A Plague of Locusts

Here's a picture of a locust:

To quote Dan Ackroyd in "Ghostbusters,"He's an ugly little spud, isn't he?" Here's what he looks like when he gets together with about a million of his friends:

And we name streets after this?!?

If you've been counting (and I know you have), this is the eighth plague, with two left. There's some interesting parallels between the Egyptian plagues and the judgments we'll read about in Revelation at the end of the year, but we'll cover that then. My question today is, What would YOU do if your country had been devastated by 8 plagues. At what point would the futility of your resistance begin to sink in?

You should have a pretty good idea where I'm going next by this point--do we not do the same things today? I'm not willing to go so far as to equate modern-day disasters as heavenly judgment on the earth--I don't rule it out, but I certainly have no way of proving it one way or another. However, we continually resist what God asks of us--he said to Pharaoh "Let my people go!" To us, he's saying "Let sin go!" And yet we stubbornly hold on to sin just as tightly as Pharaoh resisted God. The fact we were born into sin doesn't absolve us of our guilt and our need for repentance. Each and every day, the plague of sin enters our lives, and each and every day we need to repent to the Lord and accept the absolution that came only through Jesus' death and resurrection. 

The pictures I really hoped to find would have been before and after pictures of what a field looked like after a plague of locusts came through. Trying to imagine what millions of insects can do to a field (and how quickly they can do it) is like trying to explain what an 18-inch snowfall can do vs. actually experiencing it, but we can thank the Lord for a greater ability to describe 18-inch snowfalls in the future. The take-home message of the plagues for me is simple--they were all finite, and they all ended on God's timetable, not man's. Our modern-day plague of sin is exactly the same, except it ends when we receive forgiveness through Jesus. The vast majority of you reading know this--our jobs is getting the message out to those that DON'T.

Scott