“And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.” —Joel 2:25
The locust year was particularly a year of great disappointment. The people looked for a harvest. In fact, they seemed to see it spring up, and then it was devoured before their eyes. Even so, the ungodly person—the one who has no faith in Christ—is often charmed with the prospect of a happiness that he never reaches. A little more and he will be content. He gets a little more. And this increases his thirst for yet another drink from the golden cup. Run as we may, when the heart shoots with its far-reaching bow, still the arrows are beyond us. The student must know a little more. The ambitious must climb a little higher up the ladder of honor, and then he will be at ease. He learns, he reaches the honor, but the ease is still as distant as ever—perhaps it is even further off.
Lost years can never be restored literally. Time once past is gone forever. Let no one make any mistake about this or trifle with the present moment under any notion that the flying hour will ever wing its way back to him.
So the meaning of the restoration of the years must be the restoration of those fruits and of those harvests the locusts consumed. We cannot have back our time. But in a strange and wonderful way, God can give back to us the wasted blessings, the unripe fruits of years where we mourned. It is a pity that they should have been eaten by our folly and negligence. But if they have been so, we should not be hopeless concerning them. Jesus said to the man with the demon-possessed son, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth” (Mark 9:23). There is a power that is beyond all things and can work great marvels.
Who can make the all-devouring locust restore his prey? No one, by wisdom or power, can recover what has been utterly destroyed. God alone can do for you what seems impossible. And here is the promise of his grace:
“I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.”
By giving to his repentant people larger harvests than the land could naturally yield, God could give back to them, as it were, all they would have had if the locusts had never come. And God can restore our lives that have up to now been blighted and eaten up with the locust and sin, by giving us divine grace in the present and in the future. He can yet make it complete and blessed and useful to his praise and glory. It is a great wonder, but Jehovah is a God of wonders; and in the kingdom of his grace, miracles are common.—Charles Spurgeon
