Scripture Introduction
In literature, a tragedy ends with a negative or sad outcome, a comedy with a happy one. Macbeth is a tragedy; Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy. From a literary view, Ruth is a comedy – the characters pass through difficulty (even heartbreak) to end with joy and hope. The book begins and ends with tears – at first Naomi weeps from the pain of loss; the tears at the end flow from joy. The joy is real, and I think she would say, “Enough,” but the weeping that endured the night was harsh and painful.
Ruth touches our deepest feelings and exposes some of our most terrible doubts. Rather than provide simplistic or pat answers, however, the book forces us to ask harder and deeper questions. And in the end, there are some answers. We are exposed to what it means to live as fallen people in a fallen world who follow Jehovah God. We see the Almighty unfold redemptive history through the lives of people just like you and me. We may not understand what happens to us or around us, but we see that God does great things in the lives of ordinary people, and we know, by faith, “that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” It’s like when people say, “It’s all good.” Yes, in the end, God makes it all good, but getting there sure hurts a lot.
The ESV Study Bible summarizes this book of the Bible by saying that it: “highlights how God’s people experience his sovereignty, wisdom, and covenant kindness. These often come disguised in hard circumstances and are mediated through the kindness of others.” Well said: sovereignty, wisdom, covenant kindness – disguised under hard circumstances. God does good, but it hurts; my how it hurts.
Part of what makes Ruth so powerful is its literary quality. One can tell a true story and not tell it very well. I can say, “Rebekah is excited that I am taking her to dinner at Orchids.” That is true. But it is truer to say, “Rebekah’s enthusiasm radiates out to bombard everyone when she squeals with delight while discussing dinner at Orchids. Clearly, this is no ordinary birthday celebration, but a culinary and relational delight of the highest order.”
Well-written stories help us experience the events, not simply intellectualize them. As such, they are truer truth than simple declarative statements. And in that, Ruth excels. One scholar calls it, “a prime example of the storyteller’s art…. He or she was a literary genius.” The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [guoh’ te] (you may know his work, Faust) called Ruth, “the loveliest, complete work on a small scale.” John MacArthur claims that “what Venus is to statuary and the Mona Lisa is to painting, Ruth is to literature.”
At the end of the first five verses we will not be at a warm and fuzzy place. Naomi stayed there for ten years; we will for one week. Rather than run too quickly through the hurt of God’s frowning providences, let us weep with Naomi and her shattered dreams.
[Read Ruth 1.1-5. Pray.]
Introduction
It is a romantic drama, a comedy with four central characters.
First, a prostitute – unnamed, but well known.
Second, her son – wealthy, powerful, single. Is he a bachelor because his mother was a prostitute?
Character three is a foreigner, very young (twenties), yet already widowed, trying to survive while feeling desperately alone in a clannish culture. She speaks with an accent, looks different, and eats different food. The only person she knows is her mother-in-law, also a widow.
The mother-in-law is the fourth main character. She is too old to have children, maybe too old to remarry. When her husband and sons died, she was left alone, bereaved and abandoned, a foreigner in a strange country, with no friends, no family, no hope.
Four people, each rejected, each alone. Max Lucado calls them, “Four frazzled strings in the bottom of the knitting basket,” waiting to be tossed in the trash. But strangely, the owner does not discard them. He weaves them together into the redemption of the world. The son of the prostitute meets the young widow, alone in a strange country, and her mother-in-law urges her to make herself available. They marry. Now the bachelor has a wife, the widow a husband, the old mother-in-law a grandson, and in Bethlehem is born Obed, then Jesse, and David, and soon, in this “city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” It’s definitely a comedy, for it concludes with the happiest of all endings, Immanuel, God with us.
But Naomi’s story does not begin there. It starts with loss, and hurt, and despair, with shattered dreams.
If you had been the proverbial fly on the wall in my house during Christmas week, you would surely conclude that Helen and I deeply desire to delight our children. The fire in the fireplace, the decorations, the special meals, the fun and festivities, and the Christmas and birthday gifts topped with riddles that served as nametags and heighted the thrill as Daniel and Rebekah tried to guess what the package contained – all these are undeniable signs of our desire to pour blessings and happiness on our kids.
But on another day, several years ago, you could have seen discipline and punishment in the same home. Tears flowed from consequences meted out for sin and selfishness. Pain and hurt told a different story than a desire to bless and make happy. If that were your snapshot of our household, you might say that the parents were evil or mean, or at least too easily angered and too immature to handle their position of power over their helpless offspring.
So which is it? Do we desire their blessing, or their hurt? Do we love them, or hate? Do we care, or not? Naomi asked the same questions about God.
Last year, Sarah T. loaned me her copy of Larry Crabb’s book, Shattered Dreams. The title for today’s sermon is his, and several of the ideas also, both today and through this series. (Rather than quote him each time, I am acknowledging his help thinking about Naomi’s struggles, and trust you to read his book yourself if you wonder how much I borrowed from him.)
Anyway, as Dr. Crabb wrote, Shattered Dreams, he realized how fortunate he is to have real friends. Sitting in a coffee shop, he was able to quickly list six people with whom he has a good relationship. He also realized that everyone on the list would do something for him. Most of us think of our “really close friends,” as those we could call for help in a pinch, those with resources to respond to our needs, those who would do just about anything they could to help us.
Do you have some in mind? Fiends you would call when you are in trouble? Someone you want to stay with you in the hospital during cancer treatments? Who are those friends with whom you have a real and really close relationship?
If you can name one (or more), you probably find that they are people you can count on to do for you what you need and want. Close friends give what is in their power to grant. Like Christmas and birthdays for our kids – we love them deeply and we delight in their delight, so we use our resources and power to give them what they want. We want to bless them, and we make that felt in tangible ways.
So how does it work with God? It seems he wants to bless us. We have promises like:
Jeremiah 29.11: For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
Or the good God promises through the benediction that priests pronounced on the people: “‘The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.’ So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them” (Numbers 6.23-27).
God intended good for Israel; and this assurance of blessing only increased in the new covenant.
Jeremiah 32.40-41: I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them…. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.
Romans 8.31-32: If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?
So God wants to bless us, and he seems to have the ability to do so. The Bible insists that he does all that he pleases and no one can stay his hand. So sure is God’s plan to do us good combined with his power to fulfill it, that the Apostle Paul says with absolute confidence: “I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.38-39).
These promises lead us to hope that God desires our delight, like fawning parents and grandparents at Christmas. And if we fear that is too extravagant an interpretation, Jesus pushes us even further: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7.7-11).
Since God loves his people and desires them good, we might expect that when we hurt, God heals. When we are afraid, God comes close and comforts. When we are alone, we feel him nearby.
We might guess that God’s saints never suffer, his people never die young from disease. Pastors never rot in jail while their children grow up without a daddy. Faithful Christians never cry all night from the pain of cancer, or from watching Alzheimer’s steal their mother’s memory. “How much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him.”
But then when we actually live in this world, we find that God does not do what we think a good friend would, especially one with the resources to do… well, to do everything.
Like some of the people Larry Crabb describes: Carl has begged God for years to make his desire for holiness stronger than his lust for pornography. He fights against temptation every day and loses too often. Suzanne secretly wishes she had stayed with her career, since her marriage is depressing and her three children are more of a disappointment than a joy. Pete never knew his dad and expected to find close male friends in the church after he came to Christ at age 22. He still has no friends. Peggy is 38 and single, and cries when she sees a movie in which a man pursues a woman. Why does God refuse to bring a good man into her life?
What do we think of the person who says they love us and could relieve our pain, but does not?
Naomi felt it: “In the days when the Judges ruled there was a famine in the land.” 1100 B. C. was a hard time. The cycle of the Judges meant rebellion by the people and punishment from God. Whether the famine was the result of a particular set of sins on the part of the leaders of Bethlehem, we are not told. We know that Elimelech took his wife and sons in search of food. Bethlehem, which means, in Hebrew, “house of bread,” was a barren cupboard.
They arrive in Moab. Like Mexican families risking everything to cross into America, they find themselves alone in a foreign land… where Elimelech dies. Naomi now has only her two sons. Desperate, she negotiates marriages for them. This alliance surely brought stability to Naomi and her sons, so they stayed in Moab for ten years to be close to families of Orpah and Ruth. But the tragedy worsens: “Both Mahlon and Chilion died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.” So that we will feel the abandonment and despair, the author does not even name her in the last verse – the woman was left… alone. God has shut himself off from her cries. Broken and bitter, the woman must crawl back to Bethlehem to survive without hope or happiness.
Larry Crabb notes: “It is hard enough to develop a personal relationship with an invisible God, one whose voice I never hear the way I hear a friend’s voice over the phone; it’s even harder to feel close to an unresponsive God.”
Some pastors and Bible students blame this family’s problems on Elimelech: God killed the husband and two sons for leaving Bethlehem. One commentary says, about Elimelech’s choice, “For this the Jewish expositors rightly blame him. He left his neighbors and relatives in distress, in order to live in the land of the enemy; forsook his home, in order to reside as a stranger in Moab.”
That seems to me a facile solution to a serious problem. After all, Naomi suffers. She absorbs the lessons of the sovereignty, wisdom, and covenant kindness of God disguised under hard circumstances. The faithful wife and concerned mother must endure this perfect storm of God’s frowning providence, not the dead men. Naomi’s dreams are shattered; she is the central character in these events.
So we are left with three ideas today.
First, God does want to bless us. The testimony of scripture and saints is uniform and overwhelming. God loves his people and enjoys immensely giving us what he knows is good. We do not always feel the blessing, just like there is sometimes discipline in a loving Christian home, because sometimes we cannot imagine a greater good than comfort and ease. Naomi begins broken and ends blessed.
Second, the greatest blessing of all is knowing God and being part of his work. If we knew God and ourselves completely, and if we could see through the fog of sin to truly understand reality, then we would ask, “your kingdom come, your will be done, in my life to bring me closer to you.” Nothing less can make us truly happy.
Third, the pain of shattered (lower) dreams awakens desire for God and for greater dreams. We dream of good things: happy marriages, healthy kids, comfortable lives, cushy retirements. Those are not bad, but we imagine they are best. And while we hold tightly to the hope of having those as the greatest good, we will not pursue an encounter with God. So God shatters those dreams to give us something better. Naomi would not find joy in a grandson by the son of the prostitute until she went through the bitterness of a loss of her cherished dreams of a happy life.
1. Conclusion
Samuel Rutherford became pastor of the church in Anwoth in 1627. The early years were terrible and sad, as his wife and two children died. Nevertheless, he ministered faithfully to the people, comforting as God had comforted him. In 1636, however, a harsher trial was in store: he was banished from the pulpit for preaching Calvinism. During his exile, he wrote many letters which built up the church, though he admitted to a Lady Culross, that it was particularly painful to him to be “the first in the kingdom put to utter silence.” But Rutherford knew that what others meant for evil, God meant for good, and during this time he wrote a letter with this famous sentence: “I see that grace groweth best in winter.”
In 1638, political changes in Scotland restored Presbyterianism to the land and Rutherford was appointed professor of theology at St. Andrews. And in 1643, he was one of five Scottish commissioners invited to attend the Westminster Assembly, where he helped draft the Shorter Catechism. “Grace groweth best in winter.”
Naomi would agree. You think about that.
