Week 31 Joel
There’s a pioneer story about an insect plague in 1860s Minnesota: green grasshoppers of all sizes were swarming everywhere and eating. The wind could not blow loud enough to hide the sound of their jaws, nipping, gnawing, chewing. They ate all the green garden rows. They ate the green potato tops. They ate the grass, and the willow leaves, and the green plum thickets and the small green plums. They ate the whole prairie bare and brown.
Right at the beginning of his book Joel shouted out his own Grasshopper Sermon because millions of middle-eastern grasshoppers had come to Judah: after the cutting locusts finished eating the crops, the swarming locusts took what was left! After them came the hopping locusts, and then the stripping locusts, too!
Joel one sounds like a real description of real locusts. But chapter two sounds like a real description of a real army of human grasshoppers about to clear-cut Jerusalem.
Joel’s prepare-for-the-worst message to Judah sounds pretty definite. But it isn’t iron-clad definite. Joel adds this: return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful. He is not easily angered. He is filled with kindness and is eager not to punish you. Who knows? Perhaps even yet he will give you a reprieve, sending you a blessing instead of this terrible curse.
So against the odds there’s still a chance.
Note: quotes from Laura Ingalls Wilder On the Banks of Plum Creek (NY: Harper & Row; 1971) 261; and Joel 1:4 & 2:13-14 (NLT)