He Restores Years and Does Not Send a Bill

The box came down off the top of the wardrobe because somebody wanted one photograph and now the whole low table is covered in them and nobody is going to bed.

Evening. Three generations in this room. His mother in the good chair. His daughter cross legged on the floor sorting them into piles that make sense only to her. Somebody has found one of his brother with an unfortunate haircut and it is going to be a long night.

He is laughing. He is genuinely enjoying this.

And underneath it a thing has started that he cannot stop.

Because he can see it. In the photographs. There is a stretch of years, and he can see in his own face across those years that he was not there, and he can see, in the same pictures, the people who were standing next to him.

His daughter at nine. His wife at that party. His mother in a hospital chair with him beside her looking at the middle distance.

So he has started totting it up. Not what he lost, which he could live with. What it cost them. He is going through a table of photographs adding up a bill.

Habibi, come and sit on the arm of the chair with me. Because there is a verse about years and it is one of the most misused verses in the book, and the actual sentence is better than the way it gets used.

Read who does what in that sentence

Joel is prophesying to a nation that has been through years of locusts. Not a metaphor at first: actual locusts, four kinds of them, over successive seasons, and everything eaten.

And then God says this.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.Joel 2:25

I will restore. First person. God is the subject of that verb.

Now hold that beside what you are doing at that table, which is adding up a bill and preparing to hand it to yourself.

There are only two parties in that verse. There is God, who restores. And there are the people, who receive. There is no third party who calculates what was lost and presents the invoice, because in that sentence the loss is not being converted into a debt at all. It is being answered by a gift.

You are dealt with by Somebody who restores rather than by anybody who bills, and there is no invoice anywhere in that verse. That is not a way of letting you off; Joel 2:25 puts the restoring in the first person and never once itemizes what is owed, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a promise made to a locust ruined nation and lays it on a low table covered in photographs. The arithmetic you are doing is not His arithmetic.

Now the second half, and I want to be careful and honest with you, because you are a serious man and you would not thank me for a soft answer.

I am not going to tell you that nobody was affected. Your daughter was nine once and you were somewhere behind your own eyes for some of it, and that is a real thing, and pretending otherwise would insult both of you.

What I will tell you is what you are not permitted to do with it, and it is this: you may not appoint yourself the debtor and God the creditor and settle it privately at a table at eleven at night. That transaction has no standing. It is not offered anywhere in Scripture and the price was not payable by you in the first place.

You have no standing to bill yourself for what He has already dealt with, and He has never once presented an account to a person He was in the middle of restoring. Isaiah 43:25 says I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes for mine own sake the operative phrase, because it puts the motive on His side and takes the whole negotiation off the table.

What He does not promise, and what He does

Let me be exact, because this verse gets sold badly and I will not do that to you.

He does not promise that you get the years back. Time does not run backward and the photographs will not change. He does not promise that your daughter at nine gets replayed. He does not say how, or when, or in what form.

The word is restore, and what restoration looks like is His to decide. It might be that something is given later that could not have been given earlier. It might be that a relationship carries more weight now than it would have. It might be a thing you will not recognize until you are old.

I do not know, and anybody who tells you the specific shape of it is selling you something.

You are inside a promise whose shape is His to determine, and the not knowing what restoration looks like takes nothing away from the fact of it. Joel 2:25 says I will restore and stops there, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a promise like that alive in a man without turning it into a prediction he will one day feel cheated by.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than tell the story about the haircut.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how much of the last decade you can account for. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.