You’ve heard the one, I ‘m sure, about the lonely frog who goes to see a fortune-teller. He’s told not to worry. She says, “You’re going to meet a beautiful young girl, and she will want to know everything about you.” “That’s great!” the excited frog says. “When will I meet her?” And the psychic says, “Next semester…in biology class.”
Life has a way of “going south,” doesn’t it? And we wonder sometimes: “Are we merely the victims of fate? Is there any point to the unfolding events of our lives?” The book of Ruth addresses this question, and what it tells us is: There is a heart at the center of the universe. It’s not just a cold, empty expanse, indifferent to us or to our lives. Nor is it a machine driven by some cruel, malevolent force such as chance. No. What’s behind everything – this is what the book of Ruth tells us – what’s behind everything is a gracious Providence that is purposeful and loving.
It doesn’t seem that way, does it? You and I have absolutely no problem understanding Naomi, who, like the Prodigal Son, “traveled to a distant country” (Lk. 15:13), where not only her husband died, but her two sons as well. When she returned to her homeland, she asked not to be called Naomi, a name that means sweet. “Don’t call me that anymore,” she said. “Call me Mara instead.” Mara means bitter. Why? Because, as she put it, “The Lord has dealt harshly with me, and the Almighty” – who can resist the Almighty? He – “has brought calamity upon me.” She had gone away “full,” she said, but now “the Lord has brought me back empty” (Ruth 1:21).
We understand how Naomi felt. We have, no doubt, felt the same way at times. Life was good. God blinked. And now life is bad. Or, maybe it has nothing to do with God. The rabbi, Harold Kushner, asks why bad things happen to good people, and he concludes: it’s because God is powerless to do anything about it. Christopher Hitchens, the celebrated atheist, says it’s because there is no god. Hitchens writes, “I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that…there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not.”
But it is just this that I think shows us the wrong turn that Naomi took in her understanding. She didn’t know enough to believe that God had abandoned her. She didn’t understand God at all, and, sometimes, neither do we. The evil in this world is due to the fact that we live in a fallen creation. Nothing works the way God designed it to work – not because God is powerless to do anything about it and certainly not because there is no God – but because each of us can say, in the words of the old hymn – and must say, if we’re honest with ourselves – I “thrust my willful hands across Thy threads, and marred the pattern drawn out for my life” (Sarah Williams, “Because I Knew Not When My Life Was Good”).
That’s what Naomi had done, and, having done it and tasted the bitterness of its consequences, she was done with God. But God was not done with her. There is grace to reckon with, and we see it from the start in Ruth, chapter 2. Ruth, remember, is the Moabite daughter-in-law of Naomi. She is a foreigner, previously among the “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12) – and for that, she may have been an embarrassment to Naomi, a living reminder of her sojourn in the land of pagan idolatry. But that was previously. Ruth was now – in the words of another hymn – “no more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home” (Isaac Watts, “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need”). “Your God [shall be] my God,” she had said, “and your people…my people.”
It is Ruth, recently come to faith, who has come to know enough of her faith to know what to do in the face of Naomi’s extremity, which she now shared. She knew Leviticus 23:22, for example, which says, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.” This was a sign of God’s providential grace. His land, the Land of Promise, which he had given to his people, would be a place where the poor would not starve. They would have to work for their food, but there would always be a place to work. This was part of his covenant with Israel, and he ratified by signing his covenant name to the command: “I am the Lored your God.”
And so, Ruth said to Naomi, “Let me go to the field and glean among the ears of grain” (Ruth 2:2). And she went. And we’re told that “she came and gleaned in the field behind the reapers.” And, “as it happened, she came to the part of the field belonging to Boaz, who was of the family of Elimelech.” Now, there are two things we need to notice here. One is “Boaz, who was of the family of Elimelech.” Elimelech, remember, was Naomi’s husband, now deceased. This man Boaz is his relative – and that’s going to figure huge in the next episode of the story.
The other thing to notice is this statement that, “as it happened, [Ruth] came to the part of the field belonging to Boaz.” The Hebrew text literally says, “As chance chanced” or “as happenstance happened.” We might say, “As luck would have it.” Now, we have to stop and ask: Is the Bible here telling us that our destinies depend on luck? Are we no better off than the lonely frog who finds out he is destined to be nothing more than a lab project for some student – albeit a woman and a lovely one at that?
Let me tell you: the narrator of Ruth doesn’t believe in luck. Whoever it is, he is a better Presbyterian than that! No, he uses this not to chance to show us that things aren’t left up to chance. What’s happening is no coincidence. There is something better than luck behind the scenes. It is providential grace. The fields of Boaz are about to become the fields of grace.
“Just then Boaz came from Bethlehem.” That’s how the English rendering has it, but the Hebrew is more striking: “Behold, Boaz!” it says. Grace is on the move, and it arrives with this man Boaz. And look at the kind of man he is. As he arrives, he greets his employees with a covenantal blessing: “The Lord be with you,” he says. And it tells you more than a little something about the work climate in Boaz’s fields that his employees reply, “The Lord bless you.” God is known here – and in more than a casual way.
And God is active here. In the graciousness of Boaz you see the grace of God. When Boaz notices Ruth, it is God at work. When Boaz speaks to Ruth, it is God at work. When Boaz is kind to Ruth, it is God at work. “Now listen, my daughter,” he says. My daughter? Does he not know that she is a stranger? A foreigner? A Moabite, of all things? Yes, yes, and yes. As surely as God knows that you and I were once “alienated from the life of God” (Eph. 4:18). This is grace at work – the same grace that addresses you and me as sons and daughters because we have fled for refuge to the promised Savior, just as Ruth fled for safety to the Promised Land.
Boaz – ever so gently, ever so kindly – speaks to Ruth and he says to her, “Do not go to glean in another field or leave this one.” He even instructs his workmen to “let [Ruth] glean…among the standing sheaves, and…not [to] reproach her.” He tells them to “pull out some handfuls for her from the bundles, and [to] leave them for her to glean, and…not [to] rebuke her.” This is unparalleled generosity! This is immoderate, dizzying generosity on the part of Boaz. And in his generosity, Boaz foreshadows the incomparable, unconstrained, overflowing generosity of our Lord Jesus Christ – Jesus, who is for us the bread of life that satisfies – deeply satisfies – every hunger of the heart.
No wonder Ruth “fell prostrate, with her face to the ground.” No wonder she “said to [Boaz], ‘Why have I found such favor in your sight, that you should take notice of me, when I am a foreigner?’” Boaz didn’t miss a beat. He didn’t even have to think about his reply: It is “the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for refuge.” This is what he says to her. You are a covenant child of God. Your life is in God’s hands now. It is the same thing God says to all who seek him for refuge: “Those who love me, I will deliver; I will protect those who know my name. When they call to me, I will answer them. I will be with them in trouble, I will rescue and honor them” (Ps. 91:14f.).
This is the language of covenant love. This is not the language of blind fate or chance or happenstance or anything of the sort. This is testimony to providential grace. God takes us on – just as Boaz took on Ruth – and he makes promises to us…and gracious provision. And he “works all things together for good to those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:29). And he does this no matter what the cost to himself. Go to the cross, and there you will see not only how much he loves you. You will see the extent he is willing to go to show it. When circumstance seems to empty your life of all purpose and you feel hopeless, go to the cross. And wait. And wait long if you have to. But in time, what you’ll see is: God filling your life with his lavish, extravagant, boundless grace.
