Joel 1:1-3:21, Revelation 1:1-20, Psalm 128:1-6, Proverbs 29:18
Today is the ninth day of December, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is wonderful, a joy to be here with you today as we continue our journey and move forward and today, we’re moving into two new books, one in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament.
Introduction to the Book of Joel:
The one in the Old Testament we will read in its entirety today. It’s another one of the minor prophets and this one is known as Joel. And ironically nobody really knows exactly who Joel was, there are other people in the Bible with the name Joel but most scholars don’t believe any of those people are candidates for writing this prophetic book. There are some clues. Joel does share a language style with some of the other prophets found in the Bible like Ezekiel or Jeremiah or Micah or Zephaniah or Amos. So, some scholars have wondered is Joel the product of more than one author, while others have considered just prophetic language among prophetic people, a group of prophetic people, they would have a shared culture, they would have similar traditions which means they would probably have similar vocabularies, indicating that of course Joel would sound like some of the other prophets, they kind of spoke similarly and…and maybe Joel was a part of a group of profits. And there aren’t really historical clues in Joel that could help date the book. So, as you can…can imagine there’s been plenty of guesses over the centuries. Generally, Joel probably lands somewhere between 500 and 800 BC. So many, many centuries before Jesus. But even with all these disciplines being employed to understand the origin of Joel, most biblical scholars would say the origin and the dating isn’t paramount to understanding what the book has to say. Joel writes of…of vast horde of locusts that invade the land and destroy all of the crops and a great famine follows the plague and this natural disaster is used as the backdrop to call back, to call the children of Israel to repentance, to return to God. Most scholars think this isn’t just an allegory or a metaphor that the locust invasion was something that actually happened and that Joel is using it as a backdrop to reveal that there’s a fork in the road, which is so often with the fundamental message of the prophets is that you are at a fork in the road, you have the choice to make and it ultimately boils down to whether you’re choosing life or death. If you repent, blessing and restoration will come upon you, if you don’t and you reject the Lord, then you will experience what Joel calls the great and terrible day of the Lord. But before we think this is just a short prophecy of doom and gloom, we will also find that some of well, some of the very famous passages in the Scriptures are found in Joel but also some of the greatest promises of restoration. So, it probably isn’t uncommon for us to hear, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions, that’s from the book of Joel. And so, let’s dive in and read in its entirety, Joel.
Introduction to the Book of Revelation:
Alright so, this brings us to the second book that we will begin today and as we begin this book, the book of Revelation, we are beginning the last book of the New Testament, and for that matter the last book of the Bible. We still have much territory to cover in the Old Testament but we have arrived at our final book in the New Testament and we’ll be camping out in Revelation for the remainder of the year. And what a book, there is probably historically no more fascinating book then the book of Revelation and a book that has been interpreted so many ways, over such a long period of time, there’s nothing like it. Some of the interpretations are out of this world fantastic, some of the interpretations of this book are more pragmatic, we have probably heard many different kinds of interpretations about the book of Revelation and maybe we have our favorite one and that’s the one that we think this is how you interpret this book, which is a, which is totally fine, it just needs to be noted that this book has been interpreted lots of ways over, over thousands of years. The book of Revelation identifies the author as John, but it’s not clearly specified which John, which makes scholars go “which John are we talking about”. The tradition is that this is the apostle John, John, the one who was the beloved disciple of Jesus, who walked with Jesus and knew Jesus and is attributed with writing the gospel of John as well as the letters: first, second and third John that we’ve recently read. Although these things, these things have been looked at from a lot of angles and debated over a lot of time. So, whether John the apostle wrote Revelation, that has been questioned since at least the third century, so at least the 200s and this is 2021 and the debate continues until today. But if there is consensus, which there isn’t, but if there’s a majority, the longest-running tradition is that the apostle John probably wrote the book of Revelation. And if that is true then it was the apostle John, not just somebody named John, that was banished to the island of Patmos where this revelation was…was revealed and then written down. And it’s believed that Patmos was essentially like a island prison, like a penal colony were criminals of the Empire and political prisoners were captured or who had started some kind of insurrection or did something against the Empire, they were exiled there to Patmos. And Patmos is actually a real island, it’s in the Aegean Sea, it’s between Greece and Turkey, modern-day Greece and Turkey and not that far from Ephesus where John spent his elderly years, at least that’s the church tradition. What makes Revelation so intriguing and up for so much different analyzation and interpretation is that it is a work of apocalyptic literature, which is a highly allegorical and symbolic genre and it might not be quite as intriguing over quite such a long period of time, if the topic were something different but the topic is like the end of the world as we know things and the…the rebirth, the beginning of a new world, a new era for the human race. So, it’s pretty clear why they’re would be interest in such a book. But interpreting it can lead to very different types of conclusions, conclusions that may be completely incompatible with each other and that has been the case over thousands of years. So, some scholars read Revelation from a completely first century perspective. This is when it was written and all of the things at least looked at symbolically and allegorically could be put together and named in the first century world. And so, though scholars conclude that Revelation, the things that were spoken of, are things that have happened and it's…it’s already taken place. Others look at the book as a revelation from God that was revealed in the first century and it speaks of things that will go on until the, until the end of the world. And then others believe that the symbolism found in Revelation, it has no real time, like it's…it’s not to be dated, it's…it’s more cosmic, it’s about the struggle between light and dark, between good and evil. All of that can be legitimate, but when we try to read Revelation directly into our time period and go look at all the signs are lining up, this is it. We might, we might be discouraged and that type of interpretation because that type of interpretation reading Revelation into the time period and saying can’t you just look around at the world, can’t you see what’s going on, clearly it’s the end times, that has been being said of this book for thousands of years and 100% of the people making those predictions have been incorrect until…until now. But one thing that we’ll be able to pick out very clearly, if we’re looking for it, is this theme that we have been working through, through the letters in the New Testament, the theme of endurance. And we’ve talked about that several times as we’ve encountered it, in the New Testament, but it’s almost as if that is one of the major themes of the book of Revelation, almost like we’ve been talking about endurance just to get to the book of Revelation so that we can see what actual endurance looks like and what it’s going to take because what we find in revelation is that those who stay faithful to Jesus and endure until the end it will have eternal victory and that’s what this famous passage from Revelation comes from, they have defeated him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony and they did not love their lives so much that they were unwilling to…to lay them down. And we’ll notice that this endurance isn’t just gritting our teeth, sucking it up, moving forward, just kind of taking it as it comes, it's…it’s not a passive thing that we just have to kind of move through. If…if a person is to endure until the end, not even loving their life enough to try to preserve it, but rather to endure and stay true to a witness, the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony, a witness, that’s not something that you just kind of suck it up and move through like that’s something you have to actively be committed to. And as we’ll see they’re remaining true to Jesus when the world has turned against them complete, like there’s no safe harbor because the world has been deceived and it’s a whole new level of endurance. We’ve rarely seen examples of that kind of endurance but we see it in our Savior Jesus and in His story and the endurance of the final ones in the book of Revelation isn’t God being angry or frustrated or mean, it’s to leave a witness, an opportunity for people to turn to the truth, to hear the truth, to see the light. It’s an opportunity for that to happen until the very end. And so, we can look at the people who God has put in that position to endure into the very end and say maybe that’s not fair but they are in love with Jesus to the point that they are easily willing to give up their lives to participate and be a part of that last witness on earth before the destruction. And on God’s part, He is not willing to abandon Earth’s people, even until the very end, He keeps a witness to the light and good news. So, we begin Revelation chapter 1.
Prayer:
Father, we thank You, we thank You so, deeply from our hearts for the gift of the Scriptures. We thank You that there something that we can hold in our hands, there something tangible for us that shows us how to live this life. And as we continue this journey now through the book of Joel and into the book of Revelation, we ask once again Holy Spirit, come and lead us into all truth, may we be aware always of Your presence in and among us, and may we pay attention to what You are bringing up within us as we continue to read the Scriptures. May we begin to understand where You are leading and where You are guiding and may we understand that endurance…endurance is a part of our story. We pray this in the mighty name of Jesus our Savior. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com, that is home base, that is where you find out what’s going on around here and it’s not a big secret that it’s Christmas time around here and so all things going on around here right now are Christmas. We have the Daily Audio well, first of all, all of the resources that we have, we will send them to you but we are probably past deadline for international shipping. If you’re wanting things to arrive for Christmas time, we usually need to leave ourselves at least 21 days in advance for that. That is mostly because the way we ship internationally, we have a service here, Federal Express service that we use that allows us to package all kinds of things going internationally together and then they end up in the country that they’re going to and then they are shipped domestically, but using the mail carrier service in the country and that allows us, that’s the cheapest possible way. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but shipping costs keep rising and rising and rising so it’s the most cost-effective way we can ship resources, but it takes a little bit longer, it’s a little less predictable. So, we will certainly, certainly ship out all these resources right away. But we’re probably past getting them where they need to go for Christmas if it’s outside of the United States. Inside the United States we’re still fine to ship domestically but again, this is, kind of a weird year where shipping is well, supply chain and shipping and all that kind of stuff is really, really being pressed as far as these mechanisms can handle. So, I wouldn’t delay. So, that’s item number one.
Item number two are the resources that we have available for Christmas, the Daily Audio Bible Christmas box, family Christmas 2021. That is available in the Daily Audio Bible Shop in the Christmas section and you can see all of the items that are in there, check it out. The Promised Land, Photographs from the Land of the Bible, our brand-new coffee table addition, beautiful, beautiful photographs and some of the most pivotal places where some of the most important stories in the Bible occurred you can kind of look at those, get a glimpse, get a sense of space and time and place and it’s beautiful. It’s beautifully constructed. It is a unique gift idea, so check that out. That is also in the Christmas section. The Christmas music that we have Christmas Time by Maxwell Hardin, Family Christmas by myself Brian Hardin and the single that we released last year, O Holy Night by Jill Parr you can find these wherever you download your music, whatever device it is that you have and however you do that. You should be able to find it, so check those out for the holiday atmosphere.
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And that’s it for today. I’m Brian. I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.