1) A Committed Faith Series

1) A Committed Faith, Ruth 1:1-17

Today we start a new sermon series in the book of Ruth.

Ruth is only mentioned one other time in the Bible – in Matthew 1:5, she’s listed as an ancestress of Jesus Christ.

This is a beautiful love story that unfolds in a very unlikely setting. Israel was at a low point in its history, and Ruth’s background had hardly poised her for a fairy tale ending. Moabites were under God’s curse!

And we too are part of a divine romance that’s unfolding in a sin darkened world as God seeks a Bride for His Son, Jesus Christ. We were born under the curse of Eden with a nature to sin. Yet the Lord wants to “live happily ever after” with us.

The opening scene of the book shows a Jewish family trying to run from one problem only to land in something worse.

1 Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehemjudah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he, and his wife, and his two sons.

The story of Ruth is set in the days when the judges ruled – from their entering Canaan under Joshua until Saul was anointed the first king. Acts 13:29 says that this was about the space of 450 years – beginning around 1450 BC.

What was this period like? Both Judges 17:6 and 21:15 said that during these days, there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes. The nation constantly vacillated between idolatry and revival. Whenever they fell into idolatry, God delivered them to their enemies. Then they’d repent and cry to the Lord, and He’d send a judge to save them. Once delivered, their devotion would dim, and before you knew it, they were right back into idolatry. It was like a constant merry-go-round – seven times you see this pattern repeat itself throughout the book of Judges.

And this is when Ruth’s story takes place – showing that even during dark times, God keeps a faithful remnant of followers.

And you know, we too live at a time when the King of heaven is not honored in our land, but every man does whatever seems right in his own eyes with no regard for God’s Word. We too live in a time when the culture of a once godly nation has turned to idolatry, and God’s blessing seems ever farther as we decline to each new outrage. And yet, in just such an unlikely setting, at a spiritual low point in Israel’s history, this story of grace and hope and love takes place.

Doing what’s right on our own eyes is walking by sight, not by faith. But II Corinthians 5:7 says that we are to walk by faith, not by sight. And the crises that we face in life are God’s pop quizzes when our faith is put to the test.

The family in this opening verse is from Bethlehem of Judea just south of Jerusalem. It’s ironic that the name “Bethlehem” actually means “house of bread” – suggesting it was the site of a grain storage. Yet these people are fleeing it because it has no bread.

This family went to sojourn in the country of Moab across the Jordan River from Israel where they expected to find bread. Well, they found the bread they were looking for all right, because they ended up staying there.

But the problem was that Moab was a land under a curse. This was a nation born out of the drunken incest between Lot and one of his daughters. Its entire history was one of hostility toward God and His people. When Moses led Israel out of Egypt, He asked Moab to let them pass peacefully through their land to reach Canaan, and they refused him. In fact, the king of Moab hired the prophet Balaam to come and curse the Jewish people, but God turned his cursings into blessings. Still, Balaam came up with the scheme to send heathen women to infiltrate the camp of Israel and seduce Jewish men into fornication and idolatry, thus bringing a curse upon the Jewish people after all. Moabite idolatry involved sacrificing their own children in the fire to a pagan god called Chemosh. For all of this, God cursed Moab and said that no Moabite could join the people of Israel for 10 generations.

Eventually the Jewish prophets would pronounce the doom of Moab, and by the time Israel returned from its Babylonian Captivity in the book of Nehemiah, the people of Moab had disappeared from history.

And now this Jewish family from Bethlehem is being exposed to all of this. Like Lot who led his family into the well-watered plains of Sodom and lost them to sin, so this family is making unspiritual decisions guided by the pursuit of gain alone.