Lessons from Ruth and Naomi - Day 118 Through the Bible

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My Lessons and Applications from this Biblical Account

For those of us who have found ourselves in a hopeless Naomi life situation in this world: There is comfort and kindness...under His wings, with His people, clinging to His promises.  Just as He allowed the negative, God can turn our persevering faith in the midst of tragedy and extreme disappointment into an unbelievable miracle that will echo down through generations - through eternity.  He did it with the lives of Abraham, Joseph, Rahab, Christ, and He will do it with many others we will come to know in our year through the Bible.  It will not be a life without difficulties  - some disastrous.  But God...can use our lives of faithfulness for His glory and our good - temporally and eternally.

Ruth and Naomi - Negatives:

Naomi - widowed, both sons dead, no daughters, too old to produce another generation of children (in a time when those things were the sum of a woman's value), in a pagan land with pagan gods, in cultures where such women were outcasts, without hope.  Ruth - widowed, childless, married into a "foreign" family, outcast from both societies - hers and her mother-in-law's, without hope. 

Ruth and Naomi - Positives:

Faith in God; faith in God's promises, in His Sovereignty and Providence; love and service to others; obedience to God and willingness to take risks to follow in that obedience - even to death; returning to their spiritual inheritance - the Promised Land; removing themselves from the land of idolatry and pagan worship; putting themselves under the provisions of God's sovereignty and His providence - "being where they were supposed to be, doing what they were supposed to be doing." (Mike Black, "Ruth: The Providence of God"  

God's Sovereignty - Provision of the Promised Land and the blessings in it; provision of Kinsmen-Redeemers, the saving of a remnant of godly men and women; provision for the poor to work and glean fields after a harvest; a plan of redemption that He will see through to the end though all the powers of hell seek to come against it; a child, a son - the grandfather of a king and in the lineage of Christ, a home and family for those with neither - who went from nothing to great blessing as a result of persevering faith and who, in turn, blessed others.

God's Providence: A plentiful harvest and harvest time; a tribe of people within whom were God's elect; Boaz - a man of God, a man of material means, a man ready to take a wife who was a relative by marriage who was widowed, of child-bearing age, a man joyfully willing to fulfill God's role of "go'el"; employees who respected and were blessed by Boaz and who were treated kindly by him; bringing a daughter-in law into Naomi's life who became a greater blessing to her than 7 sons would have been to her; God multiplying her faith shared with her daughter-in-law by joining it with a man so godly he was seen as a type of Christ, making Naomi and Ruth, these 2 outcast, widowed, childless women, the grandmothers of Israel's greatest king and part of the lineage of the King - Jesus Christ.

Lessons and Applications:  God is still in the miracle business.  We have learned in our 4 months of daily Bible study together that this is rarely a momentary miracle.  It takes faith, obedience, perseverance to experience the amazing grace of God in its fullness.  It takes work - often in humble and even humiliating circumstances, risk in obeying His Word, in forsaking pagan idols and worldly philosophy, in returning to our spiritual promises.  It takes clinging to Christ, to His precepts, to His people - even when circumstances, when our culture, tell us there is no hope. 

Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.  (Ephesians 3:20-21)

More Lessons on Ruth:  Click on the 4 sermons in the Ruth series by Pastor Bill Dages to the right of the blog under "Ministry of the Word."