The Locusts Are Coming!

Listen Online:

Transcript:

Well, tonight, turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Joel. To the book of Joel. There in the latter part of the Old Testament.

If you can find Daniel, that’s the last of the major prophets. Find Daniel and then turn ahead three books, Hosea, Amos, and Joel. We’re going to look at the book of Joel tonight.

We’re going to start looking at it, I should say. We’re not going to cover the whole book tonight. It’s a little bit longer than the book of Obadiah that we just studied.

We’re going to start with Joel chapter 1. And I told you this morning that if you saw the flyers I put up on the door with the pictures of the grasshoppers, we’re going to begin looking at a story about how God used some grasshoppers to get his people’s attention. Now, as we go to the book of Joel here in just a moment and read this passage, one of the things that we’re going to see not only in the passage tonight, but as we read throughout the book, the book of Joel focuses on the day of the Lord.

That’s the overarching theme of the whole book is the day of the Lord and writing about the coming of the day of the Lord. And the way the prophet Joel, when he was writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the way he used that phrase, the day of the Lord, he used it to mean a time of judgment for those who reject God as well as a time of cleansing and salvation for those who belong to God. It’s both things.

We can speak of the day of the Lord as being a frightening thing. We can speak of the day of the Lord as being a joyful thing, but it really just depends on where you stand with God, sort of like I talked about this morning with the parable of the ten virgins, being prepared for His coming versus being unprepared. Where you stand with God determines how the day of the Lord goes for us.

So as we go through this book, as we go through this book over the next several weeks, the final third of the book, in the final third of it, Joel foretold some things about the coming day of the Lord. He kind of explained what it was going to be and what it was going to be like, but in the first two, he spends the first two-thirds of the book describing it for the nation of Israel, helping them to understand what it was going to be like. Before he even gets into any kind of description of it, he deals with a picture.

Maybe that’s a better way to explain it. In the first two-thirds, gives them this picture to help them understand the truth that he presents in the latter third. Sort of like the story we talked about this morning, Jesus spent a great deal of time on the picture, the story of the parable of the ten virgins, and he spent quite a bit of time, relatively speaking, explaining the story, putting the picture, putting the image in their minds, and then came back and at the end was able to give a little bit of application for them to understand what it was about.

But by giving them that picture to begin with, it helped that truth sink in better. So he spends the first two-thirds of the book really painting this picture using their own circumstances, using current events, for them things that were ripped straight from the headlines, not that they had newspapers, but using those kinds of things ripped straight from the headlines to help them understand what was going to happen in the future by comparing it to some things that were happening in their day. So we’re going to look at the first part of this book, not the whole first two-thirds tonight, but the book of Joel, chapter 1, as God used the prophet Joel to introduce this picture of the day of the Lord to the people of Judah, to help them understand this concept of the day of the Lord as coming at both a time of punishment, but also a time of cleansing and of ultimate salvation.

And when I say he used a story, he used an idea ripped from the headlines from them, That story was about a plague of locusts that were about to devour their country. Locusts were something that they were familiar with. It was something that a swarming and infestation of locusts was something they understood, but they had never seen an infestation of locusts like the one that was about to come.

And it was about to unleash a time of havoc on them, the likes of which they’d never seen. And so Joel uses this to make the point that this is a warning. It gives you a foretaste, just a little glimpse of what the day of the Lord is going to be like.

And so if you think this swarm of locusts is bad, prepare yourself for the day of the Lord, because the day of the Lord is going to be worse. And by the way, when I was a kid, we’d collect these locust shells. And I’m pretty sure now they’re what we’d call cicadas, not locusts.

It’s only been in the last few years I realized that when the Bible talks about locusts, it’s not talking about these little things in the shell. I don’t know why we called those locusts. We just did.

They’re talking about grasshoppers. They’re talking about grasshoppers. And something I read this week talked about the locusts that could have invaded Judah, and it said there were something like 90 different species, and any one of them were capable of destroying everything.

I mean, if they get hungry enough. I remember several years ago we had an invasion of locusts. And I can’t remember what year it was.

I just remember walking through the cemetery in my grandmother’s hometown down in Bryan County. And you take a step and 50 grasshoppers would fly up. And you take another step and 50 grasshoppers would fly up.

It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. And yet that doesn’t hold a candle to what the Bible is about to describe with the locust infestation. These grasshoppers were coming, and they were coming in massive quantities, and they were coming hungry.

So we’re going to look at the beginning of the book of Joel, chapter 1, starting in verse 1. I’m going to read through the verses that we’re going to look at tonight, and then we’re going to come back and talk about them. Verses 1 through 14.

It says, The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel, Hear this, you elders. Listen, all you inhabitants of the land. Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your ancestors?

Tell your children about it, and let your children tell their children, and their children the next generation, what the devouring locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust has left, the young locust has eaten. What the young locust has left, the destroying locust has eaten.

Wake up, you drunkards, and weep. Wail, all you wine drinkers, because of the sweet wine, for it has been taken from your mouth. For a nation has invaded my land, powerful and without number.

Its teeth are the teeth of a lion, and it has the fangs of a lioness. It has devastated my grapevine and splintered my fig tree. It has stripped off its bark and thrown it away.

Its branches have turned white, grieved like a young woman dressed in sackcloth, mourning for the husband of her youth. Grain and drink offerings have been cut off from the house of the Lord. The priests, who are ministers of the Lord, mourn.

The fields are destroyed. The land grieves. Indeed, the grain is destroyed, the new wine is dried up, and the fresh oil fails.

Be ashamed, you farmers. Wail, you vine dressers, over the wheat and the barley, because the harvest of the field has perished. The grapevine has dried up, and the fig tree has withered.

The pomegranate, the date palm, and the apple, all the trees of the orchard, have been withered. Indeed, human joy has dried up. Dress in sackcloth and lament, you priests.

Wail, you ministers of the altar. Come and spend the night in sackcloth, you ministers of my God, because grain and drink offerings are withheld from the house of your God. Announce a sacred feast. Proclaim an assembly.

Gather the elders and all the residents of the land at the house of the Lord your God and cry out to the Lord. So those are the first 14 verses. That’s really the first section of the book.

And what we see here is him beginning to announce what God has told him, the prophet Joel did. He began to announce what God had told him, and he begins to introduce them to the idea of the day of the Lord by comparing it to an invasion of grasshoppers or locusts. And so what he outlines for us in verses 1 and 2 is that Judah, the nation of Judah, that’s the southern kingdom, remember when Israel split into two when David’s grandson took the throne.

They split into two kingdoms. The northern kingdom of Israel was ten tribes. The southern kingdom that was still ruled by David’s family was two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, I believe. And it was in the southern portion of the country called the kingdom of Judah.

Judah was about to see a calamity come upon them that was unlike any in their nation’s memory. I would say in their history, but some pretty bad things happened to the nation of Israel. But in the memory of people who were alive, there was nothing that had happened like this.

As a matter of fact, there was nothing like this that had happened in the memory of anybody known to anybody now living. So it would be like those who today were in their 80s could remember being young children and hearing their grandparents talk about being in their 60s or 70s at the time. Talk about the great storm of such and such year.

And even they hadn’t seen anything like it. What I’m saying is in the nation’s collective recent memory, there was nothing that they had seen that was like this. The locusts that were going to come, well, the locusts that were going to come were going to destroy everything.

And Joel even asked them in verse 2, has anything ever happened like this in all your days? And a lot of times when the prophets would ask a question like that, it’s rhetorical. They’re not looking for a yes or no answer. They’re asking it because they already know the answer is, in this case, no. No, nothing like this has ever happened in your memory.

He’s asking that to make the point so they’ll realize what’s coming is going to be bad. He says this is going to be the kind of thing that you’re going to tell your children about, and you’re going to tell your children’s children, and they’re going to tell their children, and so on. For several generations, this kind of thing is going to be known.

You know, there are things that stick out in our nation’s collective memory, and we tell our children, and they tell their children, my children were not alive when 9-11 happened. And that’s fresh on my brain because a month ago we were having conversations about that because of the anniversary. My kids were not alive, and they’ve never seen anything like that.

They’ve never seen a terror attack on American soil like that. They’ve never seen the country come together in the way that it did in mourning and in resolve. And so they ask questions about what is it about.

And it’s something that happened when I was a sophomore in high school, and I remember it and I tell my children what it was like because the world changed. Our country had never seen anything like that before. There had been terrorist attacks.

There had been attacks of all sorts, but we had never seen anything like this. Our country as a whole, it changed it. We can divide our country into before and after based on that.

We’ve never seen anything like it. And it’s something that I tell my children about. And I’ll probably tell their children.

And if I’m alive to see my great-grandchildren, it’s something we’ll be having conversations about. This was going to be that kind of thing for them. It was going to be such a disaster that they were going to be telling.

Nobody had seen anything like it, and they were going to be telling for generations what it was like to live through the great locust swarm. How bad could it be? You know, we’ve had swarms of locusts through here at times, and none of us ever starve.

But how bad was it going to be? Verse 4 tells us how bad it was going to be. It says, what the devouring locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten.

What the swarming locust has left, the young locust has eaten. What the young locust has left, the destroying locust has eaten. And that’s not four different kinds of locusts, evidently from my research.

It says that’s more like the four stages of the life cycle of the locust. So the locusts were going to be around for a while. And whatever the really little baby locusts left would be eaten by the young locusts. And what the young locusts ate, what they left behind, would be eaten by the adult locusts.

and what they left behind would be eaten by the senior locusts. All right? All the life cycles were going to be there, and it was going to wreak destruction on Judah for an extended period of time.

They were going to go through this. And the result was they were going to leave nothing behind for the people. And as I said, it would be the kind of disaster that they would remember for generations to come.

The time the locusts came and ate everything. You ever had a relative come stay at your house? Maybe they’re supposed to be there for a day or two.

They end up staying for a week and they eat you out of house and home. You remember it next time they ask if they can come visit, right? Because you remember how they ate you out of house and home.

You either stalk up or you say, I’m going to be out of town that week. Sorry. You remember it.

These locusts were literally going to eat them out of house. Well, I guess not literally. They weren’t going to eat the houses.

But they were going to eat them out of house and home in just about every sense of the phrase. there was going to be nothing left. It was going to be something that they would remember.

But what we need to understand is that God allowed this to happen. This is, again, one of those times that God didn’t wake up one morning and say, oh, locusts didn’t see that coming. How did that happen?

No, this was God’s plan. And this wasn’t just something that happened as a coincidence. God allowed this to happen.

We might even say God sent those locusts that direction because God was trying to get the attention of the people of Judah. You see, if it was just a calamity that befell them for no reason, God would have said, you know what, I’ll take care of you. And no doubt God did take care of them, but that’s not what his message was to the people of Judah.

The locusts are coming, but trust me, I’ll take care of you. No, God’s message to the people of Judah was the locusts are coming. You need to wake up and change course.

We see all throughout Old Testament history that from time to time, the people of Israel, the people of Judah, would get to a place of prosperity. They’d feel like everything was going well, and they’d get a little too big for their britches. They’d sort of forget about how they were dependent on God for everything.

And they’d get this attitude of self-sufficiency. You know, we’re self-made men. We did all this.

We can take care of everything. Nothing can ever hurt us because we’ve set, you know, things have been going so well and we’re so well prepared and we’re so smart that they’d forget about their devotion to God. And that’s bad enough.

But sometimes forgetting that devotion toward God, they’d end up putting that devotion someplace else. They’d slip into idolatry. Whether they began worshiping themselves, whether they began worshiping their prosperity, whether they began worshiping the gods of the pagan countries around them, all of those things happened at various times.

Whatever it was they worshipped, they started worshipping something other than God. Idolatry was something, you look at the Old Testament, and for everything else it is, a lot of it comes down to one big story of God trying to tell them, stop it with the idolatry. Stop running after other gods.

Stop letting your heart take you toward these other gods. Israel was too into following their hearts. If you’re a Christian, the Bible doesn’t tell us, follow your heart.

The Bible teaches us to lead our hearts because it says our hearts are desperately wicked. And we have to lead our hearts toward God, toward devotion to Him. Otherwise, our heart will lead us toward devotion to idols.

And so God allowed this invasion of locusts, of grasshoppers. He allowed that invasion to come in to get Judah’s attention. Because what happens when a national calamity confronts us, many times we will turn back to God in those times of trouble.

My family and I had been attending First Southern Baptist Church of Del City around the time that 9-11 happened. We were looking for a church, and that’s where we’ve been going for several weeks. I don’t know if y’all are familiar with that church.

It’s right there on I-240, big church, massive church. And so, I mean, they would have a great Sunday morning attendance every Sunday morning. But you’d look around, and there would be pockets of emptiness in the pews, and it wasn’t as full as it could be.

I remember the week after 9-11 and for the two or three weeks after that, I feel like for a couple weeks it was close to standing room only. But it’s because when there’s a national tragedy, the nation turns back to God at least for a little bit. It may be superficial, but sometimes it’s that wake-up call that makes us realize that something is missing.

Now, it’s unfortunate that we need that wake-up call and then we so quickly forget it. And I just remember that massive church building being so packed with people. And I thought to myself, where did all these people even come from?

It happens sometimes in our personal lives. It doesn’t have to be a national tragedy. But something happens in somebody’s life and they get shaken up enough, a lot of times they’ll turn back to God, at least for a little bit.

Somebody gets a serious diagnosis, they may be a little more open to coming to church than they were the week before. somebody’s child starts going astray, they start looking to the Lord for answers. You know, when there’s a time of calamity, it’s often a wake-up call for us, and that’s what it was for Judah.

And so God allowed these grasshoppers to come in. We could look at it as a punishment, but I tend to look at it as a discipline. And there’s a difference.

There’s some overlap between punishment and discipline. But if I just want to punish my children for what they do wrong, then I just spank them and say nothing. When I’m disciplining, and that’s not how things go at my house either.

You get the punishment and the lecture. I’m not into punishing my children. I’m into disciplining them.

Because it’s not just about making them pay for what they’ve done wrong. It’s about trying to channel them in the right direction so they do the right thing next time. So there’s a difference.

And sometimes that discipline is a spanking. Sometimes that discipline is some other consequence. Benjamin hates writing sentences, and Madeline hates standing in the corner.

We find consequences that work. Now, eventually, they’ll move on to something else. We’ll have to start from the drawing board.

But we always have a discussion about what it was that they did wrong. We have a discussion about what they need to do differently the next time. We have a discussion about where they stand in their relationship with God.

See, it’s not just about punishment. It’s about discipline. And I think that’s how God deals with his children.

I shouldn’t say I think. I see all throughout the scriptures. That’s the way God deals with his children.

Those who reject the covenant, we talked about this in the book of Obadiah, those who reject the covenant, God tends to punish them. And there’s destruction for those nations. There was destruction for Edom.

There’s just outright punishment. But for his children, there’s more than punishment. There’s a discipline in order to purify us and in order to bring us back to him.

That’s what he was doing with Judah. So he sent these locusts. He allowed these locusts to come, and he called for the people to respond.

We know that God was using this to discipline Judah, to chasten Judah, because he called for a response. And that response, or those responses, shouldn’t say responses. It’s one response with a lot of different steps in it.

But the things he calls them to do, we see all throughout the latter portion of this passage, from verse 5 on to verse 14. God allowed this to happen, and he called for the people to respond. How did he call them to respond?

First of all, by waking up. In verses 5, 6, and 7, he calls them to wake up. This invasion of locusts was meant to be a wake-up call.

As I said, they were going on, they were enjoying their prosperity, they were enjoying probably their peace, things were going well for them, and they forgot about God, and they got off into the ditches of idolatry and sin, and they needed a wake-up call. Something that would cause them to notice, something that would cause them to realize that things weren’t right between them and God. Because going along in their prosperity the way they were, that part of their brains was shut off.

Their noticer was turned off. They didn’t realize how far they had drifted from God. And so they needed that wake-up call to realize that they weren’t where they were supposed to be.

You ever had those times where something happened in your life, that tragedy, and you sort of woke up out of the fog and you realized, wait a minute, I haven’t been where I’m supposed to be with God this whole time. They needed a wake-up call. So he told them.

He’s talking about here, the vineyards, and he says, wake up. In verse 5, wake up, you drunkards, and weep. Now, how were they woken up?

He uses specifically the imagery of the drunkards being woken up because the vineyards were being destroyed. The very thing that they were relying on to not notice their distance from God was suddenly taken from them, and they had no choice but to wake up. In the case of the drunkards, they had no choice but to sober up, because the vineyards were gone.

They were eaten by locusts. It was really a call for them to wake up, not in a sense of being out of drunkenness, but to wake up to the fact that they were distant from God. So God called on them to wake up.

God also called on them to grieve. Wait a minute. I thought God just wants us to be happy.

A lot of theology comes from that phrase. Usually when I hear, now, preacher, God just wants us all to be happy. Usually when I hear that, I know what’s coming next is somebody’s about to justify something they want to do and know they’re not supposed to.

But God just wants us to be happy. No, he does not. I mean, God doesn’t mind if you’re happy, but God, I’ve said this many times, God is way more concerned about your holiness than your happiness.

And I’ll add to this. Excuse me, I’ll add this to God is more concerned with your joy than your happiness. So happiness is not the most important thing that God is after in your life.

He told them they needed to grieve. In verses 8 through 10, we see him calling on the people to grieve. He tells them in verse 8, Grieve like a young woman dressed in sackcloth, mourning for the husband of her youth.

He told the nation of Judah they needed to mourn like a young woman who has lost her husband while they were still newlyweds. I mean, that’s such a sad sight. I remember a particular episode of Unsolved Mysteries, filmed back during the late 1980s, and this woman talking about her husband who was killed in World War II.

They had been married maybe a year. He was killed in World War II. She’d go to visit his grave every day, and what was it, 40-some-odd years, 45 years?

She never remarried because she was too in love with him, and she was still grieving him 45 years later. God wanted that out of Israel. Not just a little tear, not just a perfunctory showing of grief, but God wanted them really to grieve over the things that they had done.

And by the way, the things that they had lost would cause them grief. When God allowed these locusts to take away their prosperity and their sense of invulnerability, they were going to miss those things and they were going to grieve. but it was the loss of meaningful worship in the house of the Lord that should have made them really grieve.

Because he says in verse 9, grain and drink offerings have been cut off from the house of the Lord. The priests who are ministers of the Lord mourn. Now the priests aren’t mourning because they have nothing.

The priests are mourning because worship has stopped at least as far as God expected it to be, as far as God had commanded it. So the offerings that people were supposed to bring in honor of the Lord as part of their worship, they were no longer able to bring those things. God wanted them to realize what they had lost, not only materially, but he wanted that material loss to be an eye-opening to what they had lost in their relationship with him, and he wanted them to grieve over it.

Not forever, but he wanted them to understand the gravity of where they were and what they had done. So he called on them to respond by waking up and by grieving, but he also called on them to respond by being ashamed. If you came for a feel-good message tonight, this is probably not what you were looking for.

And in a lot of churches today, you’ll hear something. I shouldn’t say a lot of churches, but in too many churches, you’ll hear a message that God wants you to be happy. We just want you to feel better about yourself when you go out.

Folks, God’s word sometimes calls on us to look at our sin and mourn over it and feel bad about what we’ve done and understand how far we’ve gotten from God. They were called on to be ashamed. They were supposed to be ashamed because they had let their devotion to God die.

And God compares this to a farmer in verses 11 through 12. God compares the nation of Judah to a farmer who’s just let all of his crops die. When you’re a farmer, you have one job.

I know, I’ve never been a farmer, but I understand it’s a difficult task, it’s a difficult calling, there’s always something to do, and you may be sitting there saying, no, you have hundreds of jobs. I agree, but really all those hundreds of jobs flow into one big job, producing something out of your animals or your crops, right? And if a farmer just sat back and did nothing and let his crops die on the vine, in the case of grapes and die on the stalk.

He just let all of his stuff die. We’d say he was a failure as a farmer. I’m not saying if your stuff dies, you know, sometimes the things are out of our control.

But you just sit back and let it die, and you don’t care, and you do nothing? That’s what we have to be ashamed of. He says, be ashamed, you farmers, in verse 11.

He says, this stuff died on your watch. You had one job to do, and you neglected it. That’s how the worshipers of Judah were toward God.

They had one job. They had one job, and that was to, as God’s people, to walk with him and give their devotion to him. Their job, as the nation of Judah, was their relationship with God, and they had let things die from neglect.

And so he compared them to an irresponsible farmer and said they ought to be ashamed. He said they ought to respond by repenting. We’re coming close to the end here.

They were supposed to respond by repenting. Verse 13 tells them to dress in sackcloth and lament, you priests. Sackcloth, if you’re not familiar with it, is like burlap, potato sack.

I can’t imagine that it would be comfortable to wear. No, you wear burlap. Let me rephrase that.

You choose to wear burlap when you want to punish yourself. when you want to make sure you have a really bad day. And sometimes as a show of repentance, people would wear sackcloth, and they would sit in the ashes, they would sit in the dirt, as a show of humility, as a show of repentance toward God.

He tells them, dress in sackcloth and lament. Wail, you ministers of the altar, come spend the night in sackcloth, because grain and drink offerings are withheld from the house of your God. He called on them, especially those in leadership of God’s people.

He called on all of them, but especially those in leadership. They needed to repent. And not just say, I repent, but they needed to show some evidence of repentance.

You know, when you have kids or when you’re around kids, you probably get tired of telling them to do something and then having to get on to them for it, and then hearing sorry for the same thing every time, 15 times a day. I won’t do it anymore. Yeah, you will.

Just go on. Don’t lie to me. Don’t make it worse.

Just say you’re sorry and go on. God wasn’t looking for a half-hearted sorry. Oh, I’m so sorry.

God wanted them to realize what they had done and hate the sin. I’ve explained to you before, repentance is not a promise that I’ll never sin again. It’s not even a promise that I’ll never commit a particular sin again, because God knows our weakness, and we should strive not to sin, but God knows we’re going to fall into it because we’re human, and it’s the way we’ve been rewired through the fall.

And the only way we can have victory over sin is through the Holy Spirit, but we’re still just weak vessels. So repentance is not perfection. It’s not a promise that we’re going to do better.

It’s not a change in our behavior, although that should result from repentance. It’s not sadness, although that should result from repentance. Repentance is a changing of our mind toward our sin and toward God.

So what they needed to do to be repentant was to look at their sin and say, I hate that. I’ve let my heart worship other things. What’s wrong with me?

I’ve let my heart worship myself and my preferences. I’ve let my heart worship my prosperity. I’ve got a statue to bail in my house.

What is wrong with me? Now, a repentant person may struggle with that sin from then on. That’s the point.

They ought to struggle with it because they ought to hate it. If you have trouble with gossip and you repent, I don’t think it means you never gossip again. We should never gossip again, but I don’t think that’s what repentance means.

A biblical understanding of repentance, at least as far as I can tell, would mean you realize one day, I can call it prayer request, time all I want, but God calls it gossip, and God says it’s wrong and I’m really sick of letting him down. I hate this. And a repentant person may gossip again, but they will come back to God and say, I 

Powered by atecplugins.com