Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2081
Delivered on Lord’s Day Evening, May 30, 1886
“And I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten.” Joel 2:25.
LOST years can never be restored literally. Time once past is gone forever. Let no man make any mistake about this or trifle with the present moment under any notion that the flying hour will ever wing its way back to him. As well call back the north wind or fill again the emptied rain cloud, or put back into their quiver the arrows of the lord of day. As well bid the river which has hastened onward to the sea bring back its rolling floods, as imagine that the years that have once gone can ever be restored to us. It will strike you at once that the locusts did not eat the years—the locusts ate the fruits of the years’ labor—the harvests of the fields.
So the meaning of the restoration of the years must be the 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 mourned. The fruits of wasted years may yet be yours. It is a pity that they should have been eaten by your folly and negligence. But if they have been so, be not hopeless concerning them. “All things are possible to him that believes.” There is a power which is beyond all things and can work great marvels.
Who can make the all-devouring locust restore his prey? No man, by wisdom or power, can recover what has been utterly destroyed. God alone can do for you what seems impossible. And here is the promise of His Grace—“I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten.” 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 can restore your life which has up to now been blighted and eaten up with the locust and sin, by giving you Divine Grace in the present and in the future. He can yet make it complete and blessed and useful to His praise and glory. It is a great wonder—but Jehovah is a God of wonders and in the kingdom of His Grace miracles are common things.
We shall go into this subject, which I think will be very interesting to those here present who have wasted years to mourn over, since they have up to now done nothing for God, nor even for themselves. The locust has eaten everything. The prospect of recovering the wreckage of a life must be full of interest to them.
I. I shall first speak upon locust-eaten years. YEARS WHICH THE LOCUST HAS EATEN—what sort of years are
these?
First and darkest of all, there are the dead years of sin, of reprobation, impenitence and unbelief. Those years without God and without Christ. Those years without life as to spiritual things! What a condition to be in! Oh, how many, many years have some passed in this horrible state! We, all of us—those of us with whom God has dealt very graciously—always feel sorry that even our most early days should have been spent in sin. I was brought to know the Lord when I was fifteen years of age and I have often said that I could wish I had known Him fifteen years before. Oh, that one could, from the very earliest openings of one’s eyes have seen the light of the Eternal!
Oh, that the first pulsing of life had been with Jesus! Oh, that the first flowing of the blood had been consecrated with the life of God within the soul! But yet I fear there are very many to whom the idea of conversion in boyhood and youth seems almost too good to be true. They have now reached thirty, forty, fifty years of age, and are still unregenerate, unrenewed. I could weep over you! We frequently meet with people older, still, whose many years have all been graceless, locust-eaten years. Ah me, how sad to be old and unsaved—feeble with age and yet without strength unto
God!
Now remember. That eating of the locust—that devouring of everything by the caterpillars, meant a laborious year, because that year the people plowed and sowed and watched their crops, and their labor was all in vain. So, he that does
nothing for God and has no spiritual blessing, still has to work and to labor. None toil harder than those who are the slaves of lust, pleasure, self and Satan. These people often labor as in the very fire. The way of transgressors is hard. They have to toil and slave and tug and strive. The yoke of the world is not easy and its burden is not light. And nothing comes of it. This is the gall of the bitterness. One does not mind working when there is a good reward for it. But to plow and sow and then to reap nothing because the locust has eaten it! This is misery.
The wage sweetens the toil. But when the wage is death, the toil is horrible. Yet this is the way of unregenerate men—they spend years in laborious rebellion and the harvest is not after their desire. They toil under the impulse of some strong desire and their desire perishes. They work, they slave—but nothing comes of it. It is a year of labor but it is labor in vain.