Deut. 4:9 – “…take heed to thyself…”
Someone has said that the good Lord didn’t create anything without a good purpose – but mosquitoes come close. Rather a strange thought, but a timeless one. Not about mosquitoes, but all the things that mosquitoes might come to represent.
Christians battle with little, annoying details about so many things. Sometimes the mosquitoes come in the form of things that we need but don’t always have time to go procure. Ezra 6:8 records an edict dealing with the supply of provisions for God’s people as they worked on a certain project. It’s pretty distracting, for example, to plan on making certain dishes for a church dinner – and then, at the last, most inconvenient time, realize we don’t have some ingredient for the planned food. A slight sting, yes, but it exemplifies the things that come up at either inconvenient times – ouch – or in insufficient supply – ouch again – to get the job done. Brief, annoying mosquitoes such things are, and aggravating, but the bite soon goes away. But we remember it, because we still have to go to the grocery store!
Jesus said in Lk. 11:52, “Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.” Sometimes annoyances come our way, great and small; not earth-shaking usually, but neither is a mosquito bite. And some mosquitoes are far more dangerous than others. Some spread disease and are deadly, such as the evil spiritual influence of these Jewish lawyers our Lord referenced here.
In Rom. 15:22, Paul explains to the Romans that he had planned on coming to see them sooner but was hindered. How aggravating it is when our plans to go somewhere or attempt to do something that is really for a good cause fall through. Travel plans get messed up. There’s that pesky mosquito! Someone gets sick. There’s another one! Or maybe our financial planning won’t allow us to do what we wanted. Yes, mosquitoes often come in swarms. No picnic today. Mosquitoes would eat us alive, we sometimes say.
So how do we handle life’s "mosquitoes?" For the literal ones, fortunately, there are pesticides, fly swatters, and bug zappers. For the figurative ones that annoy us so badly at times, the best weapon is prayer. And yes, quite often the mosquito comes disguised as a human, just waiting to foul something up. The three pesky mosquitoes that tormented Job – his “friends” -- were rebuked by God. He told them to go get Job to pray for them for they had not done that which is right (Job 42:7-9). With friends like them, who needs mosquitoes? Shechem was an infuriating mosquito to the sons of Jacob in Gen. 34, causing them to act rashly in that situation. Remember Simon in Acts 8? Even he asked the disciples to pray for him. Proper prayer could have handled these mosquitoes one and all, right off the bat.
We’d better keep a can of spiritual bug spray handy. There are a lot of mosquitoes out there, waiting to hinder our spiritual lives with their bites. Do they serve any good purpose in God’s hand? Why did He create them anyway? We might not know, but if nothing else, they drive us to beware of hidden dangers and motivate us to take certain precautions to avoid them. In any case, the less we see of them, the better, as far as I’m concerned!
