Cambridge SDA Church

LEARN DILIGENCE FROM THE ANT  
 by Pastor Lem Niere

“Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wises, which, having no captain, overseer or ruler, provides her supplies in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest. How long will you slumber, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep—so shall your poverty come on you like a prowler, and your need like an armed man” Proverbs 6:6-11 

This sarcastic bit of artistry is one of the choice pieces of biblical poetry. Dramatically it addresses the student not as who he is but as who may become—a sluggard. It imagines his inexhaustible potential for laziness, mocks it by the comparison with the “ant,” complains about it in the questions that begin “how long” and “when” (v. 9).

The bite of sarcasm is left in the contrast between the diligence of the ant and the indolence of the sluggard. The contrast is humiliating. A person over 5 feet tall and weighing 130 pounds or more is told to let an ant be teacher, an ant less than a quarter of an inch long, weighing a slight fraction of an ounce. A person with gifts of speech, with a brain the size of a whole anthill, is told to bend over, peer down, and learn from the lowly ant. The irony is powerful.

The stupid sluggard lags behind the ant in two ways:

• First, she needs no leader; she is not part of a bureaucracy. The sluggard may fail despite an organisational structure that ought to promote achievement; the ant succeeds on her own.
• Second, the ant plans ahead. She understands the seasons. The cycles of life—harvest season and dormant periods—are coded into her instincts. She works while food is plentiful and stores it against the season of want.

Laziness is a breach of love. It refuses to carry its own weight let alone help with the loads of the rest of us who plod along supporting our young, our aged, our infirm. We have no surplus energy to carry those who can walk and will not. “How long” and “when” are the right questions. One of the sluggard’s traits is cartooned here—the tendency to deny the laziness.

Hard work ought to be the normal routine of us who serve a carpenter-Christ, who follow the lead of a tentmaker-apostle, and who call ourselves children of a Father who is still working even today (see John 5:17).

Diligence, foresight, and self-discipline are godly traits gifted to us by a Heavenly Father who cares about our life and ways in this world.

The ant’s preparation for winter is a metaphor for preparing spiritually for eternity, using this life (our summer) to secure our future.