“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Neither are your ways My ways’ declares the Lord.
‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.”
Isaiah 55:8-9

The results of an important entomological study were reported over National Public Radio on April 25, 1991. The study concluded that roaches are smarter than earthworms but dumber than bees! This study was conducted by entomologists who I assume are smarter than all three.

How do you suppose one goes about measuring the I.Q. of lower life? Perhaps someone checked the guest registers of roach motels only to discover that an occasional worm had slithered in but nary a bee bumbled by.

I must confess that I have never thought of roaches in terms of their intelligence or even their relative intelligence. Like most sensible people, I have only thought of them as the most disgusting and revolting creatures worthy only of total annihilation. The thought that they do anything but reproduce in Biblical proportions is foreign to me. And yet now I must accept the fact that someone is actually paid to study and measure their intelligence.

It seems rather sad that even the constituents of the bug kingdom cannot escape intelligence testing. We must not be misled however, by thinking that such research is not important. Somebody has to do it. After all, such data can be very valuable to those who have committed themselves to rid the world of roaches.

I don’t think roaches know they are smarter than earthworms but dumber than bees, and I really don’t think they care. Perhaps it should stay that way. I’m certainly not going to volunteer to break the news to them! But while I am on the subject of relative intelligence, I find it interesting that so many people think they are smarter than God!

According to the Bible, God created us and has even been gracious enough to give us His Word, that special revelation that helps us to better understand who we are and who He is. The eighth Psalm tells us that David understood that God is smarter than man.

As David gazed into the heavens, he marveled at the thought that the God who created the macroscopic could be interested in the microscopic.

And, God reminded Job of His superior intelligence in a dramatic discourse recorded for us in the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters of the book of Job. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?,” God asked Job.

The writer of Psalm 147 understood that God is smarter than man when he declared that God “counts the number of the stars [and] gives names to all of them.”

Isaiah 55:8-9 records, “‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways’ declares the Lord. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.'”

Why then do we insist on second-guessing God? Why do we insist on trying to convince ourselves that what God instructs us to do is really not in our best interests? Why do we insist on trying to prove Him wrong by disobeying His instructions? Alas, such activity will serve only to convince us that we are smarter than earthworms but not smarter than God!