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Introduction:
Good morning once again and welcome to Hope.
At this time our children can be dismissed to children’s worship.
I invite the rest of you to open your bibles or devices to Matthew 1 with one finger and Ruth 1 with the other.
Leading up to Christmas Sunday we are spending the sermons walking though the lives of a few of the people who appear in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter 1.
We are calling this series of messages: Family Christmas.
Last week we talked about Rahab, the prostitute, who believed God and ended up being listed in the family line of Jesus.
I said that if there is room for someone like Rahab in the family of Jesus, then there is room for you as well.
Today we are going to look at the story of two people who appear in this family line of Jesus.
Let’s read the first five verses of Matthew and find out who we are investigating today.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Let’s pray and ask God to help us understand the significance and change our lives with it.
Pray
The story of Ruth and Boaz is found in the book of Ruth in the Old Testament.
This is book is truly a story of romance, loyalty, and faithfulness.
I’m going to try to cover the entire thing today.
There’s simply no way I can get indepth on everything so I want to encourage you to read these four short chapters this week at home.
Based on what we see in verse 1:1 the story of the book of Ruth takes place during the time of the Judges.
I don’t know if you know about what we call the period of Judges but it is recounted in the book of Judges which directly precedes the book of Ruth in the canon of scripture.
It was 400 years of time after Israel arrived in the promised land.
This was an incredibly dark time in Israel.
The final verse in Judges illustrates it quite well.
If you look back at the period of judges you see a cycle repeat itself over and over.
The people sin and God would send enemies to oppress them.
The people would eventually cry out for help and God would raise up a deliverer, referred to as a judge to deliver them as an act of His mercy.
But even amidst this dark time we get a peek at the hidden work of God going on in the book of Ruth.
Even in the worst of times, God is at work.
Read passage:
There is a lot going on here.
There is a bit of irony as well.
But I want you to see that these women had lost everything.
I. Naomi and Ruth lost everything.
Reading this passage we can surmise some things about Elimelech and his family.
There was a famine in the land and this man left Bethlehem to go to Moab.
Bethlehem means “house of bread.”
There’s a certain irony in the fact that they were leaving “house of bread” during a famine.
While they are there in Moab, Elimelech dies.
His sons take Moabite wives which was prohibited for Israelites.
Then, they pass away and Naomi, his wife is left with these two Moabite daughters in law, Orpah and Ruth.
Naomi is a widow and then she has to do something no parent wants and has to bury here sons.
Orpah and Ruth have lost their husbands.
These ladies have lost everything and I can imagine the deep sense of loss and possibly hopelessness that they may have felt.
Naomi hears that back home in Israel that the famine is over and there is food there.
So she decides to head back to here homeland.
They’re on their way back to the land of Judah and Naomi tells her daughter laws to go back to their families.
They wept over this.
They said they weren’t going to do this but she again told them to go.
They weep again and Orpah kisses Naomi and goes back to her people.
But the scriptures tell us that Ruth clung to Naomi.
We start to see what kind of woman Ruth is.
Listen to verses 15 through 18.
Ruth was determined.
Some might see this as stubbornness.
She was taking Naomi’s people as her own and she was making a decision to follow the God of Israel.
They arrive in Bethlehem to the notice of the town.
Verse 19 says the town was stirred because of them.
This reminds me of the small town that I grew up in.
We knew most of the people in town.
When Bethany and I got married we decided to go back home for a visit.
There is a great little festival in my hometown and we decided to go and take some friends of ours with us, Eric and Jesse.
Eric was just a normal looking dude.
Jesse had long blond hair that she had dyed electric blue.
So the night before the festival we go uptown to walk around the square and look at the booths getting set up and the store windows.
Now, in my fantasized memory, people are like doing double takes and falling off of ladders as we walk by.
My mom said people were asking about Jesse later on when they would run into my mom in town.
The town was stirred.
II.
God provides Ruth and Naomi with a soft landing.
Ruth tells Naomi to let her go and glean from the fields.
This whole section might sound kind of strange to us today but in the law of Moses there was a provision made to care for the poor.
It was sort of like a welfare to work program.
The poor were not supposed to sit around and wait on government handouts but were permitted to glean in the fields and around the edges after the main workers finished.
They were allowed to pick up what was leftover.
Farmers were to leave the edges of their fields unharvested for this very purpose.
This was hard, hot work and could have been dangerous for a foreign woman who was not connected to anyone to keep her safe or for her to call out to if she was in danger.
But here is loyal, hard working Ruth offering to go out into the fields so that she and Naomi would not starve.
So Ruth goes out and by divine appointment she ends up in a field belonging to a guy named Boaz who was a relative of Naomi’s husband.
Boaz is said to be a worthy man.
He was a God-fearing man who cared for the poor.
Again, by divine appointment, Boaz comes to the field and sees Ruth.
He asks his workers who this woman is and the foreman fills him in about her.
There was a divide in their social standings, to be sure.
And yet, listen to how Boaz speaks to her and the offer he makes to her:
Boaz also provided food for her.
She ate with the reapers.
This is an extraordinary kindness being shown to her.
He even tells his workers to be deliberately careless in harvesting so there is plenty left for her to glean from the fields.
Boaz welcomed Ruth even though she was an outsider.
He made sure she had enough food for her and for Naomi.
Ruth heads home and shares what happened with Naomi.
Do you see that phrase, “one of our redeemers.”
This is in reference to something God had set up in the law.
Someone in the family could act as what is called a “kinsman redeemer.”
The kinsman redeemer was obligated to buy back relatives that sold themselves into slavery because they had gotten too deep in debt.
According to Ian M. Duguid, “Under certain circumstances, the kinsman redeemer also had an obligation to marry the widow and raise up a child for a brother who had died childless.
In this way, the inheritance would continue to be associated with the name of the man who had died.”
(Iain M. Duguid, Esther and Ruth, ed.
Richard D. Phillips and Philip Graham Ryken, Reformed Expository Commentary (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2005), 162–163.)
Ruth and Naomi make a plan for how to approach Boaz about enacting his redemption of them.
There’s a whole account of it in Ruth chapter 3 but let me just say that it works.
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