One hundred days have come and gone. Bits and pieces flicker in and out of the news like a radio station gone fuzzy. Israel hangs in there, accumulating international criticism as they clear buildings one by one. Gaza is starving and shattered; the Golan on a hair-trigger. More violence in Jordan this week leaves the entire Middle East sitting like tinder box waiting for a spark.
At least in the first weeks there was an urgency toward prayer. Then Hanukkah kept the momentum going, the frontlines of a battle we could easily wage on our knees. Prayer is a right first response, but it’s hard to stick with as the rage simmers on. As long as the situation in the Middle East remains unchanged, it’s easy to ignore in the background of life.
In this moment of volatile static, I’ve spent a great deal of time questioning the brutality I see in a world without the Gospel. I know the Good News. The question is what do I do with it here? And now? What’s my response, a million miles and a cultural chasm away from a war that groans on? I asked the Lord for ears to hear what He is saying not to me personally, but to this season.
He brought me to four hidden pages in the Hebrew Bible: Ruth.
The first time I was introduced to the book of Ruth, it was spoon-fed to me as a Christian dating manual. I can still remember the half-panicked voice of the woman who led us teenage girls through the four short chapters: “Wait for your Boaz, girls!”
I later discovered that Ruth is a favorite among women’s bible studies. Some consider it a guidebook for friendships between Christian women. For others, it’s a rags-to-riches story of struggle and grace, like a Christanized Cinderella. Many studies focus on God’s redemption and love, a simple story alive with moral lessons to help readers overcome adversity in finances, loss, community, and family. I’m grateful for all of these angles because they got me to where I’m at today.
But this time, God had other things to say. Things that are far deeper, richer, and more dangerous than I ever noticed before.
The story opens in tragedy. An Israeli family from Bethlehem finds themselves exiled to a place called Moab (modern-day Jordan) due to a food shortage in Israel. Historically hostile toward their Jewish neighbors, this family finds themselves living as refugees with no money and no land in what is more or less enemy territory. While this family hangs around in Moab, the two sons marry two Moabite women, and then, in another tragic turn, all the men in the family die!
It’s a grim outlook for the vulnerable women bereft of their husbands. Naomi, the matriarch, decides to head back home, perhaps hopeful that she can somehow scrape out an existence within the borders of her homeland. But as a displaced, aging widow, she’s in an exceedingly dangerous position. In order to avoid dragging her daughters-in-law into it, she releases them from familial obligation, charging them to go back home to their own families and their own gods. Naomi implies “I’m a lost cause. Save yourselves while you still can.”
One daughter-in-law, Orpah, wishes her well and takes off. But the other, Ruth, does not. She clings to Naomi, refusing to abandon her in her time of trouble.
This word translated “cling” first appears in Genesis 2 when Adam speaks about the woman God builds for him, that he will “cling” to her. It’s a word that often refers being intrinsically joined or intertwined to someone or something. So it’s no surprise that here, in Ruth, that we get the famous lines:
“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried…”
The passage rings with the echos of Eden: bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.
Ruth welds herself to Naomi, willing to accept whatever lies ahead: poverty, debt, humiliation, danger, possibly even death. United as one, they head back to Israel.
Those familiar with the story know how it goes. After returning to the land, Ruth, the young and able-bodied member of the impoverished duo, gathers leftover scraps from the barley harvest in a relative’s (Boaz’s) field. Moved by Ruth’s faithfulness and unwavering devotion to Naomi, Boaz basically gives Ruth a job for the whole harvest season, offering her protection as well as provision for her daily needs while laboring in his fields.
“She asked him, ‘Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me – a foreigner?’
Boaz replied, ‘I’ve been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband – how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. May the LORD repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.’”
Boaz blesses Ruth—an average, Gentile woman—because of her faithfulness to a powerless, wandering, Jewish refugee. He doesn’t just praise her benevolence and compassion. Instead, Boaz proclaims Ruth’s wisdom to stand by Naomi even when things looked bleak, trusting that Naomi’s God—the God of Israel—would come through for them both. Later in the story, Boaz comes through for Naomi by marrying Ruth, effectively saving both women from a life of misery and probable death.
But curiously, this time reading through Ruth I noticed it’s not the women that are the focus of the salvation narrative. It’s actually Naomi’s property and the family name that become the object of attention.
“Then Boaz announced to the elders and all the people, ‘Today you are witnesses that I have bought from Naomi all the property of Elimelek, Kilion and Mahlon. I have also acquired Ruth the Moabite, Mahlon’s widow, as my wife, in order to maintain the name of the dead with his property, so that his name will not disappear from among his family or from his home town. Today you are witnesses!’
A few verses later, we read that Boaz and Ruth have a son named Obed (who will become the grandfather of King David). But in another unexpected turn, it’s not baby Obed, or his father Boaz, or even the amazing Ruth, who is blessed at his birth. Again, it’s Naomi!
“The women said to Naomi: ‘Praise be to the LORD, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.’
Triumphant, these women raise hallelujah because birth of Obed saved Naomi’s life and family line in her old age. And all because a Gentile daughter, Ruth, loved her enough to hold her fast.
The story of Ruth concludes with…
- Gentile inclusion into the covenant family
- preservation of the family name
- restoration of their ancestral homeland
- and new life flourishing.
Can you hear the drumbeat of the Hebrew Bible pounding along through the pages of scripture?
“I will make your name great and you will be a great nation. I will bless you. I will bless those who bless you. I will give you this land, and in you, all families everywhere will be blessed.”
In the static of global upheaval, God challenges me to understand Ruth within its broader context: the story of a God who promises the sons and daughters of Zion that He will make them a blessing. That their children will outnumber the stars, and their land will be a source of healing for the nations of the earth. And that I am lovingly invited into this family by my faith in their God and by the work of their Redeemer, evidenced by my love for the things He loves. Boaz, the heroic savior, showed favor towards Ruth because she loved his family as an outworking of her faith in the God of Israel.
“When you do this to the least of my brothers, you’ve done it to me.”
I am compelled now more than ever that the entire book of Ruth is a sustained meditation on what it means for the everyman among the nations to love the Jewish people in their dark times. For sure the application Ruth reaches wide, but Ruth is, at the very least, setting before me a provocative question: am I willing to love a people and a God that I perhaps do not know?
This dainty, often trivialized book offers wisdom that could not be more relevant for the season in which we find ourselves living. Our brothers across the nations feel the pulse of hatred everyday, and they don’t know a path unlike the way of Cain. But I do. Like Cain, I have a choice.
In the dark days of Israel—in a season much like the one Israel finds herself in today—when the world is hostile and everything seems broken, the book of Ruth reveals truth and my own inadequacies. It forces me to take a plain look at my own heart, my own prayers, my own commitment to meditating on the scriptures, and the role my God expects me to play as someone who bears His name. I realize to responsibly read Ruth, to rightly pray for my neighbor and foe across the world, requires me to humble myself and take my own problems out of the story.
All of that preaches well. But it lives hard.
Love was hard in the days of Cain, harder in the days of Noah. It was hard in the days of Naomi, and it remains hard today.
I prefer to ignore the hard and get back to my comfy, familiar way of reading my Bible that neatly solves all my problems and gives me a tidy framework for my theological questions, with little room for the modern nations who pop in and out of my news feed. In the past, I’m afraid I have read Ruth in a way that remakes God in my own image. I have settled her story within my own understanding, so quickly dismissing the words of Proverbs 3:5. So quick to follow the path of Orpah, who warmly turned her back on a God and a people she did not know.
But as scholar John Walton puts it, “[God] has given us sufficient revelation so we might have some sense of his plans and purposes and trust him sufficiently to become participants in those plans and purposes…Our response ought to be to acknowledge the wisdom and authority of God…our response is to trust him.” Whether I like the plan or not.
While the nations reel and plot in the liminal space of this conflict, the family of the Messiah withers in the shade of Jonah’s tree. Sadly, I find myself there too, nursing Christian jealousy under my own tree. But I serve a God who is faithful to meet with broken people under the trees. He asks, “Should I not have compassion on them too, the people I have loved and attached My name to? Your brothers whom I have hidden my face from for a time in order that you might find Me? If you are not willing to embrace them–a people you do not know–perhaps you are not willing to embrace Me? Am I a God you do not know?”
The opportunity to cultivate a love like Ruth had for Naomi is now. The time to take the this book seriously is now, to humble myself and set my own myopic views aside for a chance to see the bigger test facing the world. To prepare myself and those around me for the ripening harvest fields.
Will I look on God’s people with kindness and compassion? Will I look on their enemies this way? Despite the growing indifference in many Jewish, Muslim, and Christian hearts today, will I have the courage to say “the God of Israel is my God.”
Will I be like Ruth? Will I trust that this God, in a brilliance that I will never fully grasp, has a plan for His people, just like He had a plan for Naomi? Will I do the hard work of laying down my own ideas to sit in that? Will I trust that their family redeemer will restore their name and their land as He promised? And will I trust that He will bless me too, if I am faithful to cleave to His people and call upon the Name of the redeeming King this whole world desperately awaits?
Ruth—a powerhouse of wisdom for Gentiles in an age of love grown cold. Give us the eyes to see, oh Lord. Give us the ears to hear. Awaken us to the call of your word and prepare our hearts for the frontier that awaits. Don’t let our love grow cold.
Two Precious Stones 