Ruth 1:1-22
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
There is a childhood song you have no doubt sung if you have been in church for more than a week
The song is “He’s got the whole world in his hands”
It is a childhood song because i think as we get older we find it harder and harder to believe
Sure he made the world
Sure he is in control of the big things
He cares about the big people the important people in important places
But the whole world ?
Cynicism comes with age
The book of Ruth is for adults to sing again He’s got the whole world in HIs hands”
Far from the big names and big city…God’ has it all in his hands
The book of Ruth is a story about very ordinary people facing very ordinary events.
The book of Ruth shouts this song from the rural poor country folks living in a time when all is dark
Not different from today...
It is into the darkness of the day that this book shines
It tells the story of God’s writing of a story among His people that the darkness cannot extinguish
The people of God need this book today
So we begin our Journey looking at 3 parts
When the Screen Goes Dark
Introduction to the Extraordinary
Pain in the Framework of Faith
A. When the Screen Goes Dark 1:1-5
A. When the Screen Goes Dark 1:1-5
During the time of the judges, there was a famine in the land. A man left Bethlehem in Judah with his wife and two sons to stay in the territory of Moab for a while. The man’s name was Elimelech, and his wife’s name was Naomi. The names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They entered the fields of Moab and settled there. Naomi’s husband, Elimelech, died, and she was left with her two sons. Her sons took Moabite women as their wives: one was named Orpah and the second was named Ruth. After they lived in Moab about ten years, both Mahlon and Chilion also died, and the woman was left without her two children and without her husband.
The Bible was written like a master composer looking back at the completed work of God
we can read this like Ruth’s diary
“Dear diary, today was not a good day and my mother is law is having a breakdown”
God has written a masterpiece in the life of his people
Ruth puts it display
like the greatest of directors or authors our writer sets the opening scene and darkness falls
5 verses describe darkness falling on the land from greatest to smallest
During the time of the judges, there was a famine in the land. A man left Bethlehem in Judah with his wife and two sons to stay in the territory of Moab for a while.
The book of judges describes the spiritual and societal darkness
In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did whatever seemed right to him.
God’s people lived in anarchy and lostness
Judges ends with a reference to the social chaos and personal misery resulting from lack of righteous authority among the people: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did what was right in his own eyes.’
national chaos
but that is not the holy spirit’s concern in this masterpiece
The book of Ruth zooms in on a certain man, his family and their fortunes. It reminds us that the God of the nations is also concerned about the ordinariness of ‘a certain man’.
Judges has the stories of Sampson and his hair epic names like that
heres the beauty of Ruth
God is concerned with the ordinary
our small ordinariness is not insignificant to God
B. Introduction to the Extraordinary 1:6-18
B. Introduction to the Extraordinary 1:6-18
She and her daughters-in-law set out to return from the territory of Moab, because she had heard in Moab that the Lord had paid attention to his people’s need by providing them food. She left the place where she had been living, accompanied by her two daughters-in-law, and traveled along the road leading back to the land of Judah.
Naomi said to them, “Each of you go back to your mother’s home. May the Lord show kindness to you as you have shown to the dead and to me. May the Lord grant each of you rest in the house of a new husband.” She kissed them, and they wept loudly.
They said to her, “We insist on returning with you to your people.”
But Naomi replied, “Return home, my daughters. Why do you want to go with me? Am I able to have any more sons who could become your husbands? Return home, my daughters. Go on, for I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for me to have a husband tonight and to bear sons, would you be willing to wait for them to grow up? Would you restrain yourselves from remarrying? No, my daughters, my life is much too bitter for you to share, because the Lord’s hand has turned against me.” Again they wept loudly, and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. Naomi said, “Look, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods. Follow your sister-in-law.”
But Ruth replied:
Don’t plead with me to abandon you
or to return and not follow you.
For wherever you go, I will go,
and wherever you live, I will live;
your people will be my people,
and your God will be my God.
Where you die, I will die,
and there I will be buried.
May the Lord punish me,
and do so severely,
if anything but death separates you and me.
When Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped talking to her.
Hesed- the theme
C. Pain in the Framework of Faith 1:19-22
C. Pain in the Framework of Faith 1:19-22
The two of them traveled until they came to Bethlehem. When they entered Bethlehem, the whole town was excited about their arrival and the local women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?”
“Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara,” she answered, “for the Almighty has made me very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since the Lord has opposed me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?”
So Naomi came back from the territory of Moab with her daughter-in-law Ruth the Moabitess. They arrived in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.
The Message of Ruth: The Wings of Refuge The Almighty
You can see the bitterness I have experienced: the famine, the bereavements, the questionings, the partings, the apparent hopelessness; but I know God as Shaddai, and I can leave the explanation, and even the responsibility, for this bitterness with him.
Pain is never out of the framework of her faith
though thousands of years ago listen to what has been a season for all who are children of God
the question ‘Where are you, God?’ never seems to bring a reply, and in his gracious interaction with his world, seems absent from your life. Their eyes see only the flow and counter-flow of events and experiences; their minds can discern no pattern or meaning; and they have lost hold of, or have never reached out to grasp, the hand of the unseen God who rules all, plans all, and whose purposes give meaning to history both on world and on individual levels.
Thousands of years ago it was no different
challenges to faith in the providence of God were not so very different in those times from what they are now.
the uncertainties of life, too, are brought within the context of a faith by which they may be coped with:
William Cowper (a man familiar with pains confusing darkness)
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.
‘Providence’ says that God is there, God cares, God rules, and God provides. Faith in such a God undergirds every chapter of Ruth.
