I think the book of Judges is one of those parts of the Bible that people use for excuses to disdain or discard the Word of God. After all, if that is one’s intent, there seems to be plenty of horrible human behavior to choose from: strangers subject to assault in the towns they visit, people creating idol gods and pretending they are the God of Israel, a concubine chopped into twelve pieces and shipped across Israel, sparking a civil war. Everywhere you look in Judges, you find examples of improper living.
But those who feel that God somehow condones these wayward, even shameful, behaviors just because they are in the Bible to begin with are missing a very simple “clue” that emphasizes the position between these horror stories of human behavior and the sovereignty of God’s story. “At that time there was no king in Israel,” Judges explains. “People did whatever they felt like doing” (Judges 21:25–the Message). Other versions translate it as everyone doing what he thought was right.
When God says there was no king in Israel, He really means that Israel refused to accept Him as their king, which is why every person in Israel did what was “right” by human, and NOT Godly, standards. Remember, only God is holy, a perfection we humans cannot achieve without the intervention of Christ to wash us clean of our sins and mediate for us before the holy throne of the Almighty.
When we act on our own, we leave ourselves vulnerable to disrespecting ourselves as well as others, acting on our anger, lying, cheating, hurting the innocent, promoting the agenda of the evil one instead of the Great One. In other words, we get the kind of world that we see in Judges.
But even in a world where man denies God, God finds a way to continue His story of redemption and love. Thanks be to God, He is so patient, so slow to anger, lest we all be condemned to hell. Peter writes,
Don’t overlook the obvious here, friends. With God, one day is as good as a thousand years, a thousand years as a day. God isn’t late with his promise as some measure lateness. He is restraining himself on account of you, holding back the End because he doesn’t want anyone lost. He’s giving everyone space and time to change.
2 Peter 3: 8-9 (the Message)
As we come to understand that our lives only attain importance (even to ourselves) when we see them in respect to God’s story and not the other way around, we discover an overriding theme that will help us read the Bible while learning practical ways to apply its lessons in our lives. We will start to see and think about the events of our lives as they pertain to God’s Story.
Ruth’s story begins without God being a part of it. A Moabite by birth, she has grown up in a pagan country, learning to worship manmade idols. But then she marries a Jew who has migrated to her country during a time of severe famine in Israel. She lives with her husband’s family, including his parents, his brother and his brother’s wife. Perhaps she would have spent many years like this, learning about the God of Israel from her new family, but the evils of this world intervene.
Having lost first her father-in-law and then her husband and brother-in-law, Ruth finds herself at a fork in the road. Her mother-in-law, Naomi, decides to go back to her homeland. Knowing she can bear no more children, assuming that her life is completely over, Naomi encourages her two daughters-in-law to return to their family homes and even to their idol gods.
Orpah takes Naomi up on her offer, heading back to Moab. But Ruth makes a two-prong decision that will change the course of her life as well as fit that life quite neatly into God’s story of redemption. She decides to never leave Naomi, and Ruth promises to make Naomi’s God her God as well.
Everything that follows reads more like a sweet romance than a story of “biblical” proportions, proving how even ordinary lives such as our own are important to the fabric of the grand tapestry God continues to create because of His love for us.
To feed herself and Naomi, Ruth goes to gather grain from gleanings, coincidentally in Boaz’s field. Without at first knowing who she is, Boaz treats her with great respect anyway. Imagine Ruth’s surprise when Naomi tells her Boaz is actually a relative of Naomi’s late husband! That means Boaz can redeem Naomi and Ruth by marrying the younger woman, saving them from their precarious position.
Living up to her commitment, Ruth continues to strive to follow her mother-in-law’s instruction as well as honoring God. When Naomi instructs Ruth in the art of letting Boaz know that she is ready for marriage, Ruth doesn’t hesitate. She goes to the grinding floor and stretches out at Boaz’s feet, just as Naomi has told her.
When Boaz awakes with a beautiful, young woman at his feet, he too acts in a way that shows he believes in and follows God. He admits to Ruth that one relative has the first right to marry Ruth and carry on the name of her father-in-law’s family. Boaz loses no time in confronting this relative with the offer of his redemption rights. When that relative refuses, Boaz marries Ruth.
And here is where Ruth’s ordinary life, lived in obedience to God, lends itself to the purpose of redemption in God’s story. It turns out she is the great-great-grandmother of King David, the man with a heart like God’s from whose lineage Jesus will enter the world to save it.
God’s story, as I have been emphasizing these past weeks, is a love story between Creator and that which He has created. Everything God does from beginning to end is because of His love for us. Who among us believers could want anything different or better than having our lives entwined in the greatest story of love ever to be told, a story that God continues to write because He is patient and abounding in mercy, a story that continues because of lives just like our own?
In Christ,
Ramona
Photo by Alexander Grey:
goodchristianfiction 