Joel 1:1-7
Tell It to Your Children
Read the passage
1This is the word of the LORD that came to Joel son of Pethuel:
2Hear this, O elders; and give ear, all who dwell in the land. Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your fathers?
3Tell it to your children; let your children tell it to their children, and their children to the next generation.
4What the devouring locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten; what the swarming locust has left, the young locust has eaten; and what the young locust has left, the destroying locust has eaten.
5Wake up, you drunkards, and weep; wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine, for it has been cut off from your mouth.
6For a nation has invaded My land, powerful and without number; its teeth are the teeth of a lion, and its fangs are the fangs of a lioness.
7It has laid waste My grapevine and splintered My fig tree. It has stripped off the bark and thrown it away; the branches have turned white.
Berean Standard Bible
Read aloud
The word of the LORD comes to Joel son of Pethuel. He calls the elders and everyone in the land to listen: has anything like this happened in their lifetime or their ancestors’ days? They must tell their children, who must tell the next generation in turn.
Locusts have consumed the harvest in wave after wave. What the devouring locust leaves, the swarming locust eats; what remains after that is eaten by the young and destroying locusts. The repeated losses leave almost nothing behind.
Joel calls the drunkards to wake up and the wine drinkers to weep, because their sweet wine is gone. The invader is described as a powerful, numberless nation with a lion’s teeth and a lioness’s fangs. It devastates the LORD’s grapevine and fig tree, stripping the bark until the branches are white.
This is a disaster the whole community must face and remember. Joel begins by making them look at what has happened. Their children will need an honest account of the loss their elders have witnessed.
Questions
1 Who is told to listen?
AnswerThe elders and everyone who lives in the land are told to give ear. Joel treats the disaster as something the whole community must face honestly, not as a private inconvenience for the farmers alone.
2 What are they told to do with the story?
AnswerThey are told to tell it to their children, grandchildren, and the next generation. Memory is part of their responsibility because the next generation needs to know what happened and how the community responded.
3 What has happened to the crops and trees?
AnswerA sequence of locusts has eaten what the earlier locusts left. The grapevine, fig tree, and other sources of food have been devastated.
4 Why does honest memory matter in a family?
AnswerIt helps people remember loss, honor those who suffered, and learn gratitude and compassion instead of pretending hardship never happened.
What This Means for Us
Joel tells the elders to carry a hard memory to their children. That is not permission to rehearse disaster for its own sake; it is a refusal to erase what happened or to leave the next generation unprepared for grief.
Tell the truth about a loss in words a child can carry, and include the ways people received help. A family does not need a tidy explanation before it can remember honestly and seek God together.
Prayer
God, help us remember honestly. Give us wisdom to tell hard stories with care, gratitude for what remains, and compassion for people whose harvest has been lost. Amen.