Posted 314 days ago

Birds, Spiders, and Prophets

by Christine Sine

Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?¹

For me, one of the celebrations of spring each year is when the barn swallows that nest under our eaves return. I am always quite excited when I look out our bathroom window and see them. Mum and Dad sit on the rafters and inspect their nest from last year, a nest they have come back to for several years in a row. Now the challenge is the number of offspring who also want to nest around the house. A couple of years ago, they built a nest right above our front door. By the time we realized it, (we don’t use the front door much) there were already babies in it. Being splattered by bird droppings is not exactly a welcome that guests fully appreciate. This year we are hoping to move them to the back yard.

There are many benefits, however, to having these beautiful birds around. Evidently, a nesting swallow will eat up to 8,000 insects a day (yep—thousands, not hundreds). That is definitely good for the garden and a wonderful way to cut down on the wasp and mosquito population over the summer. Even if we can’t manage to encourage the birds to move away from above the front door, I think that the benefits far outweigh the problems. Maybe we will just have to get umbrellas for our guests.

Natural pest control is a very important part of the garden plan, as I learned a few years ago when my broccoli was attacked by scale insects. I was sitting inside reading my garden books when I looked out to see a flock of chickadees joyfully feasting on my unwelcome guests. When I wandered out into the garden later that day I was delighted to discover that there was hardly a scale insect left. The birds had devoured them all.

There are other residents in our garden besides birds that help to keep the pests at bay. Spiders, for example, another one of God’s creatures, tend to be unappreciated. Growing up in Australia, where we have some of the deadliest spiders in the world, has given me a rather paranoid fear of them. When I lived in Sydney, I would never put my garden boots on without first shaking them against the stairs to make sure a funnel web spider had not crept in during the night. And I would never move a rock in the garden before I had kicked it over to make sure there were no red backs hiding underneath.

It is only in the last few years that I have come to appreciate these garden sentinels and tried to avoid knocking their silk-like webs into oblivion. In E.B. White’s beloved classic Charlotte’s Webb, Charlotte the spider informs her friend Wilbur the pig, “If I didn’t catch bugs and eat them, bugs would increase and multiply and get so numerous they’d destroy the earth.” Evidently it is true. Spiders are one of the most important forms of biological pest control in the garden and can kill up to 80 percent of the nasty bugs that infest our plants. Unfortunately they are rather indiscriminate predators and will also kill butterflies, bees, and other insects that we are trying to attract.

Spiders remind me of God’s prophets who were also often unappreciated and even sometimes killed because God’s people did not want to hear their message. Yet throughout the history of Israel, it was they who continually “kept the pests away,” rebuking God’s people and challenging them to return to the values and practices that God had given to them when they entered the Promised Land. At the same time, they pointed the way forward to the coming of the Messiah and the fulfillment of God’s promise of a new world of righteousness and abundance.

At the center of this wonderful vision, Ezekiel assures us God will once more live among these people and be their ruler: “I will make a covenant of shalom with them […] and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them forever. My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people.” ²

In Isaiah 65, we are presented with what I think is the most beautiful imagery of God’s shalom vision as depicted by the prophets:

Behold I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more. No longer will there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old man who dies not live out his years; […] they will build houses and live in them; they will plant vineyards and at their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. […] The wolf and the lamb will feed together, the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.³

What a wonderful day of rejoicing and celebration that will be when we all come home to God’s kingdom of shalom! What a glorious hope these prophets proclaimed to sweep us into the New Testament and herald the coming of Christ in whom God’s shalom vision is fulfilled and all that was promised in the Old Testament comes into being. No wonder Isaiah calls the Messiah “the Prince of Peace [shalom].” No wonder the angels burst forth out of the spiritual realm and into our physical world at Christ’s birth, proclaiming, “Peace [shalom] on earth.” Just as we rejoice in heaven and earth, all rejoiced at the coming of this promised Messiah through whom all things would be made whole, reconciled, and brought into unity again.

Notes

1. Luke 12:24-26 TNIV
2. Ezekiel 37:26-27
3. Isaiah 65:17-25

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