Joel 2:23-32
“Repayment”
October 24, 2010 - Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

         Your co-worker for whom you’ve been covering finally slips into the office late and you whisper to him, “You owe me!” You give one last heave and that shrub in your neighbor’s yard which you foolishly offered to help remove finally comes out of the ground. You turn to him and say, “You owe me!” You groggily climb back into bed at 3 a.m., after the baby has been fed and diapered and sung to sleep one more time, hit your spouse with a pillow and growl, “You owe me.”

         Your co-worker may be able to repay you by returning the favor when you’re running late someday. Your neighbor might pay you back with a cold beer. And your spouse could possibly buy you off with a back rub. Yet what if the person who owes you is God?

         In our text from Joel 2 today, God promised to repay the people of Judah for years of agricultural disaster. It’s difficult to date these prophecies even to a specific century, but one thing is certain. Joel spoke to people in the aftermath of a devastating incursion of locusts.

         Turn back to chapter 1 and we read a terrifying description of insect destruction in verse 4,

         What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten;
         what the great locusts have left the young locusts have eaten;
         what the young locusts have left other locusts have eaten.

         Four different words for locusts are used, explaining that one kind of locust invasion followed another. As soon as the swarm which darkened the sky was over, along came smaller numbers of bigger locusts. When those began to disappear, then the eggs the swarm had laid hatched and young locusts began devouring. Even those were followed by another species of locust altogether. One insect disaster after another, so that nothing grew, no grain or fruit or any produce at all was left in the land. Even the livestock went hungry we’re told further on. The locusts ate the grass upon which the animals grazed.

         I’ve walked across dry grass in Arizona and watched dozens of grasshoppers jump ahead of me, but there weren’t enough to do much damage. I would even catch a few and stick them on a fishhook as trout bait. It’s hard to imagine those bugs swarming in such numbers that they would consume all the vegetation in their path. Yet it happened.

         It happened in the United States in the nineteenth century. Just as European settlers were clearing and plowing farms on the Great Plains, huge swarms of Rocky Mountain locusts swept east devouring crops and wreaking havoc. A swarm could be hundreds of miles across and contain billions of grasshoppers. Just like Joel describes, the adults moved in swarms while the nymphs or “young locusts” moved in bands, eating and stripping plant life of all kinds. The peak on this continent was between 1873 and 1877. Laura Ingalls Wilder described a locust swarm in one of her Little House on the Prairie books:

The Cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.[1]

         The locusts of the 1870s ruined homesteaders, particularly in southwestern Minnesota. Many left, but some stayed. For those who stayed, there finally came an end. The grasshoppers left and never came back. Bleak, devastated fields were planted again and crops began to grow and thrive. By 1902 the last specimens of the Rocky Mountain locust were seen in southern Canada. They are now extinct. The Great Plains became America’s breadbasket and has been feeding us and many in the rest of the world ever since.

         Our text begins with God’s promise that something similar would happen in Judah. “Be glad, people of Zion,” begins verse 23. Be glad because God is going to turn around all that devastation. The bare, dry land is going to be watered and grow crops again. Verse 24 pictures “The threshing floors will be filled with grain; the vats will overflow with new wine and oil.” It’s a promise of bumper crops, of a steep upswing in Judah’s prosperity.

         Verse 25 names all four of those locust species or stages, the swarm, the great, the young, the other locusts, one terrible incursion after another. They had that depressing sense that as soon as one disaster was over another began. But this time God promised, “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”

         Joel compared locusts to a human army. God calls them “my great army that I sent among you.” In the first part of chapter 2 before our text, it’s hard to know if he’s talking about a literal foreign army or about the locust swarm. That ambiguity is divine inspiration. God wanted this text to apply not just to the limited and unique situation of people who suffer a locust invasion. God offered the same hope and promise of repayment to His people as their land was run over not by insects, but one foreign army after another. And God also you I to read this text when one bad thing after another happens to us.

         Evil never has the last word in God’s world. There are natural disasters like locust invasions. One bad thing after another can happen, like the Gulf coast’s devastation first by Hurricane Katrina and then by an oil spill. In war-torn places like Sudan or eastern Congo or Pakistan one army after another sweeps through killing and raping and stealing. Yet whether it’s natural or human caused devastation, God says, “I will repay.” God in His goodness never lets evil have the last say.

         Even when smaller disasters overwhelm our lives, one thing after another, God’s good promises remain. When sickness is followed by job loss, followed by more sickness, followed by a robbery, followed by a divorce, God does not intend to let evil or deprivation be the last word for us. He will send the autumn and the spring rains, and the fields of hearts and minds will sprout and be rich again.

         Yet there is more to this text from Joel. The point is not really that we’re going to get paid back in material prosperity for all the years of recession we experience. Even as God promises repayment for the locust years to Judah, He is looking past that. In verse 26, right after, “You will have plenty to eat, until you are full,” we read, “and you will praise the name of the Lord your God who worked wonders for you.”

         The point is not wonders and miracles, not prosperity, not vats full of wine and oil. It’s not fat bank accounts, good cars and full refrigerators. It’s that we praise God. Verse 27 says, “Then you will know that I am in Israel, that I am the Lord your God.” Whatever happens to you, whether it’s one locust invasion after another or a bumper crop, God wants you to know Him, to love Him, to praise Him as the source of all that’s good in your life.

         God does not owe us. Five years of locusts did not entitle Judah to five years of bumper harvests. Two years of recession does not entitle you and me to a couple years of financial profit. Suffering does not put God in our debt. God allows the locusts into our lives and then chooses to repay us. He wants us to know that He is good, that He is God.

         Early this year I felt a little like the people of Judah after the locusts invasions. A serious car accident, then broken kitchen appliances at home, then a flooded office at church, then a pay cut because our church finances were down. Then this summer came a painful visit with my father and saying goodbye as our youngest child went off to college. One thing after another and I got down, a bit depressed.

         It was like one sort of locust after another eating at my soul. I admit it. I felt like God owed me, at least a little. Some time off. Some financial compensation. Some good news of some sort. Earlier in the year even a vat of wine might have seemed like a good idea. Yet God had something better for me. He didn’t owe me anything, but He wanted to give me what He promised to Judah. He wanted me to know Him better, to love Him more, to learn to praise Him for all His gifts in every circumstance.

         That was the problem with the Pharisee in our Gospel lesson this morning. He went to the temple to declare how much God owed him. He told God how he hadn’t robbed anyone or committed adultery or done any other kind of evil. He had given up a tenth of everything he had, right down to the herbs in his garden as Jesus points out elsewhere. This was no invocation. This was his invoice to God. “I’ve been good, Lord. Now pay up!”

         God is not Santa Clause. There’s no spiritual contract whereby He’s promised to reward and repay us for not being naughty. There’s no heavenly balance sheet to assure us that for every hard year we’ll get an easy one. As wonderful and beautiful is that image of God pouring out overflowing wine and oil, He didn’t owe that to His people. In fact, He wants to pour out something completely different.

         Verse 28 says, “And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.” More than any material prosperity, God wants to give us Himself. That’s why the poor sinner who came beating his chest and moaning, “God have mercy on me, a sinner,” went home justified and blessed. He knew God didn’t owe Him anything. He just hoped beyond hope that he might find God, that God would be good to him, would be merciful to him. That’s the gift God wants to give us, the one we don’t deserve and never will deserve, no matter how many years the locusts eat up. God wants to pour His Spirit, to pour Himself, into our lives.

         Buckets of wine and oil and bushels of wheat and barley are nice blessings, but they are not what God most wants to give us. They are just a sign, a reminder that God has plenty to give, that God wants to pour out His Spirit into our hearts. Whenever we get those material blessings, whether it’s a good job or a new car or a little extra cash, it’s not because we deserve it or that He owes it to us. It’s a reminder that He has so much more to give us spiritually and eternally.

         This past year I needed to go back to a verse from our psalm today, Psalm 65:9. Years and years ago I set the last phrase of it as my signature on every e-mail I send out. “You visit the earth and water it abundantly; you make it very plenteous; the river of God is full of water.” I love that line. “The river of God is full of water.” The streams of this world may dry up. All the trees and flowers may wither and die. My own heart and soul may be as dry and lifeless as the locusts left Judah. But in God there is a river full of water. And He wants to pour that river into me, and into you.

         He doesn’t owe us anything, but God will often repay us. It’s very possible that the locust years of a housing downturn that’s not over yet will be followed by boom years of recovery and prosperity. Yet Joel invites us to remember both now and then that God is overflowing with something more, something deeper, something richer than full stomachs and full bank accounts.

         The blessing of God’s Holy Spirit will be poured out “on all people,” He says. “Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days.” The apostle Peter in Acts 2 told us that “those days” are now. Those days came when Jesus Christ came into our world and died and rose again and ascended into heaven. There He sits at God’s right hand holding and tilting the bucket to pour the Spirit down onto us and into us.

         There are terrible, cataclysmic things that happen and will continue to happen in our world. God will show us His power with “wonders in the heavens and on the earth,” says verses 30 and 32, “blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.”

         Locusts are going to keep coming around in our lives. Grasshopper hatches are timed to cycles that can be years long. Every few years they will burst forth in great numbers and start eating up everything they can find. Just as Joel and Laura Ingalls Wilder pictured, the sun will get hidden and skies will get dark and it will feel as if we’ve lost everything. Yet God remains, and His river is full of water, full to overflowing.

         So we come to verse 32, the verse that Peter stood up and quoted before a crowd of thousands on Pentecost, the verse that says God has enough blessing, enough grace, enough love, enough of His own Spirit for anyone who wants it. “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance.”

         Deliverance on Mount Zion is Jesus Christ dying on the Cross and rising from the dead for you and me. God did not owe us that. But He wanted to do it for us. He wanted to give us the overflowing gift of His own self, His own life. He wanted to pour out His Holy Spirit in forgiveness for our sins, in transformation of our lives into something new and rich and beautiful.

         “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” The people of Judah called on God in the midst of the locust swarm and were saved. That wretched tax collector called on the Lord and was saved. A confused thirteen year old named Steve called on Jesus one night and was saved. And a still confused man of 55 named Steve calls on the Lord and finds Him still there, still saving.

         “The river of God is full of water.” God does not have to repay us, but He does. There is more than enough goodness and love flowing in the river of life that is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s more than enough for me and it’s more than enough for you.

         So if the locusts are darkening the sky above you or eating up the ground ahead of you, remember that God will repay it all. You might see a repayment of lost years, a miracle of material prosperity you did not expect, but remember that’s not the main thing. No matter how many blessings do or do not pour out on you in this world, God wants to give you the very best. He wants to give you Himself. Through Jesus Christ, seek His Holy Spirit, seek to know and love and live in God. Go back to the river that never dries up. In that water you will find yourself truly saved and… truly repaid.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj