Restore Is a Word About Years

Look at what God counts in, because the unit is the whole message.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.Joel 2:25, King James Version

Not the harvest. Not the crop. Not the money. The years.

That is not how a farmer would have said it. A farmer counts bushels. A farmer says: I lost four hundred measures of grain and eleven of oil. God says: I will restore the years, and He uses a unit that has nothing in it but time.

He is counting the way the person in front of Him is counting.

And the losses are named in fours. Joel 2:25 lists the locust, the cankerworm, the caterpillar and the palmerworm, four stages of the same devouring, which is the passage's way of saying this was not one bad summer. Chapter one describes it: that which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten. It came in waves. Each wave took what the last wave had left.

That is what makes this a passage about years and not about a season. A single failure is an event. A compounding failure is a decade.

I should say plainly what we do not know, because this site will not pretend to a certainty the text does not give. Joel names no king. It gives no date. Scholars have placed the book across a range of centuries and the record does not settle it, and I am not going to settle it here either. What the book itself gives is a locust plague, a nation, and a word from God about it.

He owns the army, and He does not explain it away

There is a phrase in the middle of that verse that most people read past, and I am not going to read past it, because leaving it out would make the comfort cheaper than the text.

My great army which I sent among you.

He calls the locusts His. He says He sent them. The passage does not hand the devastation to somebody else and it does not soften it into an accident of weather.

I am not going to explain that. Joel does not explain it, and where Scripture is silent I am going to be silent too. What I will say is what the verse does with it: the same voice that owns the army is the voice that offers the restoration, in one sentence, without a change of speaker. There is no negotiation with a third party. The One being asked is the One who knows exactly what happened.

You are not the one who has to make the accounting come out even before you can be restored. Joel 2:25 puts the sending and the restoring in a single line and never once asks the hearer to reconcile them, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that from becoming a demand on a tired person's understanding.

Now, watch what surrounds the promise, because verse twenty five does not stand alone.

Be glad then, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the LORD your God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month.Joel 2:23, King James Version

The former rain and the latter rain. In that country the former rain came in autumn and softened the ground so seed could go in, and the latter rain came in spring and filled the grain before harvest. Two rains, at two ends of the growing season, and if either one failed the year failed.

So the promise is not one shower. It is the restoration of a rhythm.

You have been offered a rhythm rather than a rescue, and Joel 2:23 names both ends of the year on purpose. The written word gives the former rain and the latter rain in the same breath, and the same Spirit who preserved both halves is the reason a person can stop asking for one good day.

And then the sentence I want to hand you, the one at the end of the passage.

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.Joel 2:26, King James Version

My people shall never be ashamed.

That is the actual target of the whole passage, and it took me years to see it. The shame is what the locust years leave behind after the fields recover. A person can be eating again and still be carrying the decade. The verse goes past the plenty and lands on the shame, which means God knew that the plenty on its own would not finish the job.

You have shame addressed by name in this passage, and it is addressed after the food and not instead of it. Joel 2:26 puts never be ashamed at the end of the sentence, and it is His Spirit who reads that clause over the part of a life that stayed sore long after things improved.

Now, I am going to be careful and honest here, because this site will not promise you an outcome. Joel does not tell me what your next five years contain. It tells me what God said He does and the unit He said it in, and those two things are settled and written. What He gives, He gives; I declare the word and He sends the current. Anybody who tells you they can promise the shape of your restoration has left this text behind.

You have a God whose unit of restoration is the same one you have been grieving in, and He chose that word Himself. Joel 2:25 says the years, and the same Spirit who put that noun in the sentence is the reason it is not a general encouragement about better days.