The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 9 – 3
Like most people, I’ve always held the view that gleaning was a rule to benefit the poor. A sort of tax that land owners and rich people were required by God to pay, in order to provide for the less fortunate. And like other selfish people, I didn’t like the idea.
When I worked and slaved in the hot sun planting, nurturing, and defending a crop from the elements, I wanted to get every last olive off that tree; not one fig did I want to waste on birds, on insects, not even on the poor. I broke my back growing it, and I wanted ALL of it. Yet the commandment says otherwise: Leviticus 23:22, Deuteronomy 24:19-21.
When you harvest some leftover fruits that aren’t easily collected; the corner of a wheat field, a few olives way up in a tree, a handful of grapes missed by the picker (Ruth 2:1-9). And these are the food for the poor; in this case, Boaz was attracted to her, he made gleaning unusually easy ( (Ruth 2:15-19), but ordinarily it wasn’t.
But how do we apply this to the world today – since most of us don’t have vineyards, olive trees, or wheat fields? Even if we did, and wanted to invite the poor in to glean, we’d be hard pressed to find anyone who knew how to pick them, or was interested in picking our leftovers.
Like all laws, you can’t understand it until you pick up the letters of the law and look at what’s underneath them. God used these examples as examples, not as a complete list of everything that the law of gleaning applied to. Does this mean you aren’t supposed to let the poor glean your pecans? Your squash? Your strawberries?
Of course you are – that’s why God said you glean when you “reap the harvest of your land”, to include the whole harvest, not just the crops mentioned. And when you work on anything, when you produce wealth of any kind, there are always scraps left over. So can something that isn’t a matter of agriculture be treated under this law?
What about clothes that no longer fit? What about broken tools you don’t have time to fix? Or an old refrigerator you upgraded from? Are these things really so different from a bundle of wheat forgotten in a field?
In our society many of us still do “real” work, we still produce physical wealth, and we always have some leftover pieces – for example, is it really that different to build a house, and have a few sheets of drywall left over? Is not the “harvest” your house, and the “gleanings” the half-a-tube of caulk you have left over?
You have no need for it. You can’t return it to the store. It will probably be ruined by the time you build another house. You’ll have to store it and move it around in the meanwhile. Is this not exactly the same as the last olives on the tree?
The spirit behind the letter of the law “thou shalt not glean thy harvest” can apply to any piece that doesn’t get used by the main production, the “industrial harvest” shall we say. Scraps of copper wire, leftover 2x4s, unused scraps of metal or cloth.
So when someone builds a house and has bricks leftover, those could be considered gleanings; when someone installs a new water heater and the old one still works, that could be considered gleanings; when someone buys new clothes, but the old ones still have wear left in them, that is a type of gleaning.
In our society, these things often are donated to thrift stores and so on for resale and then the money from that resale is passed on to whatever charity it supports; and while in some ways this accomplishes the stated goal of gleaning – the feeding of the poor – it misses so, so, so very much of the point of gleaning.
TIME IS MONEY
I was raised poor. Very poor. I was raised with the so-called “depression mentality” of those who grew up in the Great Depression in the 1930s, where we lived, by necessity, under the idea of “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”.
We wore clothes until they literally fell off our backs. We cleaned our plates. We saved coat-hangers and twist ties and plastic bags to reuse for whatever non-traditional purpose we might need them for. We tore paper towels in half, wore our shoes until a toe stuck out. We wore socks until a foot stuck out.
This is not to say we were the poorest people in the world, nor even in town. But at times we lived in a car, and later a school bus; we got a lot of our food out of what was thrown away in grocery store dumpsters. I can’t honestly say I ever went hungry or lacked necessities, thanks to the sacrifices of my parents; but we were very poor.
But why are people poor? Psalms 37:25. Understand that “righteousness” has a broad meaning; keeping the Sabbath, while, say, not breaking your spirit is not righteousness. Tithing, yet overeating because you can’t rule your heart, is not righteousness. So if you’re poor, there’s a reason.
I have known a lot of poor people. As I said, I’ve been poor, and so I know firsthand that poor people are poor because they make poor decisions. Pun intended – they make decisions that keep them poor. More accurately, they break laws that keep them poor.
For example, Proverbs 20:4. When there’s work to be done, I work in summer and winter, cold and heat, even pouring rain. Not once or twice, but regularly. Would I prefer to be dry? Sure. Am I trying to get a shop built so I don’t have to work in the rain? Absolutely.
But until then, I’d rather not beg in harvest season even more than I’d like to be dry (Proverbs 26:14-16). On the other hand, I’ve had employees who won’t show up to work because there’s a 40% chance of rain. Who won’t get out of bed until 10 minutes before they come to work, so they show up groggy and half asleep.
People like that will always be poor. Yet those same employees see themselves as hardworking and diligent. Which is why the very next verse goes on to say, “The sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason” ( Proverbs 26:17). No matter how lazy they are, no one EVER sees themselves as lazy. But gleaning fixes this – more on that later.
The Bible commands (as one of the ten commandments), “Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work” (Exodus 20:9). Most people labor, at most, five days a week and goof off on weekends. Yet this is just as much a command as resting on the Sabbath day was.
So you see to be “righteous”, you must do ALL these things; yes, keep the laws of course; but also, break your spirit and rule your heart and lead with your soul. And gleaning teaches you how to do these things the hard way.
WHOSE FAULT?
Poor people, as a rule, are poor for a reason. It’s not usually their fault, per se; they were born into a wasteful culture, a culture that blamed others for their faults or downplayed the benefits of hard work. And yet, they’re still poor for a reason.
In my family’s case, my parents had various family and health problems, and we had some major setbacks in our life that weren’t, strictly speaking, anyone’s fault. But no poor person is ever poor entirely because of their own mistakes. Everyone can find a reason to blame their situation on someone.
And in every case, there is a path that a wise soul could find out of their situation, a path that depends solely on themselves. Because if you really are a good man, a three-fold cord who keep all the laws and principles in the Bible, you can’t help but be prosperous (Proverbs 13:22).
My parents were diligent, and worked hard, pinched pennies, and were generally smart about many things. But mom was bad at handling money, debt in particular; and dad was unwilling to humble his pride enough to work with, and for, other people.
He would do it from time to time in desperation, but within a few weeks he’d get frustrated and angry and quit. And we’d be broke again. So while it wasn’t their fault we were poor, per se; it was their fault that we stayed poor so long. As it is for pretty much everyone.
Now obviously, there must be a few exceptions, truly disabled people, people who were robbed of their life’s savings and so on – but I can honestly say that I, personally, have never met someone that couldn’t have made their life better by making better choices.
But unless God is trying to teach you a lesson the hard way, if you’re following all the laws – not just the great 10, but the laws about hard work, the verses about diligence, the proverbs about saving money, and so on – you will be prosperous.
And the closer you are to keeping ALL the laws, the more likely you will be wealthy – all things being equal. This doesn’t mean that being rich means you’re righteous (1 Timothy 6:5). But it means that godliness tends towards riches, as you just read.
David’s observation was that the righteous are not forsaken, nor do their children have to beg for bread. But that doesn’t mean they never lack for anything (Philippians 4:11-12). People have to learn to be “abased and abound”, and both are challenging – harder than you would think.
God will take you on the journey you need, to make sure you learn the lessons you must, but He will only do so because you are not yet fully righteous. Because you do not yet know the whole law, and apply it consistently throughout your life with all of your fractions.
And He takes us on that journey, often through poverty, precisely to teach us those lessons by personally experiencing the fruits of bad choices (Jeremiah 9:23-24). SO THAT, when we are wealthy again, we will understand exactly what wealth is worth… and what it isn’t (Psalms 52:6-7).
CAUSES OF POVERTY
As I said, no one is poor without a reason (not always their fault). And no one stays poor without a reason (usually their fault). Different people are poor for difference reasons, but the most obvious cause is simply laziness (Proverbs 13:4).
Being a slow worker at their job, and getting fired; not getting a new job because their references all say they were disinterested, sloppy, lazy, showed up late, and so on. As angry as it makes people to tell them this, it’s almost always at least part of the problem.
Even those who work “hard”, which is to say, 8 hours a day, don’t truly give it all they have – if you’re working less than 15 hours a day doing SOMETHING to produce some kind of income, you can’t complain you’re “trying as hard as you can”.
The second cause is wastefulness. Here’s an example; one student had just moved into a new apartment, and went shopping while hungry. He decided to buy lots of vegetables so he could eat “healthy”.
Of course, he didn’t really know how to cook them, nor did he really want them since he didn’t like vegetables. The person he wished he were liked vegetables, but he didn’t. So he kept putting off eating them until most of them rotted in the fridge (Proverbs 12:27).
The same student, a few years and many lessons later, after a long day’s work said to me, “well I guess it’s time to ask ourselves what we want for dinner!” And that is absolutely not what you should do when you’re poor.
The correct question is “what do we have that we need to use up?” And then, of those choices, what do we want? I am no longer poor, I can afford to waste food, and this is how I STILL think… which is one of the reasons WHY I’m no longer poor.
But wastefulness goes far beyond just food; why throw away old Ziploc bags and buy more when you can just wash them? That’s wasteful. I once caught a different student drying the dishes with paper towels!
She went through a dozen paper towels before I noticed. “But they’re not that expensive!” she said. Yes… but a dozen of them costs 25 cents and a normal towel would have been FREE! (Proverbs 10:15).
There are thousands of ways to economize around the house, and I won’t get into that. Lots of websites have ideas, because many people do understand these principles. My point is, people are poor because they are wasteful.
Another reason is attention to details. People often don’t see what’s right in front of them. Or they’re told to remove “all the screws” from something, and they only “see” about 80%, even though they’re all right in front of them. They clean “everything”, except the parts of the counter they missed because they wiped in a haphazard pattern.
Just like a cow eats only the high spots of the grass, and wanders randomly wherever her eye falls, so people by nature only do what stands out, what catches their eye – whether that’s vacuuming, or mowing, or chopping.
How does this relate to poverty? It makes your employer fire you for not doing everything you were told to do; missing a major part of the job; not following up on emails you were supposed to follow up on and missing sales; and so on.
Another reason for poverty is people don’t understand how money adds up (Luke 14:28). “It’s just a beer after work, it’s only $7!” No, it’s not. It’s $7 a day. It’s $35 a week, $140 a month, or $1,680 a year! Which means that having a beer after work is why you can’t afford to buy a good used car!
If you absolutely must have a beer every day (like a beast), skip the bar for a week and buy a case of Miller with the money and drink it at home. A year’s supply will cost you only $600! That means, if you had a little self-control and thought ahead, you could still have a beer every day AND A THOUSAND DOLLARS BESIDES!
Most people have to have a nice phone and a high data cap to kill time on Facebook and Twitter. The same phone can be bought used on eBay for about 1/4 the cost, and rather than spending $80 a month for a phone bill, you can get a basic plan for under $10 and use wifi instead of data. “But that’s only saving $70 a month!” No, it’s not. It’s saving $840 a year!
I do not know a single person who is poor because of what they earn. They are poor because of what they spend. Follow this simple rule and you can’t be poor: Make sure you always spend less than you earn (preferably about 30% less).
You need four things, in this order: water, food, clothing, and shelter (1 Timothy 6:7-9). And shelter is optional, according to Paul. Air, not listed, is clearly not optional but freely available to most of us. So sacrifice whatever else you have to, and make sure your expenses are less than your income, and you’ll always do fine.
All of these reasons above are the result of little or no self-control; which is to say, poorly trained fractions, specifically beasts. Poverty is largely the inability to choose things you know are smarter decisions, dismissing them because “it doesn’t matter”, “I deserve it”, “I need this”, “everyone else does it”, and so on.
So every time you are contemplating a purchase for the beast, you need to have this dialogue with yourself: “do I want a beer a day, or do I want to be able to buy ___ with that $1,680?”; “Do I want to sleep 5 more minutes, or do I want a job?”
Faced with choices like this, even a beast can see the right answer. You just have to ask it. You cannot overcome your fractions by force, in the long term; the goal is to learn how to reason with them, to convince them, and poverty gives you lots of opportunities to practice that.
CURING IGNORANCE
The final reason for poverty, and the most forgivable reason why people are poor, is ignorance. It is for this that God gives grace, and it is because of this, in spite of all the other reasons I cited, that God encourages us to give to the poor (Psalms 112:5-9, Proverbs 19:17, Proverbs 28:27, etc.).
Because despite it being their fault, they just don’t know any better (Luke 23:34). They’re ignorant. Now, I don’t mean a lack of college education – I don’t have one of those either, and never missed it. In fact, I’m better off for it. No, by ignorance I mean a lack of basic life skills.
For example, do you know what the best value food in the grocery store is? Notice I didn’t ask “what is the cheapest food?” (probably Ramen), but the best value. It doesn’t save you any money to buy cheap food if you have to pay a doctor or dentist to repair the sickness caused by deficient food!
So do you know what the cheapest healthy foods are? Not cheapest by volume (probably soda or pasta), but cheapest by nutrient and energy content? Most people have never thought to ask. (The correct answer, by the way, is beans and potatoes.)
When you have money, you can buy whatever you want, waste whatever you don’t eat, and you don’t care. The problem is, most poor people do the same thing, which makes them even poorer. Have you compared the cost among nearby stores? These are things everyone should know, and the poor have a REASON to learn them. And this is the wonderful thing about poverty: Ecclesiastes 7:14.
God allows poverty to teach us to consider our ways. Not so that we can vote people into office to steal from the rich to distribute to the poor! But so that the poor can learn what they are doing wrong and correct it. And gleaning is the best way to do that!
HOW GLEANING FIXES THAT
True poverty is quite rare in our country. By that I mean poverty where there really is absolutely nothing a person can do about it. Excepting for a quadriplegic, or a mental defective, or a very old person, most other people can do something of value.
Most of what looks like poverty is in fact “false poverty”, caused not by a physical problem but by a mental problem. A problem of attitude, of work ethic, of commitment. The Bible’s first word on the subject is 2 Thessalonians 3:10.
This doesn’t mean that someone who “can’t get a job” is exempt. A person without a job is not working. Therefore they should probably not receive charity from the church. That seems ridiculously calloused and harsh, doesn’t it? That’s the point of gleaning! Gleaning provides automatic work for the unemployed.
God’s ways are always about solving the problem permanently; teaching the proverbial man to fish, not feeding him every day. And to solve this problem, you must correct the cause. Most people are poor because of laziness, wastefulness, not understanding the value of money, poor attention to detail, and ignorance.
I may have missed one or two, but those are the main ones. And now if you’ll think about it, you’ll see how, say, gleaning the last olives on the tree teaches every one of those things. Obviously, the easy olives have already been picked. So you have to spend more time, to gain less. 20 olives on this tree, 50 on another, 5 on a third.
This is frustrating, and tiring, and requires a lot more time. It also requires and teaches humility, to take so little reward for your efforts. And in order to reap any real benefit, you have to put in the time, and if you’re forced to do this by hunger, it will FORCE you to learn habits of hard work and long hours.
But the fact that you have worked so hard for each and every olive makes you treasure every one. You won’t carelessly spill them on the way home, like a hired hand might, because that handful you spilled cost you an hour to pick!
What’s more, when you actually get those olives made into oil, and you realize that you worked all day for what turned into a half a cup of olive oil, you won’t put it somewhere it might get spilled. And you will use that olive oil sparingly, just enough to get the taste out of it. You won’t just pour it all over your bread, and you’ll clean every drop off your plate wasting nothing.
Most people just bury salads in dressing, when they really don’t need it. They just like the sugar in the dressing. Most people over-spice, over-cheese, over-dress everything because it never occurs to them to ask what it costs, and if it’s worth it (Proverbs 21:17).
So the effort expended for this oil teaches you to humble yourself and take whatever you can get; it teaches you not to be careless or wasteful, AND teaches you how hard it is to make wealth – real wealth, wealth someone doesn’t just hand you for showing up and sitting at a desk.
Thus teaching you that sure, there are only ten olives in that tree, but that’s ten olives you didn’t have before! And that the little things add up in a noticeable way, when you have so little! And isn’t that the lesson of Luke 16:10?
And finally – and most beautifully of all – picking free olives for yourself, the hard way, teaches you how to pick olives! It teaches you basic, marketable skills that everyone should have in your society!
Because if you were competent, and if you were hardworking and patient, you would likely already be employed! So when you are forced to work for yourself, you CARE how much time you waste on the phone talking to your friends! You CARE, because you’re hungry that night!
You care how many you spill, how many you ruin by leaving in the sun! And so you are forced to learn all the things an employer is EAGERLY seeking in the world, and cannot find! A diligent, reliable person who doesn’t make excuses and knows the value of hard work!
If the church just hands you money because you “can’t find a job”, you’re robbed of the pressure to find gleanings. As long as you’re being supported by charity, you have little motivation to go hunt for an opportunity to glean.
Which is why if you don’t work, you should not eat… because nothing motivates you to find something, anything to do, like hunger. Nothing motivates you to overcome your laziness, embarrassment and pride – the two largest things preventing you from having wealth – like abject poverty. Which is why it exists (Ecclesiastes 7:14 again).
MODERN DAY GLEANING
Obviously, you can see the application to grapes and wine; to grain and bread; but most of us don’t happen to live next to a vineyard, and if we did, the owner would probably not let us glean there in today’s world, for insurance reasons if nothing else.
So let’s put this in a context which might actually occur in our non-agrarian society. Let’s say, scrapping out metal – something I also did a lot when I was poor. Since dad refused to sell his time to a conventional job, instead we sacrificed huge amounts of time to save or earn a small amount of money.
One way was picking up aluminum cans along the road, back when littering was more of a thing. The thing about being poor is that your time is worth very little; which means that using a lot of it to earn a small amount of money can actually make sense.
Now this is slow, tedious work, and on a good day we might earn a dollar or two an hour, as a family. But when you’re poor, and the alternative is sitting on the couch watching TV, drinking, or hanging out with friends complaining about why you have nothing, picking up cans is a wise decision.
Obviously, when you can have a job at minimum wage making $8 an hour, picking up cans is stupid. Unless you do it when you’re not working! Because few people work more than 8 hours a day at their job. And their wages earned at their job is what their time is worth for those 8 hours a day.
It would be foolish to take time off of that to glean aluminum cans alongside the road. But if your time after that would be spent on Instagram or at Starbucks, then you’d be better off picking up cans in your off hours.
The point is that your time is money, whether you’re rich or poor. It’s just that when you are getting paid $100 an hour, your time is worth, well, $100 an hour. When you don’t have a job, your time is worth… less. How much less? That’s the question.
No one who can haul themselves out of bed has time which is worth absolutely nothing. It may be worth only twenty cents an hour, but no one’s time is completely worthless. An old woman who knits stocking caps has time which is worth the price of a handmade cap on Etsy, less the cost of the materials, divided by the hours it took to make it. Maybe that’s only fifty cents an hour – but not nothing.
The value of your time is exactly the value of what you would be producing in that time.
Think about that, and why I italicized “would be”. Let’s say you make $10 an hour, 8 hours a day. Your time, for those 8 hours only, is worth $10 an hour. Now let’s say someone grew a garden, had too many squash, and invited you to come pick them for free – to glean the fields.
You can’t just sit home and say “I can’t work for $5 worth of squash, my time is worth $10 an hour”, because that isn’t true. Your time while you’re at work is worth that. The rest of your time is worth absolutely NOTHING until you do SOMETHING with it!
Unfortunately the majority of people in our society, poor or otherwise, value themselves far more highly than they’re worth. They think because someone once paid them $25 an hour in a field they had studied, they are therefore worth $25 an hour digging ditches. And that simply isn’t true.
They’re worth $25 only if they can produce $25 worth of value in that time for their employer (actually, they need to produce at least $50 for him to justify the hassle of employing them). So does hiring them save him $50 worth of materials?
Is it better to have them, or to rent a machine for $50? Or buy a clamp to replace them? If the boss’ time is worth $100 an hour, does hiring this person save him at least 15 minutes an hour? If so, then they’re worth that – just barely, assuming they don’t make any mistakes that cost him money.
So our nation is spoiled, entitled, and taught from birth that they matter, whether they do or not. So most would rather hang out with their friends and complain, than take a job that is “beneath them”. When in fact no job is beneath a hungry person (Proverbs 27:7)… unless they know that they can get money for free from the next sucker just for holding a sign at a stop light.
MODERN GLEANING
I spent a lot of my childhood raiding dumps for scrap metal to sell (this was when people just hauled their trash to a vacant spot in the local woods and dumped it out). Everyone knows copper and brass is worth a lot for scrap – a few dollars a pound, give or take. Aluminum and steel are worth a lot less, of course, but still worth selling if you have enough.
Now obviously, if you can get an electrician to give you a few hundred pounds of leftover copper wire, that’s a big chunk of money. But just as obviously, he might as well just take it in the scrap yard and sell it himself. Why should he give it to you? That’s enough money to be worth even his time. These are the kinds of gleanings you go back for, yourself (Ruth 2:15-16).
No, what you’ll get from people as gleanings is old aluminum screen doors; old washers and refrigerators; broken computers and rusty sheet metal. Sheet metal and appliances are easy. A washer might weigh 50-100 pounds so that’s worth about $1-15 in scrap, depending on the market.
Aluminum is one of the best things to teach gleaning since it’s relatively common, and is only salable “clean”. That means no steel in it, not so much as a single screw in a whole load. So say someone gives you an old folding chair; you have to drill out the steel rivets, remove all the screws, and put it in a pile; hundreds of times.
You can see how, without any divine intervention whatsoever, that taught me attention to detail? You must see every single screw in a trailer load or you get paid 1/10 the value! And yet when you’ve done that to an old lawn chair – say, 10 minutes or so of work – you might have about a dollar’s worth of aluminum.
That doesn’t sound so bad until you realize you first had to find that aluminum chair and bring it home before you could scrap it out – that time adds up too. But it is possible to survive doing things like this. Lots of people do exactly this today. But it isn’t easy – which is, of course, the point.
REPAIRING
But gleaning isn’t just about selling scrap; you might see a free washing machine that doesn’t work on the side of the road. It looks nice enough, so you take it home; if nothing else, you sell it for scrap metal. You know nothing about how to fix one, like most people, but hey – you have nothing to lose.
So you plug it in and see what happens. Then you Google the name of the washer and what it’s doing. And see what people say on YouTube. And you try those ideas, and try to see what’s wrong. Most things aren’t that hard to fix, and you have nothing better to do and nothing to lose.
If, as is often the case, you can get it working, you can turn around and sell it on Craigslist for $150. If not, well, you learned something about how they’re made, which will make the next one easier to fix, and you still get the scrap metal price for it.
When someone tears their jeans and would throw them out, you can fix them and wear them. You don’t know how to sew, but how hard can it be to Google it and try? It won’t look great, and it might tear again if you did it wrong, but it was free and you learned something.
When I was a kid, we built our first house almost entirely out of thrown away materials. Scraps of drywall, wood thrown away from remodeled homes, small lots of leftover shingles. We even reused bent, used nails! We pulled them out of the boards, pounded them mostly straight and used them again. Because we could, and it was free.
The people who throw these things out – people with jobs, houses, and whose time is valuable – don’t need them. They know they have some value, of course, but they simply haven’t got the time to waste spending 10 minutes to make a single dollar.
So they throw it out, maybe set it on the street for the city’s bulky trash collection day. I spent a lot of time cruising the streets for gleanings on brush and bulky day; made some (relatively) good money that way reselling old headboards, barrels, pallets, firewood, and so on.
People without a job can use their relatively worthless time to convert this junk into something of value, connecting it to an interested buyer or making it ready to be recycled into something – all the while learning patience, hard work, attention to detail, and the value of money.
BENEFITS TO SOCIETY
Obviously you can see how, rather than wasting time at an unemployment office, at a community college, or worse, just sitting at home waiting “for your ship to come in”, this is a tremendous boon to individuals.
Yes, it’s hard; it’s supposed to be! If we could have learned the easy way, we would have already done it! But practicing this method of gleaning teaches all sorts of marketable skills, with nothing at all to lose and everything to gain.
But now I want to talk for a moment about the broader benefits, to the economy and the ecology. Those drywall scraps in our house were in a landfill when we rescued them. Now, they’re in a house, serving a purpose. They literally were the stone the builders rejected, which we rescued and made the head of the corner (Matthew 21:42).
So rather than get a job, earn money, pay taxes, so that we can afford to have someone mine gypsum and produce paper, glue it together, ship it, transport it, and sell it to us… we used something that already existed and was going to be thrown away, filling up a landfill with waste. And we housed the poor with it (us)!
Rather than put an aluminum screen door in the same landfill, we turned it into something of value, which could be recycled into a new door; thus we kept it from being mined again with all the ecological waste involved in mining aluminum, and we fed the poor (us).
Rather than buy new nails, we used ones that would be thrown away; but what’s more, if you can learn to drive a once-bent nail, you can drive any nail. So the poor learned, not only to drive a nail, but to drive a difficult nail well. Driving a new nail on a job for a real contractor is EASY by comparison!
Rather than pay someone in Asia to build a new washing machine, we gave this one another five years of life. And learned how stuff worked inside, stuff most people are afraid to take apart for fear they’ll make it worse! When it’s on the way to the dump, it can’t get any worse!
So the poor learned how to work on things they don’t understand, how to solve problems they’ve never faced before. By gleaning the “fields”, by taking the cast-offs of the rest of the world, I learned to value what I had; and I learned also how little I truly needed.
I learned patience, hard work, attention to detail, and how stuff works. And gradually, but noticeably, I became less poor. That ancient, mostly-broken post-hole digger that I got for free could be replaced. The welder I bought and repaired could be replaced with a better one, and the old one sold.
The trailer I got cheap because it didn’t work, which I repaired using that same welder, could be sold as a high-quality, well-functioning trailer. The other trailer with irreparably bad axles that I turned into a mobile chicken house, using junk laying around that I’d picked up from other places, is now worth ten times what I paid for it.
Everyone has opportunities all around them, ways to glean, ways to “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”. And after applying these laws consistently for many years, I very rarely do without now. I very rarely have to glean anymore. Because the law of God has made me rich. Rich enough, anyway.
As it will for anyone who keeps these laws.
BENEFITS FOR THE RICH
Gleaning gives an opportunity for those who have nothing better to do with their time – a chance to get “free” things to make their lives better. A chance to learn, a chance to grow, a chance to improve yourself with your own two hands, not government handouts.
And when you are not working – which, even if you are employed, is at least 6 hours a day – then any benefit you can earn with that time, however small the reward, is better than nothing! The poor have absolutely nothing to lose by tinkering with a broken dishwasher to try and make it work. And everything to gain.
But when you are abased for so long, and gradually start having enough to make ends meet, at some point you realize that your time is worth more than it used to be. I used to do everything myself. I fixed my own appliances, my own car, my own computers, I didn’t hire anyone to do anything. But at some point, my time became worth more.
Thanks to the lessons I learned from gleaning, I found myself competent to repair things for other people; qualified to build them things that they couldn’t have built anywhere else. Once in awhile, a problem we had was solved in a particularly new and clever way that no one else had ever done before – so I found ways to sell the thing we invented, or teach people how to make it themselves. So I started making more money.
But as my time became worth more, I found myself still desiring, by habit, to do everything myself. In fact, I specifically recall saying “but I LIKE gleaning, I don’t WANT to give those things away!” because I do, in fact, enjoy making something useful out of absolute junk. And why not, isn’t that what God does with us? 1 Corinthians 1:28.
The problem is, I can’t afford to do that any more. My time is worth too much for me to change my own oil. I can have it done for $30, or I can buy the materials to do it myself for $15. It will take me half an hour to set up and do it, and in that half hour I can be building something much more valuable, solving problems worth much more than $15 (and between you and me, I never liked changing my oil anyway).
The fact is, gleaning isn’t a way for God to take from the rich and give to the poor. It’s simply that He knows the rich can’t afford to pay a professional to repair an old dishwasher, or spare the time to fix it themselves; it’s cheaper and smarter for them to buy new.
And so just as it benefits the poor to receive the crumbs which fall from their table (Luke 16:21), those who reached middle class by gleaning are forced by that same law to break their “depression mentality” spirit and let the little things go… thus paving the way for them to become truly rich.
BLESSING THE RICH
You wouldn’t think so, but paradoxically, the law benefits the wealthy just as much as it benefits the poor. After all, didn’t Jesus say “it is more blessed to give than to receive”? (Acts 20:35). The wealthy are vilified in our modern culture, and justifiably so in most cases. But the idea of wealth is not evil.
In fact, all things being equal, the righteous should be wealthy. Abraham, Job, Solomon, David, and many, many other righteous men were obscenely wealthy by contemporary standards. So were Joseph of Arimathea, Lot, Noah, Daniel, and so on. The great men of the Bible were more often rich than they were poor.
And this is as it should be (Deuteronomy 8:18). Though hardly the primary goal of the law, if kept diligently, you cannot help but get wealthy – barring God cursing you to teach you a lesson, or extreme social persecution for preaching the truth, if you keep laws like Proverbs 10:4 and Proverbs 11:25.
If you do those things, you cannot help but become rich, according to these proverbs. Likewise, if you give the gleanings of your field, you’ll be come richer because that is part of being “a liberal soul”. But how exactly does it make you richer to give away your old clothes?
Mind, I’m not talking about God blessing you in return. That happens, but the beauty of the law is that the law itself blesses you when kept (Psalms 19:7-10). When we keep the law, we know God will bless us; but the greatness of the law is that the law itself rewards us.
The law is not a fence God built to keep us from having fun, it’s a fence God built to keep us from hurting ourselves. Every law, no matter how simple, blesses the keeper of it even as it forbids them from harming their neighbor.
So how, exactly, does not gleaning your field bless the rich? Awhile ago, I was on the way to a job and stopped off at the hardware store for some materials. While there, I saw a stack of drywall sheets that had been dented and damaged in transit – by those very same low-paid, low-value people who are careless and therefore poor – and so they were marked 50% off. Immediately I started thinking my gleaning thoughts:
“That’s a great price! What could I build with that? Where would I use them? But how could I store them? Would they fit in the truck, or would I have to come back later – but they might be gone!” and so on. These were the kind of thoughts that propelled me out of poverty.
But I mentally slapped myself because those thoughts were stupid for me, in my present situation. I was on my way to a job worth thousands of dollars to me. Jeopardizing, or even delaying that job to save $50 was stupid.
Besides, they were marked down because they were damaged, and would take extra labor to use – labor I know how to do, and like doing – but which I cannot afford to do. My time is worth too much to spend 2 hours repairing drywall I don’t even need right now!
And that’s why the law of gleaning is just as important for the wealthy as the poor. Because when you are poor, you know the value of a dollar, the cost of a potato, the distance you can go on a gallon of gas. But there comes a time when you simply cannot afford to cut corners like you used to; you can’t afford to wash out those plastic bags, you have so many demands on your time, all of them worth money, that you can’t afford to hearken to the habits of the penny-pinching gleaner inside you!
I can’t afford to go to yard sales. I liked it! I liked getting deals, finding things I needed (or could imagine someday needing), but the fact is I don’t need anything now. And if and when I do, I have to be able to trust it – so I can’t afford to buy something unreliable at a yard sale.
After going through 7 used “working” dishwashers that didn’t work a few years ago, I’ve finally realized that I can’t afford to buy a used dishwasher anymore. I need one that works all the time, and has a warranty for when it doesn’t, because my time is too precious.
Had I realized that earlier in the year, had I realized that I shouldn’t be gleaning, that I should leave those bargains for those who actually NEED them (and have time to repair them if they don’t work)… I would not only have left them for the truly poor to glean, I would not have wasted many hours picking up, installing, removing, and reinstalling dishwashers. And I actually would have been money ahead! To say nothing of the hours spent washing dishes while we didn’t have a dishwasher.
So my actions were not only contrary to the law “thou shalt not glean”, it was financially foolish, which is why God wrote the law in the first place! Because this law, like all laws, were not written to punish the rich and benefit the poor! But to teach the poor to be rich, and teach the rich not to waste their time, to teach the prosperous that greed hurts them, and giving away things is smarter than trying to make them work!
This is not to say I’m a wasteful person now. Again, on the contrary, because of my background in gleaning, I know very well the value of a dollar, and as I administer what God has blessed me with, I do it wisely, wasting as little as possible. I’m not like other people in my tax bracket, who waste tons of food and throw away all sorts of things that still have life in them, and don’t even give them to the poor.
But I do understand that I can’t afford to worry about changing my own oil or reusing zip ties when I can spend that time building a greenhouse; or helping someone drill a water well; or even, far more importantly, writing lessons like this.
So this is a law that benefits everyone – the poor, the foolish, the lazy, the wasteful – as well as the rich, to keep them from being greedy, and to teach them that it’s better to give than to receive; but bigger than that, it benefits the entire society, the globe itself.
For the wood cut down by the highway department could be given to the poor, who then cut it up and sell it for firewood. The grass cut from the roadside would be raked up as hay by the poor and fed to their cows. The plastic bottle the rich man throws away is used to make a house, or insulation, or even a bird feeder by the poor.
All the while educating the poor in the skills, habits, and character traits they need to become rich themselves. Meanwhile those who are best suited for production produce the most, and those less suited pick up the scraps from their table.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Like all physical principles, this is a valuable lesson for an OC people, which hides a far more important lesson for a NC people. Most of the world, even relatively affluent places like Europe, either uses everything to death, or throws away whatever it no longer wants with no thought of the poor.
It’s almost exclusively in Protestant countries that a dim echo of the Biblical idea of gleaning is preserved in thrift stores (Deuteronomy 24:22). God gave us this law to remind us what it was like to be in bondage to Egypt.
And giving a broken washer to the poor does indeed remind me what it was like to receive just such a gift, and what would be involved in repairing it and using it. But this verse allows us to jump to the spiritual level, for being in bondage to Egypt is a well-known metaphor of bondage to sin. Another example is in Genesis 22:18.
Here again, we have two layers of meaning. Abraham’s children have blessed all nations through their technology, their industry, their innovations in every field of study. Yet also, this refers to the Seed of Abraham, Jesus Christ (Galatians 3:16).
All nations are blessed through this Seed of Abraham, in that He helps all of them to be freed from bondage to Egypt. Yet not in equal measure, for it was given “to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile” (Romans 2:10).
Yet the Gentiles did indeed benefit from this Seed of Abraham – and how exactly did Jesus characterize it? Matthew 15:24-27. “Dogs” in this context is clearly Gentiles, and the healing of this Gentile woman’s daughter was called “eating the crumbs” – partaking of the gleanings of the table of the children!
Our world today would take away the food from the rich and give to the poor. But God’s way is to give, not of the food, but of the crumbs which fall from the table – the leftovers. That was all this woman asked for, and because of that she got what she asked – and a compliment from Jesus besides.
The Israelites were trained in the law. God gave it to Moses, gave them people to teach it and administer it, and they didn’t value it. Like the rich kids today who have everything, they wasted it on cars, drugs, and women.
And so the “crumbs” that fell from the table of Israel went to the Gentiles. And they were large crumbs, considering how drunk Israel was; remember from Lesson 8-9, drunkenness refers to the state where your judgment is impaired because you believe you are bulletproof. That nothing could cost you your life, your salvation, and your inheritance.
And isn’t that just what the Jews were saying in John 8:32-59? But here Jesus was telling them that guaranteed them nothing, just as John had in Matthew 3:7-10. Because their leftovers (Acts 13:46) would be taken and given to the Gentiles instead (Romans 11), to glean.
Remember all the things in Series 8? Remember how I had to first explain to you how olives grew, what ripe almonds looked like, that figs have two crops each year? The Jews knew that already… because they LIVED among these symbols!
They grew up able to go to the temple and ask a priest anytime they had a question about the law; they raised oxen and made wine and had sourdough bread, and so learning the meaning of these symbols was EASY for them… and yet they STILL didn’t do it, because it was so easy!
This is why they were without excuse, because these things were CLEARLY SEEN by them! (Romans 1:20). Not only that, but THEY spoke the language the Bible was written in! They already KNEW that “ets” (tree) also meant “closed eyes”; they knew that the word for almond meant “watchman”!
So the Jews were ridiculously wealthy in the knowledge of these things; but because they were so certain they were saved, they didn’t bother to learn any of it… which meant they were drunken, and their eyes were closed! (John 9:41).
It was much harder for the Gentiles than it had been for the privileged Jews (Romans 3:1-2); because they had to learn every lesson the hard way, from scratch just like any gleaner. They had to learn to apply themselves, to rule their carnal natures, to pay attention to the details of the law, and see for themselves just how valuable every one is, and appreciate each word.
Which is why to a Gentile, knowing he came to God as a beggar, as a refugee, these things were invaluable and precious… as they have been to you and I. To a Gentile, fresh from paganism, every law was new, every piece of truth was exciting, every symbol meaningful, because they were poor in spirit.
But as a result of that just like all gleaners, they would gradually become wealthy in the spirit. They would become wise in the law. So wise, in fact, they would outshine their spoiled rich kids who had the full meal of the spirit in the wilderness! (Matthew 8:11-12).
Because the Gentiles wouldn’t wash their crumbs down with gallons of wine because they knew the value of wine and knew they couldn’t afford to waste the forbearance of God as the Jews had (Romans 2:4). They dare not frustrate the grace of God! (Galatians 2:21)
Which is why these Gentiles would be adopted by the rich Father alongside, and in many cases, instead of, or at least ahead of, their native-born brethren. Because these children could manage His spiritual fortune better than His fleshly heirs, because they learned from scratch just how valuable every single jot or tittle of the law was.
Which, of course, is what the one scripture for this lesson already said… Deuteronomy 8:11-18. All poverty, and all the resultant gleaning, spiritual and otherwise, is done “that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end”.
So that we’ll never forget “…the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth”. In, as always, every sense of the word. Remember, our Lord is, in the sense of the fractions, the soul; and it is a wise soul which gives us the power to get wealth.
But true also in other senses; because when I said above that I no longer gleaned…. That wasn’t entirely true. In the physical sense yes, I can’t afford to glean a washing machine or a few olives off of a tree.
…But I am very much in the business of taking worn out, useless things which have been rejected by the world and turning them into valuable pieces of God’s house.
Yes, I’m talking about you. But let’s not spoil the next lesson.