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.”
Picture a field in August after a swarm of locusts has passed through. All the sound has gone out of it. There are no insects, no birds and nothing moving, because 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 and a friend of John Newton, and for most of his adult life he suffered from a deep darkness of mind that the doctors of his day could not treat. He spent about eighteen months in an asylum at St Albans. He tried to take his own life. For long stretches he believed he was completely beyond God's reach. And still he wrote hymns. One of them begins, "God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform." Further down comes the line people underline: "Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face." A man who lost decades of his life wrote that, so it was never a cheerful man's hymn.
Joel is not cheerful either. He is speaking to a country stripped bare. God never calls the locusts a blessing in disguise. He names them, all four kinds, and then He says something harder than either comfort or blame: "my great army which I sent among you." Out of that comes the promise: "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten." What God promises is the years themselves, which is far more than a lesson squeezed out of the loss.
That is what is on offer here, and it is worth being exact about it. The passage never explains the swarm, and you may never get that explanation either. What God does promise is to give back something nothing else can return to you. No person, no settlement, no apology, and no amount of time you have left can do it. The next verse tells you how the restoring is measured: "ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied." Satisfied is the word God chose, and it means more than catching up or being paid back. It means being full, and the same verse ends with the promise, "my people shall never be ashamed."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 44 is Who Am I (2 Samuel 7:18).