Be Careful Of What You Glean!

Introduction:

Famine is defined as "a great shortage." We may find ourselves in famine. Definitionally, Covid caused a great famine around us. The great famine caused the loss of livelihood, emotional turmoil, relational disturbances, social disruption, and spiritual decline.

Though this great famine did not affect everyone equally yet, there were some common denominators of loss, turmoil, disturbances, disruption, and decline in varying degrees. The great famine not only had losses, but it also necessitated gleanings or pickups; whether positive or negative, they were "gleanings" nonetheless. The gleanings affect not only one's experience of famine but also the life afterward, the life after the "famine."

First Examples:

Abraham undertook an Egyptian sojourn when hit by the famine. But he gleaned an Egyptian maiden named Hagar. (Genesis 16:1)

When God's promise was delayed, and Abraham experienced the famine of delay. The gleanings of Egypt took the place of God's promise. 

Paul comments, "His son by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a divine promise. These things are being taken figuratively: The women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves: This is Hagar. Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother." (Galatians 4:23-26)

Second example:

Jesus was in the Spirit-driven famine. (Luke 4:1,2). Forty days of abstinence from food resulting in acute hunger. Jesus gleaned a relationship with God in the famine. The author of Hebrews comments, "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin." (Hebrews 4:15)  

And He rejected "the gleanings offered by Satan." John Milton comments: 

"I Who e're while the happy Garden sung,

By one man's disobedience lost, now sing

Recover'd Paradise to all mankind,

By one mans firm obedience fully tri'd

Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil'd

In all his wiles, defeated and repuls't,

And Eden rais'd in the wast Wilderness." ( Paradise Regained, Book 1)

Conclusion:

Covid is an unprecedented famine. Everyone has a choice to glean."

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU GLEAN!