Albert Barnes Commentary Joel 2:25

"And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the canker-worm, and the caterpillar, and the palmer-worm, my great army which I sent among you." — Joel 2:25 (ASV)

And I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten — The order in which these destroyers are named not being the same as before, it is plain that the stress is not on the order, but on the successiveness of the inroads, scourge after scourge. It is plain too that they did not come in the same year, or two years, but year after year, for he says, not “year,” but in the plural, “years.” The locusts, although not the whole plague intended, are not excluded.

“As the power of God was shown in the plagues of Egypt by small animals, such as the cyniphes, gnats so small as scarcely to be seen, so also now,” in creatures so small “is shown the power of God and weakness of man. If a creature so small is stronger than man, why are earth and ashes proud?”

The locusts, small as they are, are in God’s hands “a great army” (and from this place probably, Muhammad taught his followers so to call them), and mighty empires are but “the forces of God and messengers of His Providence for the punishing of” His people “by them,” “the rod of His Anger;” and when they have done their commission and are cast away by Him, they are as the vilest worms.

“Since then, after repentance, God promises such richness, what will Novatus say—he who denies repentance or that sinners can be reformed into their former state, if they only do works meet for repentance? For God receives penitents in such a way as to call them His people, and to say that they “shall never be confounded,” and to promise that He will dwell in the midst of them, and that they shall have no other God, but shall, with their whole mind, trust in Him who abides in them forever.”

Through repentance all that had been lost by sin is restored. In itself, deadly sin is an irreparable evil. It deprives the soul of grace, of its hope of glory; it forfeits heaven, it merits hell. God, through Christ, restores the sinner, blots out sin, and does away with its eternal consequences. He replaces the sinner where he was before he fell. So God says by Ezekiel: “If the wicked will turn from all the sins which he has committed and keep all My statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die; all his transgressions that he has committed shall not be mentioned to him” (Ezekiel 18:21–22); and, “as for the wickedness of the wicked, he shall not fall thereby in the day that he turns from his wickedness” (Ezekiel 33:12).

God forgives that wickedness as though it had never been. If it had never been, man would have all the grace that he had before his fall.

So then, after he has been forgiven, none of his former grace, no store of future glory, will be taken from him. The time that the sinner lost, in which he might have gained an increase of grace and glory, is lost forever. But all that he had gained before returns. All his lost love returns through penitence; all his past attainments, that were before accepted by God, are accepted still for the same glory. “Former works that were deadened by subsequent sins revive through repentance.” The penitent begins God’s service anew, but he is not at the beginning of that service, nor of his preparation for life eternal.

If the grace that he had before, and the glory corresponding to that grace and to his former attainments through that grace, were lost to him, then, although eternally blessed, he would be punished eternally for forgiven sin, which, God has promised, should “not be remembered.”

God has also promised to reward all that is “done in the body” (2 Corinthians 5:10). What is evil is effaced by the Blood of Jesus. What, through His Grace, was good, and done for love of Himself, He rewards, whether it was before anyone fell or after his restoration. Else He would not, as He says He will, reward all.

And who would not believe that, after David’s great fall and great repentance, God still rewarded all that great early simple faith and patience that He gave him?

Hence writers of old say, “It is pious to believe that the recovered grace of God that destroys a man’s former evils also reintegrates his good, and that God, when He has destroyed in a man what is not His, loves the good that He implanted even in the sinner.”

“God is pleased alike with the virtue of the just and the meet repentance of sinners, that restored to their former estate David and Peter.”

“Penitence is an excellent thing that recalls to perfection every defect.”

“God lets His sun arise on sinners, nor does He less than before, give them very large gifts of life and salvation.”

Hence, since the cankerworm, etc., are images of spiritual enemies, this passage has been paraphrased: “I will not allow the richness of spiritual things to perish that you lost through the passions of the mind.”

Indeed, since none can recover without the grace of God and using that grace, the penitent who really rises again by the grace of God rises with larger grace than before, since he has both the former grace and, in addition, this new grace by which he rises.