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Locusts


Joel 1:4

What the fledging locust left,

    the adult locust has eaten;

what the adult locust left,

    the larval locust has eaten;

what the larval locust left,

    the hopper locust has eaten.

Thought for the day – Locusts

When I was a kid, probably about 11 or 12, we were living in a very rural part of South Africa. I remember waking up one morning to this incredible buzzing sound. A swarm of locusts had enveloped the little town we were in. And by the morning, they had stripped every green thing of its leaves and its flowers. There were tens of thousands of these giant hopping Black and yellow locusts that just devoured everything. It was scary.

If it was a problem then, it's still a problem today. So much so that in 1986, the Senegalese government sprayed 1,000,000 acres of land with pesticide to kill off the locusts in the area. One square foot of land can contain up to 1000 newly hatched locusts. And a single locust can travel 3000 miles in its lifetime. Scientists reckon that a swarm of locusts will consume in a day what 40,000 people will consume in a year. To put that in context, in 1958 a swarm of locusts in Ethiopia, consumed 167,000 metric tonnes of grain for a year, enough to feed more than a million people for a year.

As we start a new book, the book of Joel, we are dealing with an existential crisis. Judah has had a swarm of locusts and it has eaten everything. Joel interprets that swarm as a warning from God to return to him. And he uses the plague of locusts to draw people back to the covenant relationship between God and the people of Judah.

So much can be said About how we respond to natural disasters, and how we look to God for answers. I think it's just natural To try see the hand of God when things go wrong. I don't think many of us will live through a plague of locusts. But we all face difficult circumstances at times. Some of those circumstances may simply be bad luck, but sometimes God does speak to us through the difficult times. We just need to be aware enough to listen.

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

 

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

 

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