Zombies, Scapegoats, and Jesus Christ!


 I was holding a harvested set of flowers my mom found for her butterfly gardening hobby, and my daughter said tehre’s an ant on the car window on the inside, and it got me to thinking about the fungal disease that affect ants. There’s an interesting fact about disease control the ants do to make sure nothing will infect their colony.

Grey goat standing in the foreground, brown hill with the cross in the background.

The fungal bacteria, once it infects an ant, starts to control their body and starts walking in a zombie-like manner and is infectious. The infect ant climbs up a plants and hides under a leave, and the fungal disease grows and coating the ant entirely in spores. Then the spores start falling onto other ants. Most often located right above the anthill. So, you can imagine the disaster this would wreck on the colony as it spreads.

The good news is the colony can detect if an ant is infected because the infect ant starts to seep out a toxin from their skin that tells other ants the infected ant is dead. The fungal has started taking over the brain’s function and control it from there. The ants around them has to now drag the infected ant away from the colony as far as they could go. Those ants are never to return even if they’re not infected.

This is a perfect symbolic relationship of what the Jewish tradition dictates to do for a sin offering. They have two goats, one is to carry the sin and is killed on the altar. The other goat is released into the wilderness never to return (Leviticus 16:7-10, 16:26). The goats are a gift to God, but the one that is killed on the altar is pure and blameless. The one sent away is to carry away the people’s sins and punishment.

In the case of Jesus, we know He is pure because He never sinned (1 Peter 2:22), and He carried our sorrows and sins upon Himself. Prophet Isaiah wrote, He suffered and endured great pain for us, but we thought his suffering was punishment from God (Isaiah 53:4). This shows that we—as believers—saw God exacting His punishment on Jesus so that we would not endure the Lord’s Wrath. Jesus took those sorrows and sins upon Himself and sent Himself away into the wilderness. The Wrath does not come upon the people because His Anger is now in the wilderness to kill the scapegoat.

The ants that took the infected ant away symbolizes this act. The infect ant is the sin and everyone knows it’s already dead. Who’s willing to take it away from the colony so it won’t kill the rest? The volunteers, in other words, Jesus took the infected ant away, never to return.

But, Jesus was supernaturally raised from the dead, cleansed of the infection (sin), defeating death. How glorious that is! It’s a beautiful symbolic act the ants perform to save their colony to show what God has done for the world. He did that because He loves us all (John 3:16).

More verses to read on scapegoat and Jesus: John 1:29, 2 Corinthians 5:21, Hebrews 9:11-14 .

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