October 5 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading:

Joel 1:1-10

¹The word of the LORD that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.
²Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land. Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?
³Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.
⁴That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpiller eaten.
⁵Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.
⁶For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a great lion.
⁷He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree: he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white.
⁸Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth.
⁹The meat offering and the drink offering is cut off from the house of the LORD; the priests, the LORD's ministers, mourn.
¹⁰The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth.

Devotional:

The locusts swarmed down upon the land and devastated it. Our encounters with the seventeen-year locust give us a little inkling of this destruction. The description in Joel of the land's encounter with this pestilence is vivid indeed.

God speaks to His people at this time through Joel. He wants them to take notice and learn from experience. He says, 'Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation' (1:3).

What has God taught us in the hard places of life? Has He caused us to go through deep waters in order to cast us upon Himself for mercy and comfort? Has He brought afflictions upon us to humble us or to teach us what it is to be completely driven into His arms, having nothing else upon which we might rest?

Then we must be humble and open enough with our children to tell them these experiences of the might, the power, the judgment and the loving forgiveness of our heavenly Father. God wants us to enable them to participate in our experience. He does not want His lessons forgotten. He does not want to have to repeat them every generation. Nor do we want Him to, do we?