Lucas Leibforth

Joel: When The Locusts Come

There’s a reason these books feel like ancient thunder….quiet, distant, but impossible to ignore. The Minor Prophets are not minor in message. They’re filled with sacred tension, unfiltered emotion, and the relentless pursuit of a people God refuses to give up on.

When I say ‘wild,’ I absolutely don’t mean God is erratic or unholy..I mean He can’t be tamed by our expectations. He moves in mysterious places and whispers through unexpected people. The Minor Prophets show us a God who burns with justice, longs for mercy, and will not be boxed in.

This series isn’t just a study, devotional or blog….it’s an invitation. An invitation to listen again for the whisper in the wind. To meet the God who shouts through silence, who speaks through storms, and who calls us, still, to return.

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Sometimes the disaster is not symbolic.
Sometimes the thing that wrecks you is the thing itself.

Joel’s people were not dealing with hypotheticals. They were knee-deep in a nightmare. Not a war. Not a political scandal.
A plague of locusts.

Millions of them. Stripping the land to the bone. Eating every seed, every vine, every shred of hope.

There was no pretending everything was fine.
There was no “just pray it away” moment.
It was survival. Day by day. Dirt under the fingernails survival.

And into that silence, God spoke.

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When the Bottom Falls Out

Joel opens up without a warm-up or a slow emotional build.

“What the locust swarm has left, the great locusts have eaten;
what the great locusts have left, the young locusts have eaten;
what the young locusts have left, other locusts have eaten.”
Joel 1:4

It is relentless.
Layer after layer of loss. One wave after another.

I still remember sitting in my car, staring at the dashboard after a meeting that went sideways.
I had been hoping. Praying. Believing.
And then the door closed.

Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just enough to feel it in my chest.
What I thought would be a harvest turned into bare dirt.

Joel knew that feeling.

and yet he is standing right there, knee-deep in the wreckage, telling the truth most people are too afraid to say:

Sometimes God lets the bottom fall out so you will finally stop trying to build your own floor.

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When he spoke, it was not a time for empty words or passive hope.
It was a time for action.

“Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.”
Joel 1:14

Every word is a movement.
Consecrate.
Call.
Gather.
Cry out.

This was not a casual return to God.
This was a whole-body, whole-heart return.

When the locusts have stripped everything away, there is only one direction left to run.
Toward Him.

The Wild Invitation

Here is what wrecked me when I read Joel again.

God does not say, “Fix it and then come talk to me.”
He says, “Even now.”

“Even now,” declares the Lord,
“return to me with all your heart,
with fasting and weeping and mourning.”
Joel 2:12

Even now.
After the divorce.
After the moral failure.
After the years of bitterness and strife.

God is not looking for polished prayers.
He is looking for people who are tired of pretending.

One of my favorite quotes comes from C. S. Lewis:
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.”
The locusts might have stolen the crops, but they amplified the voice of God.

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Restoration is God’s Specialty

Joel does not just point to repentance. He points to restoration.

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”
Joel 2:25

I do not know if you have ever had a few years eaten by something.
Maybe it was addiction.
Maybe it was bitterness.
Maybe it was just life happening faster than you could hold it together.

But the promise is not that you get back everything you lost.
It is that God can do more with what is left than you ever could have done with what was taken.

As I have heard it said before,
“God never wastes a wound.”

The locusts do not get the last word.
God does.

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Lessons from the Wreckage

Dallas Willard said it like this:
“The most important thing in your life is not what you do; it is who you become.”

Seasons of loss force you to wrestle with that.
The harvest can get stripped away, and you are still called to come to the altar.
The future you mapped out can disappear, and you are still invited to return with all your heart.

Maybe that is why God allowed the locusts at all.
Not to punish.
But to wake us up.
To remind us what lasts.
To invite us back to the kind of life that is built on Him, not on outcomes.

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The Whisper

The losses are real.
The pain is not fake.
But neither is the hope.

God says even now.
Even after the locusts.
Even after you thought the story was over. Return to Him.

Because the years you thought were wasted were not wasted at all in His hands.