I will restore to you the years which the locust hath eaten.
The great Restorer
Locusts are happily unknown in England. We have only the harmless grasshopper here. Where plagues of locusts are known no one could Wonder that the writer of this book should represent them as a veritable army, leaving the desolations of war in their train, a desolation which would naturally take whole years to repair. Herein is a picture of some years in the life of humanity. A German philosopher has summed up our earthly state in the words, “Man has two and a half minutes here below--one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.” It is so apart from God. He is the only Restorer. Deny God, and the locusts are victorious for ever; the desolation is final and complete. Some years in some lives, and some lives as a whole, do seem to have fallen a prey to the locusts. We all know when we are wronged. And most of us feel keenly wrongs endured by others. The words of the text are spoken to a repentant nation. “I will restore.” God is pledged to do so by His very being. To that He must be true. So great is this necessity that God--may I say it?--does not trouble to be consistent on any lower plane. He is ever true to that name, which means far more than anything we know under the name Love. Years may be apparently eaten by locusts which are not really so. When God’s hereafter is recognised, what possibilities of restoration appear! The Incarnate Word came to do the work of restoration from sin, and the miseries it has caused and causes. (W. A. Cornaby.)
Lost years
Lost years can never be restored literally. Time once past is gone for ever. The locusts did not eat the years--the locusts ate the fruit of the years’ labour, the harvests of the field: so that the meaning of the restoration of the years must be restoration of those fruits and of those harvests which the locusts consumed. You cannot have back your time; but there is a strange and wonderful way in which God can give back to you the wasted blessings, the unripened fruits of years over which you have mourned. The fruits of wasted years may yet be yours. By giving to His repentant people larger harvests than the land could naturally yield, God could give back to them, as it were, all they would have had if the locusts had never come; and God, by giving you larger grace in the present and in the future, can make the life which has hitherto been blighted, and eaten up with the locust, the caterpillar and the palmer-worm of sin, and self, and Satan, yet to be a complete, a blessed, and useful life to His praise and glory. Linger over this mystery of love. Picture the spirits of evil, year after year bearing away from the fields of human life all their harvests. Whither have they borne the precious products? The fruits of wasted years are gone--gone past hope. Yet the Lord wilt bring forth life out of the tomb; those long-lost spells shall be restored. Is anything too hard for the Lord? Does not the very difficulty, yea impossibility, of the enterprise make it the more worthy of the Almighty? To him that believeth all things are possible. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The cankered years
The moral not the picturesque aspect of the visitation of locusts is uppermost in the prophet’s mind. He proclaims it as a punishment for the people’s sin, and as a call to repentance. If they shall repent, he promises a blessing which shall amply atone for past suffering. Wasted and blasted years are a fact in most human lives. The appalling thing is the years which have been eaten up by little, scarcely appreciable agencies, like a caterpillar or a canker-worm. Years which have gone, frittered away, we do not know how, and for which we have nothing whatever to show, years devoured in trifles; years that fleeted, as on the wings of a hurricane, in the wild rush of dissipation, and out of which are left only the broken strains of old songs, and a few dry leaves of withered garlands. The exquisitely bitter thought in this vision of wasted years is that of our own share in the desolation; and when our eyes are once fairly opened to the waste, our first impulse is to cast about for some method of restoration. How does God deal with facts like these? Does His economy include any law of restoration? It is evident that any economy of restoration must not only be based on superhuman wisdom, but must include superhuman compassion. “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap,” is a law which God does not violate in morals any more than in the fields. Viewed simply as a matter of law, the wasted years cannot be restored. The element of expiation only evades the difficulty. It does not meet it. Suffering is not a fair equivalent for the results of neglect or of wilful wrong. How contrition may affect one’s moral relations to God is one thing; how it affects the results of his wrong-doing or idleness is quite another and a different thing. An ocean of tears will not give hack life nor innocence. Repentance is a great power, but there are some things which repentance cannot do. On this side the truth is awful in its inflexibility. I pity the materialist when he comes to the question of repairing moral waste. I pity the positivist before the frantic appeal of a remorseful soul. If God does not ignore the action of the physical law, which is none the less His law, that law must at least be taken up and carried somehow in the sweep of a larger law. Perhaps it is not possible to formulate that larger law. At any rate it is not necessary, however desirable it might be. We want to know how it touches a man standing penitently in view of his eaten years. Some things may give us consolation and hope.
1. We have the general sweeping promise of God. “I will restore the eaten years. We might fall confidently back on that alone. Restoration, according to the Divine ideal, is a possibility and a fact in the Divine economy. And some features of the process we know. For example, God turns the man entirely away from the thought and the work of literal restoration. He does not ask him to make good, in the sense of a literal equivalent, the waste of the past. His concern is with the present and the future, not with the past. Whatever God may do with the faultful past, a penitent soul can only leave it in God’s hands. His work now is not to make good the past, but to give himself to the development of his new life as a new creature in Christ Jesus. The self-scrutiny of a repentant and forgiven man ought to be directed not at what he has been, but at what he is. Still, it is not restoration, that a man should simply leave the past behind him. God gives certain things which were forfeited in the wasted years of sin. God does not let the darkness of a man’s past come up like a cloud between the man and the outraying of His Divine tenderness. The faultful past may, and often does, poison human affection. Human nature forgives hesitatingly, and there is a background of suspicion behind reinstated confidence. But God believes in the possibility of a genuine repentance, and frankly accepts it. Repentance is a factor of immense meaning in God’s economy of restoration. When God heals a man’s backslidings, He loves him freely. Restoration is included in restored sonship. There are certain incidents on the line of actual restoration which are noteworthy. God has a wonderful power of bringing good out of evil, and of getting interest even out of the evil of wasted years. In manufacturing communities, large fortunes are sometimes made out of what is technically called “waste.” God discerns facts and possibilities in waste which we cannot see and could not be trusted to see. Illustrate from the story of John B. Gough. God strikes at the evil, but He saves the power out of the wreck, and the man carries the matured power over to the side of God’s kingdom, and makes it an instrument of spiritual victory and conquest. We do not, and we cannot know what God does with the irrevocable and the irremediable in men’s evil past; but we do know that He makes those barren and blasted heritages bloom again, and bring forth thirty, sixty, and an hundredfold. Both the Bible and Christian history are full of the grand fruitful work of restored men, men with large tracts of blasted years behind them. The best thing in restoration is getting back to God. Renewal, fruitfulness, peace, are not in our new resolutions, not in our turning to new duties; they are in His presence, His touch upon us, His guidance. The promise of restoration shall have a higher fulfilment by and by. “In God all lost things are found, and they who habitually plunge themselves in God and abide in Him, never become too rich. Nay, they find more things than they can lose.” Let us not, however, presume upon all this to neglect our heritage. Let us not be tempted by this revelation of God’s amazing goodness and restorative power, to think lightly of blight and bareness. God’s promise of restoration is no encouragement to presumption. It does not make any less terrible the blight and canker which are due to our neglect or waste. God help us all! These lives of ours have been so faulty, so fitful, so unproductive. What shall we do? Surely not unduly mourn over the past, when He says, “I will restore.” (M. R. Vincent, D. D.)
Twofold restoration
These words refer to a twofold restoration.
I. The restoration of lost material mercies. “I will restore you the years that the locust hath eaten.” Restoration is God’s peculiar work. Who but He can restore the earth? An insect may destroy a giant; but God alone can restore the life of a dying flower. Restoration is God’s constant work. From death He brings life to all nature. Spring is the grand annual illustration of it. God restores lost temporal blessings to His people in two ways--
1. By giving back the same in kind, as in the case of Job; and
2. By restoring that which answers the same purpose.
II. The restoration of lost religious privileges. What are these?
1. Worship. “And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and My people shall never be ashamed.”
2. Communion. “And ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your God, and none else.” (Homilist.)