Joel and the locust invasion
LOCUST INVASION JOEL 1 “Alas for the day! For the day of the LORD is near, and as destruction from the Almighty it comes. Is not the food cut off before our eyes, joy and gladness from the house of our God ?” (vv. 15–16). A locust invasion precipitated the vision in the Old Testament book of Joel . Joel describes a plague of locusts under the old covenant as a type of the day of the Lord (Joel 1:4, 15–16). Following the invasion of locusts at one point in the history of God’s people, the Lord sent Joel to warn them that a worse day of judgment was yet ahead for the impenitent. Of all the writing prophets, Joel is perhaps the hardest to date. The first issue is that we know nothing about Joel except that he was a prophet and the son of Pethuel (1:1). Although Joel is not an uncommon name in the Old Testament, appearing frequently in the genealogies of 1 Chronicles (for example, 4:35; 5:8; 6:33) and in Ezra 10:43, Nehemiah 11:9, and elsewhere, we cannot with certainty identify th