The Surprising Story of God’s Unfailing Love

Text: Ruth 1

Proposition: Sin and circumstance bring pain but the unfailing love of God moves with redemptions design.

Introduction: There’s a book in the Bible that tells an unlikely story of how bad decisions, tragic events and unsuspecting bystanders are all pulled together to create the setting for something great. It portrays how the way you love someone can be used by God to change the course of many lives. It even shows how the design of God may be absolutely obscure to us, at times to the point where it seems there is no point and we question the integrity of God’s sovereign control in our lives. It’s the book of Ruth, a short book that scholars are unsure of just who the author is. The events of the book take place during the time of the Judges when there was a great famine in Israel. It’s why the book has been placed where it is in our Bibles, just after Joshua’s conquest of Canaan and the subsequent book of Judges that chronicles the way Israel was governed at that point. Joshua, Judges, Ruth, that’s how it is arranged in our Bibles. Interestingly, in the Jewish version of the Old Testament, the Talmud, the book of Ruth is put with the Wisdom books of Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes and, Lamentations. So some people think that Samuel the prophet, the one who anointed Saul and then David, wrote this book long after the period of the Judges. Did the Holy Spirit direct Samuel to detail the origins of king David in a way that builds a Gentile people into not only the lineage of Israel’s greatest king but in so doing into the very lineage of Jesus Christ? The book of Ruth is a surprising love-story, perhaps it is there to point us to the surprising story of God’s unfailing love for us.

I. From the Frying Pan to the Fire, the Elimelech Syndrome.   (Vs 1-5)                                              You know what a syndrome is, a number of contributing factors that together create a ruin or dis-ease. In the first 5 verses we are given four names, the husband, his wife and their two sons. Perhaps it’s a detail that pinpoints the literal and historical truth that these were actual people in certain place and time. I think that is valid but the names themselves are peculiar. Look at what they mean in the Hebrew: Elimelech = my God is king; Naomi =  my Pleasure;  Mahlon = Sick;  Chilion = Pining. In the wild 1960’s people named their children all kinds of crazy things like Raven and Spruce and Free, can you imagine naming your children Sick and Pining? Is there perhaps a hint for us in these names of the contributing factors that caused their lives to go from the frying pan of a famine in Bethlehem to the fire of death in Moab? All we know is that Elimelech took his family from Bethlehem, literally “the house of bread” and moved them to Moab in order to escape a famine that was in the region. He moves them to the east, down the slopes of the valley leading to the Dead Sea, around the northern edge of the Sea to its eastern shores. Mount Nebo, the Mount where Moses stood and saw the Promised Land, is in Moab. They go to this apparently prosperous land and shortly afterwards Elimelech dies. Their two sons marry Moabite women and Naomi lives with them for the next ten years and then the two sons die and now there are three widows in Moab. What went wrong? The man whose name was “my God is king” left Bethlehem against the purposes of God. The famine itself was a judgment to bring the people back to God and he ran from the correction of God. Lev. 25:35 describes how the people were to care for one another in famine and thus endure it. Elimelech put his wife and children at risk when going to Moab, the idols of Chemosh prevailed in this place. His sons broke the Mosaic Law when they married women from other than Israel (Deut.7:3). To take your family and avoid a famine seems like a responsible and loving thing to do yet good intentions do not trump the truth of God’s revealed word. Marrying women from Moab seemed practical yet what’s practical isn’t necessarily right. Here’s the wonder, even when we blow it, even when we feel like our lives have gone from the frying pan into the fire, the surprising love of God for us seeks to draw us back to Himself. He takes the ashes of ruined lives and builds with them something we could never have foreseen.

II. From the Fire of the Forge to New Iron, the Love That God loves. (Vs 6-18)   God has a way of catching our attention, of redirecting our lives. The desire to be in Moab is now replaced with a desire to go back to Bethlehem, to be reminded that God is good and does bless His people. To leave and start over again is not easy, and it becomes more difficult the older you get. Yet God overrules this natural resistance to change by reminding Naomi of His goodness. This becomes a considerable test for her as she heads out to Bethlehem with her daughters in law for she knows that for Moabite widows in Israel there is no likelihood of future marriage unless it came through other sons she might have. If a man died then his surviving brother was obligated to marry the widow in order to preserve the family name and honor. Naomi had no such other sons and in tears directs her last two closest friends to separate from her and to go back to Moab where there is family and future. Her daughters in law had shown love for her sons and now for her and the parting was a great sorrow. Let’s step back from the story for a moment and ask an obvious question, “What is it that matters most to God?” It isn’t our well being or comfort, it isn’t even our happiness. He is not above using grief to redirect our steps. What matters most to God is how we love, how we love Him and how we love others. The fiery forge of losing her husband and her two sons and now having to say goodbye to her last two closest relatives, this forge tested the heart of how she could still selflessly love these daughters in law. This test of Naomi’s love became also a test for Orpah and Ruth, would they stay with her or turn around and go back? It was a dividing point for them, a crossroads. It was here that God forged the heart of Ruth to make this incredible declaration of verses 16,17, “Entreat me not to leave you or to turn back from you for wherever you go, I will go. And wherever you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people and your God shall be my God. Where you die I shall die and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts you and me.” Do you hear that, that’s the love of a heart that says “I’m all in.” I will love with everything that is in me, with all it costs, with all my life! It’s a statement of love that caught the ear of God and it arose in Ruth because of what God was building in and through her. I think that this is still what God yearns for in each of us as He proves Himself good,  He draws us to leave old places where we have hid from Him and to go back to where the bread of life is. He wants us to come to a place where we would say to Him, “Lord I choose to love you with all that I am, I’m all in, where you want me to lodge that’s where I’ll lodge, Your family is my family, where you want me to die that’s where I will die, even if it means dying to myself, to desires and habits and longings that would seek to separate me from You. Lord, by your grace, I’m all in.” This is the new iron that He was forging in Ruth, that He seeks to forge in us, it’s the iron of faith and love and hope in Jesus Christ.   

III. From New Iron to the Hammered Shape of Truth, the Beginning of Harvest.    (Vs 19-22)

Elimelech and Naomi had gone out full, two sons and enough resource to make life happen in a place they chose. Now some 15 years later she returns to a community who remembers her for who she used to look like. But Naomi has been iron that has been struck again and again, a new shape is taking place in her life and it’s a shape that that seems to be nothing but ruin to her. She says to her old friends, “Do not call me Naomi, call me Mara…”, Mara in Hebrew means ‘bitterness’. She sees her life as being struck by God, hammered again and again into this shape that seems ruined and useless. But let me ask you, if you know how this story goes and how God is soon to use Naomi to direct Ruth to become the future wife of a wealthy business man and that their son would be the father of the greatest king in Israel’s history and even be in the lineage of Jesus Christ Himself, would you call that hammered shape of Naomi ruin? We may feel like Mara but the reality of what God is doing in us through suffering, through loving, through serving, through faith has the destiny of the heritage of kingship written on it! There will be times when your life seems misshapen, like a left over remnant that once was full but now appears empty. But God brings that Ruth-like person into your life, a person who is willing to love with all they’ve got and though they are rough around the edges like any Moabite, God readies us with them for a harvest. What you might call a dark hour in your life, God would call it the finest hour. The hammered shape of truth in your life is meant to point you to harvest not defeat. It is at this very point that the surprising story of God’s unfailing love will begin to unfurl. Look for it, ask God to help you see the harvest He is about to lead you into.