I remember as a young boy waking up early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons on TV. It was a magical time for kids of my age where we could be swept away into an exciting and entertaining world of animation while our parents enjoyed a relaxed morning knowing the kids would be glued to the TV for a couple of hours.
The type of cartoons we watched were certainly different that what’s available 24/7 today on cable TV. I’m honestly quite appalled at what is being fed to our kids today by way of so-called cartoons. Sure, many of the cartoons of our day had a significant amount of violence (I still love to watch Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner although I always wondered why Wiley had the money to purchase everything imaginable from the ACME company in an effort to catch the roadrunner but yet never spent any of his money on food), but the cartoons of today are often devoid of moral principles, the law of the harvest and consequences of our choices.
I happened to come across a couple of classic cartoons from yester-year that had such great messages, I thought I’d share them with you. The first one is titled “The Wise Little Hen”. The lesson of the law of the harvest is taught quite clearly here. What you sow, so shall you reap. The government isn’t going to step in and give you what you haven’t earned. Boy, things have really changed!
The next cartoon deals with a similar situation in “The Grasshopper and the Ants”. The grasshopper doesn’t feel a need to prepare for the winter when food will be scarce and just dances around playing his violin singing “the world owes us a living”. Meanwhile, the ants are hard at work preparing for difficult times ahead.
The Bible tells us that there are times when those who have chosen not to repent or prepare are left to suffer the consequences rather than be saved as the grasshopper was. The story of Noah and his ark is one such instance. Those who listened to the counsel of the prophet, which had been given for several hundred years, to prepare by boarding the ark were saved. Those who didn’t listen to the counsel of the living prophet and didn’t board the ark died. The lesson is very brutal and hard. There are, however a few interesting points to be presented.
Noah was a just and and obedient man in his generation and he, along with his three sons, walked with God. Noah’s daughters, who had married wicked husbands, did not heed their father’s counsel and died along with the other wicked. How hard it must have been for Noah and his wife and sons to not extend mercy to their family members, especially when it started to rain. The question might be asked, “why didn’t they open the doors of the ark and let them in, or perhaps other
s in”? The answer is because the Lord wouldn’t let them.
The Lord had foreseen the problem and had taken care of it by taking it out of the hands of Noah. We read that the Lord shut the door or shut Noah and his family into the ark. “And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.” Genesis 7:16
I am sure that when the rain started and the floods started coming up that there were a lot of people who were suddenly very repentant and asked to be let into the ark. Could you imagine what it sounded like for those inside the ark to hear the screams, pleas and pounding of those, including children, outside of the ark? And yet the Lord in his wisdom did not give Noah the difficult choice of whether to show mercy and open the door and save them also or not. The Lord took Noah out of the decision making process on the issue. Instead we find that the Lord suffered them to receive the just consequences (death by drowning) of their non-action to heed the counsel of preparedness.
Of course the important lesson of Noah’s Ark is applied to us specifically by a prophet of God concerning following the prophets counsel regarding food storage. “The Revelation to produce and store food may be as essential to our temporal welfare today as boarding the ark was to the people in the days of Noah.”
So the decision is ours. The Lord will not force us to be obedient and follow the council to provide for our families both today and in future times of need. We can choose to be like the grasshopper, thinking the Lord will provide without our needing to do anything on our part. Or we can be like the ants that know and understand through common sense that throughout history, there have been times of war, famine, drought or economic collapse and these possibilities will continue to try the wisdom and obedience of us all.
