The Lord Jesus often used everyday things of life to illustrate His lessons. One day He said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem... how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!”
Have you ever watched a mother hen with her young brood of chicks and listened carefully to the variety of notes that come from her throat as she scratches around the farmyard? If you listen quietly, you will hear too the answering cheeps of her young chicks. Every cluck of the hen is an instruction or warning to her chicks, and each one is instinctively understood and obeyed by them.
Even our ears will pick up many of the notes in the hen’s clucking, but the young chicks are much more sensitive than we can be, and they soon learn to interpret the calls. It is not only the farmyard hen who calls to her young, for almost all mother birds are able to instruct their young in this way. Wild birds are usually more alert than domesticated ones, because of the greater dangers to which they are exposed. Although they learn by experience, the actual behavior that follows a particular sound is natural to them.
A bird expert showed this by a pretty little experiment. He had a recording made of a hen partridge calling to her baby chicks, which included the warning call when she saw a hawk overhead. The chicks responded to this call by squatting flat on the ground and staying quite still.
This recording was played to four partridge chicks five days old which had been hatched out in an incubator. The chicks were pecking crumbs on a flat table, but as soon as they heard the warning note, they squatted flat down and stayed motionless till the recording played the “all clear” which followed a few minutes later. Then they jumped up and carried on with their feeding. Was not that a fascinating example of the instinct present in these little birds which had never seen or heard their mother partridge!
The Lord Jesus used the words quoted above to express His sorrow over His people of old, but how true it is of very many today in our land. He calls, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Matt. 11:28. What will be your response, dear reader?
ML-09/17/1978