A Word in Season: Restoring the Years (Joel 2:25)

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While not every sorrow in this world is a judgment, some are. We may look back on years that are blighted.

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We may think that our life is a waste. For some of us, that's because we perhaps have realized that our lives have been devoted not to God, but to this world and to ourselves.

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And whatever outward blessing we may seem to have attained, we've come to understand that all of these things will crumble to dust and that they will be swept away with a passing world and there'll be nothing left of all our investments and pursuits.

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Sometimes God, in his mercy, brings such a blight upon a sinful life in order to expose its follies and its emptinesses.

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He brings down to nothing all our great dreams and schemes.

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To some degree, that may happen with God's people as well, when they go contrary to his will, when they disobey his word.

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How many of us have seen sometimes seasons of life fruitless and dry because we've been entertaining sin in our hearts.

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We perhaps have known what God has said, and yet we have gone our own way. And you may even today be looking back and saying, if I had done what

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God had said, then I would not now know my present miseries and sorrows.

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But God, in his righteousness, has been pleased to blight my plans.

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God has sent his consuming locusts into my life, and everything that might have been green and fruitful has been chewed up and torn down.

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What hope is there then for such a wasteland life? Is there any prospect of fruitfulness in the blight?

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In the days of the prophet Joel, the Lord God sent these armies of locusts upon the land.

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It's quite possible here we're talking about a literal army of locusts which would have stripped the land bare, and that would have been in keeping with God's old covenant judgments upon his rebellious people.

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And Israel may have looked around either at this barrenness that now had come upon them because either of these beasts, these insects that had come, or it may have been that they were representative of some other kind of judgment.

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I think it's most likely that they are literal. And they might have said, well, what prospect is there in year after year of blight when all our anticipated fruitfulness has come to nothing because we have sinned against our

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God? Are we now just completely lost and undone? Is there any prospect for us, any hope?

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And Joel calls the people back to the Lord and he tells them to repent, not just in outward demonstrations of grief, not just in remorse over their circumstances, but to rend their hearts and to turn back to the

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Lord. And he has this glorious promise in chapter 2 and verse 25 where the

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Lord says, So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the crawling locust, the consuming locust, and the chewing locust, my great army which

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I sent among you. It goes on, you shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of the

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Lord your God who has dealt wondrously with you and my people shall never be put to shame.

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And that is still the hope of every man, woman, boy or girl who is looking back on wasted years and blighted lives, who has been pursuing a course of sin and has seen it come to nothing, who has been rebelling against their

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God and has seen him bring down his righteous judgments upon their lives, who may be looking about them and saying, well, what's the point now?

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Is there any hope of recovery? Have I not wasted everything? You may have wasted it thus far, but the

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God who forgives, the God to whom you can now go in repentance is a

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God who is both willing and able to restore to you the years that the locust has eaten.

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Yes, it may be all gloom and blight in the past, but if you will now repent of your sins and walk in the ways of the

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Lord, then he is ready to smile upon you. And though you may have lost all that for which you had hoped in the past, the

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Lord God is able to make your future bright and fruitful, to bring spiritual abundance into your soul so that you shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of the

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Lord your God who has dealt wondrously with you. Trust his grace.

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Hang upon his mercy. Let us turn from our sins and go to God and pray that our future years may be abundantly fruitful, even if our sin has blighted our past.