(You can listen to the sermon here.)
The book of Ruth is a prodigal story. A story in which a daughter goes out full and returns home humiliated and empty only to be lavishly restored by a prodigal Father in the end. This story follows God’s familiar pattern of death and division and then resurrection and redemption and restoration—fertility made barrenness only to be made abundantly fruitful.
This story then, points us to Christ and to the good news that is God’s sovereign grace. And even further, for those of us who are in Christ, as this story follows the pattern of death and resurrection, it instructs us how to live as we experience this same pattern over and over as it is woven all throughout our lives.
Ruth is a story of a king ascending like a sunrise to break into our dark night and banish hopelessness and despair. If you have faith to see it, it is a story of a king who comes to receive his inheritance and brings gifts and who Himself becomes a gift.
The story’s namesake, Ruth, is not Jewish which makes it stand out even more, begging to be noticed and for it’s mystery to be poured over and uncovered.
It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out. (Proverbs 25:2)
Let us pray and ask God to illuminate His word to us by His powerful Holy Spirit.
Heavenly Father, we ask that you would glorify Yourself today. Illuminate Your Son in Your Scriptures and this sermon. Move on our hearts and minds and bring them into submission and conformity with Your good purpose and cause our hearts to leap for joy at your promise. For Christ’s sake we pray. Amen.
Read Ruth 1
(vv. 1-5)
In the very first verse the scene is set. The narrator begins with the sad strings in the background “In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land…” This was a time, as has been said, when the Judges needed to be judged.
In our Bibles Ruth comes just after the book of Judges so you can turn back one page and read the very last verse of Judges and when you do, you will begin to understand what God is doing in Ruth’s story and how dark the situation really was.
In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. (Judges 21:25)
But there is something that you should know as we begin this book. You see, one important question to ask when reading the Bible is “Through what lens did the original readers see this?” In other words, what was their context and framework by which they understood and applied this Word of God.
Like I said, in our Bibles Ruth comes just after Judges, however, the arrangement of the Jewish scriptures puts Ruth just after Proverbs. Which means they would have come to the last chapter in Proverbs, chapter 31, and in it read the description of a virtuous woman, and then immediately after, they would find the story of Ruth. This is more than just an interesting note, it is something that should inform how we actually read and understand this story.
We are introduced to the first characters, Elimelech and his wife Naomi, their sons Mahlon and Chilion. It doesn’t take long for even more grief to be piled on to the already pitiful scene. Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, dies and the implication in the Hebrew of this death is a slow, agonizing one. We could read it like this, “Elimelech the husband of Naomi kept on dying.” This left Naomi with two sons who took Moabite wives and then as it happened, they “kept on dying” themselves.
Ruth being a Moabite is actually a big deal. The author makes reference to this more than a few times in this little book. Deuteronomy 23:3 says that no Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the Lord. Much later in Israel’s history, in Ezra’s day, that prohibition was understood to keep Hebrew men from marrying foreign wives. Whether it was actually prohibited in the law or not is debated but at a minimum it was understood as a risky thing to do.
Remember I said Ruth is a prodigal story? Well here is Naomi, just like the younger son in Jesus’ parable of the two sons, is at the end of herself—in her proverbial pig sty, eating slop.
(vv. 6-18)
Naomi, hears that the people back in Bethlehem weren’t doing as bad and she decides to return. She tells her daughters-in-law to go back to their mother’s houses and prays that the Lord will deal kindly with them like they had for their husbands and conveys her hope they will remarry.
They all began to cry and like polite daughters-in-law refuse to leave their poor mother-in-law alone. Naomi continues to insist they leave her with strong arguments of a lifetime of lonely barrenness. She says, “No my daughters, for it is exceedingly biter to me for your sake that the hand of the Lord has gone out against me.” Orpha hears enough and finally leaves, but Ruth clings to Naomi.
Ruth could not be persuaded and what comes next is some of the most beautiful prose ever written. Ruth says to her mother-in-law (Ruth 1:16-17), “Don’t urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”
Now think about this, just before Ruth bears her soul and makes this covenant, what does Naomi tell Ruth (v.13)? “The hand of the LORD has gone out against me.” Naomi experienced God’s bitter providences and her testimony was clearly a bitter one. But it isn’t just Naomi that has experienced the hand of the Lord, Ruth herself was married to an Israelite and barren for 10 years only to be left a widow.
And yet, in spite of the bitterness that Naomi expresses and Ruth herself has experienced, she abandons everything and falls completely upon the mercy of the God of Israel—the God of her bitter loss. Ruth dies, she is separated from everything she had and was and follows another.
As a matter of fact, the narrator of this story, is actually setting up the story of Ruth to more or less resemble the story of a patriarch. Of a man of faith who leaves his father’s house to follow God’s call to a new land—to experience a new birth if you will.
When Naomi sees that Ruth is determined to go with her, she says no more. She wants to keep trying to convince Ruth but it is pointless so she just stops talking to her but she still has a bad attitude and perhaps she is mumbling under her breath or talking to herself, but she is not speaking to Ruth.
(vv. 19-22)
So the two of them go on until they come to Bethlehem (which means House of Bread) and the whole town was stirred up. “Is this Naomi?”
She answers, don’t call me Naomi, the pleasant one. Call me Mara, the bitter one. I went away full and the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi the pleasant one when the Lord has testified against me—against my very name—and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?
You see, in our modern minds we wrestle with things like whether God caused or allowed some catastrophe. But to Naomi, and in reality, that question is irrelevant because at the end of the day, Naomi knew what Job knew and what thinking Christians know, that at the beginning of it all is the Eternal One—the Almighty. And that nothing happens apart from His will. Naomi knew full well who causes famines. Psalm 105:16 in speaking of the famine in Joseph’s day says, “[God] summoned a famine on the land and broke all supply of bread.”
Naomi, the window, and mother-in-law to a barren widow, also knew who gives life and who takes life. She knew full well the word in Leviticus 26 that spoke of blessing for obedience and punishment for disobedience. She was correct in her assessment, the Almighty had brought calamity upon her. Things were dark and Naomi was faithless, she was hopeless. But as we have seen, in spite the bitterness of Naomi’s life and her hopelessness, something incredible has happened. Ruth has come to trust in Naomi’s Almighty God.
One pastor observed that Naomi’s problem was that the story of Joseph hadn’t gotten into her bones. She was very correct about the sovereignty of God. Her theology on the matter is much better then the soft theology that seeks to make excuse after excuse for God being God—for God being Almighty.
This is a point that cannot be overstated, God is Almighty. God is God. He is the Creator of everything. He is the Author and the Finisher. He calls ALL the shots. He makes ALL of the ultimate decisions. There is nothing anyone can do or choose that can change or thwart God’s eternal plan.
The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; He frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart to all generations. (Psalm 33:10-11)
Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. (Proverbs 19:21)
This has some big implications as we will see magnified in the story of Ruth and yet, God’s supremacy—God’s god-ness—isn’t just a phenomenon in a little portion of the Scriptures. It is consistently taught throughout.
Daniel 2:21 says, “[God] changes times and seasons; He removes kings and sets up kings…” and when those kings are on their thrones, Proverbs 21:1 teaches us that “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He will.”
Job 2:10 teaches us that good and bad come from the same hand of the Lord. Destruction does not come to a city unless the Lord has done it, Amos 3:6 says, and obviously blessing and restoration are from Him as we see from Adam on, through the stories of Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Esther, Peter, and Paul.
Unbelievers point to evil and death in the world and would have us believe that either God is all-powerful or all-good but that He could not be both. Some of these scriptures may even sound to you like confusing contradictions. As if God’s sovereignty makes Him capricious or schizophrenic, doing good thing one day and bad things another depending on His fickle mood, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Sovereignty and Goodness are not contradictions of His character and nature, instead they are ingredients to a glorious finale.
Remember, God is telling a death and resurrection story. A story of division and restoration—of fall and redemption, of fertility made barrenness only to be made abundantly fruitful.
Think of a baker making a cake, there are individual ingredients that tasted alone are not at all pleasant, they’re bitter, but when the cake is finally finished those sometimes bitter ingredients work together to make something sweet and good.
Or the theater, the triumphs of a good story must be preceded by the darkness that will be triumphed. A knight cannot be celebrated as a dragon slayer if there is no dragon to be killed.
How could we call the baker evil for using flour and vanilla, or how could we call the author evil for the dragon and the battle scene. If they didn’t use the proper ingredients or components, they wouldn’t be good bakers or good authors at all.
God is sovereign over all, the good, the bad, and the ugly. He deals in sweet and bitter ways, but they are all His works, and they are all ultimately good.
Our part is to trust Him. John Piper says it like this, “The book of Ruth aims to show that all of history, even its darkest hours, serves to magnify the glory of God’s grace.” Do you believe this? If not, repent and believe!
You see, Naomi’s problem was not the loss and darkness she experienced, it wasn’t the famine, her problem was that she had become bitter and hardened, rather than taking from the example of Joseph who looks his would-be murderers in the eyes and, free of all ill-will and full of forgiveness and joy, says, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.”
Naomi was blinded by her hardness and trapped in her despair. But remember, Ruth is a story of a king ascending like a sunrise to break into our dark night and banish hopelessness and despair.
And so the narrator, at the end of this first scene, ever so gently alludes to the hope present in this darkness. As chapter one comes to a close, we are left with this: “And they came to Bethlehem (the house of bread) at the beginning of barely harvest.”
Chapter one is filled with blow after blow for Naomi, famine, the death of her husband, the ten year barrenness of her two daughters-in-law, and then the death of her two sons. Not to mention Orpha has forsaken Naomi after at least ten years of covenant relationship. Naomi is filled with bitterness at the Almighty. All of this comes together to paint a bleak picture, however if we have eyes to see, there are clear signs of hope that all of this, although bitter, is not for harm and destruction but for a good future and a hope. It is a sweet and bitter providence that is working toward Naomi’s good and glory, and ultimately toward a Christ-exalting finale.
So where does that leave us? As believers in Christ, this pattern of death and resurrection, or darkness then light, is a familiar one, but it needs to be familiar in the right way. Hope must have roots in our bones, in order that we would be a people who do not forget God’s promise in the valley of shadows. That we would be a people who do not despair and grieve as the world grieves.
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