In the great prophecy of Joel, brief in extent, but comprehensive in import, the background upon which the earnest preacher of God paints his vivid pictures is the alarming condition of spiritual declension and apathy into which the people had fallen, accompanied with fearful neglect of the service of God and its ordinances. To awaken the people out of this deadly state he predicts the approach of an awful scourge, the ravages of which would be felt in a resultant condition of extraordinary impoverishment and penury. Poverty of spirit must precede entrance into the riches of the kingdom of heaven. And so the prophet is commissioned to promise that, after repentance and renewal of consecration, there shall be a rich and plentiful effusion of the Holy Spirit; and he assures the penitent that “whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered” and shall escape the impending destruction. Nothing is more probable, therefore, than that the writer of the Revelation meant to warn the Church of Christ against a decline in faith or relaxation in zeal. He assured it that such a lapse would be followed by the intrusion into its field of some dangerous enemy. What the character of this enemy should be is indicated by two things. It will be noticed that, if John deviates from the description of the locusts given by Joel, it is in the direction of bringing humanity more into the picture. The locusts spoken of in this fifth trumpet scene are to have crowns like gold upon their heads; their faces are to be as the faces of men; their hair to be as the hair of women; they are to hurt, not as real locusts do, the earth and its products, but men; their sting, unlike that of other locusts, is to be as the sting of scorpions; and their work will be, not the destruction of human life, but the causing of such misery as to make human life unhappy and undesirable. They are to be under the direction of Satan, whose field of operations in the warfare he wages against the kingdom of Christ is, not the earth, but the world of human beings.