The Cicada's Case

             

                One morning after feeding the cats, I was taken back to my childhood days. How mesmerized I was by what I called “locust shells” as a child! The photo at the right was snapped of the cast skin I glimpsed clinging to the old board.

                Now for some correction on my childhood thinking. The shell can be called a cast skin, exoskeleton, or exuviae. A more accurate identity of the insect that had emerged would have been an annual cicada.

                Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the perfect exterior of an insect, but it was hollow, empty. As a kid, I remember being pointed to the adult insect that abandoned its unnecessary case where its earlier life had been housed.

                The words from the last verse of the hymn of the 1800s, Sweet Hour of Prayer came into my mind. William Walford, its poet, in speaking about his death picturesquely envisioned it in this way:

This robe of flesh I’ll drop and rise

To seize the everlasting prize;

Walford was speaking of the everlasting prize, not as something we earn but the free gift of eternal life purchased by Jesus on the cross for those who would receive Him.

                Gladys Rainey Smith, my maternal grandmother, loved to read 2 Corinthians 5. The chapter speaks of the believer’s death. The Apostle Paul compared the Christian’s life to a transient tent much like the cicada's exoskeleton.  He began with these words in the first verse:

For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

Paul addressed the weariness of living as God’s child in a world where so many forces aggressively oppose our Heavenly Father’s ways. He stated it like this in verse 4:

For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life.

The apostle reminded us that God has given us the Spirit as a guarantee of our future home and the eternal life that He gave to each new believer at the moment of salvation when we moved from the dead state of sin to life in Christ. He concluded that section of chapter 5 focusing on the transformation much like the cicada nymph experienced:

…To be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.

When we have received life in Jesus by trusting in Him, we can be just as certain of our new heavenly body as the cicada nymph was of its change into an adult cicada.

Another photo of the 
inspiring exoskeleton.

An afterthought - The transformation of the cicada nymph reminded me of a former blog posting entitled The Metamorphosis. It can be accessed at  https://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-metamorphosis.html?