Ruth 1:19—2:7 – “Is God punishing me?”
By James Galbraith
First Baptist Church, Port Alberni
June 17, 2007
Text
Ru 1:19 So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?”
Ru 1:20 “Don’t call me Naomi,’” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”
Ru 1:22 So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.
Ru 2:1 Now Naomi had a relative on her husband’s side, from the clan of Elimelech, a man of standing, whose name was Boaz.
Ru 2:2 And Ruth the Moabitess said to Naomi, “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.”
Naomi said to her, “Go ahead, my daughter.” 3 So she went out and began to glean in the fields behind the harvesters. As it turned out, she found herself working in a field belonging to Boaz, who was from the clan of Elimelech.
Ru 2:4 Just then Boaz arrived from Bethlehem and greeted the harvesters, “The LORD be with you! ”
“The LORD bless you!” they called back.
Ru 2:5 Boaz asked the foreman of his harvesters, “Whose young woman is that?”
Ru 2:6 The foreman replied, “She is the Moabitess who came back from Moab with Naomi. 7 She said, ‘Please let me glean and gather among the sheaves behind the harvesters.’ She went into the field and has worked steadily from morning till now, except for a short rest in the shelter.”
Review
We having been following the stories of two women,
both of whom have suffered great loss in the death of their husbands.
Naomi, the older of the two, had left Israel with her husband and two sons years ago. They moved to the land of Moab to escape a famine, but all 3 of the men died in that same land. Left with nothing, Naomi set her heart on coming home.
Ruth, the younger woman, is one of the widows left behind by the death of Naomi’s sons. She is not an Israeli at all, but she has formed a close bond with her mother in law and has even adopted the God of Israel as her God.
She has left everything she knows behind in order that Naomi would not have to travel alone. Naomi did her very best to convince her to stay home, to the point where the other daughter in law, Orpah, decided at the last minute not to come on the journey.
Ruth was not dissuaded, and she and Naomi have now completed a journey fraught with danger. Their arrival in Bethlehem attracts a lot of attention,
yet Naomi seems less than joyful at the success of her journey.
Part One – 19-22 – God’s punishing me
Her attitude seems sullen, but you have to see where she’s come from to understand her state of mind.
She left Bethlehem over ten years ago, a woman surrounded by three healthy men, a family ready to make a new start in a foreign land.
She has come home with only the widow of one of her son’s at her side,
leaving all three men buried in the foreign land of Moab.
People who have stayed in Bethlehem are amazed to see her;
it’s possible that they are amazed that she has returned home safely,
despite the dangers of the trip and lack of protection or resources.
But we also see that they hardly recognize her; the anguish of losing her sons and husband has aged her more then the ten or more years she’s been gone.
She’s so bitter at her plight that she even reacts to the sound of her name by denying it’s meaning.
“Naomi” means “pleasant”, but now she wants to be called “Mara”, which means “bitter”.
She can’t face a name that has so much promise in it,
so she asks to be called something more fitting to her current condition.
She looks at the life she had before she left,
compares it to her life now,
and sees God as the cause of her misfortune.
We may be tempted to write this off as whining, but it goes deeper than that – she truly believes that this is what God has intended for her,
and she is simply acknowledging her inability to do a thing about it.
IS she blaming God for what’s happened in her life? Definitely, but she’s also accepting it as her fate and still acknowledging God’s power and place over her.
What we need to see here is that she’s partly right, and partly wrong.
Nothing in this book reveals to us God’s direct, spoken will for Naomi or Ruth, because he remains silent throughout the story. There are many places in the Old and New Testament where God speaks aloud, but not in the book of Ruth.
So when Naomi declares what she thinks the Lord has done to her,
she is sharing her opinion, and not the actual will of God.
She’s blaming God for her plight, but we can’t just take her word for it,
no more than we would if a friend went through a rough patch and threw his anger towards God.
I believe that she is wrong in blaming God for what has happened to her, because when God does directly punish people in the Bible
there is always a reason explained beforehand.
The people of Israel were punished many times for walking away from God,
but he had clearly warned them beforehand.
When Israel is conquered or suffers devastation,
there is always clear warning beforehand in the Law or through the prophets.
Take, for example, the period of history that this story is set in, the time of the Judges.
It is a tumultuous time for Israel, they are constantly being invaded,
conquered and subjected to the whims of other nations.
But this kind of chaos was forewarned in Deuteronomy 28, which was read to the nations before they entered the Promised Land.
God promises blessings to the nation if they follow him, and curses if they don’t.
SO when Israel is overrun by outsiders, it has truly brought it’s troubles upon itself by it’s collective disobedience, and as a nation suffered for it’s sin.
But there is nothing in this story in front of us that shows Naomi to be deserving of punishment, no more than any one of us!
Because of this, I believe that what’s happening to her is not God’s direct punishment on her life.
It is, however, easy to see why she thinks this.
When you live in a society that so clearly sees the hand of God at work,
then it’s easy to believe that God’s directly punishing you when life gets hard.
But I believe that she is experience hardship caused not be her direct actions, but by the sin that is at work in the world around her.
Sin makes the world a hard place to live in; it did back then and it does today.
Children die prematurely, wars start and families break up because of sin at work, directly and indirectly. Naomi lost her family not because she disobeyed God enough to deserve it, but because she lived in a world that sin has infected.
We live in that kind of world too,
and that is why our friends get cancer or Alzheimer’s,
that is why our children get beat up or picked on or worse,
and that is why we see so much evil at work.
God wasn’t punishing her anymore that he was punishing me
when my mom left when I was three, or when my brother died nine years ago.
But when you’re in the midst of tragedy, it’s easy to blame him.
We probably all have, and will again, and that’s okay.
If you added up all the people in this world that have blamed God for their pain, I’m sure you could fill up any building you can imagine a million times over.
He knows we’re weak and liable to place our pain at his doorstep. I believe he also acts to help those hurting through their pain, if they’re willing let him lead.
You’ll also see in this story that even though Naomi’s so publicly blaming God for her plight, there’s still good things about to happen.
I believe that God is hearing her pain, and starting things in motion that will address her grief and desperation.
Part Two - 1-7 – Introducing Boaz
Famine relief today is a powerful option to help those in desperate straights.
The ability to get tons of food to people within days is pretty new, but the concept of feeding the poor isn’t.
The first verses of chapter two passage highlights an ancient method of providing famine relief for the poor.
When a crop was harvested, there were three types of people working at the same time.
The harvesters, who were usually men, cut down the crop with long, curved knives called scythes.
In Israel, they were under explicit instruction in the Old Testament to leave the edges and corners of the crop alone and harvest down the middle. As they did so, inevitably some plants were left standing.
The gatherers, who were usually women, came behind the harvesters.
They took the cut-down stalks and bundled them together into sheaves,
but they left the standing plants alone.
Furthermore, it was impossible to pick up every single cut down stalk,
so there would be some lying around after they had gone by.
Gleaners were people, residents or foreigners, who were too poor to have their own land or buy their own food.
They were allowed to pick up all the left over stalks, and also pick whatever had been left standing.
It was laborious work, and you had absolutely no protection from a host of dangers. Everyone knew that you were impoverished,
and that made you an easy target in these chaotic days.
The owner of the land might steal your day’s work,
stronger gleaners might push you away from the best spots,
and there was always danger in simply being a woman marked as alone and vulnerable in these days.
Ruth enters this work of gleaning willingly,
wanting to keep Naomi and herself from being reduced to begging or worse.
She ends up in the field of Boaz, a wealthy and God-fearing relative of Naomi’s deceased husband Elimelech. She’s not aware of the connection, so she simply puts her mind to her work.
When Boaz enters the scene later, we see that he is a well-respected and loved landowner amongst the people.
The greetings traded back and forth here are more than standard “hello”s, they show care and a mutual affection between Boaz and those that work his land.
We also see that when Boaz doesn’t take long to notice Ruth, and we’re left to wonder why. There would be dozens of people all working away, so why did she stand out?
Maybe it’s a love at first sight thing, but I find it hard to believe that he could have seen anything more than a raggedly dressed woman working aloe in the field.
I think it’s more likely that he’s concerned for her welfare amidst the rest of the workers. He knows as well as anyone what can happen to the vulnerable,
and he wants to insure that none of this will go on in his fields.
She must have been working hard, because we see that she impresses the supervisor of the harvest, even though he’s really there for the proper harvest.
His words to Boaz show us that he’s certainly noticed Ruth, and his only reason for watching the gleaners would be to make sure that they don’t threaten the workers or steal grain that they’re not entitled too.
The fact that she had also asked permission also stands out here – she didn’t have to, because her situation made it her right to glean the fields.
This shows us that even in her desperate straights she still conducts herself with purpose and dignity, treating those around her with respect.
We’ll see just how much Boaz is moved by her presence next week,
but for now, what can we learn from the events that have transpired today.
Conclusion
1. Life is not always easy for those who love God
We have no reason to believe that Naomi was any more or less a follower of God that any of us in this room, and yet terrible things still happened to her.
They weren’t direct punishment for her actions,
they were part of living in a world infected by sin and evil,
and the same sort of things can happened to us too.
Anyone who tells you that Christians should be immune from pain and hurt are the worst kind of liars.
I do not follow God to get away from pain – one of the reasons that I follow God is because I need his help to get through the pain that life brings.
2. God is at work in ways we don’t always see.
Even in the worst of her desperation, things start to line up for Naomi and Ruth.
1. She makes it home despite overwhelming difficulty.
2. They arrive in the height of the harvest, so that there will be plenty of grain even for those who will need to glean for a living.
3. Ruth ends up in a field owned by Boaz, who will end up playing a very central role in this story.
I believe very strongly in providence, which is a ten-penny word that tells us that God works in this world in ways we don’t see, bringing things together that we can’t imagine, and that don’t make any sense until they’ve all taken place.
Not everything that happens to us is directly of God’s doing,
but many things happen to those who do love him, and sometimes we don’t see his hand in them until they’ve all come together.
3. A lot more happens when we set out to work then when we sit down and complain.
This story would be a lot different if Ruth had sat down and commiserated with Naomi. It would have been very easy for her to sit and sulk
But she gets up and gets to work, and in doing so unleashed a chain reaction that will eventually help her and Naomi more than she could ever hope for.
Stuff happens when we act out in faith – it’s not always what we want to happen, but it’s a lot better then talking about faith and never acting in it.
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