Thank you so much for coming and giving me the privilege of talking to you. I love to talk about the providence of God. Ruth is a hard book. It’s a beautiful book. It’s a beautiful little story with a great God. It’s probably due to the fact that we are studying Ruth that two thirds of you are women. This is the closest thing to a women’s conference I’ve ever done, and that’s okay. There’s also a lot of gray hair out there. Let me assure you that the hero in this story is not Ruth, it’s Naomi. This is a book about Naomi, and she was the older one. She was dealt the worst blow — six of them — and learned how to trust God in them.

So there’s something here for the Ruths at the younger end, and the Naomis at the older end, and the Elimelechs who die, and the Mahlons and the Chilions who die, and the Boazes who are a little bit older and in the middle, used by God to bring wonderful blessing into a broken woman’s life. It’s really a good book. I like this book, and I preached on it back in 1984. I dug out those old sermons to work on it. I’ve been reveling in it now for some days and getting it all fresh again for myself. I hope that it’s fresh for you.

I would suggest that in the days here, if the rain stays, you go away and read it four times. Just read the whole book four times, which takes about 25 minutes to get through at a leisurely pace. Read it before each session. You’ve missed one, but maybe you already read it. I hope you did. But before tomorrow morning read it again, and then before tomorrow night read it again, and then before Thursday morning read it again. My plan is to take one chapter for every session that we’re together and to work it over and draw out of it all that we can in the minutes that we have.

Sorrows Like Sea Billows

I’m assuming that the peace is flowing like a river for a lot of you, and sorrow is billowing over a lot of you. Some of you are the very same person in which both of those are happening all at once. So there’s good things for everybody here. May the Holy Spirit come and minister to our hearts and fit us. As I thought about this time together, I looked at the age range. Not all of you gave your age, but they gave me a little booklet that told me how about many women there are, how many men there are, how many Presbyterians there are, where you come from, and things like that. It made me ponder.

My dad is 81. When you think about sweet and bitter providences, and learning how to live with hard things in life, you think that you pass through those and you learn how to handle it; you learn how to rest and cope. Yet here I am, I’m 55 and my dad is 81, and I’m ministering to my dad a lot these days. He lives in Easley, South Carolina, and I live in Minneapolis; this is not easy. My dad has celebrated a 36th wedding anniversary and a 25th wedding anniversary with two different women, and I love both of my moms. My biological mother is with Jesus. She was killed in a car accident, and that’s one of the hardest things, I think, I’ve walked through.

Just last year, his wife, my stepmother, went into a nursing home. That’s not a happy situation. He lives in a big empty house — totally empty. It’s a huge house, and it’s not good. I’m trying to convince him there’s a better way to do this, but 81-year-olds are not easy to convince of anything. To leave a 25-year house is one of the hardest things to do. When one of the people in an elderly couple gets farther along and the ability for anybody to cope with them is done, they have to do something.

In other words, you don’t get through the billows. It doesn’t get over until you die and then it’s okay; it’s really okay. So I’m aware that my dad is still learning. I’m ministering Ruth to my dad and reminding him of what he preached for 60-plus years. We never get beyond the need to be exhorted with these things.

Another context with regard to the women is that Ruth really is quite a model woman in this text. Naomi is too in her own way. We’ll talk about that. But I noticed in the seminars, there’s a Becoming a Godly Woman choice that some of you can make and that’s good. That’s a really good link up with what we’re dealing with here. I’m married to one of these and I’ll tell you a few stories along the way about that, because Ruth was really amazing. The woman Ruth, not just the book, but the woman Ruth was really quite remarkable in some of the things that she did, and we’ll talk about that too.

I’m a pastor, son, and husband, and so breaking over my heart are not just my own difficulties with my children and my marriage and my father and my whatever, but my people. There’s a lot of people in our church. The last thing somebody told me on the phone last night was that my friend Doug Hyle’s mother, on the way back from Alaska in a plane, had a heart attack at 30,000 feet and died on the plane. I think he was on his way up to Montana to bring the body home from where the plane made an emergency landing. What a hard thing for his father, the husband, to be sitting beside your wife on the plane and have her slump over and die. We’ll be dealing with that. This is like the other pastors here, 10 or 12 of you, who don’t just bear with your own bitter providences, but everybody else’s as well.

This is a very great book. It’s a book that I hope will make this a memorable time together for us. So read it, ponder it, and pray over it, and I’ll do my best to open it for us.

Lessons from the Book of Ruth

I’ll list a few things about the book of Ruth just to get you ready to be thinking and praying. It’s a story for people who wonder where God is when there are no dreams and no visions and no prophets. That’s one of the remarkable things about this book. This really is wisdom literature. There’s not a prophet in this book. There are no dreams in this book. There are no visions in this book. This book is written very much like the way you live. It is a book where God is almost entirely in the background, not quite as much so as the Book of Esther. The Book of Esther, the Book of Job, and the Book of Ruth all have the same message; they’re all about providence.

In Esther, the word God is never even mentioned. Isn’t that remarkable? In Ruth, he’s mentioned often, but he never sends anybody to say anything. There’s no prophet. He’s just acting, like in your life. I’m here to persuade you that he’s acting in your life. They couldn’t see it any more easily than you could see it because there were no lightning striking and no thunder sounding in the Book of Ruth. There’s nothing extraordinary in this book; it’s all ordinary. Job, of course, has a lot of extraordinary things. You read about Satan dealing with God in heaven, and then you have those amazing chapters at the end.

But Ruth is really a modern book. It’s like it’s written by a modern person who’s not sure they even believe in prophets and dreams and visions, which of course are real, because they’re all over the Bible. But Ruth lets us feel, “I could have lived that life. I could have done any of that.” It’s a book for people who wonder where God is when there’s no extraordinary lightning flashing. It’s a book for people who experience, not just a tragedy, but six tragedies back to back. One of the things that I marvel at in life is that God does not apportion out pain evenly. Some people hardly get any, and some people, when they stand up from falling down, bump their head on the cabinet. Then, when they reach for their head, they hit their finger on the cabinet. And when they cry out about their finger, they wake up the baby who starts crying. It just comes one after another. Some people just seem to be cursed, and they feel that way. We’ll talk about Naomi’s experience like that.

It’s for people who wonder about whether a lifetime of integrity and commitment-keeping is worth it. Some of you are in marriages right now and you just wonder whether it’s worth it to keep the promise. There’s a lot about integrity in this book, and commitment, and hanging in there when it looks like there’s no future.

It’s a story for people who wonder whether anything great could come out of ordinariness. Most of you in this room feel very ordinary. You wonder if there is anything significant that can come from an ordinary life? The day before yesterday I was preaching, and I closed with an illustration about JI Packer, who almost committed suicide when he was a student at Oxford because he was surrounded by perfectionistic teaching and was rescued, thank God, by John Owen from 350 years before through a book on indwelling sin, which taught him how to understand his own sin nature that abides. He tells how he went as an unbeliever to an Oxford Christian Union meeting and a man named Earl Langston preached — an absolute no-name. And he said, “The scales fell from my eyes and I saw the way in.”

Now maybe you don’t even know who JI Packer is, but he’s one of my living heroes who teaches theology up at Vancouver, wherever Northwest is from here. He’s alive and doing well, and has written lots of books. He was brought to Christ by a nobody, and of course, so was Billy Graham. That was an illustration to me of one of the points of this book. This is a very ordinary situation with a little family that’s out of the way in a little place, but the book ends on an absolutely stunning note of universal significance to this family.

In the Days of the Judges

So it’s a very refreshing book. It has, to me, the right balance of pain and pleasure with some sweet, good, happy things that happen in this book. Some of the things that happen make you want to dance they’re so happy. There’s some other things that are so sad you wonder how Naomi survived. So it’s good. Let’s read chapter one. Take your Bibles out. I’ll read the entire chapter, and then we’ll get into it. The reason it comes where it does is because of Ruth 1:1, which says:

In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land and a certain man of Bethlehem …

From our vantage point in redemptive history, you just have to hear that in a certain way, because the book ends with Boaz’s lineage, which is Obed, then Jesse, and then David, which leads to the son of David — the Christ born in Bethlehem. I don’t think the writer probably knew that, but from our standpoint in a canonical understanding of this book, I doubt that was an accident in God’s providence.

…a man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons. The name of the man was Elimelech.

Now Elimelech means my God is king. Now that’s very significant. His name is my God is king and he drops dead. That poses the problem that the book is written to solve — namely, “Is God really your king if you drop dead? Can God do anything with a situation as king if the man whose name is my God is king drops dead at the beginning of the story?” The answer to that is yes, and that’s what the book is meant to teach.

The name of the man was Elimelech (my God is king) and the name of his wife Naomi (pleasant), 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. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. They lived there about ten years, and both Mahlon and Chilion died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.

Reading between the Lines

It’s not mentioned, but notice that they were married for ten years and how many children did they have? None. These were two barren marriages for ten years in a culture that put everything into children. She had to feel cursed, thinking, “I blew it. I shouldn’t have come to Moab.” Maybe she did, but we’ll talk about that.

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. 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. 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. 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. And they said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.”

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? 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, 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.” Then they lifted up their voices and wept again. And Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.

And she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” 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. 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.” And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more.

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?” She said to them, “Do not call me Naomi (pleasant); call me Mara (bitter), for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. 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?” 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.

In that last line, the writer has a little twinkle in his eye. Guess what’s going to happen at the barley harvest? And yet, this is sad. The writer didn’t tip his hand entirely yet. This first chapter is a chapter of pain with a little window of hope at the end of it, which will be significant because Naomi can’t see that window for anything. That’s very significant.

The Hidden Smile of God

We have a lot to learn here, so let’s go back now and see what we can see. Ruth 1:1, as I already mentioned, indicates that this was in the time of the judges. You know the time of the judges. Joshua had died after he brought the people into the promised land after Moses couldn’t. God prospered them, and they took the land that he had appointed to them for centuries. There was a 400-year period of the judges, and it was a terrible time in the history of Israel. The Book of Judges is probably the most perplexing, horrible book in the Old Testament, because there are no heroes in it. Everybody’s bad. Samson is bad, and he’s one of the best in the book. Deborah comes off perhaps better than any of them, but it’s a bad book. It’s a bad history. They sin, and everybody does what’s right in his own eyes. Do you remember the last verse in the book? In Judges 21:25 it says:

In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

This was one of the darkest times of Israel’s history. They would sin, and God would send enemies against them. They would cry for help, and God in his mercy would raise up a judge, and then deliver them. There would be a season of peace, but they would rebel and murmur again, and then he would send enemies and they would cry out again. That was the rhythm all the way through. So this little book, Ruth, comes right after Judges 21:25, where every man did what was right in his own eyes, and the first verse of Ruth says this happened during that period. That’s significant. This book happened in the darkest of times, which raises the question, “Can anything good be happening? Can God in His amazing providence, while all this junk is going on in Israel, be doing anything long term and glorious?” That’s what this book is about.

Hidden in the midst of the chaos and the evil and the failure, there was this little family of tragedy with God quietly at work, bringing us to the last chapter and the last verse about David, and the son of David, Jesus the Messiah, on the way. So position this carefully in the flow of biblical history and you’ll, I think, be helped in these points.

In the very last verse, Ruth 4:22, the child born to Ruth and Boaz, during the period of the judges, was named Obed. He becomes the father of Jesse, and Jesse becomes the father of David, who led Israel to her greatest time — the heights of glory — along with Solomon. So during the worst of time, a family was being providentially created so that from that line the king of the greatest time would come. God was plotting for the glory of his people at a national level, and for this little family’s personal blessing as well.

God Moves in a Mysterious Way

I gave Marty Goetz a song, and he’s probably never heard of this song because it’s not very popular. In fact, I had a very grievous reminder of that on the website the other day by somebody whose theology I do not admire and may refer to this person later. One of the books that I wrote is called The Hidden Smile of God, published in 2001. That title comes from a line in this hymn and by William Cowper:

God moves in a mysterious way,
     His wonders to perform.
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
     And rides upon the storm.

Ye fearful saints fresh courage take,
     The clouds that you so much dread,
Are big with mercy and will break
     In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
     But trust him for his grace.
Behind a frowning providence,
     He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,
     Unfolding every hour.
The bud may have a bitter taste,
     But sweet will be the flower.

Deep in unfathomable mines
     Of never-failing skill,
He treasures up his bright designs,
     And works his sovereign will.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,
     And scan his work in vain.
God is his own interpreter,
     And he will make it plain.

This theologian quoted my book and said, “I just ran across this little ditty,” and then he quoted this hymn, and said, “A lot of evangelicals are believing this sort of thing these days.” That’s really sad. We don’t just believe them; we die for them. Ruth is all about “behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face.” If there’s not a smiling face of God behind the frowning providences of our lives, with divine good and godly purposes in them, then I’m quitting the ministry and will eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow I will die.

The Book of Job, which I taught I think the last time I was here, you remember from reading it and studying the Bible yourself is summed up by James 5:11, which says:

You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

Job is about the mercy of God’s purposes. That’s what it’s mainly about, and that’s what Ruth is mainly about. It’s about the worst of times — Judges — leading to the best of times through an inconsequential little family.

The Sorrows of Naomi

Let’s take Ruth 1:1–5 and see what they say. They describe Naomi’s misery. Let me give you six hammer blows against this poor woman.

First, there was a famine in Judah where she lived. Now who causes famines? Who does Naomi think causes famines? Naomi believes that God causes famines. Now we’re going to test whether Naomi’s right here. I think she’s right, and I’m going to commend her. Leviticus 26:3 gives us insight into this. This is something she would have known about. I didn’t choose a New Testament text. I could choose texts about Jesus, where he stills the storm and he commands the winds. He commands waves. Jesus is clearly in charge of the weather, but you didn’t have to know about Jesus to know this. Leviticus 26:3 says:

If you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them, then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase …

So, clearly God has the authority to give rains and make increase, and to withhold rains and make famine. She knew this. She was not going to solve the problem of a bitter providence by saying, “The devil caused the famine.” In fact, look at Psalm 105. I just have to give you this off my front burner from a sermon that I preached two weeks ago I think. This is Psalm 105:16–27:

[God] summoned a famine on the land and broke all supply of bread, he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave. His feet were hurt with fetters; his neck was put in a collar of iron; until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him. The king sent and released him; the ruler of the peoples set him free; he made him lord of his house and ruler of all his possessions, to bind his princes at his pleasure and to teach his elders wisdom. Then Israel came to Egypt; Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham. And the Lord made his people very fruitful and made them stronger than their foes. He turned their hearts to hate his people, to deal craftily with his servants. He sent Moses, his servant, and Aaron, whom he had chosen. They performed his signs …

It says he summoned this famine, and you all know that he sent Joseph down there to position him to become the vice president in Egypt so that he could gather all that grain together, so that when the Israelites were starving, they’d send down there and be rescued and saved. I said to the people I preached to, “If you want to save the people, there’s an easier way to do it. Don’t summon the famine.” So Naomi is right that this is of God here.

Second, they make the difficult decision to go to Moab. Was it the right decision? The writer doesn’t tell us. I don’t know, but that’s playing with fire because the Bible taught very plainly to separate yourself from Moab and the surrounding nations — not to intermarry with them and not to worship their gods. So they went to Moab and what happened? Her husband died. And what did she say to herself? She may have said, “We should have never come. We could have died in Judah.” So there was famine, and secondly, there was exile from their homeland; that’s hard.

Third, there was the death of her husband.

Fourth, her sons took Moabite wives and there are these foreign marriages to Orpah and Ruth, and that must have grieved their mother’s heart. She probably thought, “Oh, dear, they don’t have Jewish wives now, will they ever go home?”

Fifth, they had no children in ten years for either marriage.

And sixth, both of Naomi’s sons died.

So this is the point of building up Ruth 1:1–5. There is a sixfold tragedy — famine, exile, death of her husband, foreign marriages, 10 years of childlessness, and the death of her sons. This woman must have felt like, “I’ve been abandoned. I’ve been absolutely abandoned by God. He’s beating up on me big time because I blew it by coming to Moab. I probably encouraged my husband to go to Moab.” Then in Ruth 1:6, Naomi gets word that the Lord has visited his people and given them food. So the Lord took and the Lord gave. He gave them food, and she decided to return to Judah.

Turn Away, My Daughters

Now let’s go to Ruth 1:8–13. Why is so much space given to Naomi’s effort to persuade her daughters-in-law not to go with her? It’s kind of odd. Why not just let them come? Or why would this writer spend so much space in Ruth 1:8–13 on this exchange?

The first reason is to emphasize her misery. In Ruth 1:11–12, Naomi says:

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? Turn back, my daughters; go your way, for I am too old to have a husband.

In other words, Naomi has nothing to offer them. There was this levirate marriage law that said if there was a brother surviving a man who died, he should marry the widow and raise up offspring to his name (Deuteronomy 25:5–10). But that wasn’t an option. There was nothing Naomi could offer. She was saying, “If I got married tonight and had a child nine months from now, would you wait 18 years or so before you could have the levirate experience of a husband? So go home, go home.”

I think the point here is that she was destitute. She had nothing to offer them, and she was saying, “If you come with me, you will have the same experience of destitution that I’m now experiencing.” So I think this is the first reason, as Ruth 1:13 says:

No, my daughters, for it is exceedingly bitter to me for your sake that the hand of the Lord has gone out against me.

In other words, “Don’t come with me, God is against me.” That’s pretty devastating.

I think the second reason for these verses is to prepare us for the levirate custom, which in fact is going to be the solution to the problem of childlessness. Boaz, as a distant relative, will emerge on the scene, and it’s precisely this levirate custom that Naomi was referring to here that’s going to be the solution. So this kind of gives us a little pointer and a glimpse into what is coming. But Naomi is so wounded, so hopeless, and so beat up on that she can’t see any hope. She’s forgotten Boaz. It isn’t even in her mind that there’s a Boaz in her family. In fact, there’s two men who could have performed levirate marriage, because Boaz has to get his way around somebody who had priority over him. There are at least two distant relatives that could have married both of these girls if she would have thought about it, but she didn’t think about it.

Seeing through the Tragedy

Let me just pause for a lesson here. I see this in a lunch that I had yesterday with a man. I see it in one of my sons. The lesson is this: Pain, sorrow, and tragedy can mount to the point where they make people blind to the hope that’s really there in their lives. You can experience so many bad things for so long that you almost become in love with your pain. You don’t call it that, and you’d never say that, but you begin to start to cloak yourself with your pain.

There was a man in the Job series we did here last year, who confessed to me several months later, saying, “I came to that thing feeling so sorry for myself” — he was a widower — “but I realized by the end of that that I was my biggest problem. I had to be shaken with Job and his pain out of my self-pity so that I could begin to live again.” He was just remarried by the way. He’s probably 70, and God did a Boaz kind of thing for him. He won’t do it for all of you, but he did it for him. I don’t think that would’ve happened had he stayed wallowing in his misery. I think the lesson here is this: Get in each other’s faces with hope, because you’ve got to be the hope for the people around you who just don’t see it. You may see it everywhere.

This guy I had lunch with yesterday has been to my church three times. He’s an alcoholic, smokes like a chimney, and has for the last 47 years. He’s got terminal cancer, which has scared the hell out of him, literally, and he came to church when the doctor told him he had about six months to live. He hadn’t been in a church for 50 years, and he reeked to high heaven and was half drunk when he got himself through the service about two months ago or so. He came up to me then, and he took me and spoke to me. Now this is going to be on tape, and you all understand I’m quoting somebody here, so this is not the kind of language I use, all right? He said, “Pastor, anybody that pisses me off like you did I want to get to know.” And I said, “Good. You’re the kind of guy I’d like to eat lunch with.”

I went over to his house that afternoon, and I hadn’t been in a house like this. He lives in Northeast Minneapolis, which is just full of pain and alcoholism. He has lived with a woman that’s not his wife for 13 years. His TV was blaring and he was sitting around with beer cans and ashtrays everywhere. The place reeked and was an absolute pig pen, and I sat down there and shared the gospel with him, and he fell on the floor, crying out for mercy. He prayed a prayer and I’m thankful, and he’s been back twice since then. I have a couple in the church that I knew had been through some of this stuff. I knew their background, and I knew they wouldn’t be offended by his language. I knew they could handle this, so I sicked them on him and they’ve been after him for all these months.

One of them called me on the phone on Sunday or Saturday and said — let’s call him Joe — “Joe would really like to see you again.” So I called Joe on Sunday afternoon, and I said, “I have one little window on Monday for lunch before I head out of town. Let’s have lunch.” He’s always drunk, and he said, “Well, when?” And I said, “Anytime tomorrow?” He said, “Well, the later the better because I don’t function in the morning.” So I said, “How about 11:45? So we went.

The point is this: He’s absolutely hopeless. He’s scared to death. He believes in hell. He believes, in his head, in Jesus. He’s willing to say anything I tell him to say, but he’s getting no victory. He’s got to yield because there’s a deep rebellion in here. He says so because I said, “Do you realize that in yesterday’s service at our church, there were 30 guys from teen challenge — some of them your age, some younger, some older, but all of them are exactly like you, getting healed by Jesus by this terrific ministry of drug rehabilitation?” He said, “I’ve been to 13 treatment centers.” And I said, “Have you ever been to a Christian one?” He said, “No.” I said, “I want you to go.” He said, “I’m not going to go.” And I said, “You’re a rebel, that’s why you’re not getting better.” He said, “I know I’m a rebel.”

He smokes these Camels with no filter, and they look like they’re trying to kill you, which they are. I said to him, “You know what? There’s signs of hope all over your life. I can point to them. You got to my church. It was one of our young guys that got you there. I have no idea how he got you there, but you came back. And you walked up and used that awful language to me, and I went to visit you. I don’t go to visit people in my church — I mean visitors who come, good night. There’s 200 visitors every Sunday, but I came to visit you. Why? I don’t know. It was in my heart to do it. I don’t take people out to lunch the day before I go out of town. Gary and Brenda, they don’t get into people’s lives like this. There’s hope all over you. You’re scared of hell. You preach to those people at the bar, and they tell you to be quiet. Don’t you see hope, man?” He said, “No.”

That’s where Naomi was. She couldn’t see anything because she had been so weighed down. So when you know a Naomi, don’t agree with her that there’s no hope. Don’t agree with her. You be her hope. You keep telling her that there’s hope, and show it to her and live it out for her. My hope for this guy is that I’m going to be in his life until he dies — and he’s going to die soon — and that he’ll yield to the lordship of Jesus before it’s too late.

Ruth’s Radical Faithfulness

The third reason, I think, the writer spends so much time on this is to mark Ruth’s faithfulness. These verses are spelled out in such detail because it makes Ruth’s faithfulness to Naomi appear so amazing. In Ruth 1:14, it says:

Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.

Then there’s this second entreaty from Noami, saying, “Go away, go away,” but in Ruth 1:15 there is this bleak description of Naomi’s future, and her statement “God is against me” makes Ruth’s embrace of her God stunning. Let’s read this in Ruth 1:16–17:

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. Where you die I will die …

In other words, “I’m in this forever. I’m never coming home. If you die, I’m not going back to mama.” Isn’t that amazing? Why would she do that? Well, Ruth 1:16 probably tells you:

Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

That’s the most amazing thing here. After Naomi says, “The hand of the Lord is against me,” Ruth says, “Your God will be my God.” There are a lot of lessons here, but here’s one: Don’t be afraid of speaking about your belief in the providence of God in the hard things of life for fear that you’re going to make people unbelievers. You will do that to some people. Some people will be turned away by the truth, but others are going to be mightily established. Ruth was. She heard all this stuff coming out of Naomi’s mouth, like, “God did this to me, and God did this to me, and God did this to me,” and Ruth’s response was, “Your God will be my God.”

It doesn’t go into detail as to why in the world she would have a faith like that, but she had 10 years with, perhaps, a godly husband, who taught her about the Red Sea, God’s care in the wilderness, the Jordan River, and the defeat of the peoples, and maybe he told the story of redemption and a coming one, and she believed it. So when she heard Naomi’s narration of the sovereignty of God in her life, she wasn’t put off by it. She said, “Well, yeah, if there was a famine, and if your husband died and your sons died, and they married people like us, God is still in charge. In fact, that I would be married, maybe through sin, and be folded into a Jewish family when they should have stayed home, is all grace to me.”

In fact, Ruth is mentioned in the genealogy in Matthew 1. There are only three or four women mentioned, and they’re all foreigners. This is grace here. Maybe it was a sin for them to go to Moab; the writer doesn’t care to tell us one way or the other regarding how they went to Moab and they married. But for Ruth, it was life. She came into the line of King Jesus. She didn’t know that fully yet, but that’s what was going on. She knew she had been attached to the true God, and she wasn’t about to walk away because God was sovereign. She was going to bow and submit, and say, “Yes, God is sovereign. Yes, these are bitter providences. I have no better solution than to say God is sovereign over these things.” What a woman. So here we are women.

An Exemplary Woman

This is something to keep in mind for the ideal woman. I’ll tell you what I think an ideal woman is. First, she has faith in God that sees beyond present, bitter setbacks. She’s not naive. She tastes it, and it breaks over her like a billow. But when it comes, she doesn’t turn away from God. She doesn’t say it was Satan and not God; she embraces it, cries over it, experiences the pain of it, and believes in that God. She trusts him. She says with Job:

Though he slay me, yet will I trust him (Job 13:15).

Second, she admits that he’s sovereign and that there are bitter setbacks and bitter providences as well as sweet ones.

Third, because she believes in his sovereign goodness behind bitter setbacks, she becomes a woman who is free to leave securities and take risks. That’s what I’m looking for in women. There’s a lot of women who are sold out to security. You hear them talk about things like, “Will my children be safe on the mission field?” Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.

I see this in the fact that Ruth was leaving everything she knew. She didn’t know Judah. She didn’t know there would be a Boaz. She probably thought, “I’m going with a cursed widow to nowhere, and when she dies, I’m going to be in the same grave with her a few years later. There’ll be nobody to marry because I’ve committed myself to this woman. If I were to marry another man, not in this family, I’d have to link up with another mother-in-law, and I would have to leave Naomi. I’ve committed myself to Naomi. I’m a widow until the day I die in a foreign land.” That’s a very strong woman. That’s a commitment that’s not easy to keep.

Fourth, she has radical commitment in relationships. Some of you are in terrible marriages. Some of you are newer in those, and some have been there for 40 years, and they may not get better. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. You’re wondering, “Is it worth it to stay?” Ruth thought commitment was worth it.

And fifth, she had courage to venture into the unknown. I’m married to one of these women. I’ll try to wrap this up the next minute or two and we’ll just pick up wherever we leave off. My wife is Noël, and I’m just giving you an illustration of what I mean here. This is the kind of woman I say I’m looking for, not to marry — I’ve got one, thank you. I don’t need another one, because she’s the Ruth type in this way.

I was preaching on something and I quit — this was about 17 years ago. I was new in the pastorate, and I was so discouraged. I came home one night, and I sat down at the dining room table when we were still at 1604 Elliot Avenue. The bedroom was right off the dining room, and she was in the bedroom doing something. This is to illustrate her Ruth-like abandon to do God’s will. I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself and wanting to quit the ministry, and I said out loud, “I think I’m going to go to Africa.” Out of the room came these words, “Tell me when to pack.” Isn’t that awesome? That’s awesome. Most women would say, “Not in a lifetime you’re going to Africa. Not with me, you’re not going.”

That’s my little picture of the ideal woman. Ruth, having heard that God is a sovereign God, who dealt a woman bitter providences, and yet she knew it was the true God. She had the commitment and the courage to venture out in new ways and head home.

I’ve got lots more to say about this chapter and maybe less to say about the second chapter, so it just might work out tomorrow morning that we will even things out. But I do want to keep my word. We’ll pick it up right here in Ruth 1:19–20.