Joel 2:25 And I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm… Lost years can never be restored literally. Time once past is gone for ever. The locusts did not eat the years — the locusts ate the fruit of the years' labour, the harvests of the field: so that the meaning of the restoration of the years must be restoration of those fruits and of those harvests which the locusts consumed. You cannot have back your time; but there is a strange and wonderful way in which God can give back to you the wasted blessings, the unripened fruits of years over which you have mourned. The fruits of wasted years may yet be yours. By giving to His repentant people larger harvests than the land could naturally yield, God could give back to them, as it were, all they would have had if the locusts had never come; and God, by giving you larger grace in the present and in the future, can make the life which has hitherto been blighted, and eaten up with the locust, the caterpillar and the palmer-worm of sin, and self, and Satan, yet to be a complete, a blessed, and useful life to His praise and glory. Linger over this mystery of love. Picture the spirits of evil, year after year bearing away from the fields of human life all their harvests. Whither have they borne the precious products? The fruits of wasted years are gone — gone past hope. Yet the Lord wilt bring forth life out of the tomb; those long-lost spells shall be restored. Is anything too hard for the Lord? Does not the very difficulty, yea impossibility, of the enterprise make it the more worthy of the Almighty? To him that believeth all things are possible. ( C. H. Spurgeon.) Parallel Verses KJV: And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you. |
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