MenuReturning to the Lord
“Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” – Joel 2:13
During the season of Lent at Holy Cross, we use this verse from the prophet Joel between the Epistle reading and the Gospel reading to turn our attention to our Lord Jesus Christ.
The season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday as we receive the sign of the cross in ashes remembering two things. First, we remember that because of our sin, our mortal bodies will one day return to the dust and ashes from which we came. This reminds us to return to God in repentance of our sins.
Second, we remember that because of Baptism, God has incorporated us into Jesus’ suffering on the cross where our sins are forgiven, so one day we too will be raised from the dead, without sin, just like Christ. So we live in hope of this Easter promise of how we return to God “once and for all.
Very appropriately for the season of Lent, our Tuesday morning Bible study group is going to take up the three short chapters of Joel on March 19 and 26th. The prophet Joel preaches repentance to the kingdom of Judah some 800+ years before Christ, and through the prophet Joel God’s Word continues to call us to live lives of repentant contrition and faith in God’s mercy.
About the prophet Joel, Martin Luther wrote: “All the prophets have one and the same message, for this is their one aim: they are all looking toward the coming of Christ or to the coming kingdom of Christ… So every time the prophets announced something bad or something good, they intended one to look at the kingdom of Christ.”
What Luther means is that, when we hear of something bad, we Christians should run to our Lord Jesus for mercy. We do exactly this in the Kyrie during the Divine Service: “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” In doing so, we are asking both for forgiveness of our sins as well as deliverance from evil. (We do likewise in the fifth, sixth and seventh petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.)
And Luther also means that, when we hear of something good (like God’s promises), we are drawn closer to our Lord Jesus by His love for us.
Joel prophesies about the hordes of locusts that God threatens to unleash upon the prosperous but unrepentant kingdom of Judah that would be as devastating as the invasion of a human army. (Judah would later face that kind of invasion too.) This is relevant to us today.
We would do well this Lent to consider the condition of our world, our country, our State and our own lives, to see the end time signs of increasing rebellion against God, lawlessness, violence, depravity, and rejection of Christ, with natural disasters and warfare looming ever larger, and repent.
We place our trust in our world’s only hope, the Creator and Redeemer of all. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, God promises to raise us from the dead and give us eternal life in a new heaven and a new earth. When the Day of the Lord arrives, our final deliverance will be revealed as we are returned to the Lord forever.
- Pastor Nickel