They'll want to die and can't

One of the plagues Moses smote Egypt with was a plague of locusts, but the plague of locusts the Book of Joel prophetically looks at is about something much more than bugs; it’s a pestilence in the land of Israel during the tribulation that will thoroughly decimate the land.

“These locusts that come out are not physical locusts; they’re locusts in a spirit form,” explains Jordan. “I love in Leviticus where it talks about how a locust is clean if he’s a bald-headed locust. If you ever find a bald-headed locust, take a picture of it before you eat him, will you. I just want to see what that critter looks like.

“When Joel 1 refers to that devouring fire in verse 19-20, obviously there’s more involved. Revelation 9:3 says, ‘And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.’

“If you look down at verse 11, it reveals ‘they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.’

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“What did you learn in Proverbs that locusts don’t have? The literal insect doesn’t have a king. These locusts have a king, so they’re not the insect. Who is the king over them? He’s an angel. These are spirit-world creatures; fallen angelic creatures.

“They’re not going to attack the plant life in the earth like an insect locust would do; they’re going to attack PEOPLE.

“Verse 5 says, ‘And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.’

“If you’ve ever been stung by a scorpion, you know that’s not a pleasant experience. These things are going to inflict tremendous torment, ‘and in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.’ (Rev. 9:6)

“Now watch this: ‘And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.
[8] And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.
[9] And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.’

“The guy’s got a bulletproof vest plate on! These are wicked creatures, but obviously from the description of them, they are some type of degenerated demonic creatures.

“They’re a combination of horses, men, women, lions, bugs. They’ve got strange bodies, and if we’re studying the underworld and the things that happen with creatures after they die, you’d go to Isaiah 34 and Isaiah 66 and passages like that and you would see that what happens . . .

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“When sin corrupts, sin causes degeneration. Evolution’s got it backwards. Evolution says we started in the puddle and we’re heading for paradise. The Bible says you started in paradise and you’re heading for the puddle. The puddle for mankind turns out to be the ‘lake of fire.’

“In the lake of fire, it’s an absolute complete, total degeneration of the humanity that God gave you when He created man in His image. It’s not an uplifting, ‘up with people’ thing; it’s that sin kills you and when you see creatures in the underworld like that, oftentimes you see them in weird, degenerated forms and that’s part of the nature of what sin does over time.

“What you got a picture of is, in the tribulation, there’s going to be these literal swarms of locusts and they’re just going to decimate the land. And then these demonic locusts of Revelation 9 are going to come on the land as a nation whose teeth are as a lion and jaw teeth of a great lion, and they’re going to inflict this torment upon people who’ve lost everything they had to start with. When you think about that kind of devastation where men want to die and can’t . . .

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“You know, the other week (actor) Robin Williams killed himself; hung himself on a closet door and he had all kind of personal problems. One of them was money problems. You and I think, ‘How can a guy who has a TV series who’s making $165,000 for a 30-minute show have money problems?’ Well, one way is his second wife divorced him and got $30 million and he’s trying to pay that off. That’s beyond my ability to relate.

“But when you’re that kind of a bipolar guy that he was, you torment yourself internally. Now, these guys are being tormented externally and internally to the place they want to die—they’re in such misery that they cry out to die and God won’t let them die.

“That’s the situation you’re getting described when Joel begins. It’s this total devastation that’s going to be brought on the land before Christ comes. Because when you finish this chapter, the next chapter you have the armies of God show up at the Second Advent and then in the third chapter, you have God going out and destroying all the Gentile nations that came against Israel.

“Joel is just one blast of destruction so that in the latter part of chapter 2, he can say, ‘By the way, there’s going to be a believing remnant that I’m going to save out of that,’ and so what he’s doing is demonstrating to Israel is how they can be delivered out of the devastation through the Messiah.

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“Verse 5 says, ‘Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.’

“In other words, the fifth course of judgment is coming. Joel is looking prophetically to the last phase of it. Verse 7 says, ‘He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree: he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white.’

“You remember we studied Isaiah 5 the vineyard is a picture of the nation Israel? Israel is described as a vine tree and a fig tree. When you bark a tree, you kill it. You cut the bark off around it and it’s going to die.

“He says, ‘You drunkards, cry, weep, howl; you’re cut off.’ All of the luxuries you’ve had . . . . and you know we’ve talked to you about drinking and drunkenness in the Bible and it’s like that stuff we were studying in I Timothy 3 when Paul tells you the elders are not to be given to wine.

“The idea is if you need external stimulants to get through life, then you’re not dealing with life in any kind of a real sense because as soon as the external stimulants don’t work, you don’t have a path to deal with life.

“These guys here, He’s telling the drunkards they’re to wail because they’re going to lose all the things that we’re giving them cover.

“They’re not crying because they’re losing their basic necessities. He doesn’t say, ‘Cry because you don’t have clothes or food.’ They’ve lost that too; they’re crying because they don’t have the luxury of blinding their mind to it. There’s nothing to cover their misery.

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“Verse 9 says, ‘The meat offering and the drink offering is cut off from the house of the LORD; the priests, the LORD's ministers, mourn.’

“When that stuff is cut off from the house of the lord, in Daniel 8 and 9, the Antichrist starts the daily sacrifice and he cuts it off in the midst of the week. So what you’re reading here is some stuff that’s looking toward this judgment that’s coming on Israel in the middle of the week.

“ It says ‘the priests mourn.’ Why would they mourn? Well, because the sacrifice and the meat offering and drink offering is cut off. How did the priests get their compensation?

“In Israel they were to tithe. But they didn’t tithe money; they tithed corn, wheat, figs, produce. They tithed cattle. You bring a sacrifice, you kill a bullock, and the priest got the meat to eat and that’s when the Bible talks about ‘bring all the tithes into the storehouse.’

“They literally had a warehouse to store all these provisions so the priesthood could be financed. And so the priest is going to mourn because his income’s cut off.

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“Verses 10-11 say, ‘The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth.
[11] Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers, for the wheat and for the barley; because the harvest of the field is perished.’

“He says, ‘I’ve talked to the drunkards and I’ve talked to the people worshipping; let me tell you farmers something: howl, O ye vinedressers.’

“All of the ability to produce food and sustenance for the nation--that’s why the Antichrist says, ‘You take the mark of the beast or you can’t buy or sell.’

“Somebody says, ‘Well, why don’t we have a Victory Garden?’ Because the land’s been put in a place where it isn’t going to grow you a garden. That’s why they wind up fleeing to the wilderness where God then has to feed them with the manna.”

(To be continued . . . )