Proverbs 30 verses 24 through 28. I invite you to turn with me there to Proverbs 30. We are near the end of the Proverbs of Agur. And once again, he's going to set before us, he likes to put numbers, groups before as examples. It's very common in the Proverbs of the ancient Near East. And here he's using that methodology. He's going to use some things that Solomon has set before us before. God loves to teach us through types through examples and through analogies. He knows that we're people who learn by pictures. I remember that as a kid, I used to love to open up storybooks that had animals personified, like the Br'er Rabbit stories, and read about how he was confounding constantly Br'er Fox, although I should have known there was something wrong with me. I always, I secretly pitied Br'er Fox. I always thought that, you know, that Br'er Rabbit was It was like the Roadrunner in cartoons. You know, you couldn't help but sympathize with Wiley. In any event, in all of these things, we're taught little morality tales. That was the origin of it. And Ager uses these symbols to teach us important things from the Word of God. Well, let's now, before we go to the Word of God and we seek to plumb its depths, let's go to God, who gave us this Word, and let's ask for His help. Oh, Sovereign Lord, I do pray now that you would help us to understand the examples that you've given us and to apply them in our own lives. Lord, we are about to see a pattern displayed by what we would call dumb animals. And Lord, they act often more wisely than we do, even though they act according to the instincts that you gave them. Help us then to learn, to learn wisdom from them. And oh Lord, let us not be unmoved as we hear your word. Oh Lord, please teach us. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Proverbs chapter 30 and verses 24 through 28. I remind you this is the word of the Lord. There are four things which are little on the earth, but they are exceedingly wise. The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their food in the summer. The rock badgers are a feeble folk, yet they make their homes in the crags. The locusts have no king, yet they all advance in ranks. The spider skillfully grasps with its hands, and it is in king's palaces. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God will stand forever. A wise man, as he goes through the world, doesn't go through unaware of what's around him. He is constantly examining the things about him, just as he should be examining himself, looking inward. We should be looking outward as well. So we should be considering all of God's creation, and we should be taught by God's works as well as his word. We should be taught not just by special revelation, although there we find our best instruction, our most infallible instruction. We should be taught by general revelation as well. Jesus sought to teach us important spiritual truths using the example of nature, the example of general revelation all around us. For instance, he used birds and plants to rebuke us for our fears and our worries. If you don't believe me, turn with me to Matthew chapter six. And there we will see some examples that Christ used in trying to teach us about how we should live in this world. Matthew chapter 6 and then starting with verse 26. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you, by worrying, can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. And yet I say to you that even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these. Now, if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So Christ draws our attention to the birds, to the grass, to the lilies, and he says, look at them, consider them, and then teaches us wisdom. through their example. So too, Eger is trying to do the same thing here. Here, Eger uses four things that are so small and insignificant that men see them all the time, or at least men in Eger's day saw them all the time, without even giving a thought about what they might be able to learn from them. He brings them to our attention, though, and says, consider what God has done for these little creatures. Just as Jesus said, look at how God provides for the birds. Look at how He clothed also the lilies, the flowers of the field. Now consider these creatures and how He has worked so miraculously in them, how He adapted them for their environment, and how He has created each of them for His own purposes. And we need to remember, brothers and sisters, that all of creation was given for us. We were intended to be the stewards over creation. And it's not just to provide for us, but also to teach us Charles Bridges puts it very well when he says, "...truly nothing was made for no purpose." The world of instinct shows that which will put to shame our higher world of reason. Yes, these four remarkable instances of almighty skill, the natures and habits of these four little animals teach many useful and important lessons to which the greatest philosopher might attend with profit. Now, Ager, in his first example, uses the ant. And he wasn't the first person, obviously, to do that. Solomon has already used the example of the ant to teach us an important lesson about diligence. Incidentally, what is diligence, anyway? What is diligence? What synonym might be yes, Caden? Being hard-working, okay, being industrious, keeping to our work, going at it on a regular basis systematically, day after day, and doing so cheerfully, not grudgingly, not slouchingly, not haltingly, not stopping all the time and needing to be shooed into continuing on in that work. Well, what did Solomon say about the ant? He said in the sixth chapter of Proverbs, Go to the ant, you sluggard. Consider her ways and be wise, which having no captain, overseer, or ruler, provides her supplies in the summer and gathers her food in the harvest. And Edgar teaches us much the same lesson in this verse. Now, I have been drawn to admire, albeit very grudgingly, the amazing industry of ants lately. Obviously, we're not at our home anymore, so I've been kind of in a tough situation of where to take the dogs to exercise. But I discovered behind the Sam's Club off of Skyboat, there is a large field. They have to buy more land than they need. That's part of the requirement. And they've got this big field that's completely unused. I take Allie behind the Sam's Club and I throw the ball for her in this grassy field. And even though it is December, we are still in Fayetteville, so as a result, what is the field still dotted with? which occasionally I and or the dog step in. You can always see when the dog steps in a few seconds later she'll be going like this, shaking her leg. But thankfully they are of course a little more sluggish now because it's the season when they become dormant. They've stored up their food in the summer and now they are just living off of that. Now as I go by, because I am particularly malicious towards fire ants. I will occasionally knock the top off of one of these mounds, expecting that this will be the apocalyptic event for their colony, okay? It's cold. I've just knocked the top off. Maybe it's rainy as well, and I can see I've exposed all of their egg chambers and things like that. And they're all like, what? What's going on? You know, they're not like in the summer where they're like, ah, you've done something! And they all hurry about. They're all kind of sluggishly getting to it. But amazingly enough, whenever I do this, the next day I go there to throw the ball for the dog, I go and I find that these fire ant mountains that I thought were irreparably damaged have been repaired. These little critters are incredibly industrious. So Ager points out that even though each individual ant has very little strength by itself, by their unflagging diligence and their working together, they store up food. They know because God has programmed them. God has built into them an instinct to gather food throughout the summer, to store it up so that they can remain dormant throughout the winter, and then once again in the spring, they will go out searching for food and start storing it up for the winter again. Now, there is a marvelous piece of wisdom for us to learn here, not just in the unflagging diligence of the ant, that they continue to work, and despite setbacks, despite people destroying their homes maliciously, they come back and they rebuild them. but simply that these little guys working together are able to continue to provide for themselves on a regular basis. As one commentator put it, when the ravening lions lack and suffer hunger, the laborious ants have plenty and know no want. So although they are not powerful like lions, yet they are capable of providing for themselves even better than the lions do by their diligence. So Matthew Henry says, a quickening sermon do these little insects preach to us as they prepare for the coming winter, what must be the thoughtlessness of men who make no provision for the coming eternity? He makes a very good point. The ants know the cycle of the seasons. They know that following spring and summer and fall, winter has to come. And so they're providing for it. Do we realize that winter is coming for us as well? We go through our spring, our young years, and generally speaking, we have very little thought for the winter in the spring. We are thinking only of sowing our wild oats and getting about what those things that we want to do are. And then in the summer, we begin to reach maturity. In the fall, even in our older ages, oftentimes, especially in this society, we push off thoughts of the winter. We push off thoughts of what is coming. We push off thoughts of dying. We don't prepare for it. And we always say, a little while, a little while, a little while. In South America, it's mañana, mañana, mañana, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. I'll get started tomorrow. I don't know how many people, especially those who are in the springtime of their youth, who don't think about what's to come. They don't think about eternity. They don't think about dying. They don't make any preparation for it. God is not important. Salvation is not important. And so they're only attentive to it when they're absolutely directed towards it. And sometimes that continues on through summer and fall. They're always thinking there'll be a time, there'll be a time, there'll be a time, but then they find that time has run out. Winter comes before we expect, and unless we've been preparing for it, we will be found unready. So spiritually, look to the ant for your example. They start gathering in the spring, so should we. We should be gathering the things that we need for our soul, for eternity, in the spring, going to Christ. Then verse 26, we have the example here of, now I know in your New King James Version, it says, the rock badgers are a feeble folk. And there is so much argument over what the word there should be. In Hebrew, the word is shefan. The problem is, it's a word that has fallen into disuse. In modern Hebrew, there's no shefan. So this is an ancient word. And we have no idea what specific animal a Jew in the ancient world would mean when he pointed to something and said, Shafan, what would he have been pointing to? So for instance, the New King James Version, they use the phrase rock badgers. But it's also been translated as hyrax. And even at times, commentators have said he's referring to Arabian mice. I don't even know what Arabian mice are, but apparently some commentators have thought that that's what it is. The KJV, I believe, used the word koni, okay, which was an old English word for small rabbit that lived in rocks. Believe it or not, I tend to think that that's probably the correct translation, the rock rabbit. The reason why I believe that's the case is that the Septuagint, that is the Greek translation of the Hebrew text, The Greek translators back then chose to render chaffin as coney or rabbit. They used the Greek word for rabbit. And in the dietary restrictions here and Deuteronomy, it would seem that the place where the discussion's going on and they use the word that is translated chaffin or they use the word chaffin, that a rabbit is being indicated. So I'm going to go with the idea that this is a rock rabbit or a coney. But either way, if it's a badger or a rabbit, the lesson is the same. What we're being told is that these animals, these chiffon, do not have much power to defend themselves. And yet, they escape danger. And how do they do that? Well, they make their burrows in the holes of rocks. We had an opportunity to go out and visit friends in Wyoming, and there's a place called Independence Rock. The importance of this rock was that the people on the Oregon Trail, you had to reach the rock by July 4th. Otherwise, it was likely that you were going to get caught in the winter storms as you continued to move west towards Oregon, and you got really into the Rockies. So if you made it there by July 4th, you were doing okay. Well, the interesting thing to me was not just this rock with all the settlers' initials and names and slogans carved into it, but the place was absolutely crawling with rabbits. But whenever you would get near to one of these rabbits, boom, they would zoom off into the rocks and into the crags and the crevices in order to hide. And I'm sure they'd been doing that to hide from coyotes for years and years and years. And so, once again, we have here an animal that is not strong, but yet the Lord has equipped it to survive and adapted it. for the environment that it's in by giving it these burrows and rocks. Each one of these little cones has its own Helm's Deep. And that should lead us to consider where our refuge is. That's the spiritual consideration here again and again. The psalmist reminds us that there is really only one rock, only one refuge in this world. What is it? Christ. God is our refuge. Psalm 31-2, bow down your ear to hear me, deliver me speedily, be my rock of refuge, a fortress of defense to save me. And then Psalm 62-7, another example, in God is my salvation and my glory. The rock of my strength and my refuge is in God. Trust in him at all times, you people. Pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us. Now the rabbits know to flee to the rock, But do we know to flee to the rock? In times of difficulty, how often is it that we have trusted in our own power and said, I can handle this, and found ourselves overwhelmed? Because in that moment, we're like the rabbits. Rabbits are not naturally powerful. And if they try to defend themselves, they're not going to do well. And we, when we get into trouble, so often we don't flee to God. He's not our first consideration. We don't go to Him in prayer. We see what we can do first. And then it's only when we're tragically, you know, in terrible situations that we actually turn to Him. And here's another question. The rabbits, they don't occasionally dwell on the rocks. They don't have summer houses in the rocks. They make their home there. Do we make our home with God or do we visit from time to time when we feel the need? Is it the case that normally we dwell as far away from the rocks as possible and then we come home once in a while to visit with God? What we are being urged to do is to make the rock our refuge, our fortress, our dwelling place, and our home. We're being shown their example. That's where we can find safety. That's where we can find encouragement. That's where we can find refuge. So we need to be making our home like the rabbits in the rock, but the rock that is higher than we are, the rock of refuge, our fortress, the Lord. In verse 27 of chapter 30, we have, of course, the example of the locust given. Now, the locust by itself is a feeble creature. I was amazed. I was trying to figure out what the difference between grasshoppers and locusts is. Do you know what the difference between grasshoppers and locusts is? Yes. Yeah. You know, as somebody put it once, locusts are just grasshoppers having a party. Okay? It's when they all get together that they become locusts, a locust swarm. Individually, they're just grasshoppers. They have no queen. They have no colonies. The individual grasshopper is easily crushed. All sorts of animals make grasshoppers, including birds, of course, their food. And yet, when they come together, These ordinary grasshoppers, and they become locusts, they become a mighty and an unstoppable army capable of utterly stripping a land clean of its food. I'm blessed. I have never been underneath a locust swarm, but I have seen pictures of locust storms in Africa and in the Near East, and when they come, they blot out the sun. They're everywhere. They just eat everything. They're a scourge so terrible that God used them from time to time as a means of judgment. He used them to judge Egypt and then later on he used them to judge his own people. God called these locust swarms, my great army which I sent among you. That's how terrible they are. Now, what do we learn spiritually from this? Well, I think we learn immediately that alone, each Christian is like the grasshopper. We can achieve very little. But together, what do we become? What we become, as him put it, like a mighty army. Like a mighty army moves the Church of God from onward Christian soldiers. I think part of the weakness of Christianity in this present age is the individuation of it. We have been separated. We no longer feel that communion. I know so many people who feel that it's not necessary, for instance, to be a member of a church, or even to attend a church on a regular basis. They say to themselves, well, you know, I can be a Christian all by myself. And aside from the fact that they're not under the means of grace, and thus they end up becoming colder and colder in the things of God, and the fact is they just don't grow in their sanctification, Apart from all of that, they achieved so very little by themselves. We, brothers and sisters, were intended to be part of something greater. We were intended to be part of the body of Christ. An eye by itself is useless. An ear by itself is useless. A hand by itself is useless. Aside from the body, They can't do anything, but when they are part of the body, they are very useful. Each one of you, brothers and sisters, young and old, was intended to be part of the body of Christ. Each one of you was intended to do something important. Each one of you is like an individual brick. A brick by itself is not much. But when it's part of a mighty temple, it is something awesome. It's part of something much greater. And so we should be looking for that place in the body of Christ where our talent, those things, those gifts that God has given us can be best used. We need to be working together. We need to be locusts, not grasshoppers, if I can put it that way. Now, he moves on in verse 28 to this last creature. Now, what is the last creature? In the New King James Version of the Bible, it is a samet, which they translate as a spider. But in the Hebrew, most of the commentators and a lot of the other translations, including the LXX, make it a lizard, okay? Well, since this is the only place in the entire Bible where it occurs, as far as I could tell, it's hard to tell what's meant by this creature. I can't go back to the dietary restrictions and figure out when you weren't supposed to eat it, or what group of animals you weren't supposed to eat it belongs to. So as far as I can tell, it is in fact a lizard. And regardless of whether it's a lizard or a spider, I think the application is the same. He points out that they are found everywhere. Living here in Fayetteville, I did not expect when I moved down here to find lizards everywhere. I really didn't. I didn't think of this as kind of a desert-oriented place. My wife was appalled to find a prickly pear. kind of cactus growing in her front yard, sand where dirt should be, and lizards all over the place because we moved in the middle of a very hot summer. They were ubiquitous. After a while, I got used to seeing them. They were interesting because they change colors. You know, they go from green to brown, brown to green. I believe they're called the anole or something like that, the local one. But in any event, they were all over the place. And after a while, I just got used to seeing them all over. They were, you know, we went to somebody's house, there's lizards on the wall and things like that. Not inside, hopefully, but certainly outside. And what Eger is pointing out is that these lizards are found in the homes of the poor and they are found in the palaces of the king. no matter what diligence was used to try to drive them away or to destroy them. If it was spiders, you know, our tendency is when we see a spider, we try to get rid of it. No matter how hard, though, we try to wipe out all the spiders, are we ever going to be successful in doing that? No. You're always going to have spiders. They're always going to be all over the place. They are persistent. They persist in that position. They're found all over the place, even though they are small. God maintains them. They have no strength of their own, and yet God maintains them, even in the palace of the king. And so, too, brothers and sisters, we are given the power to persist by God. We are given the power to continue on. He is the one who makes it possible for us to exist wherever we are. Now, there have been applications throughout the sermon, but let me give you just three quick applications of what we learned here. First, we need to really, when it comes to creation, not to see things and pass over them very quickly, to live without examining creation and giving praise to God for it. Now, when we go and we see, and I hope you guys get to see, for instance, incredible mountains. I've been very impressed in my life to have seen a portion of the Alps. I have seen also the Rocky Mountains. And I've seen places where even the Alleghenies are majestic, the eastern coast mountains, the very old ones, I think. But in any event, We look at those things and we see their majesty and their splendor and their natural greatness, and we are filled with feelings of wonder at the greatness of God. But it should be possible for us to look at a spider, to look at a lizard, to look at a rabbit or whatever it is, and to see the amazing way that God has made these animals and adapted them Even the smallest of the creatures is yet his wondrous creation. And we should see the wonder of God in the ant as much as we should the elephant. And one of the other things that we need to remember is we look at things. We should not merely be impressed by things like its size or its power. One of the points that Ager and Solomon made is the industry of the ant means that they have all of the things they need, though they're small. They're not like the lions. They're not these incredible majestic creatures, but the lions often go hungry. And so we need to judge what God is teaching us, is judge these creatures, not by their appearance, but by their wisdom. And so too, that needs to be applied to people. We need to judge people not by their appearance, but by their wisdom, their conduct, their faith, their diligence. We need to judge people by their characters. That's what we need to draw our estimation of a person by. not simply by their outward appearance and so on. The world these days judges people by appearance and personality, two very, very shallow and very fleeting and changeable things. We, as Christians, need to judge people by their characters, particularly you younger people, those people you intend to marry. Never pick a spouse based solely on appearance or how funny the person is in a group, but rather pick them based upon the depth of their character. their diligence, their industry, their faith, those are the things that are most important. Secondly, if we look at these creatures and we see how God has programmed them by instinct to take care of themselves, even these meanest of creatures, how much more should it put us to shame that we who have been given the great gift of reason, we who were created with reasonable souls, do not take care of ourselves, materially or spiritually, as well as these creatures do? They have the sense to flee to the rock. Do we have the sense to flee to the rock? They have the sense to store up during the spring and the summer and the fall the things that they need. Do we have the sense to do that? Often, we do not. Our we is persistent in remaining and in working and laboring, even under difficult circumstances when people are trying to wipe us out, as the lizard does. All of nature shows us God's work. And we too should be as a mirror showing God's work in the world. But are we? As Christians, for instance, are we part of the communion of God? Are we like a mighty army? Are we like the locusts? Or are we too often like the grasshoppers? We can learn so much, brothers and sisters, from the example of these mean little critters. We can become so much more if we will follow God's wisdom, if we'll follow their example. And I would urge you all to do that and to learn from these animals, these examples that Edgar has set before us and indeed throughout Proverbs. You need to be going back through Proverbs again and again and learning from the examples that God sets, learning from the examples that Christ sets in the natural world, and at least being as bright as a rabbit to know when to run to the rock, to know when you need to stand together. to know when it's time to gather and to prepare. I pray that that'll be the case with all of you, that you'll see these examples, that you'll learn from them, and that you'll apply them in your life. But we can only do that if we have first believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, come to faith. And if we have His illuminating grace within us, we'll see these examples. We won't pass by them, but we'll take them to heart. And I pray that's happening with all of you. Without, however, the Holy Spirit to bring these things home to us, they're just words. They're just, there's a lizard on the wall. There's always a lizard on the wall. There's a stepped in another anthill, you know, that kind of thing. These are things that come and go, and we don't learn anything from them. Just so these sermons are things that, it's another Sunday, he's up there talking. And we don't learn anything from it. But if the Lord has given us His Spirit, then these things should be brought home to us. And I hope that they are in your life. I hope that you have believed on the Lord Jesus Christ and that you have asked Him to give you the wisdom to live a life that glorifies Him. It will be a much better life than those which are unexamined, which are unprepared, which do not follow the Lord's instruction. Well, let's go before the Lord who prepares us for life in this world. God, our Father, I thank you for the example of the ant, the example of the locust, the example of the coney, and even of the lizard, Lord. There are so many things that we can learn from these creatures, so many ways in which they are so much more diligent than we are. I pray, Lord, that you would help us then to forget the ways that we once followed before we were Christians, to stop trusting in ourselves, to stop being hyper-individualistic, but rather to think of ourselves as part of the communion in the body of Christ. And, oh Lord, to not struggle against your wisdom. Help us to learn. Help us to apply. We pray these things in Jesus' holy name. Amen.