Ruth 3 Strategic Righteousness Of Naomi, Ruth And Boaz

Hello, I am Pastor Greg with Calvary Reformed Church and today we are going to continue our study on Ruth Chapter 3.

Before we do that, I would like to have a Prayer. Father God as we come before you, we ask for your wisdom and grace as we look at Ruth Chapter 3 to see how we are called to live our lives right with you O Lord. We ask this all in Your name, Amen.

Well you may wonder where we are today.

We are out at Maralyn and Mick Motycka's Farm.

Mick used to love to farm. I wanted to come here today, and you will see why. These are two combines and today

we use combines to harvest wheat, barley, corn, and soybeans. The combine does all the work of separating everything.

But within the Jewish time frame 3000 years ago they did not have the combines as they do today. What they had were threshing floors. The farmers would take their grain, their wheat, their barley, their corn, and they would bring it to the threshing floor. There would be a large stone that would go in a circle and there would be a few animals moving the stone around [or it could be some of the men would move the stone around] and it would separate what was good to eat versus what was not good.

We have been studying from the book of Ruth. We have looked already at Ruth Chapter 1 and Ruth Chapter 2. Ruth is the story of a young lady. The daughter-in-law to Naomi. Naomi and her husband lived in Bethlehem.

Bethlehem means house of bread. There was a famine, so they moved to Moab. The Moab people are distant relatives to the Jewish people. However, the Jewish people and the Moabites hated each other. They lived there for 10 years. Naomi’s husband dies and her two sons marry two Moabite women. Naomi hears there's food back in Bethlehem, so she goes back home. Her one daughter-in-law stays in Moab, but the other daughter-in-law, Ruth [which means friend] comes with Naomi to Bethlehem. They are destitute. They are two widows. They have no way of making an income, no way of providing for themselves.

So, Ruth ends up going out into the various fields and she does what God had set up in the Old Testament- how they were to provide for the widows and the poor. Ruth goes to work and gleans from the harvest and she ends up in the field of Boaz. Boaz ends up being a relative and in Chapter 2 of Ruth we see that Naomi, when they come back to Bethlehem, says to her friends, ‘Don't call me Naomi anymore, which means pleasant. Call me Mara, which means bitter. My life has become so bitter.’

When Ruth goes into the fields for the barley harvest to start, she goes into the field of a man named Boaz. Today we are going to see Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz in the story. When Ruth comes back home to Naomi, Naomi’s life perks up because she sees there is hope during the darkness. So, we are going to pick up the story here at the end of Chapter 2, Verse 23. Ruth stayed close to the servant girls of Boaz to glean until the barley harvest and the wheat harvest were finished. She lived with her mother-in-law Naomi. Barley harvest started around May and went all the way up through around the August time frame of the wheat harvest.

Ruth 3, Verse 1. One day Naomi, her mother-in-law, said to Ruth, ‘My daughter, should I not find a home for you where you will be well provided for?’ Does that sound like maybe what we think of when we think of the movie, Fiddler on the Roof? A Jewish mother saying

to her daughter-in-law, ‘I need to find a husband for you.’

Is not Boaz, with whose servant girls you have been with a kinsman, a relative of ours? Next week we are going to be talking a bit more about this kinsman redeemer idea. But, he is a kinsman, a relative and tonight, he is going to be winnowing the barley on the threshing floor.

Ruth, go wash yourself, perfume yourself, put on your best clothes and go down to the threshing floor. But, don't let him know that you're there until he is finished eating and drinking. Then lie down and when he lies down note the place where he's lying. Go over and uncover his feet and lie down there and he will tell you what to do.

Okay, this sounds like a scheme does not it? And yet Naomi had a purpose in her plan. With Ruth, Jesus says to us, you do not build a tower without counting the cost. There is another phrase that says if we fail to plan, we plan to fail. I love that one: ‘If we fail to plan, we plan to fail.’ We are called to be people who plan within our lives and the 15 verses we are going to look at here just briefly in Ruth Chapter 3 there's planning that takes place. But, it's a godly planning. One author that I read talked that it’s a strategic righteousness within the planning.