Identifying the Disaster
A church officer, introducing a new minister, said ‘We give you a warm welcome and hope you will make good the years which the locusts have eaten.’ The members no doubt knew what he meant. Visitors wondered. Those who picked up the reference to Joel no doubt looked it up but were unlikely to gain much enlightenment. What was this plague of locusts that stands at the heart of the book?
Never mind whether they were real locusts or of what kind. They might well have been. Devastating plagues of locusts have troubled the Middle East throughout the centuries, the last serious outbreak in Jerusalem being in 1915. Some scholars however have suggested it might be poetic imagery for a famine, a drought or an advancing army. All are possible but of secondary importance.
Grasp the big issue. This was a disaster of considerable proportions. It spelt ruin for a community and one from which they could only recover with great difficulty and over a long period of time. Like lightening, it came right out of the blue. In no way were they responsible for it and there was nothing they could do to avoid it. Ideas, advice, precautions were out of the question. Their world just crashed. They found themselves the victims of one of those ‘enemies of humanity’ which upset normal life and threaten survival, often unhelpfully defined by insurance companies as an ‘act of God'.
Notice how it shakes people out of complacency (vv 5-6), upsets their routine and destroys their feeling of security; the vine and the fig tree (v 7) are Israel’s equivalent of the English green grass, sunshine, cricket and warm beer. They can’t even practice their religion (v 9), they can’t believe what has happened (v 11) and there is devastation everywhere (vv 10-12). Like sailors, facing an unprecedented storm at sea in the opening scene of The Tempest and crying, ‘All lost! to prayers, to prayers! all lost’, Joel can only summon the community leaders to a fast and a solemn assembly (v 14).