Pass On Your History To Your Children - Joel

 Joel 1:3 (ESV)

Tell your children of it,

and let your children tell their children,

and their children to another generation.

What we pass on to our children is important.   We typically like to pass on all the great stories of our history.   The time our great-grandpa did __________!  And the time our uncle ________ did that one thing and everyone laughed!   We like to tell of our heritage and where we came from.  The internet is filled with sites to search out our past history and heritage.    But, we also know the stories we don’t tell.  We have the family secrets that we don’t want the world to know, especially our children.  We have our own failures when we were evil and we don’t want our children to know.  We definitely don’t want our teenagers to know the things we did as teenagers.   Why on earth would we tell the sad and bad stories of our past?  What profit would that be?   This might be something we would ask the prophet Joel.   He is writing about a very sad and bad time in Judah’s history.   He is telling them about the reason for the recent series of catastrophic events.   From deadly locust to dried up drought to invading armies to captivity, Joel outlines for Judah not just the calamities upon them and about to destroy them, but also the reason for it.   Joel wants Judah and all her children that come after her to know that disobedience to God is not done in darkness and secret.  He wants them to know that God is both an omniscient God and a jealous God.  God wants His children to walk in His ways.   God gave them everything.   Yet, they rejected God and went after idols and were eager to please themselves.    This is the story that Joel wants them to tell their children and their children’s children.   

Knowing the history of the past informs the conduct and potential dangers of the future.   We need to be able to see what caused calamity to avoid it in the future.   As the saying goes, “If we don’t learn from history we are destined to repeat it.”    This is Joel’s wisdom to us in the above verse.   We want to hide the mistakes of our past from our children.  That only makes sense.  But, it is also pride and it is also dangerous for children.  It not only gives them a false vision of who we are but it also denies them the truth that we, too, need God’s grace and are, today, the recipients of His grace.    We don’t need to glamorize our evil behaviors from the past.  But, we need to tell the generations after us the glories of God in the midst of our disobedience.  That is Joel’s entire message.