This is the Bamo podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we hear the words of the Prophet Joel speaking to God's people about the hope that exists, even in the midst of utter destruction.

Yep. And it's not a short little prophet, three chapters. We're all about the text here, so we're going to do what we've been doing last couple.

The Prophet's short prophets are going to read it. We are going to read the whole thing. So, yeah, let's just dive in because the image that we're going to talk about with Joel, I mean we've been working through Babylonian prophets weeping Prophet Jeremiah,

a little chiasm of lament and hope in the alphabetic chasticacrostic of the book of what Brent lamentations. We had watch tower as the image for who? Habakkuk.

We had back at last week we talked about the image of Petra for the prophet. Ovaja. Ovaja. And today Joel, so the image is going to strike us right off the bat. So go ahead and start reading there Brent.

The word of the Lord that came to Joel son of Petwell. Here this you elders, listen all who live in the land. Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your ancestors? Tell it to your children and let your children tell it to their children.

And their children to the next generation what the locust swarm has left the great locust have eaten what the great locust have left the young locust have eaten what the young locust have left other locust have eaten.

So, locusts. Yes.

Wake up you drunkards and weep. Whale all you drinkers of wine. Whale because of the new wine for it has been snatched from your lips.

A nation has invaded my land. A mighty army without number. It has the teeth of a lion. The fangs of a lioness. It has laid waste my vines and ruined my fig trees. It has stripped off their bark and thrown it away, leaving their branches white.

Born like a virgin in sackcloth grieving for the betroth of her youth.

Grane offerings and drink offerings are cut off from the house of the Lord. The priests are in mourning, those who minister before the Lord. The fields are ruined. The ground is dried up. The grain is destroyed. The new wine is dried up. The olive oil fails.

Disparry farmers. Whale you vine growers. Grief for the wheat and the barley because the harvest of the field is destroyed. The vine is dried up and the fig tree is withered. The pomegranate, the palm and the apple tree, all the trees of the field are dried up. Surely the people's joy is withered away.

I love the prophets and how sick that love of the prophets is. I love the poetry and the vivid images and the ability to communicate principles. The man is dark and we wander through all the prophets.

The image is not easy to miss. The image is going to be exactly what you said. The image starts right off the bat by introducing us to the image that will serve as the plot for his prophecy.

As we pointed out time and time again many of these prophetic voices have a picture or an image that they like to use to communicate their message. Joel introduces us to the plot of God's people by using the metaphor of a locust plague.

I am no scientist or biologist. I'm not going to pretend to be. But I have been told that as the winds in that region of the Middle East change and shift, that if everything aligns at the right time of year and the wind shift in the right direction, you get these massive locust plagues that get blown off of, if I understand it correctly, kind of blown off the Mediterranean Sea.

It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it can be unbelievably not just inconvenient, but unbelievably destructive.

I can remember even here in the States, it wasn't too long ago, we actually had a cricket infestation go through the Southern Pacific Northwest so much so that they actually shut down a stretch of the freeway because there were so many crickets, locust type critters that the roads were actually slick from all the crickets.

Just astounding how many of these things that there can be in the Middle East. In fact, I encourage you. We didn't put any in the show notes, but just do a Google image search for locust plague.

In fact, I typed in locust plague in the Middle East. You get all kinds of incredible YouTube videos, photos, you can look at images.

It's astounding the magnitude when these plagues come through an area, the amount of locusts we're talking about.

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