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When commitment costs more than you have to give, and there’s a way out, the practical thing to do would be to take it. But, Ruth chooses to stay, speaking words we associate with weddings in the cold shadow of funerals. God calls us to be willing to hold fast in our darkest places, too.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
Ruth makes a commitment to Naomi without knowing how things will turn out, choosing presence and care over the seemingly wise decision to return to her own people. What does this teach us about what true commitment looks like, and how does it differ from conditional or transactional forms of support?
The sermon uses the analogy of the abandoned building to illustrate how presence and care hold things together. Think of a time when someone’s presence mattered to you during a difficult season. How did their commitment affect your ability to endure?
Naomi believes God is in control but sees no hope for her future, while Ruth seems to understand that God’s faithfulness doesn’t depend on favorable circumstances. How do these two perspectives differ, and which one tends to characterize your own faith during trials?
The sermon discusses how we often offer conditional support to others—like a service plan that doesn’t actually cover the problems people face. When you’ve committed to supporting someone, what makes it difficult to follow through when things get truly hard?
Ruth’s commitment includes a willingness to be buried with Naomi’s family and to invoke God’s judgment on herself if she breaks her promise. What does this level of commitment demand of us as followers of Christ, and where might God be calling us to deeper faithfulness in our relationships?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Last week, we began an adventure through the book of Ruth. As we consider the book of Ruth, there are a lot of graves to start it out. We have Naomi’s husband and her two sons who die just in the first few verses, and we’re talking about something that’s even worse than maybe what we imagine. Naomi can’t flip to the end of the book of Ruth. We can’t. Maybe this week, if you hadn’t read it in a while or ever, you went ahead and read through the book of Ruth and you say, “Well, it looks like it turns out okay.” I can look at the last few verses of chapter 4 and it sounds like this isn’t too bad. But Naomi couldn’t do that. Ruth couldn’t do that. They’re stuck back at verses one and two and three and four. They’re living in that time, just like if someone summarizes our life, they might write a paragraph or two or a chapter or maybe you really want to go into detail, a whole book, but even a whole book only takes a few hours to read, not a lifetime.
We’re often stuck in that verse one moment, that verse five moment. And we don’t know what verse 10 and verse 12 is going to be. And worse than that, because we’re not living in scripture, we’re not even living in verses, so to speak. We’re just living in plain paragraphs that are going to be forgotten, and we think, is there any significance? Is there anything that’s going to happen that’s going to help me to make sense of these graves around me? What am I going to do now?
There are lots of things in life that are trying to motivate us in our current moments of challenge and crisis to act now. Maybe it’s something like having stains on our clothes, and we’re watching a television program, and it cuts and goes to a short commercial about a new stain remover, or maybe you tune in during the weekend, and it’s one of those times that the whole infomercial is going on. It’s all about why you should act now to get this stain remover because if you do, it will take care of those troublesome stains that two, three, four, five times through the laundry haven’t been able to remove. You just give it one spray of this stuff and it removes. But if you act now, you’ll also get the amazing cloth that will help rub in that cleaning solution, and in the next 20 minutes, you’ll also get the pencil stain remover and the ironing board that has the special stain resistant cloth on it so it doesn’t go through that. And I mean, they’re practically giving away half the store as long as you call within a certain amount of time.
What’s that trying to do? Well, it’s trying to take whatever crisis that you and I may be in. It may be something elementary, like a stain on our clothes. It could be really big crises, but throughout our world, we have different things calling at it saying if you act now, if you respond in this way, we will help you deal with this situation.
And if we think about the infomercial, it’s sort of the most unapologetic direct form of that. It doesn’t mind telling you that, yes, I’m going to tell you you have a crisis, and now I’m going to put pressure on you to respond to that because if you respond, this is going to solve that. But while it may not be quite so overt, we have all kinds of things pressuring us that way, and on the other hand, we often have sitting in the corner, the right thing to do. And the right thing to do oftentimes feels like it’s completely oblivious to the crisis that we’re in. It doesn’t understand the pain. The infomercial guy is obnoxious as he is; he understands my pain, he understands my problem, but the right thing doesn’t really understand. Even worse, if I act now and do the right thing, it often sounds like it’s going to be a negative response. The operators are standing by to take away more things from me.
We like when we’re going to make a response to something that there’s a happy ending clearly tied into it. We think about a story like this one. And as we get to the words we’re going to look at tonight, right in the heart of chapter one, what Ruth says—there are often words that are read at a wedding because they’re a beautiful form of commitment. Ruth is going to make it very clear that she is dedicated to what she’s doing. And in a wedding situation, it’s the perfect spot for it, isn’t it? Of course, everyone’s happy. Everyone’s excited. This is supposed to be a good thing, and so this commitment is going to lead to happiness, happiness ever after, etc., etc., etc. Except that’s not where it is in Ruth. In Ruth, it’s after a funeral.
As we read these words, what we have to keep in mind is, in Ruth, it’s after a funeral in which anything happy seems very distant. There certainly isn’t another wedding clearly in the future. There isn’t a future hope of generations to come, and the Messiah coming, and everything being made right. Those things, yes, they’re going to be there because we can flip through the rest of the book and we can flip through the rest of the Bible and we can see how it all comes together and suddenly we’re in Matthew and Jesus is born and we see the connection there, but it’s not where Naomi is and that’s not where Ruth is in this time.
And we saw last week how Naomi responds to that. She responds by saying God is against me. I’m bitter. She recognizes God’s power, but she says I’ve acted, I’ve acted multiple times, and the only thing the operators ever sent me were more problems. And I do believe that God is in control but I don’t believe that God is going to do what benefits me.
Ruth has a different perspective. And that’s what we’re going to explore tonight because as we look at Ruth, she’s almost impossibly good. She was a sinful human being, but we’re not told a lot about her faults in this story. We’re not really told about them at all. We’re told about what she does that’s right. And in that, God is showing us, yes, I’ll take an imperfect human being. I’ll take all your flaws, your background that makes you unappealing for the job, and I’ll take it and I’ll use you to bless my people for generations to come, for eternity to come.
And it starts with caring about other people. God works as we care for one another, and that’s what we see here, and that’s the heart of what Ruth expresses.
Let’s take a look at verses 14 to 15 of chapter one. If you want to pull it out in your Bible or Bible app or read on screen, it says, “Then they lifted up their voices and wept again.” That’s Naomi and Ruth and Orpah, the three women that are left, the three widows. Because Naomi’s told Ruth and Orpah to go ahead and go back to their families. They wept again, and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. And she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods. Return after your sister-in-law.”
Naomi is being the logical one here. She’s looking at the situation. It doesn’t look good, and some of it feels a little jarring. Here’s Naomi. We talked last week. She trusts that the Lord is in control of the universe and yet she says to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back to your own God.” But really what Naomi’s doing here is she’s absorbing what the Israelites struggled with over and over again, which is they thought of God’s typically in a regional way. And I say that intentionally, gods. They thought they should be loyal to the Lord. They believed that. They tried to do that a lot of the time. But they didn’t necessarily know what to do with the other gods. And they thought that maybe those gods had power in other places. That’s part of the reason why we see sometimes they decide to go follow the other gods. Maybe this god really has more control in my land than I thought. I better be nice to this god or that god.
So that’s the mindset that Naomi’s coming out of. And she’s looking at the situation practically. Inasmuch as here she is, she’s a widow, she has no more sons, so she can’t offer her other sons to these two widows as future husbands. She goes into that. We looked at that last week. She can’t offer them anything like that. They’re two Moabite women, so they’re not going to be terribly welcome back in Naomi’s own home country. And so she does the logical thing in her mind. She says, go back to your families and to your gods. Those gods are going to watch over you there. I’m tied to the Lord, but there’s nothing for me to offer you in God’s people. So just go back.
Now, that sounds really bad, doesn’t it? We look at that and we say, Naomi, how can you be so foolish? But Naomi really is being practical here. She knows what’s ahead for them. Or at least she thinks she does. There’s no wedding to read these beautiful words and there’s no hope of a future and a welcoming parade back home. There’s nothing like that. All there is is desolation. And she wants something better for them. We looked a few weeks ago at daily bread in the Lord’s Prayer, and how we pray for God’s provision, and Naomi is really trying to figure out how does she get her daughters-in-law to have what we would call daily bread. How can they have food on the table, a home to live in, a family to be a part of? How can they have those things? Well, go back to their families and their gods, and they’ll find someone in their own Moabite land that will marry them and they won’t be alone and they won’t be in trouble because, particularly in that era without any children and without a husband, a woman was in grave danger. She had no way to provide for herself. She had no future hope when she grew old. She was just desolate. She was going to die in horrible abject poverty or worse.
Naomi doesn’t want that for her daughters, and while she loves them, she says, go and find daily bread, God’s provision, everything that you need to live a decent life. Go back home. Naomi sees what she’s lost. She’s looking at her own situation, everything that she thought she had that she lost. She lost her children. She lost her husband. She has nothing to really hope for. But her daughters-in-law don’t have to have that. They’re still young enough that they can go and remarry and they can have a life that they can put together where all the things that you might pray for as you pray for daily bread, all those things that you hope that God will provide to sustain you through a day and not just barely scraping by, but to live and to thrive, to do the things that God’s made you to do, they can have that. Unfortunately, without the Lord and, unfortunately, without her, they should go back and start over.
But here’s something that we see that Ruth realizes. She cares about her mother-in-law. And caring requires presence. She can’t depart and continue to care. She just walks away, cuts off that relationship, goes and watches out for herself—that caring ends. And here we see Ruth thinking first and foremost about how she cares for someone else. Ruth isn’t dumb. She knows the things that Naomi’s saying, and she probably knows somewhere in that part of our brain that fires when we really want to do one thing, but we kind of think it’s wiser to do something else. That part of her brain is firing saying, yes, Naomi is telling you what is right and good. I think she probably hears that. But she cares, and she chooses to have presence. She’s going to be with Naomi. She doesn’t know any better than Naomi does what the future holds. She doesn’t get to look through the rest of the book and see the end of the story like we do. As far as she knows, she’s just surrounded by graves and she’ll be surrounded by another one. Naomi’s, at some point, more than likely, she will outlive Naomi, but have nothing to show for. But she cares. And that’s the starting point, I think, a lesson that we can see in how we care for other people as well.
God calls us to be people who care. And a starting point for that is to quit thinking so much about ourselves. And clearly, that’s what Ruth’s doing. She’s choosing to stay in a place that’s an abandoned parking lot, worse than a parking lot, a cemetery. She’s choosing to stay there with the mourning widow that feels there’s nothing left because she cares. She’s going to see this through with her.
I think we understand that that sense of presence when we look at an abandoned building. How often is it that some business closes, and the building always looked pretty good? The paint looked fine. It seemed to never fade. The trim on the building stayed just fine. It was always just okay. The landscaping mostly looked like it took care of itself. Everything seems fine until the day the business closes, and then it seems like a month later, the building’s falling down, the paint’s faded, the landscaping clearly isn’t taken care of itself.
And we realize no, there was a presence there, a presence that was expressing care. Couldn’t do it all on its own. We didn’t necessarily see when someone came and touched up the paint or nailed back a piece of trim that fell down in a storm. We didn’t see that stuff. It looked like it was just fine. But presence is a part of things holding together. And Ruth wants to stay present here. She’s not going to allow Naomi to become the abandoned building.
So often why are buildings abandoned? Because there’s no opportunity left. It seems the business can’t stay open. It’s losing money like crazy. It’s clearly the wise thing to get out. And for Ruth, the clear, utterly wise thing is to get out. What does she decide to do? She is going to stay present. And in presence lies opportunity, opportunity to do the work that God’s called us to do, not necessarily opportunity for raging success and everything to happen the way we want.
This story is an amazing story, as we were going to see over the coming weeks. But we need to hold off on that. We have to keep pulling ourselves back because Ruth doesn’t know that. There’s nothing to say that Ruth clearly got a prophetic message that said, “Things are going to work out, okay, Ruth?” She didn’t know that. She stays in the building as the business seems to just be running directly towards bankruptcy because she cares. But then there’s another step. And sometimes we get to this step. Okay, I will stay and I will be miserable with the person that’s suffering. I will bring myself into the misery. We can be miserable together. That’s where we go. Then we’re maybe a little bit like Job’s friends. We’ll go ahead and meditate on what you did wrong or what we all did wrong. And let’s just be miserable together.
That’s not what we’re really called to do either as we seek to be people of care. No. Are we staying genuinely out of care or genuinely out of a desire to be miserable together? If it’s the first one, then it’s going to go further than I’m just going to be here miserable with you. It’s something much deeper than that. And that’s that caring requires commitment.
And we see that as Ruth expresses it in verses 16 A and B. Because Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go, I will go. And where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people.” Think about that. It’s not in the context that we often hear it, where it is read in a wedding ceremony. Oh, these two people are getting married, and they’re saying this to each other. “I’m going to go where you go. I’m going to make your family my family. We’re going to have that commitment and we’re going into this happy forever. You know, that’s where we’re headed.”
No, Ruth has been there. It has crumbled. It wasn’t happy forever. No, her husband died, her brother-in-law died, her father-in-law died. Now all she has is her bitter mother-in-law, and her sister-in-law has chosen to go back and heed Naomi’s seemingly wise advice. She’s going to go back to her own family, back to her own gods.
There’s a rabbinic tradition that, in fact, Ruth’s sister-in-law becomes the ancestor of Goliath. No, that’s not biblical. It may or may not have happened, but it’s kind of interesting to think about, isn’t it? That somehow a future opponent of God’s people comes from that. And we don’t want to be too hard on Orpah for what she decides to do. In the moment, it makes perfect sense. But she also closes herself off from any opportunity to be a part of God’s continuing work because she doesn’t stay. She does what she’s told to do by her mother-in-law. She does what seems wise, but in that she lacks the commitment to experience what God’s going to do in that time that we’re sitting there smack dab in the middle of the cemetery.
But what does Ruth express? She expresses that classic expression of faithfulness. That beautiful one. If you’re looking in scripture, where can I find an expression of how to express to other people how committed I am that I’m really all in, that I am going to do what it takes even when it’s hard? Can’t really find much better than what we read right here from one human being to another. Well, Jesus, of course, he’s true God and true man. But if we’re talking about a human being who isn’t also true God, it’s about as good as it gets.
Why does Ruth do it? I think she cares. She has love. Now, that does probably speak somewhat to Naomi, not in this moment. Naomi’s bitter, Naomi is hopeless. Naomi thinks there’s nothing ahead at this moment, but it seems likely that Naomi’s character over the decade that Ruth has known her thereabouts has been something that has spoken to Ruth. Clearly, a bond of love has formed there. And clearly, Ruth has gotten some sense of who the Lord is through Naomi. How else would she know? But she has that. And so it does speak to Naomi, but how much does it speak to Ruth that she’s absorbed this from her mother-in-law? She now sees the one that maybe she’s learned about the Lord from, the one whom she’s heard about this other land that Naomi’s headed back to from.
It’s just utterly convinced there’s no hope, everything’s bad, and yet Ruth looks at that and says, “I’m going to go with you. I’m going to stay with you. You don’t believe right now that there’s hope. You don’t see the path forward, but I see the path forward and it’s with you.” Amazing thing. But she does. And as she does that, I don’t think Ruth assumes, “Well, it’s all going to be so much better than Naomi thinks when we get there.” I don’t think Ruth is one of those wooden characters that we see sometimes in a play or a movie where the person is just so utterly sickeningly happy-go-lucky that you say that person can’t possibly be real.
I think Ruth knows that. She says that she’s probably volunteering, “Hey, Naomi, I know that you have this path where you’re alone, where there’s no one to watch out for you, where you’re probably going to die in poverty. I want to sign up to do that with you. I’m going to go with you. I’m committed.”
And that’s true commitment when we’re going to say, “I see that there’s a better path for me, something that could work out better for me, but I’m going to go with you because I love you, because I care about you, because I believe this is where God wants me.” That’s what Ruth says.
There’s a lot of times in life that we find what we think symbolizes commitment and yet it doesn’t. Maybe you’ve gotten a new heating and air conditioning system put in your house, and the cheerful salesperson who told you about how much more comfortable you’re going to be, and how reliable the system was, did happen to mention, incidentally, because the system is so reliable, you also should sign up for a service plan so we can come out and make sure it stays reliable. Maybe that should make us a little uneasy to begin with. But we go ahead and sign up for it.
My uncle signed up for such a plan. You got a brand new heating and air conditioning system. It was supposed to be a top of the line one. It was going to last him for years and years and years. That’s why he got it, so that it wouldn’t be a hassle, that he could count on when he came home from work, it would keep working.
He signed up for it, and they signed him up immediately for that service plan. And then the first service call came, and the service technician showed up, and what do you know? There were several things that needed to be done because this super reliable system wasn’t going to stay reliable if you didn’t do these things. And it’s not covered in the service plan. If only you had the higher-end service plan.
So what do you do? Well, he had the service done and he signed up for the higher service plan level. And that pattern repeated itself multiple times over the time he had this system that they’d come out and what do you know? Oh, shucks, it doesn’t cover that issue, but you know, this is a really reliable system, but you have to have this service.
And soon he was spending hundreds of dollars every year to keep his reliable system staying reliable, signing up for more and more expensive service plans, and that service plan, which was supposed to guarantee a commitment from the provider that, yeah, we’re here with you whenever your system has any issues. Well, they were never committed to fixing whatever the problem they found in the system was. They covered a bunch of other things, just not the things he actually had wrong with it or the things that didn’t seem to be wrong with it but they claimed needed to be done to it.
And oftentimes in life, I think that’s the kind of commitment we assume people talk about commitment. Yeah, I am going to be with you. You call if you need anything. I will take care of it. Until there’s something that’s actually needed. Oh, if only I could. But I can’t.
Ruth isn’t like that. Ruth says, “No, I am going with you Naomi. I am going to be there.” Yes. Not only has the service plan expired, my husband’s dead. I’m not really committed to you any longer. Not only that, not only is that service plan expired, but by committing to you, I’m signing up for a negative service plan for myself where everything seems like it’s going to go wrong for me. Everything’s going to be set up against me, the deck is utterly stacked against me back in Israel. But I’m going to go with you because I’m committed.
What kind of service plan do we offer to people? When we come before our friends and family, when we’re dealing with our coworkers at work and we say, “I’m going to support you through this,” are we really going to when it gets tough? When there’s opposition, are we still with the people whom we say we’re going to support? Well, with our church and things get difficult, are we there with our church? When we’re with our families and things get difficult, is it only great to be together with our family until it gets difficult? And then, wait, I didn’t sign up for to provide that service. If only you’d signed up for the platinum tier. Yeah, take care of things, but you did.
Where are we? I think all of us are going to fall into different places on that at different points in our life. That’s what it means to be a sinful human being. We are going to struggle sometimes to show the level of commitment that Ruth does. It’s almost superhuman here. I think God’s spirit is working through here. That’s why she’s able to do this, but how much more than should we be praying, “God, help me to be the sort of person when those people who you’ve placed in my life to care about call that I am there and I am able to be there. Give me the strength when I don’t have it. Give me the will when I don’t have it. Give me the time when I don’t have it. Give me the means and the resources and everything I need. Lord, help me to be a person of care.” It’s so important that we actually ask for God’s help because we can’t do it on our own. But God helps us to do it.
Where are we going to go? Are we going to commit? We’re going to have that presence with our friends and family and acquaintances, not just about those people whom we know and love best, that it’s really a little easier to because at least we have that deep long relationship with. It’s about the people that we encounter just briefly. Do we appear to be people of commitment when people encounter us as people who claim the name of Jesus? Do they say, “I know that this person’s going to come through for me because this person follows the Lord.” Ruth does. That’s what I do. Sometimes. Sometimes not. There are times I can only wish I were committed like Ruth. Do you feel that? Do you have that experience too, where you think, boy, I just wish, or sometimes we don’t want to go there. So we say, “Well, I’m as committed as I need to be.”
That service technician says, “Well, it’s not my responsibility to deal with this issue. I don’t need to feel bad that I can’t fix your AC. You didn’t pay for the super hot weather plan.” Do we get to that point? God, give us such tender consciences that we can’t get to that point. Yes, sometimes we need to say there are boundaries. Yes, I can’t do everything that you need. I’m not a superhuman being in myself. I can’t be everything. We certainly can be present, we can be caring.
Ruth doesn’t commit to fixing everything for Naomi. She doesn’t say, “Well, listen here. We’ll go back to Israel. I will get everything set up so you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to worry about being in poverty. I’m going to make sure everything works. All going to come together. I’ve read chapter 4. I know it’s going to be okay.” She doesn’t say that. She doesn’t know that. She says, “I’m going to go with you and I’m going to be with you. I’m going to be committed to you. Your people are my people.” Just because my husband’s died and I’m not really bound to this anymore, you’re still my family. I committed to that years ago and I am staying with that. I’m going to go through this even though it’s hard.
And in that, we see Ruth committing to that third thing that you need in caring, which is endurance. And that’s going to tie to her commitment to the Lord here. I didn’t read this part before of verse 16, but she says, “And your God, my God.” Not a complex phrase. It’s a beautiful one. And I believe that’s where she finds her endurance. I’m going to be with you, your family. They’re still my family. I’m going to get to know them a lot better because suddenly we’re going to live in the same town. I committed to it. That’s all there. But it really boils down to this statement. Naomi says, “You don’t need to follow the Lord anymore. You’ve lost your husband who is a follower of the Lord. Go back to your people, follow the gods there because it’s so much better for you.” And Ruth says, “No, I’m going to follow the Lord. Your God is my God. I’m going to endure with that. I said I was going to do it.”
I’d imagine if there was any faithfulness at all in this family when they were talking about getting married, that Ruth spoke to her husband about what they believed, and that was at least of some importance there, because clearly she’s adopted the Lord as her God, which is, “I said I was going to do it back then. I’m not going to break away from following the Lord just because things got tough.” And because she’s holding on to the Lord then she says, there’s other things and she holds on to them. She says that “Your God is my God.”
So, were you lodge, going back to the first part of verse 16, “I will lodge. Your people shall be my people.” She can say that because of that third thing. I’m holding onto that. So what does she do then? By endurance, she’s going to hold on to her family that she married into. Naomi isn’t her flesh and blood, but she got married to Naomi’s son, and she says, “I committed not only to my husband who’s now dead—he’s one of these graves we’re standing by—but I commit to you as well. I meant it when I said I was going to take his people as my people, and you’re my people. I am with you. I hold on to that family. I am going to hold on to you so long that someday when I die, I’m going to be buried where you’re buried.”
Now, we don’t talk a lot like that any longer, but when she’s expressing that, she’s expressing something about her commitment to the family. Because you see, in those times, a lot of times families would have a shared tomb that they would put their bones in. And so what she’s saying is when people someday look back at my gravesite, I’m going to be in with you and the rest of your family. I am a part of this family and it’s going to last for good. That’s what I’m going to be known as. I’m going to be known as Naomi’s daughter. I’m not backing away from that.
I like what Daniel Bach says about this passage. He says in reference to how this is often read at weddings, “Yes, this is actually how marriage should be. It ought to be this way. This is, if people understood what this was, this commitment that’s happening here,” it would be beautiful if it were right in a wedding ceremony. Unfortunately, what we’re really thinking of is as long as everything’s going well. As long as both spouses are still alive and both spouses are still getting along. But what Ruth understands, it was so much more than that. How beautiful if people actually do make this commitment in a wedding ceremony. How beautiful if we make that commitment to our brothers and sisters in Christ just in general, that we say, “I am going to endure with you.” Why? Because the Lord has bound us together. He brought us together.
That’s a lot of commitment, isn’t it? There’s a lot of commitment when we don’t necessarily know if things are going to go right. But we see how God works through that as Ruth looks to the Lord. And I believe because she’s looking to the Lord, then she can look to this family that she has been placed in, even though it’s come apart in ways that she never imagined. And so, did she express something like this back when she gotten married? Maybe so, but now she was really owning it because now it doesn’t seem to come with the, “If you act now, you’ll get all these extra wonderful accessories to the plan that you’re signing up for.” She doesn’t even know if it can remove a stain from her clothes because as far as she can tell, all Naomi has is more stains to give her. But she made that commitment. She wants to stay. Now she’s going to endure.
And so it’s not just a loyalty to her husband—may he rest in peace. It’s not just a loyalty to Naomi, for as long as she lives, she says, no, even when you die, I’m going to be with you. I’m going to be buried someday when I die in with the family. I am going to stay.
That’s because of her God. And we can see that even more strongly in verse 17. It says, “Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord do to me, and more, if anything but death parts me from you.”
Now that sounds a little morbid, doesn’t it? I mean, she’s saying, boy, you know, I am going to take on suffering. I am going to die, and when I die, I still, even then, people are going to know me as a part of Naomi’s family because I’m going to be buried there. And she says, if I don’t do that, may the Lord do to me and more also. And you might say, well, do to me what and what’s more? Well, she doesn’t express it. Sometimes it’s thought that what she was probably doing is she was making some nonverbal gesture. Maybe she does something like this. You know, “I just talked about where I’m going to be when I die. If I don’t live out my life following you, may the Lord go ahead and kill me right now or kill me when I do that.”
She’s committing her life to Naomi. When she says “more,” we don’t know everything that she has in mind, but in other words, she’s saying, whatever the worst that the Lord can bring, may it fall upon me if I’m not faithful to this commitment. Because I am really in this. And that’s a strong commitment to Naomi, but notice also it’s a very strong commitment to the Lord because in this, she’s recognizing the Lord is the one who’s in power here. It’s not those other gods she could go back to. She’s saying, “I believe in the Lord enough. I’m putting my life on the line saying the Lord can do whatever he wants to me.”
She believes the Lord can. And in that, I think she’s saying something about how she believes the Lord is faithful too. It’s not like she’s just calling a curse down upon herself, but here she is in a land that isn’t the Lord’s land, saying, “But I want the Lord to hold me accountable.” Why? Because he’s my God. I’ve been following him and I’m going to continue to follow him. And I believe in that she’s saying something about, I believe that he is faithful.
She doesn’t know how. She doesn’t know how things are going to work out. If she’s going to live a happy life or a life that says destitute as Naomi thinks that the rest of her life is going to be. But the Lord is going to be faithful. He’s going to be there. He’s actually going to be there to enforce that curse, but so much more, he’s going to be there. And that in itself is a blessing.
How much of a blessing is it that her descendant someday—she doesn’t get to live to see this—he’s going to be the great King Solomon. And Solomon is going to talk about God and how he works, and he’s going to reflect maybe thinking back up his family tree when he says these words in 1 Kings 8:41: “Because likewise, when a foreigner who is not of your people, Israel, comes from a far country for your namesake, for they shall hear of your great name and your mighty hand and of your outstretched arm when he comes and prays toward this house, here in heaven, your dwelling place, and do according to all for which the foreigner calls to you, in order that all peoples of earth may know your name and fear you, as you do your people, Israel, that they may know that this house that I have built is called by your name.”
Daniel Bach says when someone shows up, someone who isn’t part of the people of God, someone who maybe just wants to try out who the Lord is and calls upon your name—not someone who’s already converted and become an Israelite, but just someone who walks in as a foreigner—and that person calls out to you, Lord, hear their prayer. Hear those people’s prayers that come from foreign lands, that they too can see that you, God, are the only God of the universe, the one who’s totally in control.
I think that’s what Ruth believes. I think Solomon looking back and sees what the truth of that belief is because he is there in part as a testimony to that. He wouldn’t be there if not for how the Lord is faithful, even to those who call on him, who are Moabites, who are Philistines, who are whatever group of people you come from today.
Here’s an amazing thing, friends. If we think about ourselves here, here in the United States, or Mexico, or Kenya, or India, or wherever you may be, more than likely, most if not all of your ancestors were not biological ancestors of Abraham. They were not people who originally received this promise. And yet just as Solomon prayed, just as Ruth recognized God is faithful and he endures. His promises endure because he shows care to us. And that’s the crucial turning point for us if we’re going to show care to other people.
I read a fascinating experiment that was done not long ago at a university. It was a scar experiment, they called it. It took people whose faces were not deformed in any way. They were just perfectly clean skin. They got the sort of people that would do makeup on a movie set that could do something really realistic looking to one’s skin, and they put scars on people’s faces. And they then held up a mirror and let people see what their face would look like if it had scars on it—something really noticeable, something that you couldn’t just easily hide.
The experiment was that the people were going to wear these scars and then go out and interact with people out in the world and report back what those interactions were like, what people said, how it felt, whether they felt like people were nice to them or not, all these sorts of things. To try to understand exactly how having some kind of scar or something on our face might change the way people think of us.
Well, before they sent these people out, because this makeup was stage makeup, they said they needed to moisturize it. And so they had the person come back and work on these scars and put moisturizer on it so that it wouldn’t be damaged as they were interacting throughout their day in this experiment.
The people went out. Other people went out without any scar makeup on it, interacted, and they all came back and reported their findings. And what do you know? It happened exactly how we’d expect. The people who had no scars on their face said that people were nicer to them, that their conversations were less awkward, and people didn’t treat them weirdly for having some kind of deformity or something wrong with them, etc., etc.
Then they asked the people who had the scar makeup on, “Well, how did people treat you?” And they said, “Well, you know, people look down on me. People are rude to me. People treated me like I wasn’t quite fully like them because I had the scars on.” But then the people conducting the experiment held the mirror back up.
Here’s the amazing thing about the experiment. The people who had the scars on—they’d been told they were receiving moisturizer that would help keep the scars on their faces while they went and did this experiment. But in fact, what the makeup artists were doing was putting on makeup remover, removing the scar from their faces. People hadn’t seen their faces since that moment.
They believed those scars were on their faces and that people were looking down on them, but what was really happening is they didn’t understand that people couldn’t see the scars at all. They were living with scars that really weren’t there. And because they thought they were there, they treated people differently. They received how people treated them differently. And it ended up being the self-fulfilling prophecy that people were looking down on them, even though they were actually any different than the test group that had never received the makeup at all.
They thought they were alone. They thought everything was broken down, that people were going to think oddly of them. And so what did they expect? They expected that. What did they receive? As far as they were concerned, they received that. But in truth, they weren’t any different than the test subjects, the control subjects.
Naomi thinks that she has these huge scars on her face. No one’s going to be able to treat her well. There’s no hope for her. And so what happens? All she can see is what she’s lost. She can’t see that she has this daughter-in-law who is making herself way more committed than she was ever obliged to. She can’t see how God’s going to fulfill promises in chapter 4 or even imagine that God’s somehow going to be faithful. All she can see is that everyone must be looking down on me. I’m the person with these huge scars on my face. No one is going to want anything to do with poor old Naomi.
What does Ruth see though? I believe that Ruth, even though she too bears actual scars, starts to see that God has been doing something to remove them. God’s starting to heal her. God is working. Even though she does indeed have the scars, what she sees is she sees the gift of Naomi in her life. She sees the gift of the faith that came through this family that she married into, even though things came down crashing and burning. Because of that, she proceeds in an entirely different way.
Just as those test subjects felt like, “Oh, everyone’s looking down at me. Naomi’s right there.” But Ruth, without being in control, she thinks that she has that makeup on too. She thinks everyone’s going to look at her. She lives as if she doesn’t have it. She lives because she understands that God’s working in our life.
John 16:33 says Jesus said, “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation, but take heart; I have overcome the world.”
You know, when we’re going through life and things are challenging, we experience tribulation and we experience things that are broken. We are very clear at what’s happened to us—the injury in our arm, the sore feet, the weakness and the tiredness, maybe the actual literal scars that we bear.
What does Jesus say? “I have overcome those things.”
And in the moment, we’re still thinking, “But I’ve seen in the mirror. I’ve seen what people are seeing of me and they’re not going to want anything to do with me. And I have no hope in the future.”
We end up being like Naomi.
But the key thing that Ruth recognizes that enables her to care for Naomi and enables her to then be a part of the plan that God has is that she understands that God cares for her.
And here’s the thing that we need to understand: God cares for you and for me as well.
So when he calls us, “Go and care for one another,” we’re not doing it with the heavy weight of everything that has eaten us and torn us apart and deformed us and weakened us and just utterly crushed us. We’re going as those who received all that stuff I just described—in so much more—when you went to the cross for us. Knowing that he cares for us. Because he cares for us, we can show care too.
Let’s pray that he’d help us to see that tonight.
Pray with me, please.
Lord, we come before you as those who bear all kinds of wear and tear from life. Sometimes it’s actually shown on us. We bear the scars, we bear the weight of time and struggle and health and emotional and physical pain. We feel like Naomi that there’s nothing but bitterness ahead for us, and we look and we know that you’re in control, but we don’t see anything but more of the same. We don’t see that you’ve been removing those things from us.
So we go on, we live in accordance to the things that you have released us from.
But Lord, would you help us to be more like Ruth, living in the light of your strength? We can’t do it on our own any more than Ruth could. But you help us to understand that you haven’t painted on things to cause people to run from us, but rather you’ve been working on us, taking away the burden of sin that has marred us so deeply. Would you help us to understand that you’re doing that, and that you’ve, in fact, already accomplished everything that needs to be accomplished, that we can rest in your care.
For in your care, we find what is done and what is good. Would you help us to then show that care to this hurting world.
We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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