Trinity Baptist Church June 10, 2007
Ruth: God redeems
The Road Home
Ruth 1:1-22
Chuck Swindoll describes how -- several decades ago -- Atlantic codfish were transported from the coast to the middle of the US. The shippers had problems at first. Their early freezing methods left the fish flavorless after they thawed. So, next, they tried shipping fish live, in tanks -- but, the fish got to their destination soft and mushy because of the lack of exercise in the tanks.
Then someone had a brilliant idea: they would send the cod in tanks, along with their natural enemy -- the cat fish. And from the time the codfish left the coast, they got chased around the tank by the catfish. When they arrived at market, they were as fresh as when they were when they were caught -- no loss of flavor or texture.
Swindoll says -- each of us is -- in a “tank” -- of inescapable circumstances -- those circumstances can be painful enough. But there are also God appointed "cat fish" to bring enough tension to us, to keep us alive, alert, fresh, and growing. It’s all part of God’s project to shape our character so we will be more like his Son.
It’s insightful for us to study some of the character-shaping stories God provides in the OT. Describing OT accounts, the NT says, these things were written for our benefit. These flesh and blood narratives remind us of something. God rarely chooses great people to use in significant ways. In almost every instance, God takes ordinary people -- and He allows wounding and pain and challenge to come to them. And then, when they trust Him, He gathers up all those details and events -- and He shapes them to bless and use those people.
If you’re familiar with the book of Ruth, you know how God goes about doing that.
Introduction to Ruth
Ruth is one of my favorite OT books, in part because it‘s so unique. It’s one of only two Bible books named for a woman. It’s the only OT book named for a person not born Jewish. Ruth is a book with a hero. And it’s not Ruth -- it’s not Boaz. The hero in this account is God.
It’s God, demonstrating Himself and His power in some startling ways. Even though we get only limited direct descriptions of God, His fingerprints are all over these chapters.
Ruth is a redemption story. As God uses Boaz to show loyal love and to redeem the lives of Naomi and Ruth, God illustrates His strong ability to redeem people. Ruth is also a story of God’s invisible hand; it’s what’s called God’s providence. God moves quietly behind the scenes -- and He suddenly shows loyal love -- the Hebrew word is hesed. And God blesses people who could have given up on Him; then He uses them for His purposes.
That word Providence: means God orchestrates everything to accomplish His purpose.
We can understand that if we realize there are two ways God acts in our world. One is through miracles, the other is providence. God is always doing things in the world. For some of those actions, He chooses the miraculous. A miracle happens when God takes the normal, everyday nature of things and suspends it -- he “stops the flow” and injects a miracle. There’s no natural explanation for those God driven events. There’s no relationship to what humans call “normal“. Someone is raised from the dead; there’s a miraculous healing where healing was impossible. In our time, miracles happen almost every day in Muslim countries where people are having dreams and visions of Jesus Christ and putting their faith in Him.
When miracles happen, God invades space-time history and stops or changes its normal flow. Then, He sets it back in motion again. A miracle is God invading the natural.
Then there’s providence. Providence means God takes all the diverse elements of the normal and -- He weaves them and turns them -- and He incorporates and orchestrates them --- He makes them work together to do what He desires. The Bible informs us that the Omnipotent God easily takes on a dozen or a thousand events and situations and transforms them to His will.
There’s something Ruth will help us grasp: if you understand that God is not only sovereign by miraculous intervention, but also by powerful orchestration, you become confident and content in Him. Contented people know that God orders everything for His purposes.
This book of Ruth testifies: “This is what our God is like!!” If you’ll read and re-read Ruth, you’ll see that message seeping out of relationships, situations and people. Everything here proclaims there is a great powerful God Who redeems and Who cares about your situation.
This God is full of loyal love; He’s the One who makes promises like the one over in Joel 2:25 where He says I will restore the years which the locusts have eaten. Ruth reminds us too that God acts to protect and provide for the helpless -- like widows, orphans and foreigners.
There’s a key player in this drama who testifies at the end that God even blesses people who allow circumstances to make them bitter toward Him. And also at the end of the book, we watch the Redeemer take an ordinary Gentile woman, and graciously place her into family tree of the Messiah.
The setting is a time of sin and rebellion against God. It’s the period of the Judges in Israel. If you know the book of Judges you remember the gloomy commentary that ends the book. It‘s no accident that Ruth follows on the heels of Judges. Look at the last verse of Judges -- In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in their own eyes. (Judges 21:25)
Now for independent Americans, that doesn’t have too bad a ring to it. But -- what you should know is, that phrase is code language for a sick period of the “dark ages” of Israel.
The writer could have put it this way: “nobody cared what God said was about right and wrong. They just all did whatever they wanted.” There was no king. And few great prophets -- so there’s a vacuum of spiritual leadership -- so people did whatever they determined to be right. Of course, most of the time, it wasn’t.
When you open Ruth, in that context, you realize God’s hand of judgment is on His people. God judges them because they’re not worshiping or obeying Him. Look at verse 1: a famine rages in Israel. When you read that term famine in your Bible, you could just as well write the word judgment above it. God, Who gave His people the land of milk and honey, promised to bless them and provide them. But He also promised that when they turned their stubborn wills away from Him, He would hold back the rain and take away their harvests. That’s what’s happening: and by that painful and harsh time, God is calls His people back to Himself.
He does the same today. God’s people weren’t faithful to Him and they suffered.
We’re introduced then to a particular man from this time of sin and famine. He decides to take matters into his own hands. Verse 1 … it came about in the days when the judges governed, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the land of Moab with his wife and his two sons. And in verse 2 -- The name of the man was Elimelech.
See anything wrong with that picture? Let me give you a couple of details. Israel is feeling God’s hand of discipline -- given to draw them back to Himself. He’s doing just what He said He’d do. And we meet a man -- Elimelech -- that name means The Lord is King!
There was no king in Israel in those days….but -- My God is king -- that‘s what Elimelech heard every time his name was spoken.
He’s from Bethlehem -- Bethlehem means “house of bread”. He decides to take his wife Naomi -- her name means “pleasant” -- and move to a pagan area between about 100 miles from his home. This isn’t a good move for a man who trusts God to be Lord. He also takes their two sons -- Mahlon and Chilion (those are loosely translated, “skinny” and “sicky”).
They settle in Moab. From verse 3, it appears they got the wagon unloaded and not long afterward, Elimelech died. Naomi’s left with her two sons. Time passes.
The head of the household sinned; he too did what was right in his own mind. Instead of throwing himself on God and trusting the Lord and King to provide, he carted his family off to a pagan nation.
Warren Wiersbe says, ”better to have a hungry stomach and be in God’s will than have a full one and be out of His will“. Elimelech’s sons learned by example.
They marry local girls -- Orpah and Ruth. You should know the Moabites worshipped a pagan deity and part of their ritual was taking their own infants and giving them to their idol by burning them alive.
1:4 tells us a decade passes. Now both sons die. Naomi, grieving and alone -- likely with no way to support herself, decides to return to her home. Verse 6 says, God has visited His people in Israel and now there is food there. There would also be great familiarity there as well. They start out -- her daughters-in-law going with her. But, she seems to have second thoughts. Maybe she’s afraid of what her friends and neighbors in Bethlehem will say when she returns with two Moabite women her sons had married. She knows it’s unlikely they’ll remarry in Israel. She talks to them about returning.
There will be no more sons from her who could be their husbands. So, she urges them back -- “go stay with your families.” And, Orpah receives Naomi’s blessing and prayer and starts back. Naomi assumed wrongly about Ruth. And, as we’ll talk about in a minute, we can assume Ruth has come to believe in Yahweh. So, as such, she declares her loyalty to God and to Naomi. We’ll watch all the way through this book how consistently she lives out her faith and loyal love.
They trek back and they arrive, interestingly enough, at the beginning of barley harvest. Naomi is honest and to the point with her friends and neighbors -- she freely declares she’s now a bitter woman. She even wants them to call her by a different name that means bitter. I went out full -- I came back empty. She doesn’t recognize the reality that she and her husband made a huge mistake leaving. Nor does she know it, but it is God Who brought her and Ruth home. God’s not through. Getting us back where we belong is just the first step of His magnificent moves behind the scenes. And, even though God doesn’t always hold us back from sin, or experiencing its consequences -- God does overrule again and again -- so His purposes will be fulfilled. Naomi’s emptiness will be filled. Her bitterness will get turned to joy.
Let’s think about some Implications from this chapter. First,
1. Circumstances don’t define your life….God does.
Back to Elimelech. In spite of his name declaring that the Lord is King! and despite what he knew to be true about God, like most of his generation, he just did what came to his mind. Proverbs 3:5, 6 reminded us 2 weeks ago, if put our faith in our own resources, we will repeatedly fall. God’s Word tells us, My ways are not your ways, neither are my thoughts your thoughts.
I’ve never been in a famine, but I can imagine, the circumstance screaming at husband and father, “you’ve got to do something.” But instead of falling on his face before the God Who is King, he left his village -- he left his nation -- he left the people and place in whom God had always worked and would again and set off to solve things himself. The famine communicated, God’s people, and he, had forgotten God. So they could only look at see their circumstances. We should take a lesson:
When you make God small, every circumstance looks like a giant.
James wrote to us: welcome trials as friends. He‘s saying, when affliction of any kind drops by, take it in -- learn from it. Let it teach you Truth about where you are. Understand, this hard thing you’re experiencing, according to Scripture is something God brought -- or allowed --- but -- something He will always use for good. God’s hand on His nation was intended for good. He meant to motivate them to seek Him and worship Him and get rid of pagan idols
and practices. God’s hand on your life -- even if it hurts -- is for good.
Romans 8 promises, God causes all things to work together for good, to those who love Him, to those who are called according to His purposes. You’ve never looked a circumstance in the face which ought to define who you are. How often we look back and feel like we’re damaged goods, we’re marked indelibly by some experience or some person or event. Scripture says what ought to mark our lives is that we are His blood purchased sons and daughters.
It tells us this: that if you know Christ by faith, God has said about you: I have called you by name, you are Mine.
Elimelech’s great need was to behave what he believed: that God was the King. Your need and mine are no different. The issue is this: whatever, or whoever, defines you, sets you on a course. What better and what higher definition could there be for your life than the God Who is Lord over all of life? What defines you determines your choices.
And, 2. Your choices matter deeply.
I called this message, “The Road Home” because it’s a full-circle trip. Chapter 1 begins with the move to a foreign land; it ends with the road home. That trip was a long one, filled with wrong choices. Even though God will overrule bad decisions and reassert His will in the end, those choices had consequences.
Elimelech chose foolishly. His decision was to separate his family from their spiritual heritage. The upshot was his sons would choose to marry women who didn’t know God.
There’s Naomi: she also seems to exhibit a low view of God. As we saw, after the arrival in Moab, her husband died pretty quickly. Instead of picking up and returning to God’s people and hers, she hung on with her two sons, fending for herself as a widow. And the two boys would have married at a time when she functioned as head of the household. She either orchestrated those marriages to Moabite women, or she passively permitted and accepted them.
Ten years they were there, with no apparent effort to get back to Israel, even though her husband’s intent had been to stay just for the time of the famine.
When she decided to return, it was because she heard God was providing for His people. No mention of the truth that the famine was God’s discipline for idolatry and sin. There seems to be no sense that they had left the land of God’s choosing and presence and blessing. Just the mention of grain. It seems that her choice to go to her homeland is renewed harvests. And what’s also problematic is, she insists her daughters-in-law stay in Moab to find husbands there and stay in idolatry. 1:15 -- look, your sister-in-law has returned to her people and her god. Follow your sister-in-law back home. Go back and worship the god of Moab!
Naomi is in pain and has become bitter, but if she had any grasp at all on Moabite idolatry, she’d know she was sending two young women back to evil worship practices.
The final choice in this chapter she makes is to blame God for all of this. She says in verse 13, that her daughters in law shouldn’t have to experience what she calls my intense suffering -- after all, the Lord has attacked me! Ruth, of course is a refreshing contrast to Elimelech and Naomi. At some point, she’s become a worshiper of the True God. And God moves to take her and bless her and through her to redeem the family name.
That teaches us that
3. God redeems, even in the dark times.
Like I said, God operates in two ways in our world: through His miracles and through providence. Before chapter 1 concludes, we can observe God moving behind the scenes of this drama.
To begin with, He has made Himself know to Ruth. She has become one of His people -- her faith is in Him. Make no mistake -- she doesn’t choose to go live in Israel with Naomi because she’s a good person. Look at some of the details of verse 16: …do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, 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 I will be buried. Then she makes an oath before the God of Heaven. May the Lord do to me and worse if anything but death parts you and me. (Ruth 1:16, 17)
Look at the depth of those statements: by her oath, Ruth doesn’t simply bind herself to Naomi, she also commits to the land and people of Israel, and to the God of Israel. And her commitment isn’t short-term. She‘s not going to stay until Naomi dies and then run back to her family and homeland. Her attachment to Israel and Israel’s God is for her lifetime.
She’s says, I’ll stay in Israel, worshiping God after your death. She’ll even be buried with her mother-in-law in Israel. She’s declaring her conversion and loyalty to Yahweh, the God of Israel.
Elimelech and Naomi put themselves into places and relationships and circumstances and where they experienced evil consequences.
We all do lots of stupid and sinful things and then we expect God should act miraculously and bail us out. I’ve done that more times than I can count. Very often God does not bail us out. He allows situations and He brings circumstances which will set us on the road back home -- back to Him.
God didn’t bail out Elimelech. He died in an unbelieving country and his sons did as well. His wife and daughters-in-law suffered the consequences. He doesn’t always bail us out. As we saw, our actions sometimes impact others severely. But God is never finished working. He operates quietly behind the scenes. He calls a Moabite woman to faith in Himself.
God’s not finished; He’s never finished. His power and grace never stop functioning toward us either. He overrules and weaves even the harsh circumstances we bring on ourselves.
Steps I will take
Have you ever come to the place where you have finally and contentedly put yourself into the hands of the God Who is Lord? Do you know that He is sovereign, not just to do the great and stupendous, but over those hurtful and harsh things of life?
We’re often not very content -- I know I‘m often not. We look here and there -- we try to figure things out -- trying to get away from painful circumstances…..we work so hard at doing what’s right in our own minds.
And let me ask too: have you become defined by what you’ve experienced, instead of by the Truth that you are God’s own?
Let me encourage you to take up this book of Ruth. Read it for you. Read it and re-discover how greatly powerful He indeed is. Read it and understand that He wants you to throw yourself and your circumstances and your past on Him, to take -- to fashion -- and to use for His good purpose.
