Day 11: An Interesting Trait Of God (Ruth 2:1)

Today’s Passage: Ruth 2:1

If you are a writer, one approach is to create suspense and tension to pull your readers forward into the story wondering, “How will this situation be resolved?”

God is not a mystery writer. He has an interesting trait. He tells us how our lives work out.

Consider verse 2:1

1 Now Naomi had a relative of her husband's, a worthy man of the clan of Elimelech, whose name was Boaz.

In this one verse, we see God in action. To be clear, Naomi has no idea what is going on until the end of this day (verse 22). Yet the writer wants us to understand that God has set apart a worthy man of her clan…interesting.

As I research and study, I come across tidbits. Consider:

Goethe called it the “loveliest complete work on a small scale, handed down to us as an ethical treatise and an idyll.” Rudolf Alexander Schröder(nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature) “No poet in the world has written a more beautiful short story.” (A. Weiser, Introduction to the Old Testament (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961), p. 305.)

And it reads like a wonderful short story. My point is to remind myself that I am reading the Word of God—this is not some human-only author. The author of this book, God, does not keep secrets to make our lives harder. He has said over-and-over that we are His children, that He is with us, that He loves us. 

God, as he inspired the writing of the Book of Ruth, tells us not why Ruth faced the hardships she did, but rather, that He is with her. In fact, He has her future in hand through a man named Boaz.

Now some of you might be thinking, “Yeah, but what about…”. Does your mind ever do that? What about when someone makes a statement to reinforce a point of view?  In this case your mind might be going to “Yeah but what about all the people who died in concentration camps, or…”.

Our minds do this quite naturally. It is called dialectical thinking and the likes of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle were some of the earliest to identify this very human trait. 

But rather than go there, perhaps you might ask, “Why does God reveal this kinsman this early in the text?”

The answer is because God does not keep secrets from us. He has shown us since the beginning of the Book of Genesis the way forward. Sometimes that way is through extreme difficulty. But that way is always to be with Him. 

All the bad things that happen to us, to humanity, do not nullify God—we only think that way if our aim, if our endpoint, is a safe life on earth. If our endpoint is life with God, then we will see in the Scriptures, time and again, that this is the endpoint God seeks for everyone.

Boaz will be Naomi’s kinsman redeemer. He foreshadows Jesus. In four short chapters of this little Book of Ruth, we are reading of a faithful woman facing calamity, and The Almighty, who, when our world is at its worst, He is at his best—for he has sent a redeemer—no secrets. 

I am not sure if you are the sort of person who wonders about God, and about how all that we experience in this world stacks up to our trusting of God and this story of the Bible. If you do, consider Ruth, her situation, and her God.