Friday
‘I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten — the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm — my great army that I sent among you. You will have plenty to eat, until you are full, and you will praise the name of the LORD your God, who has worked wonders for you; never again will my people be shamed. Then you will know that I am in Israel, that I am the LORD your God, and that there is no other; never again will my people be shamed. ‘And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days. I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD. And everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the LORD has said, among the survivors whom the LORD calls. - Joel 2:25-32
I think Joel 2:25 may be one of the most beautiful promises in all of the Bible. This is not just poetic language, Joel ch. 1 describes in graphic detail the total devastation caused by the locust swarm. The people who endured this disaster would have experienced terrible loss. Swarming locusts can completely strip the vegetation from hundreds, even thousands of acres in a single day. In an agriculturally based community, a locust swarm could totally decimate the economic structure of an entire nation.
The phrase “the years the locusts have eaten” was no exaggeration, it would take many years to recover from the devastation of the locusts. The people to whom Joel originally spoke this prophecy knew the pain of great loss, and this promise would have given them great hope. In my work as a pastor, I have met many people who have experienced the pain of great loss, people who have felt as though life has stripped them bare and eaten away their joy.
One beautiful example of this is young a woman who began attending our church several years ago. When I first met her, it was clear that she had been deeply wounded and was looking for a place to find some hope. She told me about how her husband had left her and their two small children for another woman, and how she had spent the last 5 years full of fear and bitterness. Slowly, God began to heal the deep wounds in her heart through the love of Christ and the people of His church. Eventually this woman surrendered her heart to Jesus and discovered the incredible joy of His grace! She has since been remarried to a wonderful Christian man and is actively involved worshipping and serving God in many ways. I spoke with her on the day of her wedding and she referred to this passage from Joel saying that she had experienced the power of this promise in her own life.
Many of us know the pain and regret of wasted years before we repented and surrendered it all to Jesus. At times, we might look back and be sad to realize that there were many years in the past that were eaten up by the locusts of sin and rebellion in our lives. Joel describes perfectly what life was like before we surrendered to Jesus, there was pain and suffering.
The good news is that God has promised to restore us from all the troubles of our past, the heartaches from broken relationships, the struggles from defeat, and the frustrations of our lives. All the times that we have felt broken beyond repair, God has promised to heal and restore. We cannot change the past. We cannot go back and do things over again. But from this moment forward we can give over to God our anxieties about the past and trust Him to restore what has been lost. We can learn from sin in our past and resolve to live fully for Christ from this day forward.
The reality is that our enemy (Satan) will always be ready to intimidate and harass us but we need to do what the Apostle Paul says, “But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. ” (Philippians 3:13-14). In other words, we should forget our past and press on in Jesus! We need to take those old wounds, the worries and naggings about our wasted years, and let God restore to us the very years that were lost.
The fact is, the closer we get to Jesus, the more we fall in love with Him and when we turn our lives to Him, Christ blots out our transgressions, for His own sake, and remembers our sins no more – (Isaiah 43:25). He tells us to: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up, do you not perceive it?” – Isaiah 43:18-19.
Jeff Frazier
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