Join for our live streamed Sunday School (9:30am) and Worship Service (10:30am). You can view them HERE.

Naomi & Ruth Return

Ruth

Mar 6, 2022


by: Jack Lash Series: Ruth | Category: Faith | Scripture: Ruth 1:1–22

I. Introduction
A. Today we begin a four week series on the OT book of Ruth, one of my favorite stories.
1. The story of Ruth occurs in about 1060BC, near the end of the period of the judges and before Israel had its first king, probably around the time Samuel was growing up in the tabernacle.
2. But before we begin the story of Ruth, let’s talk about its end, for it’s the ending which attributes such enormous significance to the story of Ruth.
a. Ruth 4:13 So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife. And he went in to her, and the LORD gave her conception, and she bore a son... 17 They named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.
3. This genealogy, of course, is picked up in Matt.1:5-16, and carried from Obed/Jesse and David, down to our Lord Jesus Himself. Ruth is one of only three women named in Christ’s genealogy.
4. The fact that Ruth had the messiah in her loins, so to speak, means that the arrival of Naomi and Ruth in Bethlehem prefigures the arrival of another couple in the same town 1100 years later, one of whom had the messiah in her womb.
5. The story of Ruth can stand on its own as a story. But when you recognize it as a part of our story – because it is part of the story of Jesus our savior – it becomes deeply personal.
B. Ruth 1:1–22 In the days when the judges ruled there was a famine in the land, and a man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons. 2 The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. 3 But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. 4 These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. They lived there about ten years, 5 and both Mahlon and Chilion died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband. 6 Then she arose with her daughters-in-law to return from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the fields of Moab that the LORD had visited his people and given them food. 7 So she set out from the place where she was with her two daughters-in-law, and they went on the way to return to the land of Judah. 8 But 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. 9 The LORD grant that you may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband!” Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and wept. 10 And they said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.” 11 But Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters; why will you go with me? Have I yet sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? 12 Turn back, my daughters; go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. If I should say I have hope, even if I should have a husband this night and should bear sons, 13 would you therefore wait till they were grown? Would you therefore refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, for it is exceedingly bitter to me for your sake that the hand of the LORD has gone out against me.” 14 Then they lifted up their voices and wept again. And Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. 15 And she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” 16 But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.” 18 And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more. 19 So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem. And when they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them. And the women said, “Is this Naomi?” 20 She said to them, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. 21 I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi, when the LORD has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?” 22 So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabite her daughter-in-law with her, who returned from the country of Moab. And they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of barley harvest.
II. Judges
A. It is hard not to notice the contrast between the book of Judges and the book of Ruth.
1. Judges is so brutal. Ruth is so tender.
2. Judges is very much written from a man’s perspective. Ruth from a woman’s.
3. Judges has to do with society and government. Ruth has to do with family and personal relations.
4. Judges is about people hurting each other. Ruth is about people helping each other.
5. Judges has many heroes: judges who delivered their people by means of the sword. Ruth has heroes as well, but they are heroes with humbler weapons by far: the weapons of love and service to others.
6. Judges portrays the nations outside of Israel as antagonistic and dangerous, Ruth shows that this isn’t always the case, but some in those nations are friendly and welcoming to God’s people, and even eager to become a part of God’s people.
B. Now I don’t mean to diminish the book of Judges or its heroes. As in Hebrews 11, they are to be exalted for their faith (Heb.11:32-34). I just want to draw attention to the fact that there is another kind of heroism which, in all its subtly and gentleness is just as brave, just as powerful, and just as effective.
III. Ruth
A. Naomi and her husband moved to Moab and remained there ten years before Ruth returned. We aren’t given a time line of their lives there, but it seems that Naomi’s husband died before her sons married. The impression we get is that the two boys were teenagers when they moved to Moab, and then they married when they became adults. So, Ruth probably married somewhere in the middle of the ten years, meaning that she became a widow after only a few years, at an early age. In a society which treasured having children early and often, she hadn’t had a child yet, reinforcing the theory that her marriage was short-lived.
1. Think Amber. This was a major trauma.
B. She wasn’t presented with a choice, she was told to go back to her people.
C. But she insisted on going. Why would she do so?
D. Why did she make such an astonishing choice: to go with an old widow to her homeland – which was a foreign country to Ruth – in order to care for her, as opposed to returning to her own people and family and friends? What was different between her and Orpah?
1. Mary Ann: caring for seniors is not a glorious task. Some of you have cared for your parents, etc.
E. Something about the life of Israel was compelling to her. How much she understood we don’t know, but to her God’s people had the fragrance of life (2Cor.2:16) — so much so that she counted everything else as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing the God of Israel. – Phil.3:8
F. Ruth wasn’t originally interested in Naomi, but in Naomi’s son. And yet in the purposes of God, it seems that God was actually using Naomi’s son to draw Ruth to Naomi. And using Naomi to draw Ruth to Naomi’s God.
G. At GPC, we have our own Ruth. Her name is Amanda. And as soon as I heard her story, I thought of Ruth. (She has given me permission to share it.)
1. Just as Naomi grew up in Israel, so Amanda’s husband Stephen grew up in church, the son of a pastor, in fact. But after he left home, he wandered from the faith and from the church.
2. Just a few years ago his mother died, and God used this to convict Stephen that he needed to return to Him like the prodigal son. So, he went to Amanda and he said, “I need to go back to the Lord and His church. So, we either need to break up, or we need to get married and follow the Lord together.” What a choice to be confronted with! What was Amanda going to do?
3. Well, amazingly God had prepared Amanda for this very moment. She did not grow up in a Christian home and she had a difficult childhood, to say the least. But God had shown Himself to her in various ways, but she had never known what to do with it. She knew that God was there and that He had His eye on her. It was as if she knew there was a light for her but didn’t know where to go to get into it.
4. And when Stephen presented her with the two options, she knew what this meant. She knew it meant walking into the light which she’d longed to walk into since she was a little girl!
5. So, what was her answer? “Where you go I will go. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” – just like Ruth!
H. You know, every person who truly comes to Christ and His church says this to God’s people: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”
1. And the two always go together. You can’t take God to be your God without also taking God’s people to be your people. And you can’t take God’s people to be your people without also taking God to be your God. They come as a package.
2. Our true family is made up of those who also belong to Christ.
3. The Bible heroes and the Christians of old are our forefathers.
4. When you come into the community of faith, you enter a whole new life, and you leave the old behind.
IV. Naomi
A. Think about what this dear woman had been through!
1. In those days women were pretty dependent on their husbands to support them.
2. Naomi and her husband were very glad to give birth to two boys, to help their dad work the fields.
3. Imagine when Elimelech died. Not only was Naomi left without her partner, but she was left to raise her two boys on her own. Surely, they bore the brunt of the work in the fields.
4. But then, after her sons married, they both died, leaving three women to care for themselves, and to work the fields alone. And remember she was in a foreign land, with no extended family support.
5. As you know, I have a daughter who has lived the last 20 years or so in West Africa. Recently she moved to a rather large city, and her father’s heart is relieved in a number of ways, one of them being that when she lived in her former town she had to make meals for her family from scratch three times a day. It too almost the entire day and by the end of the day she was exhausted.
6. I can just imagine life for these three women: working the fields, preparing food from grain and vine, storing food for winter. Not only were they all heartbroken from losing their husbands, but they were working themselves to the bone.
B. This is why she said things like:
1. 13 “it is exceedingly bitter to me...that the hand of the LORD has gone out against me.”
2. 20-21 “Do not call me Naomi (pleasant); call me Mara (bitter), for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. 21...”Why call me Naomi, when the LORD has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?” It felt like one tragedy after another.
C. Beloved, these verses are here for you and me, because sometimes we feel the same way, don’t we? Sometimes we feel like the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with us and brought calamity upon us.
1. And God put these verses here because He wants us to see that, for God’s people, even when life seems bitter, it never stays that way, the story never ends that way. Naomi’s story had such a happy ending that it made it into the Bible and ultimately it brought us Jesus!
D. What an enormous disjunction there often is between how we first experience something and how it ultimately turns out! How wrong our feelings of bitterness are!
E. How wrong Naomi was when she uttered these words and thought them in her heart: “I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty.”
1. She had lost perspective. When she originally left Israel, she was not full, she actually went away empty, didn’t she? That’s the whole reason they left for Moab.
2. And in order for the messiah to come, an important ingredient was required from Moab.
3. Without knowing it, she went away empty and came back full. But that’s not how it appeared to her at the moment.
4. And when she came back to Israel, she felt like she was coming back empty. But was she?
5. In one sense, she was bringing back with her the greatest treasure the world had ever known. For she brought Ruth back with her, and inside of Ruth was an egg which later became her grandson Obed, whose seed became Jesse, whose seed became David, whose seed eventually became Jesus.
F. This is the same with God’s people. We may feel empty, but we have the greatest Treasure in the universe inside of us.
G. Remember Satan’s first temptation – in the garden. Basically, he was trying to make Adam and Eve feel deprived – even though they were actually lavished with an immense amount of privilege.
H. The Last Battle by CS Lewis — (Tirian, the king of Narnia, had been captured by the enemy. He was tied up to a tree, exhausted and starving. Aslan, the great lion, of course, is the Christ figure in the story.) He thought of other Kings who had lived and died in Narnia in old times and it seemed to him that none of them had ever been so unlucky as himself. He thought of his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather King Rilian who had been stolen away by a Witch when he was only a young prince and kept hidden for years in the dark caves beneath the land of the Northern Giants. But then it had all come right in the end, for two mysterious children had suddenly appeared from the land beyond the world’s end and had rescued him so that he came home to Narnia and had a long and prosperous reign. “It’s not like that with me,” said Tirian to himself. Then he went further back and thought about Rilian’s father, Caspian the Seafarer, whose wicked uncle King Miraz had tried to murder him and how Caspian fled away into the woods and lived among the Dwarfs. But that story too had all come right in the end: for Caspian also had been helped by children—only there were four of them that time—who came from somewhere beyond the world and fought a great battle and set him on his father’s throne. “But it was all long ago,” said Tirian to himself. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen now.” And then he remembered how those same four children who had helped Caspian had been in Narnia over a thousand years before; and it was then that they had done the most remarkable thing of all. For then they had defeated the terrible White Witch and ended the Hundred Years of Winter, and after that all four of them had reigned at Cair Paravel, and their reign had been the Golden Age of Narnia. And Aslan had come into that story a lot. He had come into all the other stories too, as Tirian now remembered. “Aslan—and children from another world,” thought Tirian. “They have always come in when things were at their worst. Oh, if only they could now.” And he called out “Aslan! Aslan! Aslan! Come and help us now.” But the darkness and the cold and the quietness went on just the same. “Let ME be killed,” cried the King. “I ask nothing for myself. But come and save Narnia.” And still there was no change in the night or the wood, but there began to be a kind of change inside Tirian. Without knowing why, he began to feel a faint hope. And he felt somehow stronger.
1. Just like Tirian could remember the examples of his forefathers in the midst of a desperate circumstance, so we can remember Ruth and others and remind ourselves that even in the stories with the happiest endings, things look very bleak and dark.
V. Orpah
A. Orpah isn’t a central figure in this story, but there’s an important lesson to learn from her part.
B. At first, Orpah was also inclined to go to Israel with Naomi. She joined with Ruth in v.10 in saying, “No, we will return with you to your people.”
C. But Naomi’s persistence finally persuaded her to return to her own people.
D. Some people come close to the kingdom (Mark 12:34), some have an open door to walk through, but tragically they don’t. It’s right there for the taking, and they don’t take it.
E. Sometimes they even look like they’re going to take it, but in the end they don’t.
F. The rich young ruler was such a person (Mark 10:17-22). The opportunity was right there before Him, but He walked away. Salvation and life was within arm’s reach, but he refused it for something as stupid as money.
G. The world’s Orpahs and rich young rulers are such a tragedy!
H. So many are attracted to the light, but they never really latch on. They hover for a while, but in the end, there is too much to give up.
I. They come to church for a while, they like hanging out with God’s people who are waiting for the Bridegroom to return, but they have no oil in their lamps. And eventually, the open door which beckoned them will be closed and they’ll be left out (Matt.25:1-13).
J. What about you? Don’t be an Orpah. Be a Ruth, who won’t take no for an answer, who can’t be persuaded not to come. She’s going take the kingdom by force if she has to (Matt.11:12).