The Spider and the Bee

If you’ve never had a chance to listen to the readings from Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening, I highly recommend that you do. If you can make it past the King James English, you will be amazed at how he can take one small morsel of scripture and prepare a magnificent feast of spiritual truth.

The morning of August 8th, I was particularly struck by the truth shared from this somewhat morbid verse of scripture:

They hatch viper’s eggs
And weave spider’s webs.
Whoever eats their eggs will die;
Crack one open and a viper is hatched. (Isaiah 59:5)

Every summer, we have a spider at our home. Usually, it constructs its web on the back porch between the house and the grill. Flip on the light after dark and you’ll see a huge, glistening, and magnificent web accompanied by a HUGE spider. Seriously, you can’t help but be impressed. This year our resident spider decided to build its web on the front porch, making it very difficult to access our front door after dark. The one interesting thing about these webs is that the next morning, no matter how huge and intricate the web, it would be gone. So much work for something so fleeting.

Take a minute to consider the spider. It is alone and all its work is done under the cover of darkness. All that it spins comes from inside itself. This web is not beneficial to any other creature except the spider. The web is huge and impressive, but the truth is that it is frail and benefits no one, especially its poor, unsuspecting prey. Despite the work that is done by the spider, in the morning there is nothing to show for it.

Now, let’s take a minute to think about another one of God’s tiny creatures, the bee. The bee works by light of day amongst the beauty of the flowers. It gathers the nectar to build castles of wax and to produce a wealth of sustaining honey. It works in community. The honey is a benefit to all, not only to the bee itself. It is lasting, good and not at all creepy.

I think it’s worth considering this question: Are you more like a spider or a bee? Are your works, although impressive, frail and fleeting? Do they come from a power within yourself or do you take the time to draw your sustenance from the outside source, the living water, to lay up eternal kingdom treasures that neither moth nor rust can destroy? Given the choice of being a spider or a bee, for me it’s no contest. There’s not one thing about a spider’s work that appeals to me. Today, I want to be a bee. What about you?

To hear Spurgeon’s slightly different take on the subject you can listen here.