And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you. And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed. Joel 2: 25-26 I absolutely love these verses! Restoration is something that is so needed in our world today there are so many influences out there that affect the minds of people causing them to need the true restoration of God. As I looked closer at these verses I saw something I have never seen before, these verses talk about four stages of a group of locusts. The word locust here means swarm, the word swarm means to overrun or overtake! The enemy of our souls will “swarm” us until he can overtake us, we need to be sure we are walking with God daily to ward off his “swarming.” The cankerworm is the crawling stage, the locust crawls around looking for a place to eat and reside, the enemy “crawls” around looking for a place to reside in you, he wants the things of this world to fill your heart and mind, so it’ll be harder to see clearly God’s will for you! The next stage is the caterpillar stage, caterpillars are often called eating machines because they eat leaves so voraciously. For instance there is a caterpillar called the tobacco horn worm, it eats so much it can increase its weight ten thousand times in less than 20 days!!! Now, think what this “spiritual caterpillar” can do in your life!! If the enemy had his way he would “devour” everything in your soul that has anything to do with the things of God, and take away your joy and victory! The first thing to go would be your conscience, because without that we would do anything! There is a trend nowadays that sadly is touching the church and that is a giving up of things that we once held dear, it is a very dangerous thing, because God never changes, so those things should still be held to no matter the age we live in!! The final stage is the palmerworm, the chewing locust. Locusts are very bad news for farmers, they destroy crops very quickly, in fact they can grow into a swarm that is 460 square miles, and it can contain anywhere from 40-80 million locusts per ½ square mile! Locusts eat their weight in plants each day, so a swarm which is that size will consume 423 million pounds of plants daily! They are a big cause of famines that plague the continent of Africa, and it is said that locusts may affect as much as one tenth of the economic livelihood of humans on earth…what a force to be reckoned with! I guess that’s why God calls it His great army. The devil and this world will take, take, take from you until there is nothing left good in you, and the aftermath will be more than you are able to pay! The devil will cause you to feel bad about yourself and to be ashamed of things you have done or for things done to you, we have all participated in things we aren’t proud of before we knew God and maybe even now, but if we put our lives in His hands, God will restore those years back to us and in verse 26 He said we will eat in plenty, and be satisfied, praise the name the Lord our God, and we will never be ashamed, or shamed. Don’t be fooled by this world, don’t become a “victim” of the locusts of sin, it will just bring you destruction and cause you to suffer a great famine in your spirit!