Joel 1:4 (NIV)
What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten, what the great locusts have left the young locusts have eaten, what the young locusts have left other locusts have eaten.

Joel prophesied what would happen concerning the Church from her genesis to this present age, it does not take much study to come to the realization that when the Church was birthed on the Day of Pentecost, her debut was one of great power. However, it did not take many years for this aggressive Church that displayed such tremendous spiritual power, to decline into dead formalism. For the tragic decline of the Church to take place, the devil had to rob the Church of three foundational truths: justification by faith, water baptism, and the baptism in the Holy Spirit. These three truths are based on the blood, the water, and the spirit, and each of these deal with a part of the tri-unity of man.

This should come as no surprise to the student of the Bible, because of what the prophet Joel had said in Joel 1:4. The picture that Joel is painting here is the decline of solid, practical Bible truth. He sees this in his mind's eye as the stripping away of the foliage by an insect at the various stages of its growth, and likens the decay of this tree to the Church. He sees the decay starting with the palmerworm, the very beginnings of the insect. At this stage of the insect's growth it eats very little. As a matter of fact, you would hardly know that the palmerworm had been eating any of the tree if you did not know that you were looking for.

This is why the body of Christ needs men and women who are led by the Holy Spirit and are full of faith. Men like Kenneth Hagan, John Osteen, Fred Price, Ken Copeland, and many others too numerous to mention, who will view the tree, or the Church, from time to time as watchmen who will deal with the palmerworm before it turns into a caterpillar that feeds off the new growth of the tree.
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