January: New Beginnings
Day 22 — 22 January
“What the Locusts Could Not Reach”
“I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army which I sent among you. You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, who has dealt wondrously with you. And my people shall never be put to shame. You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the LORD your God and there is none else. And my people shall never be put to shame.” Joel 2:25–27 (ESV)
The field had been full the day before. Knee-high barley bending gently under its own weight, weeks from harvest. A farmer could walk through it and feel the stalks brush his shins, the dry rustle of something nearing readiness, the quiet promise of bread and seed and surplus. It was the kind of fullness you do not appreciate properly until it is gone.
Then the sound began. Not thunder. Not wind. Something lower, stranger, more mechanical. A hum that seemed to rise from the ground and the sky simultaneously, growing in volume until it swallowed every other noise. And then the horizon darkened. Not with cloud. With bodies. Millions of them. A curtain of wings and legs descending with a precision that seemed almost deliberate, as though the swarm had studied the field and calculated exactly how to dismantle it. Within hours, every stalk had been stripped. Every leaf consumed. Every tender shoot gnawed to the root. The ground that had been green was now the colour of old parchment, bare and silent and utterly, devastatingly empty.
Anyone who has lived through a locust plague, whether in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, or the ancient farmlands of Israel, describes the same bewildered numbness afterward. It is not the speed that shocks you, though the speed is astonishing. Desert locusts can consume their own body weight in vegetation daily, and a single swarm can contain forty to eighty billion insects, covering an area the size of a city. What shocks you is the completeness. Nothing is left. Not a fragment. Not a remnant you could salvage and call a starting point. The field is not damaged. It is erased.
That image stands behind every word of Joel’s prophecy. When the prophet speaks of “the swarming locust, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter,” he is not being poetic for the sake of decoration. He is naming four stages of the same devastation, four words for the same relentless process of consumption. The Hebrew terms are arbeh (אַרְבֶּה, meaning “the swarmer,” “the multiplier,” the mature desert locust in its gregarious phase), yeleq (יֶלֶק, meaning “the hopper,” “the licker,” a younger developmental stage), chasil (חָסִיל, meaning “the consumer,” “the finisher,” the stage that devours what remains), and gazam (גָּזָם, meaning “the cutter,” “the gnawer,” the locust that strips bark and stem after the leaves are gone).
Four names. Four stages. And together they describe a process so thorough that when it finishes, there is nothing left to work with. Nothing to rebuild from. Nothing to replant. The farmer does not stand in a partially damaged field deciding which rows can be saved. He stands in a wasteland wondering whether the soil itself remembers what it once produced.
If you have ever lost something in a way that felt that complete, you know this terrain. Not a loss that leaves remnants. Not a setback that trims the edges of your life. But the kind of devastation that strips the field to bare earth. A marriage that did not merely struggle but ended. A career that did not merely stall but collapsed. A relationship that did not merely cool but was severed at the root. A season of illness that consumed not only your health but your sense of who you were before it began.
Joel was writing for people who stood in exactly that kind of emptiness.
Eaten
The word Joel uses for what the locusts did is akal (אָכַל, meaning “to eat,” “to consume,” “to devour”). It is one of the most common verbs in the Hebrew Bible, appearing nearly eight hundred times, and its ordinariness is part of its power. The locusts did not perform some exotic act of destruction. They ate. They consumed. They took what was there and ingested it until it was gone. The verb is domestic, familiar, everyday. You akal your bread. You akal your meal. And the locusts akal your years.
That last phrase is the one that stops most readers mid-sentence, because Joel does not say the locusts consumed your crops. He says they consumed your years. “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.” Years. Not harvests. Not fields. Not grain. Years.
The Hebrew shanim (שָׁנִים, meaning “years”) is the plural of shanah (שָׁנָה, meaning “a year,” “a cycle,” “a turning”). Joel expands the metaphor beyond agriculture into the dimension of time itself. The locusts did not merely eat what was growing in the field. They ate the time it took to grow it. They consumed the seasons of labour, planning, waiting, tending, and hoping that preceded the harvest. When the swarm departed, what was missing was not only the crop but the investment of life that the crop represented.
This is why the passage resonates so deeply with people whose losses are not agricultural. When a decade of marriage ends in betrayal, what is consumed is not merely a relationship. It is the years you poured into building it. When a career collapses, what is swallowed is not merely a job. It is the accumulation of effort, learning, sacrifice, and hope that the career contained. The locusts eat time. They consume the irreplaceable. They devour the one commodity no effort of yours can manufacture or retrieve.
And into that specific devastation, that consumption of years, Joel speaks a word that sounds, on first hearing, almost impossible.
Restored
“I will restore to you the years.”
The verb is shillem (שִׁלֵּם, the Piel form of shalam, meaning “to make whole,” “to restore,” “to complete what is lacking,” “to repay in full”). The Piel stem in Hebrew intensifies the verb’s action. Where the basic form of shalam means “to be complete” or “to be at peace,” the Piel means “to cause completeness,” “to bring about wholeness,” “to restore fully what was taken.”
This is the same root from which the word shalom (שָׁלוֹם, meaning “peace,” “wholeness,” “completeness”) derives. When Joel says God will shillem the years, he is not describing a partial compensation. He is describing the reinstatement of shalom, the return of wholeness to what was broken, the restoration of completeness to what was consumed. The locusts left nothing. The restoration described here leaves nothing unaddressed.
Now, we must pause and think carefully about what this means, because the language of Joel 2:25 says “I will restore,” which places God as the subject of the verb. And we know from the theological framework we carry into every passage of Scripture that God does not initiate new programmes, does not begin dispensing what He was not previously dispensing, and does not shift from inaction to action. His restorative nature is not something He switches on in response to human suffering. It is what He is. Always has been. Always will be.
So how do we read “I will restore”?
The answer is in the verses immediately before Joel 2:25, verses that most readers skip in their eagerness to reach the promise. Joel 2:12–13 records: “Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”
The verb “return” is shuv (שׁוּב, meaning “to turn back,” “to return,” “to reorient toward”), and it is addressed to the people. It is a command directed at human beings, calling them to reposition themselves. To turn. To change the orientation of their hearts. To move back toward the God whose character Joel immediately describes: gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. These are not attributes God adopts when people repent. These are attributes God possesses eternally. They are what He is, whether Israel faces Him or turns away.
What Joel 2:25 describes, then, is not God commencing a restoration He was not previously engaged in. It is the experience that becomes available to people who heed the call of Joel 2:12 and turn back. When they reposition themselves, when they rend their hearts and reorient toward the God who has always been gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and overflowing with covenant love, they begin to experience what His nature has always offered: wholeness. Shalom. Shillem. The full restoration of what was consumed.
The restoration was not absent while the locusts were feeding. God’s restorative character did not take a holiday during the years of devastation. What was absent was Israel’s orientation toward the One whose nature is to restore. And when that orientation changed, the experience of restoration flowed as naturally and inevitably as water flows downhill.
Satisfied
Joel does not stop at restoration. He continues: “You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied.”
The word for “satisfied” is sava (שָׂבַע, meaning “to be satisfied,” “to be full,” “to have enough,” “to be sated”). This is not the satisfaction of someone who has received just enough to survive. Sava describes the deep contentment of a person who has eaten their fill and pushed back from the table. It is the satisfaction of abundance, not scarcity. Of surplus, not rationing. Of more than enough, not barely sufficient.
There is something almost defiant about this promise in context. The locusts had left nothing. Absolutely nothing. The field was bare earth. The storehouses were empty. The bellies were hollow. And into that total absence, the prospect of sava, of being so thoroughly satisfied that you lack nothing, feels almost aggressive in its generosity.
But that is precisely the character of the God Joel has been describing. Gracious. Merciful. Slow to anger. Abounding in steadfast love. A nature that does not merely repair what was damaged but restores beyond the point of damage. A wholeness that does not merely return you to where you were before the locusts but brings you to the place where the fullness of the table exceeds the emptiness the swarm produced.
I know a woman, a composite drawn from a hundred conversations in pastoral ministry, who once described her experience of rebuilding after a devastating loss with a phrase I have never forgotten. She said: “I did not get back what I lost. I got something the loss could never have produced.” She was not minimising the devastation. She was recognising that the restoration she experienced was not a photocopy of what had been consumed. It was something new in her experience, something whose texture and depth had been shaped by the very absence the locusts created. The empty field had become space for something the crowded field could never have grown.
That is the nature of shillem. It does not merely replace. It completes. It fills the emptied space with a wholeness that could not have existed in the same form before the consumption took place. Not because God needed the devastation to do His work, but because the human heart, having been emptied of what it once relied upon, is now positioned to receive what it could not have received when its hands were full.
Known
Joel concludes with a statement that pulls every thread together: “You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the LORD your God and there is none else.”
The verb yada (יָדַע, meaning “to know,” “to perceive,” “to recognise through experience”) appears here not as an invitation to intellectual awareness but as a promise of experiential recognition. This is not theoretical knowledge. It is the knowing that comes from having been emptied and then filled, from having stood in a barren field and then sat at a table you did not set, eating food you did not grow, surrounded by abundance you could not have manufactured.
And the content of that knowing? “I am in the midst.” The Hebrew beqerev (בְּקֶרֶב, meaning “in the midst of,” “in the inner part of,” “within”) is a word of intimacy and interiority. God is not at a distance. God is not over there, beyond the ruined field, waiting for you to walk to Him. God is beqerev. In the middle. In the centre. Within. He was there during the swarm. He was there in the bare earth season. He was there when the storehouses stood empty and the bellies growled. His presence did not depend on the harvest. His location did not shift when the field was stripped.
What shifted was awareness. What changed was the human capacity to perceive what had been there all along. The locusts consumed the crop, but they could not consume the presence. They devoured the years, but they could not devour the One who fills all years. They stripped the field bare, but they could not strip away the God who occupied the very soil they gnawed.
That is what the locusts could not reach.
Not the grain. The grain was taken. Not the years. The years were consumed. Not the harvest. The harvest was devoured. What the locusts could not reach was the presence embedded in the ground beneath them, the character that saturated every inch of the field they destroyed, the restorative nature of a God who does not relocate when the swarm descends and does not thin when the storehouse empties.
The restoration Joel promises is not God finally deciding to act after a period of inaction. It is the human experience of turning back toward a presence that never turned away. It is the opening of eyes that had been shut, the reorientation of a heart that had been facing the wrong direction, the recognition that the field was never truly empty because the One who fills all things was there in every grain the locusts took and in every bare inch they left behind.
You may be standing in a field the locusts have visited. You may be looking at bare earth and calculating how many years of your life were consumed while you watched, helpless. You may be carrying the particular grief of someone who has lost not merely a thing but the time that thing represented, the seasons of investment, the accumulated effort, the carefully tended rows of a life that looked, until recently, like it was heading somewhere.
If so, hear Joel. The years are not beyond restoration. The emptiness is not permanent. The barren field is not the final state. Not because God has suddenly decided to intervene, but because His character, which has never altered, includes a restorative wholeness so complete that the Hebrew language needed the Piel stem to express it. Shillem. Intensive. Full. Thorough. Leaving nothing unaddressed.
The locusts ate everything above the surface. But they could not reach the root system. And roots, given time and the right conditions, produce again. Sometimes more abundantly than before. Sometimes with a resilience the first crop never possessed.
Turn. That is all Joel asks. Shuv. Reorient your heart toward the One whose nature has not changed. And then watch what the soil remembers.
Declaration
From the bare ground of what was taken, I speak to the soil and I say: remember. Remember what you held before the swarm. Remember the weight of what grew here. Remember the fullness. And now grow again. I turn today. Not because God has been absent. He has been beqerev, in the midst, closer than the roots the locusts could not reach, present in every stripped and silent inch of this field I stopped believing could produce. I have wasted no grief. The tears that fell on empty earth were not wasted moisture. They watered what remained hidden below the surface. The years the arbeh consumed, the seasons the yeleq licked clean, the remnants the chasil finished, the bark the gazam gnawed, none of it is beyond the reach of shillem. Full restoration. Intensive. Complete. Not a partial refund for a partial loss but the reinstatement of shalom in every dimension the swarm dismantled. I will eat in plenty. I will know sava, the satisfaction of a table I did not set and a harvest I did not expect. And when I push back from that table, full and astonished, I will know. Not theorise. Not hope. Know. That the One who was in the midst of the desolation is the same One in the midst of the restoration, unchanged, unmoved, and unfathomably generous. The locusts took the visible. They could not touch the eternal. And from the root system they never reached, something is growing that the swarm could never have imagined.
Strength for the Day: A Year of Encouragement for the Soul © 2026 Promise Ave. All rights reserved.
