Joel 1:1-3:21, Revelation 1:1-20, Psalms 128:1-6, Proverbs 29:18
Today is the 9th day of December welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian and it is a joy and an honor and a privilege to be here with you today just like it is every day of the year. I’m excited for us to take our next step forward in the Scriptures. That next step forward is actually going to lead us into new territory in both old and new Testaments. So, we have two books that we are entering into today that we need to talk about and the first one that we will encounter is the next of the minor prophets in the Old Testament, and this book is known as Joel and we’ll read the entire book of Joel in our reading today. So, let’s just kind of get a little bit of understanding of what we’re reading.
Introduction to the book of Joel:
Nobody really knows exactly which Joel wrote the book of Joel. There are people…other people in the Bible that have the name Joel but…but scholars believe that these are the…any of them are the author of this prophetic book although the language of the book does share kind of a style with other prophets, prophets, like Ezekiel or Jeremiah or Amos or Micah in the minor prophets or Zephaniah. So, that leads to conjecture like so much of the scholarship that surrounds the origins of the Bible. On the one hand it…it could be that the book of Joel is the work of more than one prophet or it could be that the writer of Joel, Joel, this Joel that we’re talking about was in fellowship with other prophets, maybe even in close proximity to other prophets, so they shared kind of a common vernacular. And, so, with repeated readings of these texts these similarities become apparent. But those are like plausible ideas. The text itself doesn’t really give any historical clues. So, dating the book is really, really difficult at least with any precision. If we’re just kind of like aggregating the ideas, somewhere between 500 and 800 B.C. like a three-century span here, somewhere between 500 and 800 years before Jesus came. And what we’ll see is that Joel wrote of this massive overwhelming horde of locusts that invaded the land and just destroyed the vegetation of the land, including all the crops. And, so, following that, as you can imagine, famine because there’s no food. And, so, a plague and then a great famine. And Joel uses this as the backdrop to call the children of Israel to repentance. And its thought that the locusts…like this isn’t a vision, this isn’t like a metaphor or an allegory. There probably was this type of locust invasion and people knew of the circumstances and had endured these things. And, so, when Joel’s speaking of these things people know exactly what he’s talking about and so they’re listening. And as is the case with the other prophets, the prophet is essentially announcing a fork in the road like that. Things have reached a point where like this is the last stop. This is where you either get off the train or you stay on the train and go straight into destruction. And if they stay on the train headed for destruction, then…then they will encounter the great and terrible day of the Lord as Joel describes it. But there is an alternative path as there typically is in the prophets, a path of restoration, a path of repentance. And following that path in the book of Joel leads us to some of the most encouraging and famous passages in the Scriptures, things like “I’ll pour out my spirit upon all people and your sons and your daughters will prophesy, and your old men will dream dreams, and your young men will see visions”, stuff like that. So, God through Joel is saying, “you can have the great and terrible day of the Lord, or you can have Me pouring out my spirit upon all of you. The choice is yours.” And friends, the choice is still ours. And, so, let’s dive into the book of Joel understanding that not matter what’s been going on, no matter what the locusts have eaten, restoration is still always possible. And, so, we’re reading from the English Standard Version this week. Joel its entirety, which is three chapters.
Introduction to the book of Revelation:
Okay. So, that is Joel in its entirety and now we flip the page or flip several pages into the New Testament, and we find ourselves at the very final book in the New Testament, and this book is called Revelation. And there isn’t a book in the Bible that seems to have captured the fascination of…of its readers more than this book. And it’s been interpreted many, many various ways through many various lenses over many centuries, in fact, over thousands of years. And these interpretations can be fantastic just wild stuff and then there are more pragmatic attempts to try to find out what’s going on in this book. And, so, revelation tells us, it self-identifies the author as is John. It’s just…we don’t have like a last name. We didn’t have those then. And, so, which John are we talking about because this is not particularly an uncommon name? So, traditionally we would accept the author being the apostle John who wrote other portions of the New Testament as well - the gospel of John and first, second and third John. But this isn’t like a straight line and this isn’t like modern scholarship trying to tear things apart. that’s been questioned since at least the third century and that debate continues to the presence but without, you know, without new evidence, without something archaeologically being discovered that would give more clues or that would paint a more complete picture, the tradition…the tradition holds just as strongly as any other explanation that the…it was the apostle John who probably wrote this text. So, this being the case, it’s not just any John who was exiled to the island of Patmos it's…it’s John the evangelist, the disciple of Jesus who was banished to the island of Patmos where Revelation was written. And it’s believed that Patmos, it…Patmos still exists, it’s still an island today. But at the time it's…it’s like a Roman penal colony, a place of criminal and political exile. So, rather than just dealing with all these people they just put em’ on this island and let them sort it out under the guard of the Roman…Roman military. And like I said, it’s still an island. You can still go there. You can visit Patmos. It’s in the Aegean Sea. It’s like between modern-day Greece and Turkey and not too far actually from Ephesus where the tradition holds that John spent the elder…elderly years of his life. But here’s where it gets interesting. Here’s where the intrigue about the book of Revelation begins. It is a work in the genre of literature known as apocalyptic literature. This type of literature is highly symbolic, highly allegorical. And, so, when you read the book of Revelation and you have to kind of have your discerner…if that’s a word…you have to have discernment, you have to be paying attention because you find that as you go through this, you’re taking certain things to be literal, you’re taking other things to be allegorical or symbolic and you have to wonder why you’re doing that. How is that happening? How do you decide? And because we have so much seemingly symbolic language and be…because it appears that the subject matter here is the end of all things as we know it, like the end of the world and the beginning of the next, well then you’ve got a good recipe because everybody’s interested in that topic. Like if there’s going to be the end of the world then we should probably have as much understanding about that as we can get. So, we would read this at different than say a poetic allegorical poem like the Song of Songs, right? So, we can read Song of songs and put different lenses on and go, “this is Christ’s love for His bride, this is God’s love for His people. This is just a beautiful portrayal of love between a man and a woman.” And we could be fine with that but you overlay the end of the world into that mix and you’re paying attention, but you still have highly symbolic language to…to discern and work your way through. And, so, as you can imagine, there have been thousands of very unique diverse interpretations over thousands of years. So, some scholars would say this is a very, very important book. Obviously, it’s in the New Testament. Pulling it apart and trying to lay the pieces, the components out and then put them back together, this is indeed a prophetic utterance, but it is meant for people in the first century and contains a first century perspective and the sym…symbolism is something that would be understood better in the first century context. And, so, they conclude that the book of Revelation is already been completely fulfilled. That’s like one way of looking at it. Others see like that Revelation outlines a chain of events that starts when this was written in the first century but lasts until…well…until the end of the world. And then others believe that the symbolism is the thing that keeps the relevance. It's…it’s poetic and so can be interpreted and brought into any time period. So, it’s timeless, and is ultimately describing the overarching cosmic struggle that we find in the Bible between good and evil. And the thing is, all of that can be legitimate. Like all of that can be right but even knowing that we still pretty much have only ever gotten it wrong because what happens is that we get intrigued in all these details and we’re trying to fit them together and overlay them into the time that we live in and come to some sort of conclusion that this is it…this is all going down right now. The problem is that’s what’s been going on for 2000 years. So many, many, many, many generations have looked into this and overlaid it into their time and said this is happening now. And yet 100% of the time until right now they’ve been wrong. One thing that I can tell you that is a right though, remember when we started getting into the letters and started to move to Paul and I’m telling you like this theme of endurance is going to show up and it’s going to be unrelenting all the way until we end the Scriptures and understand how important that word, endurance, actually is to our faith journey, that is probably as clear as it can get in the book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible because it’s a fundamental theme in the book of Revelation. In some ways, it almost feels like we’ve been pulled forward in this theme of endurance all the way to this point where we can see its enduring, not just kind of enduring healing because you broke your leg or enduring the transition of a job. It's…it’s enduring until the very, very end, enduring until the end of all things. And Revelation ultimately tells us that those who stay faithful, those who endure and stay faithful to the testimony of Jesus until the very end will then experience eternal victory. And that brings us to one of the famous passages in the book of Revelation –“they overcame, they defeated evil by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.” Here’s the thing, this theme of endurance that we’ve been working our way through for months, and it has probably encouraged us on days that we needed to endure and enduring is never easy, but as we kind of come to the end of the Bible and this theme becomes dominant, we begin to realize that this is…endurance isn’t just sitting still and suffering until something is over. It’s not a passive waiting thing. It’s not like some sort of defensive posture. It’s actually a very conscious active thing that we are doing understanding that it’s going somewhere. It’s our endurance in the face of deception, our holding true to the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony. In the face of the entire world being dissected around us, we’re to remain true. When I say, “we are to remain true” I’m talking about the people at the very end that are spoken of in this book. It’s their witness that remains until the very end so that there was always a chance for anyone to turn. And when everyone who is going to turn has turned then things get very bleak and they come to an end and a new beginning emerges. And, so, let’s dive into the book of Revelation. This will carry us until December 31st in the New Testament, until the end of our year. And we will notice that as we begin the book of Revelation, we begin by hearing from Jesus. Jesus writes some letters to some churches and that sets the backdrop. Revelation 1.
Prayer:
Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for bringing us into this territory, this new territory across the board…board in both old and new Testaments. And Lord we invite your Holy Spirit as we now encounter and move into and move through the final book in the New Testament, the book of Revelation. Show us what we need to see. Give us what we need to take with us into the future. From the very beginning of this year we’ve been asking for something specific because it’s something that you told us Jesus that we need - eyes to see, ears to hear. And, so, this is again our prayer as we move through the rest of this month, as we move through the territory that we’re moving through in the Bible. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear what you’re saying. We pray this in the incomparable immeasurable name of our Savior Jesus. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com is home base, it’s the website, it’s where you find out what’s going on around here.
And really, the things to talk about are Christmas related because that’s where this is headed. That’s where we’re going. And, so, the first thing is we have an annual program and …sort of like our annual Christmas party. And, so, for the next week beginning yesterday you can call in your holiday greetings to the community that you’ve been spending the year going to the Bible together with. And you can use the Hotline button for that or the phone number 877-942-4253. And that might sound familiar because that’s how we send in our prayer requests and encouragements to each other. And, so, we’re gonna use that same apparatus to collect our holiday greetings. There’s just one kind of rule…rule about it. Don’t call a holiday greeting mixed with a prayer request or anything like that. If you’re gonna call in a holiday greeting, call in a holiday greeting and let that be that. If you have some other things going on or you wanna pray for somebody or you want to ask for prayer, do that separately. This is like the only time year that you can do like multiple…like you can do that, call and then call right back. We’ll take those calls for the next week and then we’ll start assembling everything and create our annual Christmas gathering and I can’t wait for it. It’s always virtual because we’re a virtual community but this year, especially. It’s like we get to do this without a…we don’t have to change a thing. There can be viruses running around the world or pandemics. We don’t have to change a thing. We’re gonna do what we always do and it’s gonna be beautiful as it always is. So, you can call those in now.
And then the other thing is the Daily Audio Bible Shop and shopping. Go there and look for resources that you might want to use to invite others along for the journey, or just to encourage their…their faith. There are written resources in book form, like the God of Your Story or Sneezing Jesus or Reframe or Passages. Like, there’s there are books there. There are all kinds resources from things to wear to things to write with, to things to write in. Our Global Campfire candle is in the Shop. We worked so hard on that with a perfumer last year, with a sent a designer to get a candle that smells like a campfire but still smells good, not like ashy, like still smells good like a campfire to remind us. It’s amazing how aroma actually brings us to a place. And, so, to have the Global Campfire candle reminds us that we’re in community together. All kinds resources like that. The Daily…or the Wind Farm coffee, our entire line of coffee that we roast fresh and send you our entire line of tea because these are activities that we do most every day. We drink something warm…not everybody…but most people drink either a cup of coffee or a cup of tea in the morning and maybe even throughout the day. I do. Everyone around here does. And, so, we created this line well over a decade ago because it’s kind of part of the journey. It’s nice to have a cup of coffee and allow God’s word to be spoken over us and gives some things to think about and move into our day. It’s just part of the rhythm. All those resources and more are available in the Shop. If you spend $40 or more in the Shop, we will send you this year the 2020 Christmas ornament for the Daily Audio Bible included in your order. So, check that out.
If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible here in the latter part of the year, then thank you. Thank you humbly and deeply. Sincerely, we wouldn’t be here if we weren’t in this together. So, thank you. If this has made a difference, then thank you for your partnership. There is a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. If you’re using the app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner, or the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.
And, as always, if you have a prayer request or encouragement, or right now holiday greeting then you can hit the Hotline button in the app, or you can dial 877-942-4253.
And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.
Community Prayer ad Praise:
Hi everybody it’s Lisa the Encourager I just wanted to remind everyone of something that I wrote down after Brian read the last part of second Peter and I just called it when I wrote it down in my notes I just wrote it down as Peter’s charge. And I thought it’s…it was so good the way he reminded us that, you know, we should honor Peter in this last message that he gave to us as followers of Christ and basically telling us that, you know, this would be things that you would follow in the gift of having the rich welcome into the kingdom of Jesus Christ. And, so, I love that. And, so, there are seven beautiful principles to follow. And, so, the first one is goodness and the second one is knowledge. And we’re certainly getting all that through Brian and also reading the Bible every day. Self-control, which we could all use that especially with the busy holidays and busy traffic and even with our families continuing to have self-control with those that we love the most. Perseverance and walking with Christ, mutual affection and respect for all. I love that…just…just having mutual affection for, you know, people that we interact with. And then godliness, mirroring the way we are like Jesus, so continuing to have godliness. And then the last one is love. Again, just reminding us to show love to all and everything we do and all of our actions, like put those word to action. So, I wrote them down because I need reminding of this. So, I hope it helps you. I also shared them with my children…
Good morning DAB family my name is Pamela and I’m calling from Toronto Canada. It’s December 5th 130 in the morning and I’m calling for prayers, to ask for prayers for my son in Jamaica. His name is Ray. For him to turn his life over to Jesus because it’s the only way. And I’m praying for my other family members, nephews, and nieces, sisters, brothers. And I am also praying…asking for prayer for myself. I’m having pain all over my body. Sciatica pain, arthritis pain. So, I’m asking for your prayers and I just want to say thank you Brian and your family for the beautiful work you’ve been doing through Jesus. Thank you. I love you all. In Jesus name. Amen.
Hi DAB family this is Radiant Rachel and like Jane in the Everglades I’m going to pray Psalm 191 over us and with us for anybody who is in battle against demonic attacks. And I’m also specifically calling out protection and clarity for Janna and her family - Billy, Amber, Roland, Braden and Izzy. I may have one of those names wrong, but God knows his name and also over the state of Washington where they currently reside. Lord, we choose to live in the shelter of the most-high where we will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty. You alone Lord are our refuge, our place of safety. You are our God we trust You. Thank You, Lord for rescuing us from every trap and protecting us from deadly disease. We are covered with Your feathers. You shelter us with Your wings. Your faithful promises Lord are our armor and protection. We will not be afraid of the terrors of the night nor the arrows that fly in the day. We do not dread the disease that stocks in the darkness nor the disaster that strikes at midday. Though 10,000 fall at our side, though 10,000s are dying around us these evils will not touch us. Open our eyes Lord that we may see all the wicked are punished. You are our refuge. You Lord are the most-high and You are our shelter. No evil will conquer us. No plague will come near our home. You Lord have ordered the angels to protect us wherever we go. They hold us up with their hands so that we won’t hurt our foot on the stone. Thank You, Lord for the strength to trample lions and cobras and the strength to crush fierce lions and serpents under our feet. You tell us Lord that You will rescue those that love You. We love You Lord. You will protect those who trust in You name. We trust in You. Thank You for answering when we call on Your name. Thank You for being with us when we are in trouble. Lord, thank You for rescuing and honoring us and rewarding us with a long life and giving us salvation. In Jesus’ name we pray all these things. And we thank You for all these things. Amen.
I recently learned the lesson of the bamboo tree
and the many parallel analogies between that tree and me
that tree can grow so tall so fast that it mystifies the mind
90 feet or more in the first five years much faster than any other tree you’ll
find
but for the first 4 ½ years you’ll only see a sprout
just a tiny shoot above the ground is all that’ll be sticking out
but in the last six months of that last 5th year it grows 90 feet and
more
only the most faithful and loyal cultivators would stick it out to see what’s
in store
but God is like that in our lives he’s faithful and he’s true
and even when we show little or no growth he still gives grace and mercy too
most would say just let it die it looks like it’s dead already
but God never loses hope for us his hands are true and steady
great is his faithfulness morning by morning new mercies we see
God changes not his compassions they fail not and as he has been he forever
will be
and when all our worldly hope is gone and no more friends are left around
that sprout we had left for dead becomes a tree high above the ground
with roots so deep that the fiercest of storms could never erode its grip
it bends it sways some branches may break but mostly it’ll just dip
while we see nothing above the ground there’s continual growth below
only God can make a tree there so much that we just don’t know
but I also know that sometimes it looks like there’s little or no growth in me
so I’m thankful for his loving hands and I’m sure in time all will see
that growth was present all the time and God was present too
carefully nurturing day by day so my roots would hold fast too
don’t be so quick to judge that shoot that’s barely out of the ground
God has the power to make it as strong as any of the tree that’s around
This is from junk to treasure. I want to talk about our voices for couple minutes. I have heard so many people on the DAB mention of a miss the voice of someone who used to call in for prayers or someone who will comment about how they love to hear from those who call in regularly. The study of the voice and the ability to recognize voices is so complex and amazing. Like our unique fingerprints everyone has a voice identity due to pitch and tone rhythm and tempo and texture and so on. Also, many of us have little catchphrases that are used for their own special way of expression like when I say “kiss kiss”, “shalom shalom”, “okay Holy Spirit let’s roll”, or “in the name of Jesus!” You would know exactly who I’m referring to without me even using their name. I love to hear Grandpa Bob on here. His voice is so calming and soothing. He expresses such a sense of sincerity that you want to hear from him more and more. But there is one voice that is above all others and that is the voice of the One who has the power of creation and judgment, that of healing and forgiveness. It calms a raging storm and raises people from the dead. How do we recognize the voice of the Lord? By spending quiet time contemplating in His word. I believe we also hear from God in the voices of those who call in for prayer and encouragement every time they throw their log in the community campfire. Each day I find that I long to hear and get into the word with Brian every day and to hear the wonderful unique voices of my DAB family and I praise God for the ability to recognize and to hear from each and every one of you.
Hello DAB family this is Russell from superior. I just had a call talking to my daughter. She told me she’s injecting drugs. Ask you all to pray for her and keep her safe. Thank you.