He Will Make It Up to Me

Joel 2:25 Then I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust, My great army with I sent among you.

This is the first promise of restoration we will look at because it is in direct response to Joel 1:4 which we looked at in our March 4th post.

And this is God's promise. How He will do it? When He will do it? His timing is above mine. He knows my heart and the hearts of all those who need to be restored. He knows when I will be ready and when others will be ready and He will move accordingly.

But the most important thing to remember is that HE PROMISED!

And if He promised, HE WILL KEEP IT.

Another thing to remember, which most who have been ravaged by the locust already know, we cannot work this up in ourselves. We can only make ourselves ready to receive the gift. We need to ask questions about where we need to be and what we need to do to get into position to receive. But we cannot receive it until God pours it out. We can only trust that if He said He will restore, then He will restore.

He is not a man that He can break His promises.

What the Locust Have Eaten

We aren't in February anymore. We are in March, you know, that month that comes in like a lion and leaves like a lamb, or comes in like a lamb and leaves like a lion. But we aren't talking about lions today. We are talking about locust. And in Joel one we see that the locust have come in a ravonous swarm, leaving nothing in their path.


Joel 1:4 What the gnawing locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten; And what the swarming locust has left, the creeping locust has eaten; And what the creeping locust has left, the stripping locust has eaten.


This verse jumped out at me once, when I stood in a desolate place in my life. I felt like the tree stump in my front yard, cut off and dead.


All these locust had come into my life in the form of rejections and other things and left me with nothing. Even as I prayed, I felt dead at His feet. As an exercise I named the locust that had come. Somethings that happened in my childhood I named the gnawing locust. The abandonment of my sister, I named the swarming locust. The recent deaths of my in-laws, especially my mother-in-law to whom I was very close, I named the creeping locust, etc.

I meditated on this verse for some time because of that desolate place. I couldn't shake for a while. Sometimes I reassigned the locust for whatever it was that made me feel desolate that day. But always it was the same. Many things had been stripped away from me. And there was nothing I could do but grieve over things old and new that worked together to destroy me.

And I needed to grieve over it rather than pretend it never happened.