Ash Wednesday
Joel 2:12-19
2/18/26
Shuvu … shuvu. Return … return.
Those are the words that ring out in the first two verses of our text for Ash
Wednesday. The Hebrew verb shuv means literally “to turn back or return.” It is
a word that is commonly used by itself to express the need for repentance. The
image is that a person is going in a way that is not true to the will of God.
He is sinning and so needs to turn around; to turn away from sin.
Sin certainly includes thoughts,
acts, and deeds that break God’s law.
But God’s law is not merely some abstract set of rules. It is an
expression of God’s will and ordering of life. And so every sin is a sin
committed against God. Sin is the rejection of God. It is the individual saying to God: “You
don’t matter and I am going to do my own thing.”
This very personal nature of sin
comes out in our text tonight. God says in the first verse of our text, “Yet
even now return to me.” He adds, “Return to Yahweh your God.” Turning away from sin, means turning back to
God.
It’s not hard to understand why this
text from Joel was chosen as the Old Testament lesson for Ash Wednesday. We
hear, “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your
heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
and rend
your hearts and not your garments.”
God calls upon the people to repent.
He urges a repentance that is true and real – not something that is just a
matter of going through the motions. He calls upon the people to repent in a
way that goes to their very heart as they confess their sin against God and
turn back to him.
What was the people’s sin? We don’t
know. Joel never gives us any indication about what the problem was. But if you
have read the Old Testament, it’s not hard to guess. The recurring sin was the
worship of the false gods that were found among all of the surrounding
peoples. Yahweh had told Israel not to
intermarry with these other peoples because they would lead Israel away into the
worship of these false gods. But Israel did it anyway, and it produced the
exact result about which God had warned them.
It is no different for us. Of
course, we don’t go and offer animal sacrifices to false gods on the high
places established by paganism. But we offer sacrifices to our false gods. You
can see it in the ways we use what we really value – our time and money.
We lavish our time and money on our hobbies, our entertainment, our
recreation, and on that great and almighty god – our sports. When there is the
least inconvenience we think nothing of skipping the Divine Service on Sunday. And
of course, if there is something else scheduled on Sunday, there is little
doubt we will choose that instead.
We don’t take time during the week to read God’s word each day. We
ignore our vocation as parents to see that our children are learning the
Scriptures. Our offering in the support
of the Means of Grace does not reflect a true proportion of the blessings that
God gives to us. It pales in comparison to the ways we spend money on the
things we want to do. We are miserly toward God, because we have other gods
that we want to worship with our time and money.
While we are aren’t told exactly how the people had sinned, we know
how Yahweh’s judgment had come upon them. He had sent a terrible locust plague.
Joel says in the previous chapter, “What the cutting locust left, the
swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping
locust has eaten, and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust
has eaten.” Joel compares the locusts to an army that had advanced against the
land. He says that the results were devastating as he reports: “The fields are
destroyed, the ground mourns, because the grain is
destroyed, the wine dries up, the oil languishes.”
Joel describes this event as “the day of the Lord.” He said at the beginning of this chapter, “Blow
a trumpet in Zion; sound an alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the
inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming; it is
near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness!”
The locust plague was not some random natural disaster. Joel
declares that it is an act of judgment by God. But the prophet also tells us
that the locusts are God acting in a way that it meant to cause repentance.
This act of judgment was an act of law that confronted the people with the
consequences of their sin. It was meant
to turn the people away from sin and back to God. And so Joel begins our text
by saying, “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your
heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your
hearts and not your garments.”
God’s law continues to do the same thing to us. It confronts our
life and reveals our sin. Sometimes those sins have their own built in
consequences and punishments. God uses
those consequences to reveal how the things that violate his ordering for life
bring harm. He uses these things to
reveal that sin is damaging as he seeks to turn us away from sin and back to
God and his ways.
Tonight we begin the season of Lent. Lent is a season of
repentance. It is a time of the church year in which we confess the sin that is
present in our life. It is also a time that prompts us to examine how we are
living our lives and to test this against God’s word.
In our text, Joel calls upon the people to return. Yet in doing so,
he also provides the reason that they can return to God in confidence. He says, “Return to the Lord your
God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in
steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.”
This statement – this description of God – repeats over and over in
the Old Testament. Why should people repent and return to God? They should do
so because God is gracious and merciful. God gives us what we don’t deserve. He
wants to be merciful and caring towards us. He is patient because he
gives people time to repent. He is slow to anger – his first reaction is not
destructive judgement. He abounds in steadfast love. God is love, and he acts
in faithful lovingkindness toward us.
This is what God revealed about himself in the Old Testament. And
then in the fullness of time in his grace, mercy, and love God sent his Son
into the world in order to rescue us from sin. The season of Lent prepares us
to remember the culmination of the saving work that God carried out in Jesus
Christ. During these days of Lent we are
moving toward Holy Week. We are moving toward Good Friday.
In the prophet Isaiah, God revealed about his Servant:
“But he was pierced for our
transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the
chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have
turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity
of us all.”
The surprise of Jesus is that he
was both the Messiah who descended from King David, and the suffering Servant
who received God’s punishment against our sin. As the fulfillment of all of the
Old Testament, he was God working through his son – Israel. He was also God
working through his son – the Davidic king. Jesus’ death on the cross made
atonement for your sin. He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me” as he received the judgment that you deserved.
Holy Week ends in the darkness of
the sealed tomb where Jesus’ lifeless body was placed. But sundown on Saturday
is also the beginning of Easter. After winning forgiveness through Jesus’
death, God the Father then defeated death forever by raising Christ from the
dead. Through Adam sin and death entered into the world. But through Jesus
Christ, the second Adam, God began the resurrection life that will never end.
Now, as sinners we return to our
God in confidence. We do because in Jesus God has been gracious, merciful, and
loving. We approach him in the knowledge
that God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all so that we can
be the forgiven children of God who will enjoy eternal life with him.
Paul told the Colossians that you
have “been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with
him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from
the dead.” You have been baptized into Christ’s death, and so have forgiveness
for every sin you confess. But the crucified Lord is also the risen Lord.
Because you are in Christ, already now you share in his resurrection.
And this leads us to live
differently. Paul went on to say, “If then you have been raised with Christ,
seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right
hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on
earth.” The Spirit of Christ now prompts
us not only to confess sin and receive forgiveness, but also to make changes
that remove sin from our lives. We seek
to walk in the way of the Lord because it is God’s will by which we receive
blessing in our lives.
Shuvu … shuvu. Return … return. Tonight God calls us
to repentance through the words of Joel.
He leads us to see sin for what it is so that we can confess and return
to God. We do so because God is gracious, merciful, and loving. That is what he
has been in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for us. Now through
Christ’s Spirit we seek to live in God’s ways, for they are always best for us.
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