Reversed Thundar

Joel 3:10

Beat your plowshares into swords

and your pruning hooks into spears;

let the weakling say,

“I am a warrior!”

Thought for the day – Reversed Thunder

As I was reading our chapter today I had to do a double take. I read our verse today and thought ‘hang on a sec, that’s the wrong way round.’ Isn’t the passage ‘ they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.’ Not in Joel. Joel reverses the image. It’s Isaiah and Micah that take the words Joel uses and make them peaceful. And I found myself thinking how often we do that? Think we know a passage, read it for the umpteenth time, and something different pops out at us. And if I’m honest it’s not just in our Bible readings either.

God is very good at taking what we think we know and turning upside down. So the words of Jesus come to mind. The first will be last, the last first. The weak shall be made strong and the strong made weak. That sort of thing. This is the Kingdom of God. It’s upside down and turned around. God takes the comfortable and makes it uncomfortable, the banal becomes inspirational and the world is conquered by a lamb. Why? Because God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. God uses the weak things of the world to overthrow the strong, the humble over the arrogant. To borrow another title from an excellent book: God’s Kingdom is ‘Reversed Thunder.’

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

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