The Years that the Locusts Have Eaten
If you’ve been watching television (and who hasn’t?) you’ll know that one of the traditions associated with New Year’s is for the media to recap the significant news stories of the previous year. They put together a compelling montage of memories of the great and the small that have gone into the drama of life.
I’d like you to imagine this morning that a news director and a camera crew were assigned to do that for your life. Their job would be to put together a highlight film of your life in 1989 - a highlight film that would include the bad times as well as the good times; the small moments as well as the great. You would be seen at your best, but also at your worst. The camera crew would have access to the film archives of your memory as well as those of the people whose lives your life touched in 1989.
How would you feel about watching that program when they got done? Would you feel a sense of satisfaction and fulfilment as you viewed the flow of events in your life over the past year? Or would you cringe with regret at having to relive some very painful moments… moments that were better forgotten? Somehow I feel that for most of us, that would not be a very rewarding experience. We all sense with the passing of time that we would like to have done things differently.
The prophet Joel challenges the people of Israel with just such an exercise. He reviews their past years with the dispassionate objectivity of a TV camera, and he finds them wanting. The people have gone their own way, they have forgotten God. For years they have been living in the rut of sin. And Joel concludes that the time has come for God to discipline them.
Joel tells us that way God would judge His people would be to send a plague of locusts upon their land. When we read that, we say “Big Deal! How bad can a few insects be?” But when Joel talks about locusts, he’s talking about the scourge of the Middle East. He’s talking about a natural catastrophe that we here in North America have no conception of.
Middle Eastern locusts look a lot like our grasshoppers, only bigger. But there’s a significant difference in their behavior from our cute little grasshoppers. Locusts like to be together. Boy, do they like to be together! They gather together in swarms which become so large they boggle the mind. In 1889, we have records of a locust swarm which appeared over the Red Sea which was estimated to cover 200 square miles. That’s a lot of locusts!
Just how many was estimated by National Geographic in an article which described a locust swarm that hit Palestine in 1915. It was estimated that that particular swarm contained 24.4 billion insects. It’s no wonder that a locust swarm blocks out the sun, giving the same impression of a total eclipse.
If you have the bad fortune to be around when a locust swarm hits, you can expect to find locusts inside your clothing, in your mouth and in your ears, in every nook and cranny of your house, including your sheets and blankets and your food. These locusts are relentless in their search for anything edible. When a locust swarm passes through, there is not one green plant left anywhere. I have a picture of a fig tree in full leaf, taken just before a locust swarm hit. Five minutes later, the tree is completely naked, with not a leaf on it. Locusts are the piranhas of the insect world. And Joel said that the locusts were coming… coming to eat up the grain, and the fruit of the vine, coming to strip all the good off the land and leave scorched earth in their wake… coming because God’s people had sinned.
It seems to me that there can be locusts in our lives too. When we lose our spiritual focus, when we get our eyes off God, He sometimes has to allow the locusts to discipline us. And these locusts eat up everything that is good in our lives and reduce us to spiritual poverty. And it is only then that we realize how far we have wandered from God.
What are these modern day locusts? Well, in the book of Joel ch.1, he describes four different types of locusts, using four different Hebrew words to do so. I’d like to consider four modern-day locusts that can attack our lives when we wander away from God.
1. the locust of busyness
2. the locust of laziness
3. the locust of selfishness
4. the locust of failure
1. the locust of busyness
If there is one common refrain I keep hearing from people today, it is that we are all too busy. Like gerbils in a cage, we run and run and run in our little round wheel of busyness, and we never really get anywhere. The busier we get, the less we seem to accomplish that is of truly lasting value.
Everyone is in a hurry. Everyone is under stress. Just try dawdling at a stoplight down where I live on Long Island and you’ll see what I mean!
Medical research has shown that it is possible for us to become addicted to our own adrenalin. We unconsciously structure our lives so as to live them under maximum pressure, and when our adrenalin kicks in to carry us through, we get a “high” that workaholics know all about. But we pay the piper in the currency of high blood pressure, ulcers, and heart attacks. There’s a price to pay for living this way.
As you look back on the year just completed, was it a year of busyness? What did you really accomplish for having lived your life on the redline of the tachometer? Someone has said that “much of our activity is nothing more than a cheap anesthetic to deaden the pain of an empty life.” If we were really honest with ourselves, we’d have to admit that we often fill our lives with busyness to fool ourselves into thinking that what we are doing is meaningful. But when we stand before the judgment seat of Christ, He isn’t going to ask us how busy we were, He’s going to ask us what we did that was truly of lasting value for Him.
A year of busyness is a year that the locusts have eaten.
2. the locust of laziness
Laziness is the opposite of busyness. Laziness is letting things slide. Laziness is when you let yourself become a couch potato socially, mentally, and spiritually. The locust of laziness eats away your incentive and gobbles up your gumption. It whispers in your ear the seductive message of manana — Why do today what you can get around to doing tomorrow? It takes many forms, from putting off reading your Bible and going to church, to just letting your marriage drift along without really working at it, to spending every afternoon watching Santa Barbara and Another Life.
We have some beautiful beaches on Long Island. Some of the rich folks from Manhattan have built magnificent beachfront homes on the shores of Eastern Long Island. But there’s a problem. The ocean has been attacking those beaches. Day after day, as the waves roll in, a little more beach rolls out, and many of those beautiful homes have had to be condemned. Some of them have simply collapsed into heaps of rubble. Just like those beaches, our souls, our minds, and our characters are eroded by the relentless attacks of the locust of laziness until our lives are nothing but a heap of rubble - a chaos of broken dreams and unfulfilled potential.
A year of laziness is a year that the locusts have eaten.
3. the locust of selfishness
We live in a nation where 9 out of 10 people have been seduced by the goddess of success. Most Americans subscribe to the the theory that if one is good, two is better, and three is better yet. And so most people are consumed by the locust of selfishness — the desire to get more: more money, more things, more fame, and more power.
And don’t think that just because you are a Christian, you have some special kind of pesticide to keep the locust of selfishness from attacking you. As a matter of fact, Christians, of all people, can be especially prone to the locust of selfishness. You see, we often equate success and prosperity with the blessing of God. We say that if we have a big house and two cars in the garage and money in the bank that God has blessed us. But has He really? Or did we simply go out and get those things ourselves? Are they merely the product of our selfishness? How much of God’s real blessing did we sacrifice on our way to the new car showroom?
There is a proverb in the Jewish Talmud to the effect that, as a baby, man is born with his hands clenched, but he dies with them wide open. The locust of selfishness makes us want to clench our hands, to grasp for everything we can get, only to lose it all when we die.
One block from our church is a large funeral home. Just the other day, they had the funeral of the father of the Nassau County Executive. The father was a judge. He had been very active in politics. Hundreds of people visited the funeral home, making it almost impossible for us to find parking for our Prayer Meeting. The next day, the funeral procession went right past our church. Fourteen motor cycle police racing ahead to block off the intersections. Two flower cars laden down with thousands of dollars worth of flowers. Five stretch limousines with the family. Over thirty cars in the procession. And the hearse. You want to know what I noticed about the hearse? There was no U-Haul trailer hooked up to it. This man, for all his power and prestige and prosperity, took nothing to his grave with him.
One by one God took them from me,
All the things I valued most,
Till I was empty handed;
Every glittering toy was lost.
And I walked earth’s highway grieving,
In my rags and poverty,
Till I heard His voice inviting
“Lift your empty hands to me”
So I turned my hands toward heaven,
And He filled them with a store
Of His own transcendent riches
Till they could contain no more
And at last I comprehended
With my stupid mind and dull
That God could not pour His riches
Into hands already full
A year of selfishness is a year that the locusts have eaten.
4. the locust of failure
Every one of us has felt the sting of this locust. Some more than others have felt the lingering after-effects of his bite. Failure can induce a creeping paralysis into your life. It can infect you with fear: fear of starting over; fear of beginning anew; and fear of failing again.
Perhaps as you look back over 1989, you see the giant shadow of failure blocking out the sun. Perhaps you have experienced the failure of a relationship; perhaps the failure of an endeavor. Perhaps your failure was in the area of your dreams and your goals. Perhaps things just didn’t turn out as you had hoped they would.
Maybe you felt like a failure in your walk with God. You started out the year with an iron resolve to be more faithful to Him, only to find at year’s end that your iron resolve was covered with rust. The acid rain of life took the luster off your fellowship with the Lord. And now you feel a sense of shame and failure.
A year of failure is a year that the locusts have eaten.
But there is a tremendously encouraging verse in the book of Joel. After cataloging this chronicle of doom, the prophet turns a page and speaks of blessing and restoration. The key:
Joel 2:12-13 “Even now,” declares the LORD, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.” Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.
The key to experiencing God’s restoration is repentance. It is simply turning back to God. It is simply putting God back in His rightful place in our lives. And notice how true repentance is expressed: it is when we rend our hearts and not our garments. God is not impressed when we make a loud show of coming back to Him; He is impressed by the quiet, heartbroken prayer of a contrite soul.
God delights in giving us a fresh start; a new beginning. He specializes in taking our wrongs and making them right. Someone has said with regard to the grace of God “No matter what a man’s past may have been, his future is spotless.” According to the prophet Joel, God says
Joel 2:25 “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten”
What a message of hope that is on New Years Day 1990! As we look back upon years that may have been eaten up by busyness, or laziness, squandered on selfishness, or consumed by failure, God says that if we will but return to Him, He will make up those years for us. Our loss will become a profit, our liabilities assets. And in the grace of God, the years that the locusts have eaten will become lessons to guide us in the days to come.
Two summers ago, Yellowstone National Park was devastated by forest fires. Huge areas of that beautiful forest simply went up in flames. Left behind were the charred and blackened stumps of once mighty trees. Many people were outraged that the U.S. Forest Service didn’t do more to prevent the catastrophe from happening. They felt that this was a tragedy, a disaster that forever destroyed that wonderful forest. But they were wrong. They didn’t understand the way of the forest.
Were you to go there now, you would still see areas of the park that were untouched by the fires, still as magnificent as ever. But that’s not where the miracle is taking place. In the blackened areas, new growth is coming in. Saplings are sprouting, wild-flowers will bloom in the spring in a riot of color. Young trees will take hold and grow rapidly, out from the shadow of the old trees that once were. And in a few years, the portions of the forest that were destroyed by fire will actually be healthier than the areas that escaped.
There’s a lesson there for us about the grace of God. We all have burned over areas of our lives. Areas ravaged by the locusts. But God can bring new growth in those very places if we let Him. And what were once weaknesses will become strengths under His healing hand.
A woman named Kathleen Wheeler, who I believe must have been a school teacher, wrote a poem to illustrate the grace of God:
He came to my desk with quivering lip - the lesson was done
“Dear teacher, I want a new leaf,” he said. “I have spoiled this one.”
I took the old leaf, stained and blotted, and gave him a new one all unspotted.
And into his sad eyes smiled, “Do better now my child.”
I went to the throne with a quivering soul - the old year was done.
“Dear Father, have you a new leaf for me? I have spoiled this one.”
He took the old leaf stained and blotted, and gave me a new one all unspotted.
And into my sad heart smiled, “Do better now my child.”
God never tires of our new beginnings. In His grace, He stands ready to pick us up when we fall. That is because in His eyes there are no losers. In heaven’s eyes no hopeless cause. Only people like you with feelings like me, amazed by the grace we can find in heaven’s eyes.