---

The text speaks of the ravages of the locust in the different stages. If to the Jew the locust was a vivid type of the repeated wastings of his nation by the Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman invasions, it may be to us a no less vivid picture of sin's successive swarm and scourge of our own spiritual heritage. Three thoughts respecting spiritual life.

I. ITS FOES. Nature reveals life in its myriad lower forms begirt by foes. In our own physical life, the foreign fact becomes a near experience. Intellectual life has its foes. That spiritual life should have its foes is therefore no anomaly.

II. THEIR SUCCESSION. In a garden, you save the plants from their first enemies only to find that later foes attack them. There are successive foes for every stage of the spiritual life.

III. THEIR CONNECTION. The foes of the text were of one kind. They were several species of locusts, or several forms of the same species. So sin in one form is often followed by its fellows or its progeny, each working a wider ruin. We see pleasure-seeking followed by a breed of worthless traits; speculation followed by falsehood and dishonour; worldly yielding followed by neglect in prayer; compromise followed by compliance; doubt followed by intellectual pride; ignorance followed by fanaticism; covetousness by pharisaism; selfish success by indolence. What is the lesson? Beware of the coming into the field of your spiritual life of any sin. It will draw others after it. It will itself be metamorphosed into something worse.

(G. H. Morgan, Ph. D.)

---

---

KJV: The word of the LORD that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.

WEB: The Word of Yahweh that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel.