Week 33 Joel 2
I’ve been reading the prophets for a month-and-a-half now so I’ve gradually shifted into a mental zone where I’m expecting quite a bit of gloom-and-doom.
Reading Joel today I wondered what “quite a bit” converted to in numerical terms so I decided to count verses.
There’s 73-verses in the book and I decided I’d do a simple two-part contrast: Dark Forecasts vs. Non-Dark Forecasts. I recorded them by putting a penciled dot beside Dark Forecast verses.
The number I had in my head before reading – it was a pure guess – was that Joel would have maybe 80% Dark Forecasts.
In the first 31-verses I dotted 27 verses: ~87%!
But then partway through chapter 2 Joel said (quoting the Lord): even now…return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning. And then Joel added: return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity. Who knows? He may turn and have pity and leave behind a blessing.
From that point on I wasn’t adding many dots. Almost the whole rest of the book was Non-Dark (my final Dark tally dropped to 42%).
Anyway…all that aside I thought about Joel’s pretty good question: who knows?
One of the tricky things with prophetic forecasts is that even though they sound very definite there sometimes seems to be an open-endedness to them too. Dependably predictable. But not absolutely predictable.
Note: quotes from Joel 2:12 13-14 (NIV)