Ruth 1:1-22
This morning we are starting a new series on the life of King David that we are calling, A Man after God’s Own Heart. Most of us know the basic stories about David. Any four year old who has been at church for any length of time could tell the story of David and Goliath. We are familiar with such military victories and we know all too well his moral failures. How could David have committed adultery and then murdered the husband of the woman he committed adultery with—all of it in plain sight—and then still be called a “man after God’s own heart?” We will answer that question eventually, but before we jump into the life of David, I want to lay the groundwork of his entrance onto the Biblical and historical scene. David doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, as many Biblical characters do. David has a genealogy—in other words, David has a legacy that reaches back further than his time spent in the fields as a shepherd and songwriter.
David’s legacy begins with a foreign woman named Ruth. If David was “a man after God’s own heart,” then clearly, Ruth should be called “a woman after God’s own heart.” But before we meet Ruth, we meet Naomi and her family.
In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. 2 The man’s name was Elimelech, his wife’s name Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there.
3 Now Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. 4 They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, 5 both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.
The culture surrounding Naomi’s life was about as bad as it could get. The story is set during “the days when judges ruled.” If case you forget what that period of history was like, look up or over to the last verse in the book of Judges. “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.” It was a time of anarchy and unrest when the people of Israel would swing into long periods of idolatry and apostasy, only to repent and be delivered, and then start the cycle all over again. We are now less than one year away from the next presidential election and less than two months away from the start of the primaries. Though they may differ on some issues, the Democratic candidates have one unified message: because of the failures of our Republican president, our country is falling apart, and they want you to know that they are the appointed savior of the United States. The Republicans have a similar message, only they blame all of the problems on the Democratic Congress. My point is that over the next twelve months, we will repeatedly be hearing how bad things have become in our country. Regardless of how good or bad things may be right now, our national problems pale in comparison to what Naomi’s family faced. Not only did they have anarchy and apostasy, the author of 1 Samuel tells us that “In those days, the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions.”
The national problems included a famine so severe that Naomi’s family was forced to move to a foreign land to stay alive. The next crisis was the death of Naomi’s husband, followed by her two sons marrying foreign women. This was not strictly forbidden by the Law, but Naomi would have greatly preferred that her sons marry woman from their native Israel. If this wasn’t enough suffering for one woman, the next tragedy was the death of her two sons. To further compound her troubles, in this culture, a widow was basically helpless without a husband or sons to take care of her. Naomi knew that as a widow in a foreign land, she was as good as dead. When she heard that God had reversed the famine in Israel, out of sheer desperation for her life, she decided to make the dangerous journey. If she stayed in Moab she was as good as dead. If she survived the journey from Moab to Israel, maybe, just maybe she could keep a little food in her stomach by gleaning in the fields for grain. The choice before her was enormous: almost certain death if she stayed and probable death if she left.
I am certain that there is no one in this room who is as bad off as Naomi was. However, many of you do know what it is like to get hammered with one problem after another: the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, rebellious or prodigal children, a serious health issue, rocky relationships or an uncertain future. We all experience these things. Sometimes they are spread out over years or decades, but sometimes they come one after another, like a jackhammer of pain and sorrow. Other times they get dropped in our lap in one big, heavy lump—boom, there it is. What do I do with this new trouble?
This is what Naomi faced—pain after sorrow after pain; loss and more loss. How did she handle it? At first, her daughters-in-law were planning to follow her to Bethlehem. She didn’t get very far until she tried with all he might to convince them to stay in Moab.
8 Then Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home. May the Lord show kindness to you, as you have shown to your dead and to me. 9 May the Lord grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.”
Then she kissed them and they wept aloud 10 and said to her, “We will go back with you to your people.”
11 But Naomi said, “Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons, who could become your husbands? 12 Return home, my daughters; I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons— 13 would you wait until they grew up? Would you remain unmarried for them? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the Lord’s hand has gone out against me!”
I will skip to verse 19 for now. 19 So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?”
20 “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”
22 So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.
As I see it, there are at least two things tha Naomi did right here. The first is that she did not try to hide her pain. There is a stoicism in so much of our Christian faith that is unhealthy and even unbiblical at times. We pretend that everything is OK. We stuff in our feelings and give the world a smile, meanwhile, we are dying inside. This is not healthy, nor is it a Biblical model of mourning and grieving. I am not suggesting that we must tear our clothes, put on sackcloth and sit in a pile of ashes every time something bad happens to us. That is as much a cultural phenomenon as our stuffy stoicism. You don’t need to weep and cry all day long, but I submit to you that the way Naomi dealt with her grief is much closer to the Biblical model than what you and I practice. I mentioned last week that two-thirds of the Psalms are laments. These Psalms lament the writer’s own sin, or the sin of others or the basic rebellion against God, but the point is that there are twice as many laments in the Psalms as there are praises. When people experience deep grief, often we are afraid to go near them—either we don’t know what to say to them or else we are afraid of being pulled down by the power of their grief and laments. We would much rather spend time with happy people than sad people.
A verse my former senior pastor quoted often was Ecclesiastes 7.
It is better to go to a house of mourning
than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of every man;
the living should take this to heart.
3 Sorrow is better than laughter,
because a sad face is good for the heart.
How many of you have written these verses in a sympathy card to another person? I am not suggesting that you do this, because it may not be understood in the right way. My point is that we don’t understand passages like this one. We don’t even have categories for this kind of thinking. We are a hundred times more likely to quote from Proverbs 17. “A cheerful heart is good medicine.” We may even quote the paraphrase of this verse and declare that “laughter is good medicine.” Too often our endless search for entertainment and laughter is little more than a mask to hide our pain. The television airwaves are filled with situation comedies called sit-coms, but not even one situation grief. We have no category called sit-grief. It’s not that people don’t die on the TV screen. You can watch endless hours of cop shows where bullets move slowly through the air and blow a guy’s head off. You can watch dead bodies being sliced and diced on CSI, but this is not a healthy examination of human grief. The most you get on these shows is a cop telling someone, “I’m sorry your husband got his head blown off,” and then the final credits begin to scroll. We will not learn how to grieve form Hollywood, but make no mistake about it—we must learn the proper way to grieve. Naomi is not a perfect model for how to grieve, but she is a good model.
The second helpful thing Naomi did was to express her grief in good theological categories. That is not to say that she sat down and placed her laments into orthodox theological statements. Rather, her belief in God was theologically sound, therefore her grieving was theologically sound. Nothing exposes your true beliefs more quickly than times of grief. Naomi’s grief showed that she had sound beliefs. Let’s take another look at her most stark statements.
It is more bitter for me than for you, because the Lord’s hand has gone out against me!
“Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”
Do you see what Naomi was doing? She was saying that God was the cause for all of her suffering? What do you think—is this good theology? I have already told you that I think this is good theology. Please notice something very important here. It is wrong to blame God for your suffering, but it is right to accept suffering from him. What Naomi was expressing is the old theological term called providence, what we more commonly refer to as the sovereignty of God. A Biblical understanding of God must see God as sovereign over all things. We cannot separate life into categories where God is responsible for all good and happy things and where Satan is responsible for all bad and horrible things. It’s true that sin and death are a result of the curse of sin. Further, it’s true that God cannot tempt anyone nor can he do any evil. However, at the same time we affirm these truths, we must also affirm that God gives life and he takes it away; he blesses and he punishes. Naomi was making sound, Biblical statements here. The Lord had blessed her In Israel with Elimelech, Mahlon and Kilion, but now she was in a foreign land and all she had was three graves marking the burial locations of her husband and two sons. Naomi knew that the Lord was in charge of every part of her life, even as she grieved her great loss.
So far the story of Naomi has served as preparation for Ruth. We finally hear from Ruth in verse sixteen.
At this they wept again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law good-by, but Ruth clung to her.
15 “Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.”
16 But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.
In this very familiar passage, Ruth makes some absolutely amazing statements.
Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.
Your people will be my people
Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.
As a widow in her own country, Ruth would probably have been taken care of by some relatives. She figured she would be alright in Moab, but she was willing to leave her country, her family and her security in order to follow her mother-in-law to a strange land. In Israel there was little guarantee that a widow would be taken care of, let alone a widow from a foreign land. She was risking everything to follow Naomi. But even more than this, she made a covenant promise with Naomi stronger even than the marriage covenant.[1] A marriage vow is “until death shall part us,” which Ruth promised in verse seventeen. If a spouse dies, the husband or wife is free to remarry, but Ruth seems to be promising that she will not leave Naomi even after Naomi dies. Ruth promises that she will be buried in the land of Israel, which meant that she did not have any plans to return to Moab after Naomi died. A powerful promise would have been if Ruth stayed by the side of Naomi until she passed away, but her covenant went well beyond this—even beyondthe promise of a marriage vow—she promised to never leave Naomi, Naomi’s land or Naomi’s people.
If this were not enough, Ruth also made one of the most beautiful promises in all of Scripture. In verse sixteen she promised that “Your God [will be] my God. Ruth was more than willing to leave her multitude of pagan gods behind and give herself fully to the LORD—to Yahweh. This was no mere sidewalk conversion that doesn’t last. Her commitment to the Lord is in the context of giving up everything else in her life. How did she arrive at such a dramatic decision? Was this the moment of her conversion or had it already happened? We don’t know for sure, but it is almost certain that she had learned of the Lord from Naomi and probably also from her husband when he was alive. Ruth would have heard the stories of creation in Eden and judgment in the flood. She would have known the family history of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as if it were her own family’s history. She would have heard how God allowed the Israelites to multiply as abused slaves under Pharaoh in Egypt. There is no doubt in my mind that she would have been able to recount the narrative about how Moses and a wooden staff took on the combined power of Egypt—and was victorious. She knew that the God of Israel was a Creator; that he was a Deliverer; that he was Sovereign over all. She probably heard the story of how the Lord took in another foreign woman into his fold—a prostitute named Rahab. She knew that every other god was a pretender to the throne; that this God is the one who gives life, but also takes away life. In fact, just before she made this covenant promise, she had just heard Naomi describe how the Lord had made her life bitter.
Ruth knew all of this, and yet she followed with her whole heart and life. Why? I believe Ruth placed her faith in the Lord because she would rather have taken her chances with a sovereign Lord, who even though he makes life bitter at times, was infinitely better than all the pantheon of false gods in Moab who were powerless to do anything. Ruth knew that Yahweh was the one true God and for that reason, she had no choice but to follow him. The overarching theme of the book of Ruth is divine providence. The true power of the story comes through when you can see this divine providence guiding each step of the way from behind the scenes, but at the same time, his divine providence was somehow co-mingled with the incredible faithfulness of a foreign woman named Ruth.
You know her legacy, don’t you? Ruth was the great-grandmother of King David, the greatest king of Israel, and the forerunner of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. That, my friends, is a legacy. That is the legacy of David, and this is the legacy handed down to us. A legacy of a woman fully submitted to the sovereignty of God, yet striving in faithfulness with her whole being. God is fully sovereign over each of our lives; whether or not you realize it, whether or not you believe it, and even if you try to thwart his plan. He is sovereign over this church. He is sovereign over this building project. He knows where every dollar will come from and when each brick will be laid. All that remains is to see if we will submit to his sovereign leading.
Rich Maurer
November 11, 2007