The Story

Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land.

Ruth 1:1

This little book of Ruth is sandwiched between the Book of Judges on the one hand, and the First Book of Samuel on the other, two momentous books that remind us of the many varied and difficult experiences of the people of God in the Old Testament. And it shines out on the pages of the Old Testament like a light in the darkness, like a bright star in the night sky. It is, to my mind, one of the most moving and one of the most beautiful books of the Bible; and as we study this book of Ruth together I hope that we will see that its significance is out of all proportion to its length.

You will know that there are two books in the Old Testament that are named after women. One is the book of Ruth, and the other, of course, is the Book of Esther. Both of them are very, very different. Esther was a queen. Ruth was a very lowly peasant girl. Esther was a Jewess who married a Gentile. Ruth was a Gentile who married a Jew. The Book of Esther opens with a feast, while the Book of Ruth opens with a famine. The Book of Esther comes to a close with the hanging of an enemy; the Book of Ruth comes to a close with the birth of a child.

But both of these books, for all of their differences, are concerned with one issue, and that is the issue of God's preserving His own church in the world. There are times in the history of the world and in the history of the church when we are tempted to think that the church has no future, and that the cause of the church is doomed to extinction. Our detractors tell us that the work and witness of the church are no longer relevant, and that it is a dying institution. But I think that it is important to come to these great books of the Old Testament, particularly this Book of Ruth, to remind ourselves that the church can never be a dying institution because she is the preserve of God. She is under the direct supervision of God, who has pledged himself to the maintenance of His own cause, and to the furtherance of his own Gospel. He has promised that men will be blessed in and through the saving work of Christ, and the Book of Ruth reminds us that however low the cause of Truth might come before the eyes of men, before the eyes of God it is marching forward in triumphal procession, gathering momentum and blessing and changing the lives of men and women and children along the way. The Book of Ruth reminds us that to the uttermost the God who preserves his own church and his own cause in the world will save sinners and bring them into what the prophet Ezekiel called "the bond of his own covenant".

Ruth: an Overview

If we are to spend some time gleaning around the chapters of the Book of Ruth, then we need to understand something of the setting and the meaning and the themes that are covered in this great book of four chapters that we have in the Old Testament. It is important, I think, to take an overview of this great Book of Ruth, and to look at the movement there is over its chapters and across its pages and its verses.

I'm afraid sometimes that men and women have a view of God that he is some kind of static, unmoving entity in the sky, whereas what I discover in the Bible is that the God in the Bible is a God of movement, a God who changes the lives of men and women and who makes the most fundamental and the most radical difference in the heart and the home of an individual. Just as he made a difference to Ruth, he can make a difference to us.

To summarise the difference God makes, I want to borrow Warren Wiersbe's summary of the four chapters of the Book of Ruth. The first chapter of the Book of Ruth, is a chapter full of tears: it's a weeping chapter. It's a chapter of sorrow. I see Naomi weeping. I see Orpah weeping. I see Ruth weeping. There are all these tears, so many broken hearts; and yet that is the introduction for this great book of the Old Testament -- this weeping chapter filled with sorrow.

And then I come into Chapter two, the great working chapter, the chapter in which Ruth finds herself among the workers and among the people of Boaz, gleaning in his fields at the beginning of Bethlehem harvest. It's a chapter of service, a chapter in which Ruth is engaged in a great work that is full of spiritual significance and full of spiritual lessons and encouragement for her and for us.

And then I come into Chapter Three where I find Ruth waiting. She has got to be patient. She has to go to a certain place at a certain time and she has to wait for Boaz, and she has to wait on Boaz and she has to wait until Boaz can deal with and regulate all the affairs that concern her personally now that she's come as a stranger among God's people. It's a chapter full of submission in which Ruth bows before the Lord God, and before the person of Boaz, her kinsman redeemer, in which she waits, and her waiting is not in vain. It's the kind of waiting that David has described in Psalm 40 when he says, "I waited for the Lord my God, and he heard my cry, and he lifted me out of the pit."

The lesson of this third chapter is fundamental to our understanding of the story, and of the whole Gospel itself. There are many people in the world today who are waiting for something, something major that's going to intrude into their lives and improve their lot. They are waiting for some great act, some blinding flash, some brilliant miracle: one day, in the future, something is going to convert them, and make Christians out of them. But we are reminded in the word of God as well as in the experiences of our communities, that none of us has a future. None of us has the guarantee or the pledge of any more days or any more weeks or any more years. Christ, as one of the Puritans puts it, "makes great promises to death-bed repentants, but he makes no promises of death-bed repentance". He says to a man who turns to him even at the eleventh hour, that if he puts his trust in Him he will be saved, but he gives no man the guarantee of an eleventh hour repentance. He says to men and women to come to him, not when some great incident takes place in days to come, but when the voice of God in the gospel calls now. It's those who wait on the Lord that renew their strength; perhaps the problem for many people is that they are waiting for him when they should be waiting on him. Well, Chapter Three of Ruth is a waiting chapter, a submission chapter in which Ruth bows before the word and the law and the claims of God as every sinner must do who will come to Christ.

And then Chapter Four is the great wedding chapter, the great marriage, the final consummation of God's purposes for Ruth the Moabitess. She is joined in marriage to Boaz and a child is born. There, in the marriage of Ruth and Boaz there is great satisfaction that the purposes and the promises and the blessing of God have been enjoyed and experienced. So, in the course of this narrative, we move from sorrow through service and submission to satisfaction. And that is precisely the movement of the Gospel from beginning to end; the Gospel that comes to us in a world of sin and of sorrow, a world of broken hearts and broken dreams and broken promises and broken lives. A world that finds us burying our dead and mourning our dead and grieving our dead and fills us with all the aches and all the heartaches of living in a fallen world that is divorced from God.

And the Gospel that finds us in the midst of all this sin and sorrow and heartache brings us at last to the place of submission before Christ and satisfaction in Christ. If we have not experienced that great movement of the Grace of God in our soul then we have missed the greatest thing in the world. With all the problems and all the burdens and all the heartache of living in a sin-sick world, there is a Gospel that is able to bring the heart of man out of sorrow and into satisfaction, out of misery and into peace, out of the bondage of sin and the meaninglessness of our Godless life into the fulfilment and the completion and the purpose that there is in Jesus Christ.

Because until Jesus Christ fills the void in the heart of man, there will always be sorrow and there will always be heartache, there will always be meaningless and futility, and men will always waken up and say "What is it all for?". The world will continue to deceive and delude, to promise and to renege. Without a relationship with Jesus Christ, men will chase their dreams and pursue their plans down every road and every avenue of human experience and they will always return saying, "I did not find it there. I went down this road looking for it, looking for peace and meaning and satisfaction, looking for purpose, and at the end of it there was brokenness -- there were broken plans and broken dreams and it did not work and I left that place hopeless and more desperate than ever before. And then I went down this road and that road and the next road and every other road and I was chasing the wind". The Bible says that the man who "chases the wind" will "reap the whirlwind".

You see the man who takes his sins to a place which cannot deal with them will come back with them even worse than before. But the man who has come to Christ, who has bowed before Christ, who has come to see the fullness that there is in Christ, is the man who may still have burdens and heartaches and sorrow in this life; but he will have satisfaction and contentment in his soul: what the Bible calls "the peace that passes all understanding". Just look at all the avenues and all the roads of human experience and see crisis upon crisis upon crisis at the end of them all except one. Down that well-travelled road along which poor, needy sinners have gone, taking all their sins and all their burdens to the Saviour, they have found in him a resting-place and he has made them glad.

That, after all, is the great issue. Isaiah described the Saviour as 'the shadow of a great rock in a weary land' (Isaiah 32:2). Here is this great image of people living in the wilderness, open to all the problems of the wilderness: the sun beating mercilessly and the drought and the dryness and the barren desert all around them. All they want is some shelter, some rock, some shadow from the sun, something to keep them and to preserve them; to take away the burning, burning heat of the sun and the dryness and the barrenness of the desert and the meaninglessness of it all. God says there is a man, the God-man, who is like a hiding place in the storm, the shadow of a great rock in our weary life. To come to him is to experience the transition from emptiness to fulness, despair to rejoicing.

And that is exactly the movement and message of the Book of Ruth. It is possible for a human life to travel from sorrow to satisfaction, from tears to rejoicing, from bitterness to blessedness, from emptiness to fullness, from darkness to light, from chains and bondage and sin to liberty and freedom and covenant. Have you made that journey?

Ruth: the Times

But it is also important to notice the setting of the Book of Ruth. This short story is set for us very carefully and very precisely at a particular time in the Old Testament. We read in the opening verse: "It came to pass in the days when the judges ruled". Now, these are words that you can read very, very quickly and pass them by; but they are of tremendous significance.

This verse does not tell us at what point in the history of the judges the Book of Ruth was set, but we know from the New Testament that Boaz, who is to feature highly in the narrative, was the son of Rahab the harlot. She believed in God and was saved at the destruction of Joshua of Jericho when Joshua overthrew Jericho (Judges 2). That, I think, hints that this story took place very early on in the period of the judges.

Now if you know your Bible, you will know that there was one outstanding characteristic of this period of Old Testament history. It was something that occurred and recurred time and time again in this period that we know as the period of the judges and is covered for us in the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. And you will find it summarised in the last verse of the Book of Judges. We read in Judges 21:25 that "in those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did that which was right in his own eyes."

I believe that in order to understand the Book of Ruth, we need to underline and underscore this summary of the period in which and during which the Book of Ruth is set.

What kind of days were those days in which the judges ruled? The Bible tells us. They were days when there was no king, when there was no person occupying the throne. Instead, God sent judges to rule and to lead the people, to declare the word and will of God to the people. When these judges were raised up God delivered his people from the hands of their enemies who were oppressing them and who were keeping them in bondage. But this whole period had one great characteristic and it was that "every man did that which was right in his own eyes".

The problem was not that they did not have a Bible. They had the word of God and they had the law of God preserved for them in the law code of the Mosaic covenant. The whole purpose of that law was to remind them of their identity as covenant people, to regulate their behaviour as covenant people, and to open the door of blessing and fellowship with God as his covenant people. They had God's word, in written form, and that word had to do with their whole lives and their thinking and their behaviour.

But the one great feature of this whole period was simply this: that they neither paid attention to the message or to the messengers; neither to the law or to those who delivered it to them; everyone, without exception, did what was right in his own eyes. It was an age of tremendous independence, manifesting a spirit of self-rule, and of self-confidence. God said one thing, but that did not matter. What was written in God's law was of little consequence. God laid down standards of absolute morality and ethics, but that was of little consequence. Every man claimed as his right, the right to live as he claimed and as he wished and as he himself desired. What God said was of secondary importance and was almost irrelevant and peripheral.

Don't get me wrong: this was not an irreligious age. There was no shortage of religion, no shortage of judges, or of messengers from God. But when it actually came to the individual response of men and women to the claims of God's truth, every man did as he pleased, and lived as he pleased, and worked as he pleased and went where he pleased, and married how he pleased, and did exactly what he wanted to do. And what was true of the judges long ago is still true; indeed, the summary of Judges 21:25 could be a summary of our own generation and nation.

We have far more than these people ever had. They had the written law code, as well as the great histories passed on to them by word of mouth. We, however, have a closed Bible, a full, final, completed canon of scripture; God has spoken his last word in Jesus Christ and he has recorded it for us in the pages of the Bible from beginning to end. Here is the word of God. These lively oracles of scripture, this Bible is full of God and full of his truth and his salvation and full of the absolute standards that God requires. But what is the one outstanding characteristic of this generation of ours in which we live? Is it not that men and women are doing what is right in their own eyes? When we survey every stratum and every area of the world in every society we will find men and women claiming their inalienable right to do what they will with their own lives, and to do what is right in their own eyes.

We need to guard our young people against that kind of thinking. Every parent knows the struggle of trying to get their children to follow a certain course of action, and being met with "I want to do this" or "I want to do that". But we need to teach our young people that we do not have an inalienable right to do what we want with our own lives. It is this mindset that does irreparable damage to human lives, societies, and even churches. Why are there so many pulpits where doctrines are preached that are contrary to the doctrines of this word of scripture? Why do men (and women) preach things that do not accord with the great declarations of God's final authority and revelation in the Bible? Simply because they are claiming a right to dispense with the written, authoritative, final word of God in the Scriptures.

Many of our secular colleges and universities are selling to our young people this great fundamental ethos that we can live as you please. Yet God says that is the most destructive principle by which a man can live. It will destroy a life, a society, a community, a church. And time after time, history has repeated itself at this very point. "Every man did that which was right in his own eyes". Every man made up the rules on the spot. Every man wrote his own laws for his own life where he was. Every man looked at his own situation and decided to go his own way, irrespective of what God was saying. That is the most destructive principle in the universe.

And yet, the amazing thing is that it was "in the days when the judges ruled" that the Book of Ruth was set. Even with all this spiritual rebellion against God, with all this anarchy, all of this independence that was bringing society to the very brink of destruction, God was at work. He was working to draw men and women out of the destruction and the sorrow and the power of sin and to bring them into submission to himself.

And it is still the case. The Gospel of God's redeeming grace is the one thing that can save this world. Even when men are lobbying for all their rights, changing the glory of the Creator for that of the creature (Romans 1:23-25), God's grace is abounding in human experience. It may have been "the days when the judges ruled"; but that's when Ruth was saved. That's when Ruth was brought into submission to God, into the bond of the covenant. When the covenant people forfeited the blessings of the covenant, this stranger inherited them and entered into them.

Perhaps for some people, one thing that's keeping them from coming to Christ is the thought that to live as a Christian will mean to swim against the tide, against the stream, to go a way that is different from the way everyone else is going, to swim against the current of thought patterns and ethical behaviours and standards that all their friends and colleagues are living by. But this world, with all its patterns of rebellion and apostasy will pass away. The cost of following Christ is great, but infinitely greater is the reward he promises to those who know him personally and savingly. If God is for us and with us, then who can be against us? Look at the Apostle Paul, that great Apostle of the Gentiles, great preacher of the Gospel. Look at him standing there against all the philosophies and all the movements and all the religious independence and pride of his day, and all the destructive forces of his generation and listen to him saying "At my first trial, no man stood with me, not one" (2 Timothy 4:16). But you see Paul is standing in the footsteps of his master, who stood against the stream of the world's hostility and the world's anarchy and the world's rebellion and who said "there is no-one who acknowledges me ... no one cares for my soul" (Psalm 142:4).

It may be that for us to take up the cross and to follow Jesus Christ will be to say "no one cares". It may be that for you to become a Christian will mean having to say "No man stood with me". But I tell you this: it is far better to be one and alone on the side of Christ than to drift with millions into death and into Hell. "In the days that the judges ruled" many people drifted away from God in a self-dependent, wilful, rebellious spirit. These were days of anarchy and rebellion against God. Yet God saved and God brought sinners out of that darkness and into His light, and he does it still.

Ruth: the Themes

What, then, is the Book of Ruth about? I trust that as we work through this book, you will do so with a Bible in your hands. But I want to say that there are three great themes intertwined throughout the four chapters of this book.

The Book of Ruth is first of all about God's promises. It's a book that reminds us that once God says a thing, he will do the thing that he said. Once God has made a pledge, he will honour that pledge. Once God has committed himself to a particular course of action, he will carry that commitment through to the very end. What promise had he made? He had made covenant promises, covenant pledges, way back at the dawn of human history. He had committed himself to the salvation of sinners. Adam sinned and dragged the whole of mankind with him into hopelessness and into despair and ruin. But God came to him where he was, in the darkness of his loss, and God said to him "I will send one who will bruise the head of the serpent. And I'll deliver sinners out of the grip of Satan and the fear and the bondage of death." God renewed his covenant pledge with Noah and with Abraham, with Moses and David. Down through the years of the history of the Old Testament, he revealed himself as a covenant God and Saviour, promising to bring a people out of sin's captivity and bondage into the light and the liberty of the Gospel.

And Ruth is all about the fulfilment of the promises of God. One of its great themes is God's faithfulness to his pledge, to his covenant commitment. It is about his determination to save, his power to save and his ability to save. God has seen the bitterness of sin. God knows what man has done to himself. And even before the world was made, he pledged himself to the recovery of man out of sin. As the Puritan Thomas Goodwin put it, writing boldly three hundred years ago, "the heads of the persons of the God head work together in order to effect a way of salvation for fallen man." These promises of God's salvation are displayed in the Gospel. God can save! He does save, and he will save, every sinner who comes to him, that is his promise.

"Those who come unto me," he says, "I will in no wise cast out" (John 6:37). Ruth comes in need to the God of the covenant, and he does not cast her out. Others have cast themselves out, but God casts none out. And the free offer of the Gospel is built upon this great divine promise. Whatever our lives are like, whatever our background, our theological hang-ups, our sin and despair, he says that there is hope for us in his covenant pledge. That is why Hugh Martin, the great Scottish theologian, described the free offer of the Gospel as a call from within the covenant. Young and old are called to come to the everlasting covenant, whose promises are made sure in the blood of Jesus Christ. Those who come to him discover that he is not a God who breaks promises, or reneges on pledges, who does not fulfil commitments.

The Book of Ruth, therefore, brings us to the very essence of the Gospel. Its background is in the covenant revelation of God's salvation, and its ultimate focus is on the Mediator who will be born from the royal line of David. Christ invites us to search the Scriptures, because they testify of him. It is in that light that we must search the Book of Ruth.

But the Book of Ruth is also a story of God's providences. It's a story of things that God allows to come into the lives of men and women. It's a story about experiences that are hard to bear and about burdens that are difficult to carry. It's a story about heartache and loss. It's a story with graves in it. It's a story with mourning. It's a story with famines and feastings. Here there is wailing and weeping, mingled with wedding celebrations and joy. It's a story that reminds me of the havoc sin has wrought in the world, and that God sometimes allows the most indescribable difficulties to meet us along the way. It's a story that reminds me that he may take me to the very edge of my reason and to the very edge of despair, before I can know the liberty and the blessing of his peace. It's a story that reminds me that sometimes I have to feel the thorn on the bloom before I can see the rose. A story that reminds me that although weeping endures in the night, joy will come in the morning. A story that reminds me of light and darkness intermingled in the experience of men and women; of God bringing people through the shadows, through the fire, through the water, into the wealthy place.

Ruth had gone through the years of idolatry in Moab, and there, around the grave of her husband and her brother-in-law and her father-in-law, she made her pledge to come to God and to bow before the covenant promises of the sovereign God of all the Earth, who does all things well. And I am reminded here in this epic story of the Old Testament, whose significance is beyond all proportion to its size, that the God of Ruth is the same God still; that he rules over the night as over the day, over the shadows as over the light, over death as over life. For us to know this God personally is to be able to say, "we know that all things work together for good to those who love God who are the called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28). There are many things we cannot know; we have no idea what God may be calling us to; but to be able to say "I know whom I have believed", is to be "persuaded that he is able to keep what I have committed unto him against that day" (2 Timothy 1:12).

But we will also see, thirdly, that this is a story about God's provision. You see, every point along this line that takes us from the beginning of Ruth to the end of Ruth, is about God providing. It's all about God providing food when there is no food, and shelter when there is no shelter, and hope when there is no hope, and blessing when there is no blessing. Out of his inexhaustible riches and fullness he makes abundant provision for the needs of men and women. The Book of Ruth will teach us that God supplies all our needs according to the riches of his Glory by Christ. There is a God who is the great provider, not of all that I want, but all that I need. And it is to that God that Ruth came, and it is to that God, that we too are called.