Locust-Eating Calots

Awake, you drunkards, and weep, and wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine, for it is cut off from your mouth.  For a nation has come up against my land, powerful and beyond number; its teeth are lions' teeth, and it has the fangs of a lioness. – Joel 1:5-6

This is not an invading army of Assyrians or Chaldeans but of locusts.  Death would come in mass not by the sword but by famine and starvation.  God’s judgment doesn’t always dress the way we might expect. 

This is part of the reason arguing with unbelievers is so fruitless.  Apart from revelation, everything looks accidental or coincidental.  To use a rather trivial literary example, Edgar Rice Burroughs is often targeted by critics for his somewhat excessive reliance on unlikely coincidence, and while it can be laughable at times, in his seminal work, A Princess of Mars, I would argue that it makes sense.  John Carter did not just show up on Mars.  He was sent there by some unknown power, transported, one might say, miraculously across space.  Call that power what you like, there was clearly a will associated with it.  Carter’s presence on the Red Planet and his Barsoomian adventures were instigated and orchestrated by a higher intelligence with the ability to direct, at least to some extent, the decisions and actions of the principal players involved. 

Carter had a purpose and destiny on Mars.  The reader is given that revelation at the start of the novel – albeit more or less subliminally, and he is thus able to accept more easily that old Woola might happen to show up when he was needed most.  I am perhaps biased as this is one of my favorite books, but I think the critics are sometimes careless readers.  

For us, be it an invasion of locusts or lawyers, senseless attacks by mad men or Muslims (pardon my redundancy), we are apt to look in the wrong places for our answers.  Americans repeatedly elect corrupt fools and incompetents to high office.  We enrich and empower those who are systematically and intentionally destroying our culture, our prosperity and our liberty.   

We are breeding the locusts which will devour us.  But, if we are focused solely on politics, economic policies, and demographics, we are missing the underlying cause:  we have sown to the flesh and are about to reap corruption.  We have planted the zephyrs that will spring up and blossom into hurricanes and tornadoes.  In turning from God, we have become the agents of our own destruction.  If a hell-hound is on my trail, I might want to think about what manner of man I have become.   

As with John Carter on Barsoom, we dwellers upon this blue orb have a destiny and a purpose for our lives here.  We can either fulfill that calling or be just another thick-headed Thark in the wrong place at the wrong time.