Daily Manna · Day 44 · February 13
The Years the Locust Ate
“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.”
A field in August with the sound gone out of it. No insects, no birds, nothing moving; the swarm has already passed through and there is nothing left for anything to eat.
William Cowper knew what that looks like from the inside of a life. He was a poet, a friend of John Newton, and for most of his adult years he was ill in a way the eighteenth century had no name for. He spent eighteen months in an asylum at St Albans. He attempted his own life. He believed for long stretches that he was beyond God's reach entirely, and he wrote hymns anyway, including the one that begins God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform, and the line further down that people underline: behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face. A man who lost decades wrote that. It is not a cheerful man's hymn.
Joel is not cheerful either. He is speaking to a country stripped bare, and God does not tell them the locusts were a blessing in disguise. He names them by their four kinds and then says something harder than either comfort or blame: my great army which I sent among you. And out of that, the promise. I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten. Not compensation. Not a lesson extracted. The years.
That is what is on offer, and it is worth being exact about it. God does not undertake to explain the swarm. He undertakes to give back the one thing that no person, no settlement, no apology and no amount of remaining time can return to you. The next verse says how it is measured: ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied. Satisfied is the word. Not caught up. Not compensated. Full.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 44 is Who Am I (2 Samuel 7:18).