Joel Chapter 1
Scripture Reading: Joel 1:1-20
Invasion of Locusts
Despair, you farmers,
wail, you vine growers;
grieve for the wheat and the barley,
because the harvest of the field is destroyed.
The vine is dried up
and the fig tree is withered;
the pomegranate, the palm and the apple tree—
all the trees of the field—are dried up.
Surely the people's joy
is withered away.
(Joel 1:11-12 NIV)
Have you ever gone to get groceries and the store didn’t have a specific ingredient you needed for a recipe? It’s happened to me on more than one occasion. My usual response is a mumbled complaint followed by several deep sighs of frustration as I go back to my car to drive to a different grocery store. It’s an inconvenience when the store is missing an ingredient. What would it be like if the store was completely empty of food?
It’s difficult for us as Americans to fully grasp the destructive power of locusts since we have not experienced it. Some of us may think of locust plagues as something that existed only in Biblical times. We only need to look back a few years to the Desert Locust Crisis of 2020-2021 that took place in the eastern countries of Africa. Below are some facts on desert locusts from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations[1]:
1 locust can eat its own weight of food in a single day
1 swarm of locusts covers an area of 30 square miles
1 of those square miles consists of 50 million locusts
Those 50 million locusts can eat food enough for 22,000 people in a single day
Locusts are incredibly devastating! Do you know what else is devastating? Sin! I don’t think it is necessary to list facts on the destructive power of sin since I’m quite certain that you have experienced and witnessed it yourself.
Joel calls on God’s people to morn over the devastation of locusts. Let us take time today to come before God and morn over the devastation of sin. Do not morn hopelessly, but morn while clinging onto Jesus, who, in His great mercy, has given us new birth into a living hope through His resurrection from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade (1 Peter 1:3-4).
Prayer: Lord, I recognize that it is sin that has corrupted what You had called good in Your creation. Help me to understand what it means to follow You and to live in obedience to You.
[1] https://www.fao.org/locusts/en/ (I did some conversions from metric to American standard measurements)
Written by Pastor Vinh Luu.