty prayer meeting in the ship from which Jonah had escaped to the mission in Nineveh (Jonah 1:5-6).
If the Prophet Joel were in our day, the ecclesiastical media might have rubbished him for calling such open ‘ecumenical’ prayers, and the social media might have nailed him for so ‘unscientifically’ proposing a ‘religious’ solution to a ‘plain’ ecological problem demanding rigorous modes of pest control. Do political and economic ‘invasions’ and disasters sometimes have their root in the spiritual decay among a people? By his prescriptions, Prophet Joel seems to think so. I won’t debate the point. Sometimes prophets see things that escape natural radars.
From The Preacher’s diary,
January 23, 2022.
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