Ruth 1:1-13

And read Ruth chapter 1 verses 1 through 13.

"God's word says, 'Now 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.

The name of the man was Elimelech, and the

name of his wife, Nomi, and the names of his

two sons were Mahalan and Kilian, Ephrathites

of Bethlehem and Judah.

Now they entered the land of Moab and remained

there.

Then Elimelech, Nomi's husband, died, and she

was left with her two sons.

They took for themselves Moabite women as

wives, and the name of the one was Orpa, and

the name of the other Ruth, and they lived

there about ten years.

Then both Mahalan and Kilian also died, and

the woman was bereft of her two children and

her husband.

Then she arose with her daughters-in-law that

she might return from the land of Moab for

she had heard in a land of Moab that the Lord

had visited his people in giving them food.

So she departed from the place where she was

and her two daughters-in-law and her, and

they went on the way to return to the land of

Judah.

Then Nomi said to her two daughters-in-law, "

Go return each of you to her mother's house.

May the Lord deal kindly with you as you have

dealt with the dead and with me.

May the Lord grant that you may find rest each

in their house of her husband."

Then she kissed them and they lifted up their

voices and wept.

And they said to her, "No, but we will surely

return with you to your people."

But Nomi said, "Return my daughters, why

should you go with me?

If I get sons in my womb that they may be your

husbands.

Return my daughters, go for I am too old to

have a husband.

If I said I have hope, if I should even have a

husband tonight and also bear sons, would

you therefore wait until they have grown?

Would you therefore refrain from marrying?

Know my daughters, for it is harder for me

than for you, for the hand of the Lord has

gone forth against me."

Let's pray.

Hey, Father, we love you and just thank you

for the wonderful service we've had so far

and we do pray that you bless this message to

our hearts and our minds and the message

in spite of the messenger in Christ's name.

Amen.

When we read Scripture, we have to understand

that the books and the letters that are

recorded

in Scripture are works of ancient literature.

They're from a different time in culture than

we're at.

They were written by people who lived in those

different times and that those people thought

in very different ways.

And sometimes, when we read what happens in

Scripture, what was written for us and how

it's written, it causes us to scratch our

heads when we look at it from our minds and

our cultures and especially in the Old

Testament.

For example, if you remember the story of Abr

am who became Abraham and Sarai who became

Sarah, God had made a promise to them that

they would give them a son in their old age

and that his family would have the descendants

as many as the stars in the sky and the sand

by the sea.

But God waited and waited to fulfill that

promise and he kept waiting.

And so in their own works, in their own mind,

they were going to try to speed up the process

.

So Sarai does something that I don't think any

modern wife would do.

They gave Abram her maid servant, Hagar, so

that he could marry her as well and have a

baby with Hagar, her maid servant.

And this was a common practice at the time

when couples were dealing with infertility.

It wasn't just that happened with Abram and

Sarai.

So this made complete sense in their mind.

And Sarai was happy to do it until she had

Isaac and then she got a little bitter.

But it was a completely valid way to handle

the problem of infertility at the time.

Even though to us, it doesn't make any sense

and it's kind of offensive and kind of crazy

for us to think that way.

But we as Christians, studying this ancient

book, we need to be students of some of these

ancient Near Eastern manners and cultures.

If we're going to interpret scripture, and

when we do this all the time, if you look

back at the past 15 years of preaching behind

this pulpit from Philip and me, as he goes

through the New Testament, there's always a

lot to explain about what was happening

at the time and what the history said and what

was the government situation, the political

situation and the religious situation.

Why the Pharisees acted the way they did.

And so little by little, we're all being

schooled as experts in heavy historical

ancient knowledge.

And this is all for a reason, not just to lift

up our intellects and make us experts

in history.

But God decided to reveal himself in history

through men in certain cultures and certain

times.

He revealed himself and his will in the Bible

in ancient history for us.

So in order for us to understand and interpret

his will and what he's written down, we learn

about their culture.

And this comes into play for our subject today

in the book of Ruth.

The book of Ruth is full of these ancient

customs that are very different from the

way that we understand how families work and

how life should work.

And we can get a glimpse into what God has

written for us in the book of Ruth and

understand

how to apply it to our lives.

We get to learn about some of these ancient

cultural things that are very different, like

brother-in-law marriage duty, like sandal

contracts, and like kinsman redeemers.

And all these things and more in the book of

Ruth, we get to learn about those things

so that we can understand what God has given

to us in Scripture, what he's revealed to

us.

And no matter how different the things that

these ancient peoples would do, they're still

people and they still act and respond in ways

that are very familiar to us, even though

they do it through these different cultural

artifacts.

And so the Scripture written in this ancient

period is still directly applicable to us

and to our lives.

And because it is Scripture, it's important

for us to learn these things and to interpret

it correctly so we don't skip over them and

skip over the blessings and the truths that

are available to us, even in the Old Testament

, ancient history of a book like Ruth.

So we strive to be experts in these things,

and you may not understand this for us,

especially

those of us who have been Christians for a

while and have been going to church for a

while.

Our understanding of these things is much

greater than the average person.

We're becoming experts in ancient history and

ancient literature, specifically because

the Bible is ancient history and ancient

literature.

So as we look at our passage today, we see

that Ruth is a short story about this one

family that lived in the time between the

Hebrew people taking the Promised Land and

Joshua, and before the Hebrew people were

given a king in King Saul, it was the time

of the judges.

That's what verse 1 says, "Now it came about

in the days when the judges governed that

there was a famine in the land.

In those days, there was no king that ruled

over the Hebrew people.

There was a federated government of families

and then clans and then the 12 tribes, as

we heard in Sunday school this morning, which

Levi was one of them, and the Coalites was

one of the clans of the tribe of Levi.

And these tribes and clans and families were

given God's law by Moses as they came out

from slavery in Egypt to obey.

They were God's covenant people.

And God in the covenant promised that if they

were to follow those laws given by Moses,

that he would bless them.

And if they were to ignore and to disobey the

laws that God gave them, that he would curse

them.

In Deuteronomy 28, verse 15, it says, "But it

shall come about if you do not obey the

Lord, your God, to observe to do all his

commandments and his statutes with which I

charge you today

that all these curses will come upon you and

overtake you."

And he gives a list of a bunch of different

curses and one of them in verse 17 of chapter

28 of Deuteronomy says, "Curses shall be your

basket and your kneading bowl."

And so one of the curses was a curse of famine

, which is what the people in Israel were

experiencing

at this time.

And so the book of Judges goes through what's

called the cycle, a Judges cycle.

The first thing that would happen was the

people would start disobeying the law and

they would do evil and they would worship the

idols of the people around them, the Canaan

ites

and countries around them.

And then God would curse them like with a

famine or with the Philistines taking over and

they

would be under enslavement to those around

them.

And then it would get so bad that the Hebrew

people would cry out to God and then God would

hear them and have mercy on them usually in

the form of taking off the curse, like off

the curse of a famine or sending a judge to

rescue them from the other nation that

enslaved

them.

And then you would rinse and repeat and it

would happen over and over again.

As you read the book of Judges, you see that

it over and over again, the people would fall

into the sin of disobedience and then God

would rescue them.

But God during all this time was faithful to

them to the promises that he made to the

nation of Israel and he kept all of his

promises in spite of the Jews' lack of keeping

their

end of the covenant up.

Even though they repeatedly failed to keep his

law, God remained faithful to them and

they would keep failing and rinse and repeat

as we said over and over and over again, like

the last verse of Judges says, chapter 21, 25

says, "In those days there was no king

in Israel, everyone did what was right in his

own eyes and over and over again."

And it's kind of familiar to us.

We may not be under the same covenant as they

were, but we still experience the failing

over and over again and his mercy and his

faithfulness to us.

So here we find ourselves in the middle of one

of these judge cycles where the Israelite

people have failed to keep God's laws and

started worshiping other gods and God was

punishing them with a famine.

So here we have the family of Limelech and

Naomi and the repercussions that they are

feeling from the punishment of God around them

, specifically the famine.

And I want you to, as we go through this, to

always remember that we get the opportunity

of reading the whole book of Ruth, if we want

to.

It only takes about 25, 30 minutes to casually

read through the four chapters.

So we can see the beginning and the middle and

the end.

But Limelech and Naomi were living in the

middle of it.

They didn't know the end.

They were experiencing the suffering that the

famine was bringing, the starvation that

was all around them, live in real time.

And we can see that the story of Ruth wraps up

in major blessings for them, and not just

on their particular family, but on the whole

nation of Israel.

And eventually the blessings that Ruth and

Naomi, all that was left, as we'll see,

received

would eventually bless us in Jesus Christ.

But they had to go through this moment by

moment and day by day and respond to the

situations

that were happening around them and the prov

idence of God that was around them, with their

lives,

with their decisions, with their actions.

And that's very important for us to grasp as

we look at this family, that they weren't,

they didn't know the beginning from the end

and the end from the beginning.

You see that when we see God working through

the lives of this one family, that we can

directly apply this to how God works in us.

We know the end, we just don't know how we're

going to get there.

We don't know all the moment by moment, day by

day, that's going to happen.

And we don't know how God is going to work

some of the situations of suffering that we

face out.

But we can apply the same faith that

especially Ruth had, as we'll see, to our

lives, into

the suffering and trials and tribulations that

we have.

And one of the main reasons why Ruth is even

in Scripture, and as a short story about this

one seemingly insignificant family and their

struggles in this middle of this cycle of

pain and hardship, is to show us that God is

always in control and that even though we

can't see it, His sovereignty is working out

through providence in every single person's

life for His purposes, and that His purposes

are good as you see, as you go to the end

of the book.

So the old-timers separate God's providence

into two different categories, His sweet and

good providence and His dark and bitter prov

idences.

But no matter which category His providences

go into, we know and understand and have faith

that the good and the light sweet providence

and the dark and the bitter providence is

never without purpose.

God doesn't do anything on accident.

He doesn't do anything for nothing for no

reason.

He's not whimsical and making it up as He goes

.

Proverbs tells us in chapter 19 verse 21, "M

any plans are in a man's heart, but the counsel

of the Lord will stand."

He knows the beginning from the end and He's

planned it all out on purpose, the sweet prov

idence

and the bitter providence.

And we can look at the life of Limelech and

Naomi, and I can promise you that they didn't

have any inkling about the plans that God was

working out in their lives and how it would

work out for them, but God from the very

beginning, before the foundation of the word

world, knew

exactly what He was doing.

He took them from fullness to emptiness and

then back to fullness again, and God's hand

was working everything out so that His

purposes through this one little family would

have effects

that would ripple all throughout history, all

the way to eternity and even to our lives.

God works through these sweet and bitter prov

idences in the lives of His people, but like

the words

of the great hymn that we sing sometimes teach

us, that we should look beyond the immediate

pain of the trials and sufferings and see God

's smiling face.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust

Him for His grace.

Behind a frowning providence, He hides a

smiling face.

And those words are so very important, and

that is what the book of Ruth is trying to

teach us, especially that every single one of

us must trust God's working even through

His bitter and dark providences, because He's

at work through the bitter providence around

us all the time, verses 1 and 2 say this, "Now

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.

The name of the man was a Limelech, and the

name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his

two sons were Mahalon and Kilian, Ephrathites

and Bethlehem and Judah.

Now they entered the land of Moab and remained

there."

As we have seen in the introduction that our

story has happening during the time of the

Judges, and in that part of that Judges cycle

where God is punishing the people through

famine.

So the Israelites were lived, they were given

a land that used to be occupied by worshipers

of false gods, in particular the false god

that they mainly worshiped was a god they

called Baal, or we sometimes say Baal.

Baal was supposed to be the god of storms.

He was the one that would bring rain, and rain

was very important to an agricultural

society.

Without rain you would have no crops, and

without crops you wouldn't have food.

So Baal was the god of fertility, the

fertility of the crops, the fertility of your

animals,

and the fertility of the people.

So in order for there to be rain and fertility

, what the idolaters would do is they believed

that when Baal himself, I'm trying to make

this PG-rated, would perform the act of

marriage

with other female gods, then it would rain,

and then it would have fertility of crops,

and then it would have fertility of animals,

and then your family would have babies as

well.

But the thing about Baal was that sometimes he

would just forget to perform the act that

needed to happen for fertility.

So he needed to be reminded.

And so what they would do in order to bring

rain and fertility, they would go up on the

top of a flat hill because it would be closer

to the sky where Baal was, and he would be

able to see them, and they would perform the

act with priests and priestesses on top of

the hill to remind him to bring fertility to

the land.

And I know that it's graphic and disgusting

for us to think about this, and it kind of

gives us a little check because it's so

foreign to our culture and our consciousness.

But that is a blessing from God that it is

that way for us, right?

That is the norm throughout history is for

these weird and pagan ceremonies and things

that happen to please the God, and for us to

feel that repulsion from this is a blessing,

is a grace for us as human beings.

To praise God that it's kind of ick because

that was completely normal to the Mesopotamian

people.

They looked at what was going on and said, "

Yes, this is how we're going to get rain.

We're going to go top of this hill."

They called it, or scholars call it, "im

itative magic," and it wasn't just this one

thing

that they did, but if they wanted another God

to do something, they had a ritual for

that, too.

That was to remind him.

Elijah, on the top of the mountain with the

450 prophets of Baal, he said, "Maybe he's

sleeping.

Maybe he's in the bathroom.

Maybe you just need to get a little louder and

cut yourself more."

That's what they were doing.

They were trying to wake up Baal to get them

to do their will.

Yahweh didn't need that to happen.

He didn't need some ritual of imitative magic

to remind him to keep his end of the covenant,

to bless his people.

The people needed to be reminded of his

faithfulness and their lack of faithfulness.

The people needed to be reminded that God

always keeps his promises, that the fertility

of the land and the prosperity of his people

rested on the eternal covenant that God had

made with him and their obedience to that

covenant, like he said from the beginning,

the establishment of the nation of Israel.

We saw in Deuteronomy that he would curse them

for disobeying the law, but that was

the second part.

The beginning of chapter 28 talks about the

blessings that he would give them.

Deuteronomy 28 1 says, "Now it shall be, if

you diligently obey the Lord your God,

being careful to do all his commandments,

which I command you today, the Lord your

God will set you high above all the nations of

the earth.

All these blessings will come upon you and

overtake you if you obey the Lord your God.

Blessed shall you be in the city and blessed

shall you be in the country.

Blessed shall be the offspring of your body

and the produce of your ground and the

offspring

of your beast, the increase of your herd and

the young of your flock."

All those fertility rituals that they relied

on the false God by all to do, God promised

them that he would do all those things if they

keep his laws.

Verse 5, "Blessed shall be your basket and

your kneading bowl.

Blessed shall you be when you come in, and

blessed shall you be when you go on."

The list goes on and on as you read chapter 28

.

The problem wasn't that God would forget the

blessed people.

The problem was that they had a lack of faith

in God and they showed this lack of faith

by worshiping the idols of the nation around

them, by worshiping by all who would just

forget to bring fertility to the land by the

little humans who worshiped him.

But the lack of faith was with God's people

and here that's where we relate.

We don't have the same kind of false gods and

idols that the ancient peoples did.

We have our own idols today of different sorts

.

How many of our fellow citizens worship the

state and think that their blessing and the

happiness and satisfaction in this life comes

from the state doing what they want.

The state is the bringer of fertility and

prosperity to us.

If we just vote for the right person, if we

convince enough people to vote for the right

person, then that will usher in prosperity for

our nation and morality for our nation.

We should vote for the right people and we

should encourage other people to vote for

the right person.

That is not the way that true prosperity comes

to a nation by bending the knee to a

politician.

True prosperity comes to a nation by bending

the knee to the God of the universe and his

son through the regeneration of the heart by

the Holy Spirit.

You took the people of today, including many

who go to churches in our land and you plop

them into the ancient Israel in the time of O

limelak and Naomi, that they would be right

there on top of those hills worshiping with

the Canaanites just like the Jews of the time

were.

And so because of their unfaithfulness, God

was punishing the Israelites with famine.

So our text takes a microscope and looks at

one family out of the thousands that were

affected directly by this famine in Olimelak

and Naomi and their two sons.

But notice where they're from.

Verse one says they're from Bethlehem of Afr

atha.

Does that sound familiar to you?

You recognize which Bethlehem that was?

That was the home of David and David's most

important descendant, Jesus Christ.

Olimelak, looking for food for his family, up

roots them out of Judah and moves them to

the country of Moab.

So the hand of God brought famine, a bitter

providence, and from the later description

of Naomi and how her faith was followed by

Ruth, it appears that Olimelak and Naomi and

their two sons were followers of Yahweh.

But so they were dealing with the effects of

God's punishment and providence on the

nation around them because of the unfaithful

Hebrews of their time, but the bitter prov

idence

that God was putting out on the whole nation

affected them and their family themselves.

But that bitter providence would be used by

God in great ways, even through the struggle

and trials of the life of this family.

So if you put yourself into their shoes and

forced to leave your home and move to another

country because of starvation and the famine

around you and having to completely start

your life over, eventually God's provident

would make sense to those that were left

remaining

alive, but it wasn't finished with the empt

ying part yet.

This wasn't the end of it, just them having to

move because of the famine.

For Naomi that the bitter providence was

happening around her, it was also happening to

her in

her own life.

Verse number three says then Olimelak Naomi's

husband died and she was left with her two

sons.

They took for themselves Moabite women as

wives.

The name of the one was Orpah and the name of

the other Ruth, and they lived there for

about 10 years.

Then both Maulon and Killian also died and the

woman was bereft of her two children and

her husband.

There's a debate over whether they should have

left Judah at all and moved because of

the famine, or if they should have stayed in

Judah and just dealt with it and relied

on God.

So we know that Israelites were called to

remain separate from the nations around them.

And it would have been very difficult for Olim

elak to lead his family in following God

in the pagan nation of Moab.

Moab was the land of the descendants of Lot.

Lot, if you remember, was Abraham's nephew.

He had two sons and we'll just call it a very

unorthodox way.

If you want to know more, go ahead and read

Genesis 1930 through 38 later.

One of the sons' names was Ben-Ami, and his

descendants settled and made a nation called

Amon, and the other's name was Moab.

This was the founder of the nation that Naomi

's family escaped to.

But the nation of Moab was steeped in this Ba

al worship.

They followed a God named Kamash.

And so when Olimelak died, Naomi probably

assumed, rightly or not, we're not told, that

this was God's hand of judgment specifically

on her family for leaving the land of Israel,

the promised land, and going to this pagan

nation of Moab.

So Olimelak died in the nation of Moab, not

seeing the promised land again.

So then now she just has her two sons, and

they marry these two Moabite foreign women.

And one was named Orpa, which by the way is

the namesake of Oprah.

It's actually Orpa on her birth certificate,

but people pronounced it incorrectly.

And so now she's called Oprah.

And the other is the namesake of our story,

Ruth, two Moabite women that didn't know Yah

weh,

that her sons, Naomi's sons, married.

And now, again, the hand of God falls on Naomi

's family.

She lost her husband, and now both of her sons

die.

And verse five says that she is bereft.

She is left without.

She is lacking everything in her husband and

her sons dying.

She's destitute.

And so this may be easier for some of us to

picture, but she has gone through a famine.

She's gone through the death of her husband,

and now she's lost both of her sons.

And left, she's a widow left with two other

widows.

She has had her life hit blow after blow and

tragedy after tragedy, just stacking up in

her life with sadness and sorrow and pain.

And no matter the differences in time or the

differences in culture, we can really feel

for poor Naomi and what she must be going

through, no matter what the time was, the same

emotions

and the same grief for such a loss.

We can kind of relate to all that's happened

to her, all that she's gone through.

And now as a widow with two other widows,

complete loss and destitution, God's face was

completely

dark in this time in her life.

There was really no place for her to turn to

now.

But again, we get to see the end from the

beginning.

We know that God is going to take this grief

and the suffering and the sorrow and turn

it into something amazing in time.

Her crying will be turned into singing,

although at that very moment living in it, she

couldn't

see how that was going to happen.

God was working using that bitter, dark prov

idence in her life to do something amazing.

It just required her trusting in God, which

she generally does.

The last thing I want to look at in this

passage is that God works through the bitter

providence.

He uses that to work in our own parts, verses

6 through 13.

Then she arose with her daughters-in-law that

she might return from the land of Moab, for

she had heard in the land of Moab that the

Lord had visited his people in giving them

food.

So she departed from the place where she was

and her two daughters-in-law with her.

And they went on the way to return to the land

of Judah.

And Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, "

Go, return each of you to your mother's

house.

May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have

dealt with the dead and with me.

May the Lord grant that you may find rest each

in the house of her husband."

Then she kissed them and they lifted up their

voices and wept.

And they said to her, "No, but we will surely

return with you to your people."

But Naomi said, "Return, my daughters, why

should you go with me?

Have I yet sons in my womb that they may be

your husbands?

Return, my daughters, go, for I am too old to

have a husband.

If I said I have hope, if I should even have a

husband tonight and also bear sons, would

you therefore wait until they were grown?

Would you therefore refrain from marrying?

No, my daughters, for it is harder for me than

for you, for the hand of the Lord has gone

forth against me."

Remember the story of Job and how he went from

fullness to emptiness to fullness again.

This is a very common theme in Scripture.

Job lost everything.

He lost his children, he lost his possessions,

and he lost his health.

And you remember, his wife counseled him to

just, "Look, it's too much, curse God and

die."

But Job didn't, Job didn't curse God because

he said that God gave him all those good

gifts, and it was in God's hand to take those

good gifts away.

But that didn't stop Job from grieving, Job

from suffering emotionally and physically

with all that was going on around him, for Job

questioning and wanting to talk with God

about why this was happening.

He couldn't see the end from the beginning

either when he was in the middle of it.

And certainly, we have all felt that same way

at certain times in our life.

Why is God doing this to me?

Why is this happening to me?

And so often, when we're in those times of

suffering and bitter providence, we can't

see how God is going to work out those things

in our lives for our benefit, much less a

purpose that he would have, and Naomi was no

different.

Again, bereft, left without a husband and

without her sons.

She was in the middle of misery, and our story

here shows it, that in this last part that

we're going to look at, she heard that the

Lord had visited Israel again, that he was

lifting off.

He had heard their cries for mercy, and he was

going to bring them blessing again and

bring them food again and end the famine.

So she decides to leave Moab and go back to

her hometown, and so she and her two widowed

daughter-in-laws are on the trail back to Beth

lehem, Ephrathom.

And while she is traveling, she is trying to

convince Orpah and Ruth to go back to their

land and to their families, verses eight and

nine.

And Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, "

Go return each of you to her mother's house.

May the Lord deal kindly with you as you have

dealt with the dead and with me.

May the Lord grant that you may find rest each

in the house of her husband."

Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their

voices and wept.

And this kind of makes me smile.

Can you imagine being someone else on that

path, and you've got these three poor women

just on the side talking with each other and

just weeping and sobbing on the side of the

road.

But here the author of Ruth takes time to go

through this conversation with Naomi and

Orpah and Ruth as she tries to get them to

turn back to go to Moab because he's setting

up the foundation for the rest of our story.

And he first does this, but I remember those

ancient customs that we said we're going to

talk about.

He kind of sets this idea up for us here in

the beginning of the book.

In verse 11 it says, "But Naomi said, 'Return

my daughters, why should you go with me?

Have I yet sons in my womb that they may be

your husbands.'"

So we're going to get into this later as we

get to chapter two and chapter three.

But this custom that she's talking about, that

in her misery, that there's really nothing

that she has to offer the two girls because

there was this custom that if a brother, if

a man died, his brother would take the wife,

the widow that was left and marry her and

have a child with her so his line wouldn't be

erased and that his inheritance would

go to his family.

And that's what she's talking about here.

There's no hope for her to have another son

and for them to wait for him to get old enough

to marry, for them to use this custom of

brother-in-law marriage to rescue them and to

help them as

widows.

And this is going to play a huge role in the

story of Ruth.

And so this is a little bit of foreshadowing

of what is to come.

So it shows us the beginning of this ancient

custom of brother-in-law marriage, but it

also shows us something else.

He's setting up the story to show the faithful

ness of Ruth, the loyalty of her daughter-in-

law,

Ruth.

Naomi was completely correct.

For all they know, they would be going back to

Judah and would be a complete dead end

for her two daughter-in-laws.

No Hebrew man would want to marry a widow of

Hebrew people who married Moabites.

They wouldn't want to marry these foreign wid

ows.

It would be the last thing on their minds.

They would be going to nothing if they went

back to Judah, if they followed Naomi.

There was no hope for them in what they could

see.

But Ruth decided to stay with Naomi in

faithfulness to her and loyalty to her.

In verse 14, it says, "And they lifted up

their voices and wept again, they're still

on the side of the road, sobbing, and Orpah

kissed her mother-in-law," in other words,

she said goodbye and returned to Moab, "but

Ruth clung to her."

Orpah went back, and that was the last that we

hear of her, "but Ruth clung to her."

Ruth held fast to Naomi.

And we're going to see more next time about

Ruth's faithfulness as a woman and what all

that meant, but just see how strong of a love

that Ruth had for Naomi, that all that she

could see was a dead end life with no chance

of marrying where she was going.

And she's going back to this destitute widow,

back to Judah, but she clung to Naomi.

We're just beginning to see all of these

connections, and there will be more to come.

But this is kind of a type of Christ.

Christ is faithful to us.

Ruth in her example is showing us an

illustration of what Christ is like in his

faithfulness

and his loyalty to the Father and by way of

the Father to us as believers.

Paul told Timothy in 2 Timothy 2, 13, "If we

are faithless, he remains faithful, for

he cannot deny himself."

And Naomi's despair and utter misery, Ruth was

a shining light.

Brothers and sisters, we could go chair by

chair in here today.

And as Philip said earlier, there's so much

dark and bitter providence is that we could

tell of ourselves, that we're going through

right now, and we have no idea that we could

see the end of it.

Just like Naomi and Ruth in this time in their

lives.

But we know that God is faithful through Jesus

Christ, and we know he doesn't do anything

on accident.

And we can see that here in this book.

The answer for some of those bitter prov

idences may not be given to us in this life.

But we know, just like Naomi and Ruth learned,

that God is ever faithful and he never goes

back on his word.

If you know the story of Jeremiah, the prophet

, he was a prophet of woe to Judah.

And he was prophesying at a time when they

were extremely hard headed and God would come

in and send another nation to bring them into

exile as punishment.

But his fellow Jews who he was trying to

encourage to turn back to God, and maybe God

would have

mercy on them, hated him for the truth that he

was given to seek by God.

They absolutely hated him.

They threw him in a cistern, in a mire, and so

many things that happened.

They would take the words that he was both

given by God and burn them up, and he'd have

to write them again.

And Jeremiah was called the suffering prophet,

because he really took this all to heart.

And he wrote a whole book called Lamentations

about the suffering that he had.

And in chapter 3, verses 12 through 18, he

says, "He bent his bow," this is God bending

his bow at Jeremiah, "He bent his bow and set

me as a target for the arrow.

He made the arrows of his quiver to enter into

my inward parts.

I have become a laughing stock to all my

people.

They're mocking song all the day.

He has filled me with bitterness.

He has made me drunk with warm wood.

He has broken my teeth with gravel.

He has made me cower in the dust.

My soul has been rejected from peace.

I have forgotten happiness.

So I say my strength has perished, and so has

my hope from the Lord."

But in the end, Jeremiah knew that it was

better to go through all that suffering, and

in the end, see Christ, and have Christ, than

to have prosperity in this life, and to have

no cares in this life, and in the end, not to

have God.

In verse 21, he said this, "This I recall to

my mind, therefore I have hope.

The Lord's loving kindnesses indeed never

cease, for his compassion never fail.

They are new every morning; great is your

faithfulness.

The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "there

fore I have hope in him."

Sometimes it takes those bitter providences,

those famines, and death, and pain in our

lives

to get us to understand that God is our

portion.

And sometimes we can learn those truths from

the stories of others, which is what the book

of Ruth was written for.

So we can learn the truth that God is in

control, and that if we have him, he is

faithful forever.

May God teach us, through his word and through

our suffering, that he is faithful and his

loving kindnesses endure forever.

Let's pray.

Lord, I pray that you bless the rest of this

day for us, and we can leave here in worship

of you and be reminded, hopefully, in this me

ager way, of who you are and what you've

done for us through all eternity.

And I just pray that you bless this word to

our minds.

In Christ's name.

Amen.

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