Decreation and Deliverance Text: Joel 2:30-32
Introduction: Reading the Signs
We live in an age that is simultaneously obsessed with and terrified of the end of the world. Our secular prophets in Hollywood and the news media are constantly serving up visions of apocalypse, whether through climate disaster, global pandemic, or nuclear war. They are eschatologists without knowing it. They see the smoke and the fire, but they have no categories for the God who sends them. And because of this, many Christians have been spooked into adopting their interpretive lens. They read a passage like this one in Joel, and they immediately think of far-off, future events, of a final cataclysm at the very end of time. They see the language of a darkened sun and bloody moon and assume it must be a literal, cosmological collapse.
But this is to misread the prophetic vocabulary of Scripture. The Bible has a well-established way of speaking about monumental historical judgments, and it is the language of decreation. When God brings a nation or a city to ruin, the prophets describe it as the undoing of the created order. The sun, moon, and stars in prophetic language are often symbols for earthly rulers and authorities. When their kingdom falls, their lights go out. Isaiah said this about the fall of Babylon: "For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light" (Isaiah 13:10). Did the literal sun go out when Babylon fell to the Medes and Persians? Of course not. But the world of Babylon ended. Its cosmos collapsed.
This is crucial for understanding what Joel is prophesying, and what Peter, on the day of Pentecost, declared was being fulfilled. Peter quotes this very passage from Joel in Acts 2 and says, "this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel" (Acts 2:16). The last days had begun, the Spirit was being poured out, and the great and awesome day of the Lord was fast approaching. What day was that? It was the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. That was the culmination of the covenantal age. That was the day of the Lord that would shake the heavens and the earth of the old covenant world, and from which there would be a great deliverance for those who called on the name of the Lord.
So, this passage is not about some far-flung future that we can only speculate about. It is about the central event in redemptive history: the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, the pouring out of His Spirit, and the subsequent judgment on the generation that rejected Him. It is about a historical apocalypse that has already happened, and a spiritual deliverance that is happening still.
The Text
"And I will put wonders in the sky and on the earth, Blood, fire, and columns of smoke. The sun will be turned into darkness And the moon into blood Before the great and awesome day of Yahweh comes. And it will be that everyone who calls on the name of Yahweh Will be delivered; For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem There will be those who escape, As Yahweh has said, Even among the survivors whom Yahweh calls."
(Joel 2:30-32 LSB)
Cosmic Collapse as Covenant Judgment (v. 30-31)
We begin with the signs of the coming judgment.
"And I will put wonders in the sky and on the earth, Blood, fire, and columns of smoke. The sun will be turned into darkness And the moon into blood Before the great and awesome day of Yahweh comes." (Joel 2:30-31)
This is the language of decreation, the reversal of the Genesis account. God is unmaking a world. The "blood, fire, and columns of smoke" are the terrible signs of war and divine judgment. This is what the siege of a city looks like. The Jewish historian Josephus, an eyewitness to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, describes the city in exactly these terms: a place of horrific bloodshed, massive fires, and smoke that blotted out the sun. The wonders in the sky and on the earth were not UFOs, but the terrifying portents of a collapsing social and political order.
The sun turning to darkness and the moon to blood is standard prophetic imagery for the fall of ruling powers. The sun, the great light, represents the highest authority in the land. The moon, which reflects the sun's light, represents the lesser authorities. In the context of first-century Judea, the sun was the Temple establishment, the high priesthood, and the Sanhedrin. The moon was the associated civil magistracy. In A.D. 70, their lights went out. The entire sacrificial system, the center of their world, was obliterated. Their authority was extinguished in a sea of blood. This was "the great and awesome day of Yahweh." It was a historical day of the Lord, a temporal judgment that served as a type and a shadow of the final Day of the Lord.
Peter quotes this at Pentecost to a crowd of Jews in Jerusalem and essentially tells them that the clock is ticking. The final forty-year period, a generation of probation, had begun. The Spirit has been poured out as the sign that the Messianic age has dawned, and with it comes a choice. The coming of the Spirit is the first great portent. The second is the disintegration of the cosmos of Old Covenant Israel. It was all one event, one symphonic composition, as Peter describes it. The overture was the speaking in tongues, and the crescendo was the fall of Jerusalem. This was not a distant event for them; it was their immediate future.
The Great Escape (v. 32)
But in the midst of this terrifying judgment, God provides a way of escape. The central promise is not destruction, but deliverance.
"And it will be that everyone who calls on the name of Yahweh Will be delivered..." (Joel 2:32a)
This is the heart of the gospel. In the Old Testament, the name of Yahweh is the covenant name of God. To call on His name was to appeal to His covenant faithfulness for salvation. But when Peter and Paul quote this verse in the New Testament, they apply it directly and unequivocally to the Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 2:21; Romans 10:13). To call on the name of the Lord is to call on the name of Jesus. Jesus is Yahweh. This is a profound statement of Christ's divinity. The way to be saved from the coming wrath was to confess that Jesus, whom they had crucified, was both Lord and Christ.
What did this deliverance look like practically for the first-century Christians? When the Roman armies under Titus surrounded Jerusalem, the Christians living in the city remembered the words of Jesus in the Olivet Discourse (Luke 21:20-21). They saw the "abomination of desolation" and knew it was time to flee. They escaped to the mountains, to a town called Pella, and not one Christian is recorded as having perished in the siege. They called on the name of the Lord, and they were delivered, both spiritually from the guilt of their sin, and physically from the temporal judgment that fell upon that city.
This is a pattern. God always provides a way of escape for His people before He pours out His wrath. He delivered Noah before the flood, Lot before the destruction of Sodom, and the Christians before the fall of Jerusalem. The call is not to hunker down and wait for the end, but to flee to the ark of safety, who is Christ Himself.
A Called and Chosen Remnant (v. 32b)
Joel concludes by clarifying who these delivered ones are. Their escape is not an accident of history, but a result of a divine, sovereign call.
"For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem There will be those who escape, As Yahweh has said, Even among the survivors whom Yahweh calls." (Genesis 2:32b)
The escape is located "on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem." This seems paradoxical. How can the place of destruction also be the place of deliverance? Because it refers to the true, heavenly Mount Zion, the Church of the living God (Hebrews 12:22). The physical Jerusalem was about to be destroyed, but the spiritual Jerusalem, the assembly of the saints, was the place of refuge. The deliverance was found among the remnant, the "survivors whom Yahweh calls."
This points directly to the doctrine of election. People do not call on the name of the Lord out of their own native wit or spiritual insight. They call because they have first been called. Salvation is a sovereign work from beginning to end. God chooses a people for Himself, He calls them by His Spirit through the preaching of the gospel, and He grants them the faith to call back to Him for deliverance. Our calling on Him is the echo of His prior call to us. We love Him because He first loved us.
This is a great comfort. Our salvation does not rest on the strength of our grip on God, but on the strength of His grip on us. He is the one who calls, He is the one who delivers, and He is the one who preserves His remnant through every fire and every judgment. The world may be shaking, earthly kingdoms may be falling, and the sun and moon may grow dark, but the kingdom we have received in Christ cannot be shaken. The deliverance promised here is not just an escape from a doomed city in the first century. It is an escape from a doomed world system, an escape from the wrath to come, and an escape into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Everyone who calls on His name will be delivered. That is not a suggestion; it is a covenant promise from the God who cannot lie.