🦗 Learn from Locusts

“There are four things which are little on the earth, but they are exceedingly wise… The locusts have no king, yet they all advance in ranks.”

Proverbs 30:24, 27

No throne. No ministry. They still move as one. That is enough to break the Left’s faith that a “king” must redistribute wealth and administer mercy.

Force is not charity. Taxes are collected under threat of court and cell. Call it welfare — it is still compulsion. Biblical giving is voluntary, from the heart, because someone actually saw the need.

“So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver.”

2 Corinthians 9:7

When the state plays the cheerful giver, two things die: the giver’s moral choice, and the receiver’s dignity. You cannot grow in generosity if a clerk has already taken the decision from you. Gratitude becomes a claim. Work looks optional. Then tyranny looks necessary, because someone has to keep feeding the machine and someone has to punish the ones who will not. That is why socialism never works. It disincentivises the very labour a people live on, then calls the resulting poverty a proof that the king must take still more.

It is also clumsy. Bureaucracies cannot see a street the way a neighbour can. Layers of process sit between the money and the mouth. They write one rule for every town and then act surprised when the rule bites. The 1960s “man in the house” welfare policy told African American single mothers: lose the cheque if a man lives here. The incentive was obvious. Fatherlessness in that community went from under 30% in 1950 to over 75% by 1990. A generation learned that a present father was a financial penalty. The swarm got a king. The ranks broke.

Locusts do locally what Whitehall cannot. People who live there know who is hungry, who is lazy, and who just lost a job. They bring local knowledge and a personal stake. Churches and households can move this week without a white paper. Targeted. Personal. No incentive to stay broken. That is why a collection in one congregation often does more good, pound for pound, than a department with a logo. Even drones have copied the same trick: no central brain, each unit reading the one beside it, the formation still holds. Agur saw it first.

None of this is “keep every penny and let the poor starve.” A strictly every-man-for-himself market, with no duty to share, produces a cold people and then a restless one. A people that will not share becomes a people that will not hold. The other ditch is as ugly as the first. We need the tension: personal achievement and communal responsibility, without a king with a gun collecting the tithe. Paul does not skip equality in the household of God — he just refuses to get there by the sword.

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.”

2 Corinthians 8:9

Surplus walks toward lack because Christ walked toward us. That is 2 Corinthians 8. Not a tax code. And he will not baptise idleness:

“If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.”

2 Thessalonians 3:10

So: no king required. Ranks, yes. Give freely. Work honestly. Be found a faithful steward, not a brilliant central planner. The locusts already know. The church should too.

Maranatha.