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.
[BLANK_AUDIO]