Our family has always had a love for animals. Julie and I never knew what it was like not to have a dog around. While pastoring in South Carolina, we decided that we were going to have a little farm. Emily had a name for every animal on the farm. We had about forty goats and thirty or so chickens. We raised Oregon quail for a while. These were tall, beautiful quail. We had some rabbits and then there were the dogs. These animals were a constant source of laughter, fun and frustration for our family.
So many stories we could tell of interesting things that happened while we had the farm. I decided that I would take some of the these stories and put spiritual applications to them. Hope you enjoy.
Numbers 32:23 says ……..”:and be sure your sin will find you out.” Since the garden of Eden, sin has always had consequences. Sometimes sins results can be seen immediately and sometimes the reaping of our sowing may come later down the road. Elijah warned Ahab of the fate that would come because of his sin but it was twenty years later before doom arrived. God does remind us, though, that sin always “brings forth death”.
We had a chicken coop full of chickens…Rhode Island reds,Andalusians, Buckeyes, and Cantalanas. Many of them we had bought when they were just chicks. Emily had each one named. She knew each ones personality and most of them she could identify by the sound that they made. It was nothing to see her riding on her golf cart with a goat or dog sitting beside her and a chicken in her arms. We all had our part in the livelihood of these feathered creatures. Julie filled the scrap bucket, Emily fed the chickens, and I generally had the joy of keeping the coop cleaned. Our chickens laid so many eggs. We kept about three dozen a week to eat and then Emily would sell the rest to pay for her “Faith Promise” commitment. We finally decided that we were going to let one of our hens sit on a few eggs and see them hatch. We took six morning-fresh eggs and put them in a crate to be set on. We marked the calendar and began watching the days go by. Twenty-one days is the usual incubation period for chicken eggs so we knew that it would not be long before we had new baby chicks. We lost one of our eggs over the next few weeks so we were only going to have five.
The night before the chicks were to hatch, Emily could hardly sleep. She went out during the night with her flashlight, lifted the hen up, and made sure that all the eggs were still good. At night, you could shine the flashlight against the egg and could see the outline of the little chick resting quietly inside the shell. Finally she was worn down and decided that she was going to go to sleep. She made us both promise to get her up early.
The next morning she was up early, and with her pajamas still on, she headed with anticipation to the coop. I stood at the door,with a smile and watched her make her way to the back. She opened the door. Shut it quickly behind her and made her way to the back corner to the crate. All of a sudden, I heard a blood-curdling scream, and Emily was yelling for me to come quickly. I didn’t know what could be wrong. I walked in the coop and she could not even speak. She just pointed to the empty crate. No chicks. No eggs. What could have gone wrong. We had closed up all holes and even put boards around the base of the coop to make sure that no fox or raccoon could get in. We were puzzled.
All of a sudden I looked up on the ledge above the crates and to my surprise lay a five-foot black snake with part of its body through a small hole in one of the boards, and the rest was laid out along the ledge. I wanted to grab its head to get it out, but the head was outside the pen. I looked closer at the snake and to my chagrin there were five distinct lumps in the middle of its body. The lumps were the perfect shape of five unbroken eggs. This creature had just recently come into the coop and swallowed our eggs and was gleefully on it’s way back out with the spoil, but, something happened. The small hole that was his point of entrance to take his prize was now about to become the reason for his demise. The hole was large enough for him to slither through but with five lumps in his body, he was now too large to get back out.
Emily finally gained her composure and ran and got the shovel. With fire in her eyes she said, “Dad, I want to kill this snake”. I pulled the snake back through the hole and threw it on the ground and Emily began swinging. With its head now gone, Emily picked the snake up like her beheaded “Goliath” and went and showed it to Mom.
This slippery serpent learned the great truth, “Be sure your lumps will find you out.”
What caused this snakes demise?
1. His desires got the best of him.
2. He did not consider the consequences.
3. He thought that what he did in darkness, no one would know.
4. He tried to hide what he had done, but others could see.
