What the Locusts Have Eaten
--Joel 2:18-27 (Verse 25,
“I will repay you for the years the
Locust have eaten—
The great locust and the young
Locust,
The other locusts and the locust
Swarm—
My great army that I sent among
You.”—NIV)
They are destroyers and a delicacy. God sent them as the eighth plague of Egypt, but they were the mainstay of John the Baptist’s diet, for they are an excellent source of protein. Locusts are a type of grasshopper. They are the most important insects in the Bible. Nine Hebrew words in the Old Testament and one Greek word in the New Testament are translated by the English noun locust.
Locusts are destructive creatures. A swarm may have a population of billions. Wherever they go they devour and destroy all vegetation. We remember the account of the Plague of Locusts in Exodus 10: “And the LORD said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over Egypt so that locusts will swarm over the land and devour everything growing in the fields, everything left by the hail.”
“So Moses stretched out his staff over Egypt, and the LORD made an east wind blow across the land all that day and all that night. By morning the wind had brought the locusts; 14they invaded all Egypt and settled down in every area of the country in great numbers. Never before had there been such a plague of locusts, nor will there ever be again. 15They covered all the ground until it was black. They devoured all that was left after the hail—everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees. Nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt (--Exodus 10:12-15).”
They are speedy creatures who appear suddenly and disappear just as quickly. A swarm can travel over long distances and have found as far as 1,200 miles out to sea. One swarm of desert locusts that crossed the Red Sea in 1899 was said to cover an area of over 1,930 square miles. As the Biblical account in Exodus 10 relates swarms are usually brought in by the wind. When the come the literally block out the sun giving the appearance of darkness.
Egypt has not been the only nation to experience the painful results of locusts that “devoured everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees so that nothing green remained in all the land of Egypt,” our own country has experience the blight of locusts from time to time in our own history. Crops in New England were destroyed in 1797 and in Minnesota’s Red River Valley in 1818. In 1848 the Mormon pilgrims in Utah were plagued by locusts.
Laura Ingalls Wilder in her book On the Banks of Plum Creek and the chapter entitled “The Glittering Cloud” shows us what it was like to have the swarms of grasshoppers or locusts devour their homestead. This was the greatest plague to attack the United States and devastated the Great Plain States all the way to the Texas Panhandle: “They left the prairies utterly barren, with only holes in the ground where wheat or range grasses had been. . . .One swarm, about 100 miles wide and 300 miles long, was so high and dense that it obscured the sun and darkened the land” (--http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/natbltn/500-599/nb573.htm).
In Old Testament Times God employed the locusts as instruments of judgment upon His people Israel. Before they entered Cana, He warned them in Deuteronomy 28: “You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it. 39You will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them. 40You will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil, because the olives will drop off. 41You will have sons and daughters but you will not keep them, because they will go into captivity. 42Swarms of locusts will take over all your trees and the crops of your land (--Deuteronomy 28:38-42).”
The Lord clearly explains His reasons for sending locust as instruments of judgment in Deuteronomy 28:15, “However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you.” Egypt suffered the devastation of the locusts because of the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart; Israel and Judah experienced the same years later because they did “obey the Lord their God and did not carefully follow all His commands and decrees.”
In the midst of law, all crops destroyed by the locusts, we have the promise of grace:
“I will repay you for the years the
Locust have eaten—
The great locust and the young
Locust,
The other locusts and the locust
Swarm—
My great army that I sent among
You.”
When thinking about a New Year’s message, the promise that came to me immediately was: “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”
I can not think of a better promise to claim either as an individual Disciple of Jesus Christ or collectively as His Body than this one as we stand on the threshold of a New Year. This is the promise by which I intend to live in 2005, and it is my prayer that each one of you will as well.
The image “have eaten” paints a literal picture of something that has been completely, totally destroyed. God speaks again through the prophet Amos in Amos 4:9 and says,
“‘Many times I struck your gardens and vineyards,
I struck them with blight and mildew.
Locusts devoured your fig and olive trees,
Yet you have not returned to me,’
Declares the LORD.”
The fruit of those fig and olive trees were totally destroyed in the same vain
as in the 1870s the Great Plains were “utterly barren, with only holes in the ground where wheat or range grasses had been.” The Lord promises, “I will repay you,” meaning nothing less than “I will restore, I will bring the gardens and the vineyards back to their original productive state.
Oftentimes our lives, both as individuals and as the Church, seem to be devastated from years of destruction the locusts have consumed. What have locusts consumed, eaten, destroyed in your life over the years? What hurts and pains have you continued to carry over a long period of time? We all have experienced disappointments; we all have regrets; we all have made mistakes and experienced neglected opportunities; each of us has made wrong decisions that can not be reversed; and perhaps there is even sin that has remained unconfessed. Whatever the locusts have destroyed, God is able to restore. The past cannot be reversed, but in Christ we all can have a new beginning.
None of us can “turn back the clock” and reverse the errors of our past. I so appreciate what Nicky Gumbel’s observation in one of his awesome Alpha talks. He reminds us that we all wish we could have a dress rehearsal for life. In a dress rehearsal you can make all the mistakes possible, but you then have the opportunity to “get it all right” in the actual performance. Nicky says, “Unfortunately that is not possible; from the moment we are born, we are all on stage.” We can not reverse the mistakes of our past, but Jesus promises us a new beginning, “I will restore the years the locust have devoured.”
Oswald Chambers once again says it so well in the December 31st devotional from MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST: “Our yesterdays hold broken and irreversible things for us. It is true that we have lost opportunities that will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ. Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.”
That is our invitation to each one of you this morning. As we come to the Lord’s Table to commune with Him for the first time in this New Year, we invite you to “leave your broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.” He is here to “restore your years the locusts have eaten.”
