Sermon 83 - The Years the Locusts Have Eaten
Joel 2:25
I will restore to you the years which the locust, and the bruchus, and the mildew, and the palmerworm have eaten; my great host which I sent upon you.
Joel 1:4
What the locust swarm has left
the great locusts have eaten;
what the great locusts have left
the young locusts have eaten;
what the young locusts have left
other locusts have eaten.
Joel 1:15
Alas for that day!
For the day of the Lord is near;
it will come like destruction from the Almighty.
Many years ago I read a book with this title, "The Years the Locusts Have Eaten." It was based on this verse, Joel 2:25, "I will restore to you the years which the locusts have eaten." I don't remember what the story was actually all about. I don't really remember very much about the book: I have a vague recollection that it was a story set sometime in the late 1800s. But over the more than five decades between that time and this, that verse has stayed with me: "I will restore to you the years which the locusts have eaten." I can't say that, over the years, I have always believed it.
But in terms of a sermon, I am getting ahead of myself. We should really cover this in order. The order starts with the destruction, not the restoration.
Joel is a prophet, and like all the prophets, he is either telling what is going to happen, or explaining why what has happened, has happened. In this case, he is explaining why what has happened has happened. The ravaging hordes have come. The armies have invaded Israel, and plundered everything. And the Israelites are wondering why the day of the Lord doesn't come. Joel is explaining that the day of the Lord *has* come. Like Amos, who follows him in the Bible, Joel is explaining that the people got it wrong: the day of the Lord is not simply a time when everything will be set right. It will be a time when all injustices, and unfaithfulness, will be punished. And Israel has been unfaithful. This is, in fact, the day of the Lord. The Lord has finally gotten tired of the people being unfaithful to him and failing to follow his commands, and has finally decided to give them a gentle reminder in the form of their being completely overrun and exiled to a foreign land.
And when an army comes, it is not just the army that comes. The great swarm of the army comes and fights, and kills, and plunders. The infrastructure supporting the army comes around and plunders once again, sometimes just to resupply the army. The camp followers come along and they do some plundering themselves. And then various opportunists come and strip off anything left behind that they can pick up. It's like a bunch of different styles and species of locusts coming through.
And just to establish the point, go back to the plague of locusts in Egypt and look at it in context. The plague before the locusts was the plague of hail. The hail came and destroyed the flax and the barley, which ripen earlier than wheat. *Then* came the locusts, and the locusts destroyed the wheat crop, and also destroyed and ate the leaves on all the fruit trees. This is passed over very quickly in the Bible, without comment, so it is hard to see the level of destruction and devastation that this means. This is the complete destruction of all agriculture for the entire year. The early grain crop is gone. The main grain crop is gone. Also, all of the fruit for the year is gone. The entire year's produce is gone. Well, you say, in full ignorance of all the agricultural requirements of what comes to your grocery store, they can just eat the animals. Well, what are the animals going to eat? All of the fodder stocks are gone as well. Unless there is grain in reserve, everything, and everybody, is going to starve.
Everybody loves the blossom festivals. The cherry blossom festival, and the shorter, but even more fragrant, apple blossoms. Those blossoms are beautiful in and of themselves and are also the promise of the crop for the year. If there is a late frost at the wrong time, or even just a heavy rain, and those blossoms get washed away, there isn't going to be any crop.
And yet there is that promise: if the pollinators have had *just* enough time, then, yes, there will be a crop that year. Even if the rain washes away the blossoms, the fruit is already set, and the crop will grow.
When God makes that promise, "I will restore the years that the locusts have eaten," it is interesting to look at the ways that verse is translated in different versions of the Bible. Sometimes the word "years" gets translated as "ears." Obviously, since the original was in Hebrew and not in English, this can't just be the problem of a single letter being missing in some transcriptions of the verse. So, yes, sometimes God is talking about crops, but he is also talking about the years. God is talking about the time that is lost. The years that are wasted in various ways.
Sometimes the translation says that the years will be restored. Sometimes the translation says that the years will be repaid. I came across one that said that the years would be paid back *double*. This is a reference to parts of the law, where, if you have done something wrong and defrauded or stolen something, then, in terms of making restitution, you have to pay back more than you stole in order to restore or repay and make right the wrong that you did before.
We all have our own years that the locusts have eaten. So how do they get paid back? For us physicists, we have a standing joke that there is no difference between space and time except that you can't reuse time. Once time is gone, it's gone.
I have probably mentioned elsewhere that I never had a girlfriend before Gloria. I never had a girlfriend in school. I never had a girlfriend in high school. I never had a girlfriend in college. I never had a girlfriend when I was starting out in my working career. You don't have to feel sorry for me. I could have married any girl I pleased. I just never pleased any.
So that's a possibility for years that the locusts ate. Years that I was alone. Years of loneliness and unproductivity.
And then I met Gloria, and we knew each other for a while, and then we got married. Somehow we seemed to skip that whole stage of boyfriend and girlfriend and dating, but we had a really good marriage. And a few years after we got married, Gloria admitted that she really appreciated the fact that I never had a girlfriend. Never. The fact that Gloria didn't have to worry about me comparing her with anyone else, because I had no one else to compare her to.
You see, other people had compared other women to Gloria, and unfavorably to Gloria. There was a husband who decided that it wasn't worth being faithful to Gloria. There was a boyfriend who never really did decide whether it was worthwhile sticking with Gloria and committing to her. There were even family members who made unfavorable comments in terms of Gloria's physical attractions in comparison to those of other women.
And suddenly all those years that the locusts ate became a gift, a gift that I could give to Gloria. Even though I had never intended to, and didn't even really realize it until long after the fact.
Of course, it took twenty years ...
I definitely have mentioned elsewhere about being fired from teaching, and the long years of not teaching or teaching very little. But eventually I did get to teach again, and in the best teaching gig in the world. There were definitely some years that the locusts ate, but I don't remember much about the years of non-teaching, or seldom teaching. I do remember, and have lots and lots of stories about, the years of teaching the best teaching gig in the entire world.
Mind you, it took twenty years to happen. And another ten for me to figure out that it *had* happened, and *how* it happened ...
Sometimes, in terms of restoring the years the locusts ate, the illustration is used of women in labour. There's an awful lot of pain involved, but there's a baby at the end of it. In view of the value of babies, yes, this has got to be a pretty good compensation, regardless of the pain involved beforehand.
But you don't have to go that far, and you can have a more generic example. Any major accomplishment is accompanied by a lot of work. The work, particularly hard mental work in solving a problem, is very difficult indeed. There are all kinds of efforts involved in building structures of logic and ideas and concepts, putting them together, getting distracted so that the whole thing comes crashing down in your head, and it has to be rebuilt all over again and rechecked to make sure that you haven't forgotten anything that will make the whole thing worthless. Then finally testing it out, finding that you have missed something, and fixing that problem, putting it back together again, testing it again, and finally it works! And all of that effort, and all of that worry, and all of that work, and everything else is forgotten in that sense of accomplishment and productivity when you finally make it work.
So, we have to consider these small accomplishments. We have to consider that, yes, there is the possibility of restoring the years that the locusts have eaten. It is possible, as *impossible* as the wasted years that we are in now seem, in terms of any compensation ever making them worthwhile. God has promised that He will, and He can.
As hard as it is to wait patiently while He does.
Sermon - Garden series
Sermon 2 - Broad Beans
Sermon 3 - Blackberries
Sermon 33 - Transplanting
Sermon 57 - Leaven
Sermon 59 - Corn
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