“Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not: Fear ye not Me? saith the Lord.” Jeremiah 5:21,22.
Do you know how to tell if something you see crawling or flying is really an insect? One quick way is to count its legs, because insects always have six legs, no more and no less. Spiders are not true insects, because they have eight legs. Centipedes and millipedes have many legs. The word insecta means “in sections,” and this is also true of them. All true insects have three body sections joined together—the head, thorax and abdomen. The legs and wings are supported by the middle thorax section. Most insects have four wings, but some have only two and some don’t have any.
When the Lord God created the world and everything in it, He surely must have had much pleasure in arranging for the insects. They represent the largest group of visible forms of life. There are three times as many kinds of insects as there are kinds of animals—actually over 600,000 species. Some are so small they can only be seen through a microscope, and others can easily crawl through the eye of a needle. The fairy fly, for instance, is only 1/100 of an inch from head to tail, but is perfect in all its parts. At the other end of the line are the 15-inch insects called walking sticks, which are found in New Guinea.
In proportion to their size, insects are the strongest creatures on earth. In experiments, a bumble bee was able to pull more than 300 times its weight, and a beetle carried more than 800 times its weight! When insects walk, their front and back legs on one side and their middle leg on the other side move together. The Creator arranged this so they keep their balance and are always firmly attached to the surface.
Most insects begin life as eggs, hatch out as larvae or nymphs, then change to pupae, and finally appear as fully-formed adults. Having no skeleton or bones, they have been given an armor-like skin for protection. When they increase in size, this splits open and drops off, with a new “armor” soon replacing it. This happens several times as the insect matures. Sometimes the old skin doesn’t want to let go, so the growing insect swallows lots of air and water, swelling itself so much that the outer shell finally splits. Sometimes, too, it will inflate itself with air and water after the skin has dropped off, in order to take all the wrinkles out of its body and make a smooth new surface.
Insects breathe, yet they have no lungs; they hear, but they have no ears; they smell, but they have no noses. They have eyes, but they cannot close them, even when they are asleep. Their hearts can pump blood backward or forward. These peculiar things about insects remind us of the opening verse of this article... the Lord scolded those people who refused to use their eyes to see His ways, or to use their ears to hear His word. No wonder He called them “foolish people, and without understanding.” We hope none of you will be so foolish! “Today if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.” Hebrews 4:7.
ML-06/19/1983