I. The coming of the locusts was a day of the Lord; a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, a day of bustle and heartrending calamity, of which fathers would tell their children, and children to the generations yet unborn. And as all things are double, one against another as the types of the physical have their antitypes in the spiritual world so is there not something of which the locusts are an emblem and which is yet more terrible than they a mysterious something, at which in our healthy state we shudder, as though an evil spirit passed us by in the darkness? The fall of the first accursed locust, on the smiling plain, is not one-tenth part so awful as the first little cloud of evil that flung its shadow over the innocence of a still youthful life.
II. Thickly as the locust-swarms may be over our past years, utterly as they may have wasted a vain and misguided boyhood, or a passionate foolish youth, yet the very worst of us need not despair. For what cause is it that God gives us the gift of time, if it be not that we may repent therein? Once more sow the seed, and plant the vineyard in the furrows of the contaminated soil. Poor may be the aftermath, scant the gleaning of grapes upon life's topmost branches, that may be left for thee; yet do thou thy best to redeem these from the locust-swarm. The Holy One who inhabiteth eternity reaches to us out of His eternity the fingers of a man's hand, and touches into green life again the years that the locust hath eaten. Even the memory of guilt He will alleviate. Sometimes as we float down the river of life, memory flashes up from the hidden depths, and the dark wave is peopled with the innumerable faces of once-forgotten sins which menace us from the waters and prophesy of death. But God can enable us to gaze unshudderingly on these faces, and say with thankful emotion, "These sins are not mine; they were mine, but they are forgiven."
F. W. Farrar, The Fall of Man,p. 292.
References: Joel 2:25. Preacher's Monthly,vol. iv., p. 305; J. Vaughan, Old Testament Outlines,p. 273.