“Rend your hearts and not your garments and

turn unto the Lord your God . . .

 and I will restore unto you the years the locust hath eaten.”

(Joel 2:13, 25)

The prophet Joel lived through a locust plague. It was a tough experience. The whirring insects blew in like storm clouds. Their flight darkened the sky. Wherever the air-borne vandals settled, they stripped the earth and left it a desert. The grain in the field, the fruit in the gardens, they ate up and left not a kernel nor a fig for man nor beast.

Joel describes the locust attack in terms of a marching phalanx of soldiers: “They climb the wall like men of war; they march everyone in his way and do not break rank; . . the land is as the Garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.”

Joel’s description of the locust plague resembles a picture in the National Geographic magazine about a contemporary locust swarm in Palestine when clouds of the pests devoured leaves, twigs, and even the bark on the trees.

An observer of a locust plague in Lebanon tells about it in these words: “I saw under my own eye, not only a large vineyard loaded with young grapes, but whole fields of corn disappear as if by magic. We dug trenches, and kindled fires, and beat and burned to death heaps and heaps, but the effort was utterly useless. Wave after wave rolled up the mountain sides and poured over the rocks, walls, ditches, and hedges, those behind covering up and bridging over the masses already killed.”

Now, I’ve never seen a locust plague in the Middle East, but I’ve endured a grasshopper plague in the Middle West. That’s plenty for me. I’ve seen the corn stalks devoured down to bare nubbins, acre upon acre. I’ve heard the cynical song of the massed grasshopper choirs singing in the brazen summer evening from the leafless trees. I’ve witnessed the human suffering that followed crop failure. I understand something of the pathos with which Joel writes of those years he suffered which the locust devoured.

But I know and Joel knew and you know very well that plague and pestilence are not confined to the insect kingdom; neither are fields and gardens and vineyards all that can be laid waste in the realms of the Kingdom of man.

World traveler that each one of us is, we come at last to our own Great Sahara, the wasteland of our years. In despair we sit down to contemplate it. Not in fearful prospect of crossing it, but in retching retrospect, as we look back and realize we have been adrift in that desert land, lo, so many years.

It was not originally a desert. As we entered it seemed green and lush and fair enough. But in the exigencies of our existence that is what it has become, a wasteland, and now we look back across it and recognize it as “the years the locust hath eaten.”

What for you and me, are the years the locust has eaten? Why, the years you have been working and living for wrong values; and now suddenly you see the arid emptiness of it all. The years you have been hiding from your real self, living as a creature of convention, a clumsy marionette of the smart clique into which you thought you wanted to get so bad you sold your soul and substituted the clique mentality which has ever since pulled the strings to put you through your nervous routines.

The years the locust has eaten? Why, they are the years you have lived in secret, sinful infidelities, playing false with your family, friends, business associates, or fellow citizens. And from time and life and labor invested there is for you now no glad and wholesome harvest. These are the years the locust has eaten.

The years that the locust has eaten, what are they? Why, the years we have remained aloof, unconcerned, unimpassioned, at the world’s distress. In The Devil’s Advocate, Blaise Meredith, a Roman Catholic priest, is dying of cancer. His doctor has diagnosed his case as carcinoma and told him he has only a few months to live, but his Cardinal, who knows Meredith better than his physician does, tells him that his sickness is really his aloofness. That explains his sense of aching emptiness.

“This is your sickness,” says the Cardinal to his dying priest. “There is no passion in your life. You have never loved a woman, nor hated a man, nor pitied a child. You have withdrawn yourself too long and you are a stranger in the human family. You have asked nothing and given nothing. You have never known the dignity of need nor the gratitude for a suffering shared. This is your sickness. This is the cross you have fashioned for your shoulders. This is where your doubts began and your fears, too. Because a man who cannot love his fellows, cannot love God either.”

As Joel stood in the midst of the years the locust had eaten, in the wasteland of his nation, in the crop failure of his own personality plowing, he does not whimper in despair nor resign himself and his nation to destruction. He does two positive things.

First, he issues an invitation to repentance: “Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain . . . Now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to me with all your heart . . . And rend your heart and not your garments.”

Dr. Carlyle Marney says this injunction of Joel in our vernacular means: “Tear your hearts and not your britches.” Sob over your sins and not over your bruises. Pine not over your stock and bond losses, but over your diminished moral standards. In other words: “Get through to a genuine repentance.”

For Joel, the locust plague was not simply human catastrophe, it was divine judgment. And whenever judgment occurs, the only appropriate human response is repentance. And if the divine judgment fell upon the relatively innocent, as well as on the relatively wicked, it is still a sign for general repentance, for all men are sinners. Jesus said about those who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell: “Think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, nay. But except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:4-5)

But Joel, in the midst of the years that the locust has eaten, not only calls to repentance, he affirms his confidence that his God will restore more abundantly than the destroyer had destroyed. “For the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great mercy and will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.”

The best crops are those that come up out of the soil fertilized by the decaying bodies of the dead locusts. Though a ravaging flood destroy the freshly planted seed and spread misery across many months, the soil enriched by the silt the flood waters brought in produces a bumper harvest. So, many a life whose years the locust has devoured, when the wasted years are past, brings forth rich harvests to God.

Why is this? Because calamity enriches life? Because evil experiences fertilize for harvests of righteousness? Oh, no. But because any desolation which is seen and accepted as God’s judgment, unerringly produces repentance and repenting opens the unlimited resources of God to restore and recreate and make marvelously productive human life in the harvest fruits of God’s kingdom.

Our church school is now recruiting teachers for the new term to begin in September. Because of our rotation system and a few removals, we need 27 new volunteers. This may be the opportunity God is offering you now as you stand in the desert wasteland of your life, to restore to you the years the destroyer has taken. How rewarding and blessed this experience can be. Your church needs your life invested in its teaching program, but you need it too. It may well be that this is your one best hope for God to restore to you the years the locusts have eaten.

Shortly before he died, Studdert Kennedy wrote these lines for his children: “I am the king of a tiny kingdom that contains three sons. I desire above all things else that they grow up to be fine and fair and free. I know so well my weakness and my illness and my sin. So every day I pray: ‘God save the King.’”

Our Lord Himself, thinking of His disciples, prayed: “O Father, for their sakes, I sanctify myself.”

O man or woman, boy or girl, when the shadow of the destroyer falls across the horizon of your life and threatens to blot out the sun of righteousness from the realm of your soul, and you are tempted to allow some vagrant destroyer to trespass on the sacred soil of your life, say to yourself: “I am a king. I have my tiny kingdom, my royal responsibilities. I must sanctify myself for their sakes.”

So, should not each of us pray every day: “God save the King. . . God save the Queen.”

 

ASCRIPTION OF GLORY

“Now unto Him that loved us, and loosed us from our sins in His own blood, and hath made us a Kingdom and priests unto God, His Father; to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever, Amen.”

PASTORAL PRAYER

Almighty God, who in Jesus Christ Thy Son hast given us all things that are necessary to our spiritual life and godliness; grant us, we beseech Thee in all our occupations, the aid of Thy strength and the guidance of Thy wisdom, that whether we be called to rule or to obey, to teach or to learn, to labor or to suffer, we may abide in Thee, and that whatsoever we do, we may do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.

Teach us, in whatsoever state we are, therewith to be content, that we may know both how to abound and how to suffer need; that in prosperity we may bless Thee, who givest us richly all things to enjoy, and in adversity may not suffer our faith in Thy love to fail. Guide us with Thy counsel while we live, and afterward receive us to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who taught us when we pray to say:

CALL TO WORSHIP

“Therefore, now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and rend your heart and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God; for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness.”