LIFE IS A ZOO
THE ANT
DR. JIM DIXON
PROVERBS 6: 6-11
SEPTEMBER 5, 2004
Grover Cleveland was the 24th President of the United States. He was also the 22nd President of the United States. Grover Cleveland is the answer to that trivia question, “Who was the only American President elected for two terms that were not consecutive?”
The year was 1894 when Grover Cleveland signed the bill that made Labor Day a national holiday. Of course, Labor Day is celebrated on the first Monday of every September. That’s true in the United States, Puerto Rico, and in Canada. Wherever Labor Day is celebrated, the irony is nobody labors. On that day, nobody works. Labor Day is a holiday. It’s a day of rest. It kind of signals the end of summer. And of course we come today to the end of our summer series called “Life is a Zoo,” and we focus today on the ant. As we focus on the ant, our life lessons all concern the subject of labor.
Our first life lesson is this. Work is good for you. Did you know that? Work is good for you. Ants live in colonies, sometimes called formicaries. They vary in size. Some ant colonies are only 30 to 40 ants. Some include tens of thousands of ants. In Israel, ant colonies actually tend to be larger than in America because of the climate. Because of the condition, the average ant colony in Israel contains 30,000 to 40,000 ants. In Africa, there are ant colonies, believe it or not, that contain ten million ants and are the size of a tennis court, certainly something you wouldn’t want to have in your back yard. Regardless of the size of the ant colony, there are only three types of ants in an ant colony. There are the queens, there are the workers, and there are the males.
The queens and the workers labor. They work, but the males do virtually nothing. The workers, who are technically female but functionally asexual, do almost everything. They gather the food. They feed the young. They guard the colony. They build the colony, expanding its borders, making it larger and larger. The males just sit around. They just sit on their duffs. That’s all they do for three to seven weeks and then they do the one thing that they were designed for, and that is they take their mating flight with some of the young queens. They take off on their mating flight. They mate in the air. These young queens gather all the sperm they will ever need from that one flight, and they store it in their gaster and then they land.
When they land, the male just goes off and dies. The queen goes off and she starts her colony. Initially she does all the work because there’s nobody else. She builds the colony. She begins to build the nest and then she begins to produce offspring, laying her eggs. She will do this for years and years and years. But that male lives just one to two months. The workers live almost five years. The queens live ten to twenty years, but the males just live one month to two months and they have that mating flight and just go off and die.
Entomologists, those who study insects, do not really know why the life of the male is so short. Perhaps it’s genetically mandated. Maybe it has something to do with that mating ritual or maybe it’s because these guys just sit on their duffs. This much we know: Work is good for you. Doctors tell us that, psychologists tell us that, and the Bible tells us that. Work is good for you.
You’ve all heard of the Protestant Reformation, perhaps the greatest social, ecclesiastical, theological movement in history. Certainly, it was one of the greatest. It all began on October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther, the German priest and reformer, nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg. Certainly, Luther was the first of the reformers and perhaps the greatest, but he was not alone. There was Huldrych Zwingli, the Swiss priest and reformer. And of course, there was John Calvin, the French scholar who mastered Latin and Greek at the University of Paris. Calvin combined the teachings of Luther and Zwingli and he developed what is called Reformed Theology. The followers of Calvin in France were called Huguenots. The followers of Calvin in England were called Puritans, and of course the Puritans were very much a part of colonial America, very central to the formation of our nation.
It was John Calvin also who started what historians today call “The Protestant Ethic.” He was the reformer involved in the development of the Protestant work ethic. John Calvin taught that work is good for you and work is meritorious in the sight of God, that when we work it pleases God and it’s good for us. Of course, this Protestant work ethic popularized by Max Weber, the German sociologist. It impacted the Industrial Revolution, but John Calvin didn’t come up with these ideas in a vacuum. He got them from the Bible. It’s the Bible that tells us work is good for us, that labor is meritorious in the sight of God. You read the Proverbs and all the wisdom and literature in the Bible and it tells us work is good for us. It constantly talks about the benefits, how beneficial work and labor is.
You even go to Genesis, chapter 1 and 2, and you see God created man, male and female, and God crowns man with glory and honor, the crown of His creation. God gives man dominion over the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, the fish of the sea, and that dominion is exercised in work. We were made for work. Even Eden, the Garden of God into which man was placed, was to be a place of work. As we were placed in the Garden of Eden, we were to till it and keep it. We were designed for work. Work is good for us.
In Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ” Jim Caviezel in a beautiful scene portrays Jesus in His carpentry shop. Remember that scene in the movie? We know Jesus was indeed a carpenter. The Greek word in the New Testament can mean carpenter or stone mason and surely he was both. In this scene in “The Passion of the Christ,” Jesus is working on a table. He’s making the table just perfect, a beautiful piece of work. It kind of reminds me of something that Justin Martyr said in the 2nd century.
Justin Martyr was born in the year 100 in Samaria. As a teenager, Justin Martyr lived in Galilee in the region of Israel. Then as an adult he became a scholar and he ultimately became a teacher at Ephesus and then finally at Rome, but Justin Martyr wrote that in the year 115, when he was 15 years old, he was in the region of Galilee and he constantly saw people who were plowing their fields and they said that their plows had been made by Jesus in his carpenter shop and they were still working.
To this day, scholars don’t know what to make of that. Perhaps Jesus did make those plows and perhaps they were still used in the 2nd century. Scholars just don’t know, but that’s what Justin Martyr reported. Os Guinness, the great theologian, has said that it’s a beautiful thing to think of Jesus and the plow because Jesus believed in the dignity of work. On this Labor Day, it’s very important that we understand that work is good for us. It is good for us.
In the days of Christ and the days of Jesus when He walked this earth, the Roman Empire controlled the Mediterranean world. The Romans were builders. Historians tell us that the Romans basically built four things. First of all, they built walled cities. Of course, those walled cities they built, the ruins of many of them are still standing today from England all the way to Western Asia and Northern Africa. Throughout the Mediterranean world, the Romans built walled cities.
Secondly, they built roads. The Romans are famous for the roads that they built, and those roads are, again, all over the Mediterranean world and many modern highways in Europe are actually built along the same path of an old Roman road.
The third thing that Romans built were stadiums, and these varied in size and function. They built amphitheaters like the Flavian Amphitheater called the Colosseum in the city of Rome. They built hippodromes like the Circus Maximus, which no longer stands. Barb and I some years ago went with friends to Asia Minor and to the region of Turkey. We went to Aphrodisias and there in that city archeologists are unearthing a Roman hippodrome, a stadium, an arena, that held 200,000 people. Unbelievable. Two hundred thousand people! It was bigger by far than any Bronco stadium. This place was huge. The Romans were builders.
Fourthly and finally, the Romans built aqueducts. Architecturally, in terms of engineering, this was their greatest accomplishment. In the year 109, in Spain, the Romans built an aqueduct from a freshwater spring and it ran 18 miles into the city of Segovia, Spain. This aqueduct was an engineering marvel, and of course it brought fresh water to the people. It functioned for 1800 years perfectly. Then around the year 1900, the people in Segovia, Spain, thought, “Wow! This aqueduct is amazing, and it’s still just as good as it was 1800 years ago when the Romans first built it. This is so amazing, we ought to preserve it and not use it anymore. Let’s preserve it for our children and our children’s children. Let’s preserve it for history.”
And so right around the year 1900 in Segovia, Spain, they ceased using that Roman aqueduct. They built pipe and they ran the pipe from the fresh water spring into Segovia and they let the aqueduct just go dry, and you know what happens. You can guess what happened. The aqueduct began to just decay and rot and fall apart because it was made to be used. It was made to be used and it needed to be wet. When it became dry and unused, it just rotted away. That’s the way people are. We’re made for work. Every one of us needs to work. That’s the problem with retirement. If you just sit on your duff, that’s the problem with retirement. Retirement is fine if you still work. If you still have purpose, if you still give your time, if you still labor for things that are meritorious in the sight of God, it’s good for you.
The Apostle Paul in the Book of 2 Thessalonians, the third chapter, writes these words in this amazing passage. He says, “I command you, brothers and sisters, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from anyone who is living in idleness and not in accord with the traditions which you receive from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us. We were not idle when we were with you. We did not eat anyone’s bread without paying, but we worked and labored day and night so as not to burden any of you. It’s not that we have not that right, but to give you in our conduct an example to imitate. For even when we were with you we gave you this command: If anyone will not work, let them not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work, working around working. Such persons we exhort in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to do your work quietly and to earn your own living. Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in well doing.” It’s a powerful passage of scripture and very important. Work is good for us.
Sloth kills the church and the community, which leads us to our second teaching and that is that sloth kills the church. It kills the colony. Of course, when we look at ants, it’s amazing the way God has designed them. Every ant has a function. Even the male has that mating flight function. Every ant has a function and if they do not do their work, then the colony suffers.
Amongst worker ants, there are a group called soldier ants. Soldier ants are larger working ants. Amongst the soldier ants, one type of soldier ant is larger than all and has a massive head. This soldier ant’s function is to guard all of the openings to the colony. So these particular soldier ants with the big heads guard all of the openings to the ant colony. Usually there are three or four openings in an ant colony and it’s the soldier ants that guard them. Here’s how they do it: They just back into the opening and they use their big head to block it. They are literally blockheads. That’s what they do. That’s their function. Of course, if a member of the colony comes up, they come out and they let that member in and then they back right back in and they use their big head to block the opening again. If somebody who shouldn’t be there comes up, they do not let that head leave the opening and the other soldier ants come around and protect the colony.
There’s a function for everyone. Everyone has SOME function. You’re kind of reminded of 1 Corinthians, chapter 12, and Romans, chapter 12 where the Bible describes the church, the body of Christ, and how we all have a function and we’re all called to some purpose in the church. God’s given us all gifts. We all have roles to play and the reason, of course, the church of Christ is suffering in so many places today is so many Christians are slothful. We’re not willing to work at church. We’re not willing to take our gifts and our abilities and apply them to the needs of the community.
I want you to see a little clip from a move by DreamWorks called “Ants.”
Z: A good attitude even though I’m utterly insignificant. I’m insignificant but with attitude.
Azteca: Oh, sorry, Z. I didn’t see you.
Z: Great, Azteca. It’s working already. I’m so meaningless, I’m invisible.
Azteca: Now you’re getting it. After all, it’s not about YOU. It’s about US, the team. It’s about this.
Z: A giant hole in the ground?
Foreman: Okay, people. Are we feeling good? Great! Now, R1734-Z7829, you guys are on wrecking ball.
Z: You got it. Now remember, Azteca, be the ball. That’s the main thing. Now remember that. You’ve got to be one with the ball.
Azteca: Will you cut it out already? Gee! I love my work. And you, well, you think too much. Come on, Z. Help us build a bigger, better colony. And for crying out loud try to be happy about it.
Z: Sure, how could I possibly be unhappy being a piece of construction equipment?
Foreman: Okay, workers. Remember, BE THE BALL. Let the energy flow through you.
Z: Grin and bear it. This is for the colony.
Well, that’s just a little clip from that movie. Of course, you can see how everyone needs to work for the sake of the colony. Of course, if you drop the ball, the colony suffers. Of course, that’s the problem in the church of Christ today. So many are dropping the ball.
Jesus often walked a path from Jerusalem to Bethany. The Bible tells us Jesus walked that path again and again and again. It was a short road, just two miles long, beautiful, winding through trees. It was a beautiful short road from Jerusalem to Bethany and Jesus walked it again and again mostly because Mary and Martha and Lazarus lived in Bethany and they were His good friends.
The Bible tells us that one day Jesus was once again walking that road from Jerusalem to Bethany and it was very late in the ministry of Christ. As He walked down that road, He went over to a fig tree and the disciples watched Him. The fig tree was barren, and the disciples were stunned because Jesus cursed the tree. They’d never seen Him do anything like this. They had seen Him bless a lot of people but here He cursed a tree. They continued on to Bethany and to the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. The next day, coming back to Jerusalem, they passed that tree and the disciples were stunned to see that, overnight, that fig tree had withered to the ground. It truly had been cursed and the curse was effective.
Of course, Christians for the greater portion of 2,000 years have read that passage and they thought, “Wow! What’s that about?” Of course, it’s really pretty simple because the fig tree is the symbol of Israel. Jesus had just come from Jerusalem and He had seen their spiritual barrenness. He had just come from the Temple and He had seen that they were spiritually vacuous, spiritually barren, and so He curses the fig tree representing the nation of Israel. Israel is cursed because they were blessed to be a blessing and they were barren. Jesus says to the church, “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and I have appointed you to go and to bear fruit that your fruit should abide.
We’ve been called to productivity. We’ve been called to labor. We’ve been called to work that we might be productive for the sake of the church. This is, of course, the will of Christ and when we’re slothful, the church suffers.
There’s another road mentioned in the Bible, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. If the road from Jerusalem to Bethany was short and beautiful, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was long and ugly—really long, really ugly, really hot, with lots of robbers and lots of thieves. Of course, you know the story of the Good Samaritan which Jesus told and how a man went down that Jericho road and fell among robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and left him half dead by the side of the road. You know how a priest came by and did not stop to help him. A Levite came by and did not stop to help him but finally a Samaritan came and, “moved with compassion,” Jesus said, he went and helped him.
People have often wondered, “Why did the priest and the Levite just pass right on by? Why didn’t they stop?” Some have suggested tongue-in-cheek that perhaps they saw that this wounded man was already robbed, but of course that’s not fair because priests and Levites, whatever problems they had, were not thieves. Others have suggested, “Well, maybe they didn’t stop because they were in a hurry to get to some ecclesiastical meeting.” That’s pure conjecture and perhaps prejudice against ecclesiastical things. Many Bible scholars think, “It’s just a parable,” but many think a good explanation would be that they didn’t stop because of the Jewish law and the rites of purification. They were afraid that this man was dead. He was probably not moving. They were afraid this man was dead and if he was dead and they had touched him, they would have defiled themselves according to Torah and according to the Jewish law and they would have had to go through long and rigorous purification rites. And so, they didn’t even bother to check the man because they just didn’t want to go through all those rituals.
That may be a good explanation, but of course if it were so, it would mean they were lazy. They weren’t willing to help because they didn’t want to have to do that work that was involved in the rites of purification. They were slothful, too slothful for compassion. Maybe that’s what it’s about. They were just a little too lazy to help. Sloth. Of course, Jesus said that the Good Samaritan was “moved with compassion.” The Greek word is “sumpathos” which literally means, “to suffer with” or “to feel with.” It literally means, “with feeling.” Sumpathos. Sympathy. With feeling.
The opposite word in the Bible is “apathos,” which means, “without feeling.” We should understand that Jesus never tells us whether the priest and the Levite were “apathos,” if they were without feeling. They may have felt everything the Good Samaritan felt. They may have had all the same feelings, but they didn’t act on them.
I think most of us have good feelings and we’re sympathetic to people. Most of us have good feelings and we’re sympathetic people. Most of us have good feelings. We feel for children. We feel for the poor. We really feel for people who are hurting, but maybe we have a problem with sloth. We’re just not willing to put out the effort and that’s what really hurts the church.
Many years ago, a man named Kim Fu Mu in Africa in the region of Kenya from a village called Kikwit became feverish. This man, Kim Fu Mu, had a very high fever and he began to bleed externally and he began to bleed internally. He was rushed to a little village medical care facility. Five different people worked on Kim Fu Mu there and yet Kim Fu Mu died. Soon after, the five who had worked on him became feverish with very high temperatures. They began to bleed internally and externally and they all died and it was the beginning of the Ebola virus. Of course, there have been many outbreaks of Ebola in Africa made famous by the book “Red Zone.” It’s a very scary deal. It’s not an airborne contagion. Ebola is not as contagious as the common cold or as influenza, but when the symptoms appear, it’s more deadly than AIDS. You can have AIDS and live for many, many years with proper medicines. But with Ebola, when the symptoms first appear, you can die in hours.
On CNN, they had a special on the Ebola virus and they showed a woman working in an African village hospital. This woman was small and she was thin. She was clothed in white. She was a nun. She was a Christian and she was working on Ebola victims. She was washing their chests and washing their arms and washing their foreheads, trying to comfort them in the midst of their fever. Blood was coming out of their ears and out of their noses and even out of their eye sockets. There was a lot of bleeding and she was tending to them. Of course, they were also bleeding internally. They were going to die.
CNN was there and they were filming her as she ministered to these victims and wanted to talk to her. Finally, they came up to her. She had latex gloves on. She took them off. She had on a mask and she took it off. When she took the mask off, you could see she was beautiful. She probably could have done any number of things career-wise, probably could have married any number of husbands but she was married to Christ. The CNN reporter said, “I wouldn’t do what you’re doing for a million dollars.” She said something beautiful. She smiled and said, “Neither would I.” Isn’t that great? “Neither would I.” She wasn’t doing it for a million dollars. She wasn’t doing it for any money at all. She was doing it for Jesus and for these people that she cared for.
There are all different kinds of people in the world. There are all kinds of people. There are people with different values, different beliefs, different priorities. What kind of a person are you? We’re not asking you to treat the Ebola virus here. We’re asking you to teach Sunday school. We’re asking you to go into the inner city and tutor a child. We’re asking you to sing in the choir, help in the parking lot. We’re asking you to lead a small group, and that’s work. I know you have good feelings, sumpathos. Remember, sloth kills the church.
Well finally, we just have a minute or two. Everybody needs rest. Work is good for you. Sloth kills the church. We have one last life lesson. Everybody needs rest. You can look at an ant colony and you see an amazing thing. Inside of an ant colony, there are all kinds of rooms, and entomologists are familiar with all of them. There are grain rooms, and nurseries and all kinds of rooms inside of an ant colony, inside of that formicary. They are amazed to find “rest rooms”—not bathrooms, like men’s and women’s, but rest rooms where ants go to rest. That’s all they do in there is just go and rest. Even the worker ants go into these rest rooms and they just rest. Entomologists have found that even army ants need to rest. Army ants work for two to three weeks at a time, 24/7, and then they rest for two to three weeks. Ants rest. The misconception is that ants never cease to labor, but the truth is they rest. So go to the ant, consider her ways and be wise. Don’t be slothful. Work is good for you. Sloth kills the colony. But remember that everybody needs rest.
I want to conclude with a story. It took place on March 4, 1849. It was a very special day, March 4, 1849. It was on that day that Zachary Taylor was to be installed as the 12th President of the United States, but it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because March 4, 1849, was a Sunday and Zachary Taylor said he wouldn’t receive his inauguration on what he called “The Lord’s Sabbath.” And so, he refused to become President that day and they decided that they would just move it to March 5. They did that, but of course who was President of the United States on March 4? James Polk had been the 11th president, but his term had expired. They could not extend his term of office according to the Constitution, not even by one day. So, who was acting President on March 4, 1849?
Historians tell us that it was a man named David Rice Atchinson. How did he spend his one day as president? Historians tell us he spent the whole day sleeping. He was so stressed out, so worn out from all the election struggles and everything surrounding this controversy that he slept through his one-day presidency. That’s what he did. I’m not sure that sleeping through your presidency is a good idea, but sleeping on the Sabbath is a pretty good idea. Taking a nap on the Sabbath, which some of you do right in here, is not always a bad idea.
The word Sabbath in Hebrew is “shabbat,” and it means, “to rest.” It means, “to stop,” “to cease your labor.” Of course, it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at Hebrew or Aramaic, “shabbath,” or Greek, “sabbaton,” or even Latin, where it’s “sabbatum.” In any language it means, “to stop,” “to cease your labor and to rest for a season.” It’s a respite.
Now, rest was never meant to be a lifestyle. Just built into the meaning of the word is that it’s a break from what you normally do. It was never meant to be a lifestyle. You’re never meant to make rest a permanent thing. Even the New Testament words for rest, “anapausis” and “katapausis,” mean, “to take a pause,” “to pause from your labors.” God loves it when you rest. He loves it when you take a walk in the woods. He loves it when you take a hike in the mountains. He loves it when you sit down and read a book. He loves it when you take a nap if it’s a respite, if it’s a break from your labor. God loves that and He’s designed us so that we need that or we just stress out and we burn out.
And so, on the Sabbath Day every week, the Jewish people had their biggest meal. They went to the synagogue. If they were near the Temple they went there, but after going to assembly they came back and had the biggest meal, which had been prepared the day before. It was huge. Then they would play games. It was a family time, a community time. Then they would take naps. It’s always been that way in the Jewish community, and God knows we need breaks.
So even if you’re laboring in the Sunday school, you might need to take a break. Even if you’re singing in the choir you might need to take a break. But come back to it because, remember, rest is just a respite. It’s a break from what you normally do. We’re called to work and work is good for us. Sloth kills the colony and kills the church of Christ. Let’s close with a word of prayer.