Joel ii. 12, 13.
Therefore also now, saith the Lord, Turn ye even to
me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with
weeping, and with mourning; and rend your heart, and
not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God,
for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and
of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.
This is one of the grandest chapters in the whole
Old Testament, and one which may teach us a great
deal; and, above all, teach us to be thankful to God
for the blessings which we have.
I think I can explain what it means best by going
back to the chapter before it.
Joel begins his prophecy by bitter lamentation over
the mischief which the swarms of insects had done;
such as had never been in his days, nor in the days
of his fathers. What the palmer worm had left,
the locust had eaten; what the locust had left, the
cankerworm had eaten; and what the cankerworm had
left, the caterpillar had eaten. Whether these
names are rightly rendered, or whether they mean different
sorts of locusts, or the locusts in their different
stages of growth, crawling at first and flying at
last, matters little. What mischief they had
done was plain enough. They had come up ’a
nation strong and without number, whose teeth were
like the teeth of a lion, and his cheek-teeth like
those of a strong lion. They had laid his vines
waste, and barked his fig-tree, and made its branches
white; and all drunkards were howling and lamenting,
for the wine crop was utterly destroyed: and
all other crops, it seems likewise; the corn was wasted,
the olives destroyed; the seed was rotten under the
clods, the granaries empty, the barns broken down,
for the corn was withered; the vine and fig, pomegranate,
palm, and apple, were all gone; the green grass was
all gone; the beasts groaned, the herds were perplexed,
because they had no pasture; the flocks of sheep were
desolate.’ There seems to have been a dry
season also, to make matters worse; for Joel says
the rivers of waters were dried up— likely
enough, if then, as now, it is the dry seasons which
bring the locust-swarms. Still the locusts had
done the chief mischief. They came just as they
come now (only in smaller strength, thank God) in
many parts of the East and of Southern Russia, darkening
the sky, and shutting out the very light of the sun;
the noise of their innumerable jaws like the noise
of flame devouring the stubble, as they settled upon
every green thing, and gnawed away leaf and bark;
and a fire devoured before them, and behind them a
flame burned; the land was as the garden of Eden before
them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; {162}
till there was not enough left to supply the daily
sacrifices, and the meat offering and the drink offering
were withheld from the house of God.
But what has all this to do with us? There have
never, as far as we know, been any locusts in England.
