Locust

Locusts are grasshoppers that swarm in vast clouds, descending on a region and devouring every green thing in hours. To an agricultural people they were among the most terrifying disasters imaginable, leaving famine in their wake.

They strike as the eighth plague on Egypt, covering “the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened.” The prophet Joel turns a locust plague into a portrait of the Day of the LORD — an unstoppable army — yet also delivers God’s tender promise to “restore… the years that the locust hath eaten.” The law permitted certain locusts as clean food, which is what sustained John the Baptist in the desert.

The locust thus carries two notes: the seriousness of judgment that can consume everything, and the mercy of a God who can give back what devastation took. Even ruin on that scale is not beyond his power to restore.