Summit Life with J.D. Greear

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today on Summit Life with JD.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Grear, How does the.

Speaker 3 (00:02):
Love of God square with the threats of judgment we
see in places like Joel. This is how any experience
of the painful consequences of our sin before it is
too late, is God, in mercy, in love trying to
wake you up. He's not trying to pay you back
for your sin. He's trying to bring you back from
your sin.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of JD. Greer,
pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh Durham, North Carolina.
I'm your host, Molly Bitevich. Okay, So, I think there's
a question nearly everyone wrestles with from time to time,
even Bible believing Christians, And the question is this, why
would a loving God let so many bad things happen
in the world. Well, today, Pastor JD is flipping that

(00:54):
question on its head. He's asking us to actually consider
what if the hard things I'm facing are be because
God loves me? Seems a little off right. Well, it's
a part of our study in the minor profits called
come Back to Me, which you can find at our
website Jdgreer dot com. Pastor JD titled this message only
one thing is wrong. So grab your Bible and a

(01:15):
pen and let's dive right in.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
The Book of Joel is right after the Book of Hoseiah.
We are in a series on the Minor Prophets, which
is a set of books that most people skip right
over in the Bible. These twelve books are short, but
they're really important because they describe how life in Israel
went so wrong and then what they could do to
bring about restoration after it had gone wrong. And that's

(01:41):
really good news for us, because there's some of us
that our lives have gone wrong, and so these books
give us instructions about how it got that way and
what we can do now that we're in that condition.
Joel's book is the second in the Minor Prophets. You
may not realize this, but Joel was actually one of
the earliest recorded profits. Most people miss that because Joel's
book comes so late in the Old Testament. But your

(02:03):
Old Testament has not arranged strictly chronologically. It's arranged by
different schemes. Joel lived and prophesied very early in Israel's history,
a little bit after Solomon, but before the exile. Joel
was probably, they say, a student of Elijah and Elisha,
if you kind of know where they go in the
biblical story. Joel's book was written during the time when

(02:24):
a lot of things had gone wrong in Israel. They
just had a slew of really bad leaders, and they'd
suffered through a national plague, which I will talk about
with you here. At a moment, there was civil unrest,
there were economic problems. Their stock market was down, foreign
trables low, National confidence was nonexistent. Their FBI director had
just gotten fired. Almost everybody believed the country was headed

(02:45):
in the wrong direction. And so Joel writes to diagnose
the problem, and he tells them there's only one real problem.
They feel like a bunch of things are wrong, but
Joel says, actually, there's just one thing that is wrong.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
In fact, the Book of.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Joel were of the story I heard about the guy
who went to the doctor and complained that everything on
his body hurt. The doctor said, well, you show me
what you're talking about. So the guy takes his finger
and he points to his head. He said, it hurts
right here. Then he takes his finger and he points
to his shoulder, and he says, it hurts right here.
And he points to his leg. He says, and it
hurts right here. The doctor said, you idiot, you have

(03:19):
a dislocated finger. That's why it hurts everywhere you touched,
not because there's anything wrong. There're from wrong in one place.
You see many times in our lives we feel like
a host of things are wrong, when it's actually only
one thing that is wrong.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
This book is really really short. It's only three.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
Chapters, and we're gonna go through the entire book here
in our time together. Joel opens the book in chapter
one with a description of a gigantic locust plague that
has just occurred here.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
It is in verse four, Joel one.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
What the cutting locust is left, the swarming locust is eaten,
What the swarming locust has left the hopping locust is eaten,
And what the hopping locust has left the destroying locust
has eaten. Now, most of you have probably seen the
local before. They looked like kind of supercharged grasshoppers, about
three inches long, heavily armed grasshoppers. But thankfully, none of us,
at least in the United States, have ever seen the

(04:09):
kind of plague that he is talking about. Here, we
have a record of a modern locust plag that occurred
in the region.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Of Palestine around nineteen fifteen.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Observers of that event said that in March of that year,
swarms of locusts just appeared in the sky. They came
from the northeast in clouds so thick that they obscured
the sun. Immediately, these locusts began to dig holes in
the soil about four inches deep and about a half
inch wide, depositing into each hole more than one hundred eggs.

(04:38):
These holes were literally everywhere across the landscape of Israel.
After a few weeks, the young locust hatched. When they did,
they resembled large ants. They hadn't formed wings yet, so
they would just hop around the ground like fleas. They
would cover between four and six hundred feet a day
as they did, devouring any and all vegetation in their path.
As they grew, they would develop the ability to jump,

(05:00):
at which point their rains got higher and they would
scour the trees and the vines, and a few weeks
later they would develop wings, at which point they would
swarm over the areas that they had already devoured to
destroy any plant life left within it. The sound of
their swarms, they said is terrified. Witness has said that
within a few days there was literally nothing living, plant

(05:20):
wise left in the region. As they get more desperate
for sustenance, they swarm into houses, eating food and clothes
and fabric and wood. They're like middle school boys at
a pizza party. They leave nothing behind, and literally everything
is gone. Joel uses this locust plague as both an
illustration of Israel sin as well as a warning about

(05:43):
God's future judgment on their sin. Let me talk for
a few minutes here about the illustration aspect. Like the
locust plagu the devastating power of sin, Joel explains, is total,
and it gradually destroys everything in its path progressively.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
The laws of God gave to us our life.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
His commandments and his rule in our lives lead to
our flourishing. We probably see this best illustrated in the
creation account itself in Genesis one, when God created the earth.
Genesis one two says that God first created the world
as a kind of formless, dark chaotic mass, and then
into that dark, chaotic, disorganized mass, God spoke his word,

(06:25):
and out of that dark chaotic mass came life and
beauty and order and design. And all the other complexities
of creation and the reason that God did it that way.
He could have just created it all perfect from the beginning,
but he did it that way because he was trying
to illustrate for us what God's word coming into our
lives would be like. Into the dark, chaotic, disorganized chaos
of our lives, God's word speaks, and out of it

(06:48):
comes light and life and order and beauty. Sin, by contrast,
unravels creation and plunges our lives back into darkness. And
God's judgments throughout scripture often illustrate that. You might see
God's judgments in scripture as just God zapping down lightning
from heaven, but that's not usually what they are. Usually

(07:09):
his judgments or illustrations of the natural consequences of sin.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
And maybe one of the.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
Best illustrations of this is what happened in the Ten Plagues.
The Ten Plagues were not like God's ultimate book of
practical jokes against Egypt. That's kind of what people think
is that God was just you know, inflicting these play
or he was just trying to demonstrate to Pharaoh who
was really in charge. If that's all that God was
trying to show He could have had Moses walk in and,
like you know, turn some of Pharaoh's soldiers into grasshoppers

(07:35):
and mash a few of them, or put the Darth
vader choke hold on Pharaoh, or levitate in front of it.
All these things would have convinced Pharaoh that Moses had
God's power. But that's not all God was trying to illustrate.
He was trying to demonstrate to Pharaoh into Egypt what
their rebellion was doing to themselves into the creation. And
so what you see in the plagus is a systematic
unraveling of creation. The now turns of blood, which causes

(07:58):
the frogs to come out. The frogs bring the next
that's ring the disease. The disease brings the boils. The
boils bring the death and in darkness, and it's just
illustrating for you creation literally unraveling. We're gonna see that
same kind of picture again here with the locusts creation.
Our lives unravel and they go into chaos and they're
progressively destroyed. As we pursue this type of self centered,

(08:23):
self focused lifestyle. You might think the pornography, you might
think the flirtation, you might think doing things. Your way
is not really causing that much harm, but it is
numbing your soul to the devastating effects that sin is
going to have in you. And that's what this locust
plague is. An illustration of the consuming, destructive power of sin.

(08:44):
It's not just an illustration, though, it's also for Joel,
a warning about a coming judgment, one that Joel says
is going to be much more terrible than the locusts.
Joel says that unless Israel wakes up, God is going
to send in the armies of Babylon in the Israel
life like a horde of locusts, So you notice it.
For the next two chapters, he's gonna describe this coming

(09:06):
invasion of Babylon if Israel doesn't change their ways, He's
gonna describe it in terms of the locusts toward watch
so I'll get to see you this for a nation
has come up against my land. That's a prophecy about Babylon,
powerful and beyond number like the locusts. Its teeth are
like lions, teeth like the locusts. It has laid waste
my vine and splintered my fig tree. It is stripped
off their bark it has thrown it down. Their branches

(09:26):
are made white, the fields are destroyed. Before them, the
ground mourns. The land is like the garden of Eden
before they get there, and then behind them is a
desperate wilderness that's just like the locust flag. Nothing escapes them,
as with the rumbling of chariots. That's the sound of
the swarms. They leap on the tops of mountains, like
the crackling of a flame devouring the stubble. What you're
seeing there is God saying your sin caused this kind

(09:48):
of destruction in your life. I send the locus as
an illustration of that. And if you don't wake up,
there's gonna be a worse one that comes the armies
of Babylon.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
What's your scene there? Watch this. This is a little
nerd moment. What you're seeing.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
There's an illustration of what theologians call the passive and
the active dimensions of the wrath of God, and you're
seeing how they work together.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Here's your definition. The passive wrath of God is God
simply allowing.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
Us to suffer the natural consequences of our sin.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
God says, okay, that's.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
What you chose, I'll let you experience that the active
wrath of God is the lightning bolt of judgment from heaven.
And what you see in stories like this one listen,
is that the passive and active wrath of God work together,
and the active wrath of God is usually just an
affirmation of or an extension of his passive wrath. It

(10:38):
is God simply affirming to you the choice that you've
already made for yourself. Give you a few quick examples
on this. Genesis chapter three, Adam and Eve in the
garden sin and God cast them out of his presence.
But remember what Adam and Eve had already done. They'd
hid themselves from God's presence.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
So God's active.

Speaker 3 (10:56):
Wrath casting them out of his presence was simply an
affirmation of what they already chosen for themselves. Or to
go back to the plagues for a minute, the scripture
says that God's judgment on Pharaoh was to harden his
heart so that he would not believe, but that was
only after it says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart
several times.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
See, so what God was doing.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
Was he was affirming and solidifying the choice that Pharaoh
had already made. In fact, the way that Jesus describes
Hell itself. Hell, which is of course the ultimate display
of the wrath of God, shows Hell to be just
an extension of his passive wrath. And sometimes we can
miss that because the Jewish metaphors that Jesus uses to

(11:36):
describe Hell can be unfamiliar to us. Now, I'm not
saying these things are only metaphors, but you can see
in them the metaphor of what he's trying to describe.
For example, he says that Hell will be a place
where the worm does not die, the maggot does not die.
That is an image of a conscience that's continually being
eaten away by guilt and regret and shame.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
It is a place of outer darkness.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
Darkness to Jewish people represented the total absence of God
and all of his goodness. It is a place of
the gnashing of teeth. That was a Jewish image that
meant self condemnation and self loathing. It is a place
of fire. Fire represented the agony of God's displeasure. Hell
is in many ways the full fruition of us telling
God to get out of our life and God saying okay.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
It's like C. S. Lewis used to say, He's like
in the end, we'll either say to.

Speaker 3 (12:23):
God, I will be done, or God will look at
us and say thy will be done.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
You're listening to Summit Life with JD.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
Greer.

Speaker 1 (12:31):
To learn more about this ministry, visit us online anytime
at Jdgreer dot com. Before we get back to today's teaching,
I want to take a moment to remind you about
an extremely helpful resource that we offer our listeners in
addition to this daily teaching. If you have questions about life, theology,
or the Bible, you won't want to miss Pastor JD's
all new Ask the Pastor podcast. In each episode, Pastor

(12:55):
JD answers real questions submitted by listeners just like you,
using biblical with along with practical advice he's gleaned from
his many years as a pastor. You can access Ask
the Pastor with JD Greer by visiting Jdgreer dot com,
Slash Podcasts, or by searching for it on your favorite
podcast platform, and now brand new for twenty twenty four,

(13:16):
we're also on YouTube. You can subscribe to Pastor JD's
YouTube channel, which is at j dot D dot Greer,
and you can finally see what they look like live
and in person. Don't miss out on this great resource
by subscribing to the podcast today. Now let's get back
to today's teaching once again. Here's Pastor jd here on

(13:37):
Summit Life.

Speaker 3 (13:39):
Nobody has helped me get my mind around the wrath
of God as much as as CS Lewis. And one
of the things you explained, he said, sin is like
a cancer. One of the things about cancer is it
never stops growing. It just keeps multiplying and growing, and
as long as you're alive, or until you kill it,
it will just keep growing until it consumes the host.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
He said. Sin is like that.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
He said, So there's a lot of things in your
soul that probably you wouldn't need to worry about if
you only were around for seventy or eighty years. But
scripture says that God creates you to live forever, either
in heaven or in hell. He says, so, what is
it like when selfishness, jealousy, unchecked lust, materialism, cowardice? What
do those things look like when they've grown unchecked in

(14:19):
you for a million years? He said, Hell is exactly
the technical term for what that state would be. In
other words, God doesn't destroy sin destroys, and when you
understand that, listen, You'll start to see earthly experiences of
God's judgment, like.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
This plague of locusts.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
You'll start to see them as expressions of God's mercy
because God is trying to let you see where sin
is taking you before it is too late for you
to return. You see a lot of Bible readers wonder
how the threats of judgment we encounter in the minor
prophets could be consistent with God's love?

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Right?

Speaker 3 (14:54):
I mean, you know, we started with Hoseiah, which is
the most mind blowing.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Illustration of the love of God.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
How God come after his people like a husband comes
back to a cheating wife who scorns his love again
and again and again, and he says, I'm never giving
up on you. And people see that image of love
and they're like, well, where is that love in the
mind of prophet? Can we fast forward to Jesus, all
meek and mild and he comes pet and lambs and
looking pensively off in the sunset.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
I want that God, you say, how.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
Does the love of God we see in Hoseiah, how
does it square with the threats of judgment we see
in places like Joel. This is how I'm explaining to you,
how any experience of the painful consequences of our sin
before it is too late, is God, in mercy, in
love trying to wake you up. He's not trying to
pay you back for your sin. He's trying to bring

(15:42):
you back from your sin. And then one of the
most gripping illustrations I've ever heard of, this was from
a Christian leader I knew of who got caught up
exposed in this Ashley Madison scandal a couple of years ago.
Remember that Ashley Madison was his website that facilitated adulterous relationships.
And when the you know, kind of the email thing
broke and it came out to all these people that

(16:04):
whose identities weren't no longer hidden, his was one. He
was a national leader of a national ministry, and he
was publicly humiliated, and his board asked him to step
down or removed him from ministry. And five six months
later he wrote this article. And what he said in
the article is he said, you know, when this thing happened,
he said, and.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
I was exposed. He said, I thought the.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
Judgment of God against me was unusually harsh, he said,
because he says, here's the thing I never he was
one night, I just signed up, he said, I never
acted on it. Nobody ever contacted me. I never contacted anybody.
I've never met anybody. I certainly never followed through with
the adultery. It was just a moment of weakness where
I was kind of living out this fantasy.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
And he said, that was it.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
And then now I get publicly exposed, humiliated, I lose
my ministry, he said. So I thought of it as
an unusually harsh demonstration of God's judgment, he said. Now
I am here five six months later, and I see
it as one of the greatest acts of God's mercy
he has ever given to me.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
He said. Because here's what would have happened.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
Had it not gone down that way, he said, I
would have done what I always tend to do, and
that is I wouldn't really have seriously dealt with this sin.
I would have said a quick prayer of repentance and
just swept.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
It under the rug.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
You see what God does in his mercy is he
allows you to taste some of these consequences of sin,
and it's painful. It feels like locust. But God in
mercy is trying to wake you up. So let me
ask you, is something like that happening in your life
right now? But for example, maybe you're trying to save money,
but God just keeps letting stuff break down, and you're like,

(17:32):
come on, God, we're trying now, we're trying to get
back on our feet, and you let our car break down,
you let our air conditioner go out, Come on, little
help here. Or you're trying to be better in your marriage,
but new issues of conflict keep cropping up. You keep
trying new strategies to be happy that work for a while,
but they're like pseudo happiness and then don't make you
that happy. Hey, can I tell you something? If you

(17:54):
got to spend money every single day to keep yourself happy,
you're not really happy. If you're constantly having to find
an escape from real life in order to be happy,
whether that's a TV show or porn or shopping or
a hobby or drinking or something like that, that means
that you are rotten on the inside. And God's trying
to wake you up, and he's going to keep frustrating

(18:14):
those strategies. No new strategy is gonna fix you. And
that's because the source of your problem hidden horizontal. The
source of your problem is vertical. There's not a lot
of things wrong. There's one thing that's wrong. And here's
good news bad news. God has more locust than you
got solutions, so you need to quit pursuing the solutions
and deal with the one thing that's actually wrong. In

(18:36):
order for God to bring you to your senses, he
has to bring you to the end of yourself. You see,
for some of you, he's been calling out to you
for years, but you haven't yet been ready to listen
because you haven't come to the end of yourself yet.
But see, in order for God to make you new,
he's got to rip out the old. That means she's
got to tear you down. So do not be surprised

(18:56):
when your world keeps crumbling against Lewis, if you'll let
me quote him one more time, and it's quote mere Christianity,
He said, many people come to God as if to
think of it like their house is broken down and
they know they need help fixing their house. They got
a leaky roof and mildewing the walls, and the paint's
falling off the wall and so they come to God
and they're like, God, my house is a mess.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
Help me, he says.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
At first, what God does in their hearts makes sense
to them, because God's fixing the roof, and God's painting
the walls and getting the mildew out, he says. But
then all of a sudden, God invariably starts to do
things that don't make sense to them. He'll start to
rip out a wall, He'll start to rip up the carpet.
He'll start to You're like, I wonder, why are you
doing that? He says, because it hurts. It hurts abominably,

(19:38):
And you suddenly look at God and say, what.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
Are you doing? I came to you for help, and
you're giving me this. I'll tell you what he's doing.

Speaker 3 (19:45):
The explanations that he's building quite a different house from
the one you thought of.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Erecting a new wing.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
Here, he's putting on an extra floor there, running up towers,
making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a
decent little cottage. He's building the palace one intends. He
intends to come in and live in himself. You might
be happy with little changes to that little cottage of
your life, and God's like, I don't want a little cottage.
I want to live in a palace, and that's what

(20:12):
I'm gonna turn you into. You might be just fine
with that shag carpet in the living room, and Jesus says,
I ain't living in that. We're gonna rip out that
shag car butt, y'all. I like the shag carbet, I
don't like the shag carpet. We're getting rid of that
shag carpet and all. He starts making all these things
because he has so much more for you than you
ever had for yourself. And in order to give you that,

(20:32):
He's got to send the locust into your life to
eat it out and wake you up to where's this
happening for you? Is there something in your life that
maybe you've been asking God to take away?

Speaker 2 (20:42):
You've been saying, God, fix.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
This, repair this, But instead you need to realize that
God is trying through it to send a warning to you,
to wake you up. That's what God was doing with
Israel with this locust play.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
So what is it that God says to them? What
does he want from then?

Speaker 3 (20:56):
Chapter two, verse twelve, get even now declares the Lord
turned to me with all.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Your heart, with fasting, with weeping.

Speaker 3 (21:03):
And with mourning and wren That means tear, tear your
hearts and not your garments. The thing to notice here
is that what he's describing is a repentance that grows
out of love. That's the key thing. He's not talking
about changing your behavior. He's talking about a repentance that
grows out of a broken heart. See the words, with
all your heart, fasting, weeping, mourning, tearing your hearts. He's

(21:25):
describing repentance that comes from a broken heart, not just
a bent will, but a heart that his heart broken
over what it's sin did to God. Because that's the
only kind of repentance that actually works. And I tell
you that, not only do I know that from Scripture,
I know that from my own life. Let's see a
little something about me when what bothers me about my

(21:47):
sin is that it caused some painful circumstance, or it
caused me to be embarrassed, or I felt guilty or ashamed,
like I wasn't a great Christian, or I wasn't a
very good pastor. And then I make a change when
that's the source of my repentance, my resolutions to change
are always really short lived. They don't go that deep.
I've described it to you before, like smacking a balloon.

(22:08):
I've told you, you know, the only way to keep a
balloon afloat, if it's filled with your breath.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
Is to continually smack it.

Speaker 3 (22:13):
And I'm like, this is the relationship that a lot
of us have with God, is that God has to
smack us from time to time to get us to
act right. And so you know, you come to church
and that's what I do is I smack you about
something and you.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
Change your behavior, but it never lasts. You kind of
hover for a little bit, smitch.

Speaker 3 (22:26):
Then you sag back down and God's got to send
somebody else to smack you again. And I told you
that that's not a fun way. That God didn't like it,
and you don't like it. There's another way to keep
a balloon afloat that's better for everybody, and that is
you fill it with helium and then it floats on
its own smacking required. What God wants to do is
he wants a change of heart that leads to a
heart broken repentance. In those areas where my heart has

(22:48):
been broken over how my sin hurt God, how my
sin drove out his presence from my life. Those are
the areas of repentance that really changed me.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
That's presence and power flow through a repentance that grows
out of love for Him. So if you can't repent effectively,
it's most likely because you don't really love God. That's
a hard reality. Today on Summit Life with Pastor JD.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
Greer.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
To listen again or to catch up on previous messages,
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(23:34):
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(23:55):
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(24:18):
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rather mail your donation, our address is JD. Greer Ministries,
Pobox one twenty two ninety three, Durham, North Carolina, two
seventy seven oh nine. I'm Molly Venovich inviting you to

(24:40):
join us Wednesday as we continue our study in the
Book of Joel on Summit Life with JD.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
Greer.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Today's program was produced and sponsored by Jdgreer Ministries.