The Blessing

Praise be to the Lord!

Ruth 4:13

In the last chapter we took special note of what Boaz did in order to secure the redemption of the property that had belonged to Elimelech and to take Ruth to be his own wife. That was a work in which Ruth had no part at all, a work that had to be done for her, and in her place. It was a purpose of grace that was secured on the ground of law and was upheld by the law. It was an act of special favour that Boaz showed Ruth because of the love that burned in his heart for her. Jesus Christ, the great redeemer of the church, has done his great work for the salvation of his people by rendering complete obedience to the law of God. And in doing so, all the debts of his people, all the law-breaking, all the sins that they had ever committed were taken to the cross, to the place of law and judgement. Now God's justice is satisfied. Now the condemnation is lifted away from the head of God's people. There is no more condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.

The young woman who had made her choice in chapter 1 to follow Naomi and to join with the people of God not only became a fellow-labourer in Boaz' fields of harvest, but a fellow-citizen with God's people in Bethlehem, and a fellow-heir of God's promises of covenant blessing. Redemption has become the ground of marriage, and marriage has become the basis for union, consummation and covenant blessing. So we will take note in the remaining verses of chapter 4 of the bride, the birth and the blessing of which these verses speak.

Here Comes the Bride

The elders at the city gate, and all who had witnessed the transaction, invoke the Lord's blessing on Ruth's coming into the house of Boaz. We have noted that the law required that following the death of a husband, it was the right of the kinsman-redeemer, the dead man's brother or close relative, to continue the family name and the family line by undertaking to be a husband for the widow. This included raising up children, to fill the place and perpetuate the name of the man who had gone. That is what Boaz is doing here. Ruth came to Bethlehem as a widow, and as a stranger in a strange land. But Boaz' eye fell on her and Boaz' heart went out to her. His fields were open to her, and his riches secured her redemption, which included both the purchase of the inheritance, and the purchase of his bride.

So in 4:11 Ruth is compared to Rachel and Leah, the wives of Jacob and matriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel. "The Lord make the woman that is come into your house like Rachel and like Leah." There is a great contrast drawn for us over the Book of Ruth between the house that Ruth has left and the house into which she came, between the house that she once had and the house that she now has. All that belonged to her past is now truly past; old things have been passed away; all things have now become new because Ruth has entered into a new house, into the house of Boaz. One home has been left behind, and Ruth has a new home now.

To know the blessing of God's salvation means leaving one home in order to come into another. Psalm 45, which is applied to Christ in Hebrews 1, speaks of the King's bride 'forgetting her people and her father's house' (Psalm 45:10). The King desires to have her. Unless we have experienced this transition from one dwelling to another, this translation, as Colossians 1:13 puts it, from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's dear Son, we cannot be Christians. A Christian is a person who has discovered the blessing of the old yielding to the new, the old ties dissolved, and a new home and inheritance to be enjoyed.

Perhaps the greatest commentary on these verse is in the great words of John the Baptist in the New Testament, in John 3:29, as he testified before his audience that he was not the Messiah. This is what John said: "The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom's voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete". John pictures himself as the bridegroom's friend, who shares in the bridegroom's joy when he is united to his bride. Jesus Christ is the great bridegroom of his church, and throughout the Bible - both in the Old Testament (cf. Isaiah 62:4-5) and in the New (cf. Ephesians 5:25-7, Revelation 21:2,9-10) -- the church is the bride whom Christ possesses. He has purchased her and brought her in to his kingdom, he has secured her release from her old way of life, and from the claims that her old life had upon her. He has made everything new, by taking her into his own embrace and making her part of his own life, giving to her a share in his own inheritance, and giving her his own name.

Ruth is no longer the Moabitess; she is now the wife of Boaz. There is a progression in the Book of Ruth: in chapter 1, Ruth is far from Boaz; in chapter 2 she is introduced to him; in chapter 3 she receives a pledge from him; and in chapter 4 she is brought into his home. She moves from being estranged from the redeemer to being his bride. Here is the Gospel in the Book of Ruth -- a Gospel of redeeming love, which brings the stranger in, and which unites those in greatest need to one who can meet that need and make all things new. Covenant blessings become Ruth's because she is brought in to Boaz's home.

What are these blessings that the bride found in the home of Boaz? I think that some of them are brought before us in the words of the witnesses at the gates of the city. "The Lord make the woman that is come into your house like Rachel and like Leah, which two did build the house of Israel." There is a contrast here between these two women, Rachel and Leah, and the two women of Ruth 1. Orpah and Ruth went their separate ways, but Rachel and Leah 'built' the house of Israel. They were married to the patriarch Jacob and them the children of Israel, the tribes of Jacob sprung; through them the blessing of God's salvation was to reach out in to the world and was to be carried along in the stream of human history.

There was, of course, a twist in that love story too. Jacob loved Rachel and worked hard to secure Rachel. But their father, Laban deceived Jacob, whose very name meant 'the deceiver', and who had previously shown in his conduct that he would get his own way by deception if necessary. Jacob had to marry Leah first, and she became the mother of most of his children. Rachel was his true love, however, and her children, Joseph and Benjamin, were especially favoured by Jacob. In God's providence, however, the purposes of his salvation were carried forward. The house of Israel was built on pillars of love, divine love that was woven into human experience, and that was revealed in stories of human love and deception, affection and betrayal, until at last God's true Israel, the people of God, were redeemed by "the Son of his love".

It was the prayer of those at the gate that such would be Ruth's experience also: that God's love would be so interwoven with the marriage of Boaz and Ruth that the unfolding story of their home and family would be full of the blessing and grace of God. The love stories of the Bible function at a purely human level here, although their meaning and significance goes much deeper. I think it fails to do justice, for example, to the Song of Solomon, to see it merely as a story of human love. But at the same time it is not less than a story of human love, and whatever its theological significance might be, the truths which it unfolds have as their point of departure a genuine experience of love, affection and romance. It is the same with the story of Ruth and Boaz. The canonical and theological significance of the Book of Ruth go much deeper than the experience of human love; to see the story of Ruth as merely a love-story is to fail to grasp that significance. Nonetheless, its meaning is rooted in the bonding of two hearts, and its significance is woven into the fabric of that romance and union.

We would indeed fail to grasp one of the basic lessons of Ruth -- that our relationships, romantic or otherwise, can only be fulfilling as we know the blessing of God upon them. For young people entering into marriage, setting up homes and laying the foundation for family life, there is surely a great moral here. Just as the blessing of God was on the home of Jacob, and now on the home of Boaz, we too need to seek the blessing of God on our homes, families and marriages. The pillars of divine love built the house of Israel. They must be the foundation of our homes and families too.

But there is a greater family, of which our homes and families are faint shadows. The marriage of Christ and the church is archetypal -- it is the marriage par excellence, foreshadowed and typified by the marriage of Boaz and Ruth, and brought before us in such clear relief in the New Testament. It is to the consummate marriage of the Book of Revelation that the purposes of God's salvation point. There is a sense in which the angel of Revelation 21:9 speaks for the whole Bible when he says "Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb's wife". That is what the whole of the Scriptures says to us. It shows us the church, the gathered bride of Christ.

And the house that is the church is built on pillars of love, on the foundation of God's love in Christ for his own people, a love that is eternal and unchangeable. "I have loved you," God says to his people, "with an everlasting love" (Jeremiah 31:3). Jacob served willingly and long for Rachel, but the years were just like a few days because of the intensity of his devotion and love for her. What is that in comparison with the love that went to Calvary for the church of Jesus Christ? Christ loved his bride, and he gave himself for his bride. The the church of Jesus Christ is built on the pillar of his incomparable love for his own people. And the purposes of his salvation, in and through the covenant seed of his people, in and through each generation of his own witnesses in the world, are the guarantee that Christ's name will endure forever (Psalm 72:17).

That was the purpose of the laws governing marriage and inheritance of property: it was all focussed on the perpetuation of the family name. And God's purposes of salvation are also focussed on a name that will abide forever. I have every confidence that the Gospel will be preached to the end of time, and that men will be saved, that there will be a church until the end of time. Even though the church in our experience and in our eyes is tossed and torn and tempted, and the witness of the church so impoverished and so weak, it is not to these phenomena that we must look. Christ's marriage to his bride will ensure that his name will live on! My confidence is not in men, not in numbers, not in phenomena, not in things that we can see with our naked eye, but in the unfolding purpose of God's redemption. His name will endure forever. And it will last like the sun, and men will be blessed in him, as the house of Israel was blessed in him through Rachel and Leah, through whom the house of Israel was built.

So the blessing of God's love, of God's purpose was clear in the family of Boaz. There was also going to be the blessing of worth and fame : "May you be great in Ephrathah and famous in Bethlehem" (4:11; NLT). Maybe there were some that didn't know of Boaz and Ruth. But Ruth's name was going to become famous. In the experience of the people of God at the time, she was going to be famous in Bethlehem because she belonged to the household of Boaz. But long after she is gone, and long after Ruth leaves this world, and her dust mingles with the dust of the earth, her fame continues because her story is written with the finger of God.

The world is full of men and women who are desperately searching for something to be remembered by. Their one great aim is to be on everybody's lips, their consuming passion is that men will remember them long after they are gone, that men will remember what they did, and what they said, and the contribution they made in their own field. But everything about us here will pass away, except what God has done and been for us in Christ. And every name that has ever been written in the books of men will vanish, but those that have been written in the Lamb's book of life, written with the finger of God, in his inerrant record of the ages, their name, bound up with the name of their kinsman redeemer, will live on beyond death in immortal annals. What matters ultimately, is not whether men will remember us when we're gone. What matters is whether our name is written in the Lamb's book of life.

The third blessing Ruth will enjoy in the home of Boaz will be the blessing of her descendants. "...may the Lord give you descendants by this young woman who will be like those of our ancestor Perez, the son of Tamar and Judah" (4:12; NLT). This is a reference to an embarrassing, intriguing and important event that is recorded in Genesis 38. The link between Genesis 38 and Ruth is noted in 4:18, where we discover that Boaz was a descendant of Perez. We need, therefore, to take time to work out the significance of this reference.

Genesis 38 is an intriguing passage that interrupts the story of Joseph. Joseph, we learned from Genesis 37, was loved by his father Jacob, and hated by his brothers. They conspired to kill him, but on account of the intervention of Judah, Joseph's life was spared, and he was sold into slavery. It was from the descendants of Judah that the Lord Jesus Christ would be born (cf. Hebrews 7:14). But while Joseph kept himself pure and maintained his integrity in Egypt, even when he was faced with strong sexual temptation, Judah, at home in Canaan, had sex with a prostitute, not realising that the woman was actually Tamar, the widow of Judah's eldest son, Er. One purpose of the story is therefore to contrast the two sons of Jacob -- Joseph and Judah -- and another is to show us why it was that God's judgement came upon the family of Jacob which led them to seek corn in Egypt, from Joseph himself.

There are clear echoes of this passage in the Book of Ruth. When God judged Er for his sin, Judah said to Onan, his brother, that he should observe the law and act as a kinsman to Tamar. He refuses to do so, and God strikes him dead. For a second time, Tamar is left without hope and inheritance. The themes of marriage and widowhood, and the related theme of the kinsman duty, as well as the underlying themes of inheritance and righteousness, undergird both stories. But above all, there is an emphasis on the sovereign purposes of God. For the result of the sinful liason between Judah and Tamar is that Tamar gives birth to twins, Perez and Zerah. When they were about to be born, Zerah's hand appeared first, and a scarlet thread was tied to it. But Zerah retracted his hand, and Perez was actually the firstborn son of Judah and Tamar. This too is an echo of the story of the births of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 25:19ff.

The situation of Tamar in the Genesis 38, therefore, was very similar to the situation of Ruth. Tamar was a Canaanite who did not belong to the covenant people of God. In the event, however, God overrules the sin of Judah, and Tamar is brought into the covenant line. She is one of only five women mentioned in the genealogy of Christ in Matthew 5 (Rahab, the mother of Boaz, and Ruth, his wife, are two others: see Matthew 1: 3,5). Even although she had sinned, Tamar was fulfilling God's purpose, and Judah had to admit that she was more righteous than him. From their offspring, the result of an illicit union, came Perez, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Boaz!

It is a principle in the word of God that God's thoughts are higher than ours. His ways are not our ways. He is sovereign in the affairs of men, and is able to over-rule even the most base of our actions for his own glory. The story of the patriarchs, and their ancestors in the pre-patriarchal era, is a story of sovereign, controlling grace. Take the two sons of Adam, Cain and Abel. Cain was the first-born; he is the symbol of strength and might. He is the one that will inherit -- but he's not the man God chooses. God's choice falls on Abel, the second son. Here are the sons of Abraham: Ishmael and Isaac, of whom Ishmael is the first-born. Ordinarily, he is the symbol of the family line, and Abraham's heir, but he is not the one God chooses. God chooses Isaac. Here are the two sons of Isaac, Jacob and Esau. Jacob is the younger; Esau is the one that stands to inherit. But Esau is not God's choice. God chooses Jacob. Here is Jacob, who has married Rachel and Leah. Jacob's firstborn is Reuben, but the covenant purposes of God focus on Judah. And of the sons of Judah, the covenant line will descend from Perez.

The God of the covenant is a sovereign, deliberating, discriminating God. He acts according to his will among the armies of Heaven and the inhabitants of the earth; none can hold back his hand, or challenge him by asking 'What are you doing?' (Daniel 4:35). The prayer of the people for the house of Boaz is, "let your house be like the house of Perez". What kind of house was that? A house marked out, not by men but by God, chosen, not by men, but by God. A house under the blessing of the sovereign God of the covenant, in which his purposes of grace are executed, and his will for the salvation of men accomplished. In his great evangelistic work, this was Paul's great comfort, assurance and hope: that God had chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; he chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong; he chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things -- and the things that are not -- to nullify the things that are, so that no-one may boast before him (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). God has chosen the things that men despise in order that he might have all the glory in the work of salvation.

The home of Boaz and Ruth was marked out by God. The midwives marked the hand of Zerah with a scarlet thread, but God had marked out Perez. External symbols are not enough. What lasts, and what matters supremely, is that God, in sovereign, discriminating grace, will mark out our homes and families that we might enjoy the blessings of covenant communion and fellowship. In the destruction of Jericho, as Joshua was about to conquer the city, there was a home marked out by a scarlet cord in the window, placed there as an act of faith that God would fulfill his promise and deliver those who trusted in him. That cord had been placed there by Rahab, the mother of Boaz (Joshua 2:21). That scarlet cord was the symbol of a living faith in a sovereign God. Things did not look too promising, and Rahab was in a minority. But Joshua (interestingly, the name 'Joshua' is the Hebrew equivalent of the name 'Jesus') delivered the house of Rahab (Joshua 6:25).

So unlike Zerah, whose hand had been marked by a scarlet thread, the home of Rahab, marked by the scarlet cord, was saved. In Rahab's case, external sign and inward reality agreed. God's sovereign grace worked faith in Rahab's heart, which moved her to place all her trust and confidence in the God of the covenant.

What a blessing it is when the external symbols of our religion -- the sacramental signs of baptism and the Lord's Supper -- correspond to a living reality in our hearts! When they truly show that we are marked out by the grace of the God of the covenant, who alone is able to save. That was the blessing of the lineage of Perez, and it was to be the blessing of Ruth in the household of Boaz too.

Have we come into the household of Jesus Christ? That is where we'll find the blessings of God's redemption, the blessings of God's everlasting love, the blessings of God's salvation. It was the blessing of which Noah prophesied when he said that Japheth would dwell in Shem's tents (Genesis 9:27). The Japhethites would be enlarged and would represent the whole Gentile, non-Jewish world (Genesis 10:5). Yet the sovereign covenant promise was that the Gentiles would enter the tents of Shem, the Semitic race of the Hebrews, through which salvation would come to the world. And Christ died for that very reason -- that the blessing of Abraham, confined to the Jewish people for the long years of the Old Testament when Satan blinded the eyes of the nations (2 Corinthians 4:4), would come upon the Gentiles through the death of Christ (Galatians 3:14). Satan has been conquered! He cannot deceive the nations any more (Revelation 20:3). The millennium has been inaugurated! The knowledge of the Lord -- an integral element of the covenant -- now covers the earth, as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9). And within the Old Testament itself, Ruth, like Tamar, stands as a light in a dark sky, as an example of a Japhethite coming into the tents of Shem, a Gentile woman entering into the blessings of the sovereign covenant of grace.

What a blessing to find our way into the circle and communion of the covenant people of God! At the beginning of the story of Ruth we went out with Elimelech, then we came back with Naomi, and now we've come in with Ruth. The long, cold night of alienation is gone. The day star of hope and resurrection has arisen. There is nothing to compare with being on the inside with the redeemer. As the psalmist David puts it so magnificently in Psalm 118:15, "there is the melody of joy and health within the dwellings of the righteous". There is a new song to be sung in the house of Boaz.

Here Comes the Baby!

I like the King James Version rendering of 4:13: "Boaz took Ruth and she was his wife, and when he went in unto her the Lord gave her conception and she bare a son". It underlines for us that the gift of life is the Lord's to give. He gave conception; and as he did so, he continued to unfold his purposes of grace deep inside the body of Ruth. God is a God of moral order, and there is a moral order here. The marriage comes first and then the birth of the son. That is God's design; that is the way he intended that it should be. It was not always so in Bible times, and it is not always so today. But the exceptions prove the rule: marriage is God's ordained environment for sexual relations and for the procreation of children.

Soon the home of Boaz is filled, not only with the song of salvation and redemption, but with the song of a child. A son cried, and a new day dawned. At this particular point in the history of God's people in the Old Testament, the hope of Israel focuses on this one child whose name is Obed. The name Obed means a servant. We know little about him, except that he brought great consolation and comfort to Naomi in her old age, and that he was the grandfather of King David. Both Matthew (1:5) and Luke (3:32) remind us of his place in the genealogy of Christ. God's purposes are fulfilled and realised. Famines do not thwart them. Accidents of birth do not hinder them. Personal sins do not change their course. God's achievements are equal to his designs.

And God's purposes focussed immediately on the son born to Ruth and Boaz, the son given the name of a servant. But ultimately they focussed on Ruth's greater son, who took to himself the name Obed, because he took the form of a servant (Philippians 2:7). The one who is both Son of God and Son of Man, whose right it is to be served, came to this world, not to exercise his right or stand on his privilege, but to serve (Matthew 20:28). Of him Jehovah can say, "Behold my servant, whom I uphold; my elect one, in whom my soul delights" (Isaiah 42:1). There it is again -- sovereign, discriminating grace, focussing at last upon the one whose whole life was a life of service for the salvation and redemption of sinners.

Christ is our Boaz and our Obed in one; indeed, he is our Boaz because he is all Obed. He redeems because he is in service. He is God's chosen one, God's elect one; and he at last comes to say "Not my will, but your will be done" (Matthew 26:39). It is in his service to God that he redeems us. Yes, "unto us a child is born and a son is given" (Isaiah 9:6), one who will do all that requires to be done for our salvation and for the redemption of God's elect people. He will be the root of Jesse, and in him the Gentiles will trust (Matthew 12:21; Romans 15:12).

Here Comes the Blessing!

I think that it is one of the most beautiful touches of the Book of Ruth that the women not only bless the Lord because he has provided a kinsman for Naomi, but that they say "There is a son born to Naomi" (4:17)! Because of Obed, born in the household of Boaz, Naomi enjoyed a special blessing. Many waters had run under her bridge. Nursing Obed brought back her own memories of Elimelech, Mahlon and Chilion. But Ruth, as the women reminded her, was better than seven sons (4:15). And, you know, that day in Bethlehem, when Naomi held Obed in her arms, she did something that she had never done in Moab. She had never nursed a child in Moab. She had buried children in Moab, but she had never nursed a child there. It is here in Bethlehem, in the home of Boaz, within the circle of God's covenant salvation, that Naomi nurses a baby. That's where they sing "A child is born to Naomi," in the house of Boaz. Weeping endured for a night. But joy came with the morning.

And there's something else too: the same voices that had said in Chapter One, "Is this Naomi?" now said "A son is born to Naomi." Remember when they arrived on the road from Moab and they came to Bethlehem? The whole city was moved. The women noticed that Moab had turned Naomi's hair grey. It had left its scars on her face and in her heart. They didn't even recognise her when she came back saying "Call me Mara. The Lord has dealt bitterly with me." And the same voices in the same city that had cried then, "Is this Naomi?" now say "A son is born to Naomi," and that son was to be a restorer of her life. Now she can say "Call me not Mara. Call me Naomi".

God has promised to restore the life of his people, to restore in their experience the years that the locusts have eaten (Joel 2:25), the years that sin ran away with. God has promised to give back even more besides them. And here was Naomi now, nursing this child in the home of Boaz, living testimony to the faithfulness of the covenant God.

God is going to renew Naomi's youth (Psalm 103:5). She had seen many things, endured many hard experiences, nursed many painful memories. Now her sun was beginning to set. But in old age, when others were fading, she was still bearing fruit (Psalm 92:14). Unlikely as it seemed so long ago, the blessing of God was evident on her life. God promises that though our outward man perishes, the inward man is renewed day by day. So it is with Naomi here, and so it will be with all of God's people. Grace will keep and guard, protect and guide. None will perish that put their trust in him.

In Conclusion

The Book of Ruth ends with a genealogy. We often find in the Old Testament that books begin with genealogies. But the story of Ruth explains the genealogy, and the genealogy brings us face to face with the purpose of the story. I want to note just one thing about this list of names in 4:18-22: it is both retrospective and prospective. The reference to Perez in 4:18 links the story of Ruth back to the history of the patriarchs, to the family of Jacob and to the dawn of time and of covenant history in the Book of Genesis. The reference to David in 4:22 links the story forward to the climactic histories of king David, and the greater revelation of the covenant promises to be made to David in 2 Samuel 7. The story of Ruth embraces the whole of Old Testament history -- this tremendously rich anticipatory era, in which God was working in the history of the world to prepare the way for the Messiah.

The story of Ruth, in other words, is the Old Testament in miniature. It is the story of sin and its effects as it is the story of grace and its effects; it is an intimation of the blessings of the covenant upon God's chosen people and his faithfulness to them; it tells us of chastisement on disobedience and blessings upon the righteous. Above all, it tells us of the opening of a door by which Gentiles, strangers and foreigners can become fellow-citizens with the saints. And it reminds us that the God who does all of this, focusses his attention on the coming of a Son, for Jesus Christ is the Son of David, the Son of Ruth.

© Iain D. Campbell 2001