God of the Ordinary

Pastor Melinda Song
08 March 2020

This week I am starting a series entitled Beauty for Ashes based on the book of Ruth.

The book of Ruth would NOT be a box office hit if it were made into a movie. Most block-buster movies have special effects, computer graphics, car chases, big explosions, Superheroes, and at least a few fighting sequences. For example, Avengers: Endgame which as of August 2019 is the highest-grossing international film (and overall) of all time worldwide and in Malaysia has all the elements that make up a block-buster movie.

The book of Ruth is different from the other books in the Bible in that it contains nothing spectacular or supernatural. There are no prophets, nor kings, nor mighty heroes, and not even a direct message from God.

Yet the story of Ruth is a beautiful picture of how God is extraordinarily involved in our ordinary lives. The story reminds us that is invisibly and mysteriously working all of the time, even within tragedy. His invisible hand of God is always guiding, directing, providing, sustaining, and redeeming us.

The bridge of the song Waymaker is a description of all that is happening in the book of Ruth:

Even when I don’t see it, You’re working
Even when I don’t feel it, You’re working
You never stop, You never stop working
You never stop, You never stop working

Ruth is a story for those who in the midst of tragedy, loss, pain or disappointment may doubt whether God is in control, whether God is good, and whether faithfulness to do what is right is worth it in hard times.

This little book also addresses themes that are very real today – famine, refugees, migrant communities, prejudice, discrimination, inequality and women.

Most of all Ruth teaches us about love – the redeeming love of God and redeeming love in our relationships.

Let us begin by looking into Ruth Chapter 1.

Ruth 1:1-22 (NIV84)
¹ In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. ² The man’s name was Elimelech, his wife’s name Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there.
³ Now Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. ⁴ They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, ⁵ both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.
⁶ When she heard in Moab that the Lord had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them, Naomi and her daughters-in-law prepared to return home from there. ⁷ With her two daughters-in-law she left the place where she had been living and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah.
⁸ Then Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home. May the Lord show kindness to you, as you have shown to your dead and to me. 9 May the Lord grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.”
Then she kissed them and they wept aloud ¹⁰ and said to her, “We will go back with you to your people.”

 ¹⁴ At this they wept again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law good-by, but Ruth clung to her.

 ¹⁸ When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.
¹⁹ So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?”
²⁰ “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. ²¹ I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”
²² So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.

The book of Ruth is sandwiched between book of Judges and 1 Samuel. It tells the story of one little Ephrathite family from Bethlehem in Judah that takes a detour with disastrous consequences. But, as we will see, God is governing and superintending the details of their lives. And He brings them safely through in the end.

The book of Ruth is very often overlooked due to its small size and seeming ordinariness. The main characters were to all intents and purposes, nobodies.

Ruth, Naomi, Elimelech, Mahlon, Chilion, Orpah were ordinary people that we would know nothing about, if God hadn’t paused to tell us of their existence. But God is…God of the Ordinary

And God’s church is very often comprised of very ordinary people. As Paul says, “Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth” (1 Cor. 1:26, NIV).

The story begins with a famine in Bethlehem in the land of Judah.

FAMINE

“In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land…” (v. 1)

Besides a lack of food, but there was also a famine of spirituality, a famine of faith, a famine of trust in the Lord; and we are told it is in the days when the judges ruled.

The condition in the days when the Judges ruled is summarised in the last verse of the book of Judges:

Judges 21:25 (NIV84)
In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.

One commentator says, “The book of Judges teems with violent invasions, apostate religion, unchecked lawlessness, and tribal civil war.”

Every man was a law unto himself. If it feels good, do it! If you want it, take it! Apa pun boleh!

At the end of the Book of Deuteronomy God had warned that if God’s people did not walk in God’s ways, the curses of the covenant would come down upon them. Part of those curses would be the effects of famine. It appears that that’s what, in part, is taking place here in Judah.

And the story continues…

¹ In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. ² The man’s name was Elimelech, his wife’s name Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there.

Beth in Hebrew means house. Lehem means bread. So Bethlehem means House of bread, or house of food and there was a famine in the house of bread. But just about fifty miles away, across the Dead Sea on the high plateau of Moab, there was no famine, and so Elimelech makes what must have seemed at the time like a necessary and wise decision.

He packed up his family went off to Moab. This was not an unusual custom for those days. Abraham, when there came a famine in the land, also went down to Egypt.

Refugees are what we call people who are displaced because of natural disasters such as famines, wars, floods. Most of us are here because our forefathers left their homeland due to some crisis or disaster.

So, let’s not be too judgemental. Elimelech and his family are refugees as the result of a famine.

But having said that, we also wonder why Elimelech didn’t stay put and dare to trust God to carry them through the hard times? Others like Boaz didn’t run off and they made it through the famine.

Life is the sum of our choices. every choice we make helps determine which road we take, and which roads we don’t.

Like in the movie “Back to the Future”, changing that one choice would cause much of this present reality to disappear. You have made choices like that too, choices that affected the trajectory of your life in a thousand ways.

Elimelech’s bad choice #1 was to move his family to the land of Moab. The Moabites were the sworn enemies of Israel and a really degenerate people whose family tree began with scandal through an incestuous encounter between Lot and his older daughter (Gen. 19).

The Moabites later hired a prophet named Balaam to curse the Israelites and when that didn’t work, they sent their women in to seduce the Jews into worshipping false gods (Num 22-24). God despised the Moabite people so much He declared that the Moabites were forbidden to enter His assembly even down to the 10th generation (Deut 23:3).

When Elimelech stood at the fork in the road of this choice, one road was to stay in Israel and trust God to provide, the other road was to go where there was food. He decided to go down the road that compromised his obedience to God for the comfort and security that the Moab road seemed to offer.

There are defining moments in our lives when we will be faced with a choice between hardship that requires trusting God or immediate comfort and security if we’re willing compromise our obedience to God. At the moment it may seem like compromise is the best way to get instant blessings but in the long run that road is never the right road. What’s easier in the beginning becomes much harder in the end.

ILLUSTRATION

Winter was coming and a hunter went out into the forest to shoot a bear out of which he planned to make a warm coat. By and by he saw a bear coming toward him and raised his gun and took aim.

As the hunter was about to pull the trigger the bear spoke in a soft soothing voice, “Isn’t it better to talk than to shoot? What do you want? Let’s negotiate the matter.”

Lowering his rifle, the hunter replied, “I’m cold. I want a fur coat.”

“I’m hungry. I only want a full stomach,” said the bear, “so let us negotiate a compromise.” They sat down to negotiate and after a time the bear walked away alone. The negotiations had been successful.

In the end, the hunter was well enveloped with the bear’s fur and the bear had eaten his dinner.

Compromise eventually leads to a dead end. That’s what happened to Elimelech and his family. We should heed…

Proverbs 3:5-6 (NIV)
⁵ Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
⁶ in all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make your paths straight.

ILLUSTRATION

The history of Christian persecution is filled with inspiring stories featuring people of principle-those individuals who are immortalized for refusing to compromise their beliefs. John Bunyan was one of those.  

In 1660, England’s experiment as a Republic came to an abrupt end with the return to monarchist rule under Charles II. With this change, religious freedom also ended and Anglicanism was once again designated as the official state religion. It became illegal to conduct church services outside of the Church of England and unlicensed individuals were forbidden from addressing a religious gathering.   

With these new laws, John Bunyan was arrested for preaching without a license. His growing popularity, though, prompted the judge to seek some sort of a compromise. Promising Bunyan immediate release if he only promised not to preach again, the judge’s leniency was met with the reply, “If you release me today, I shall preach tomorrow!”   

Three times in his life Bunyan was arrested, convicted and jailed for preaching without a license. In the end, he spent over twelve years in prison. At any time during those years he could have secured his freedom by simply promising not to preach. But Bunyan knew God’s calling on his life and so he adamantly refused to compromise his convictions.   

Those prison years were certainly not wasted. It was during this time that Bunyan wrote the book Pilgrim’s Progress. Its immediate success and ongoing popularity has made it a Christian classic, the second most read book in English literature next to the Bible.   

The danger of compromise is seen in the progression in terminology; they were going to go to Moab and “live for a while” (v. 1) there. The description at the end of verse 2 is a far more settled description: “they went to Moab and lived there.” They ended up settling down there. Therein lies the danger of compromise.

And the story continues…

³ Now Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. ⁴ They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, ⁵ both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.

If things were bad, they got even worse. From famine the family were hit with three…

FUNERALS

At some point Elimelech died, and Naomi was left with two sons to raise by herself. The life of a single mom was much harder then than it is now, but at least she did have her boys. Then they put their roots down in Moab even deeper as her sons had married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth.

Naomi might have wondered if she would ever get back to Bethlehem now that she had two daughters-in-law whose families were right there in Moab. But, at least she did have her sons and their two wonderful wives. She had a family. She had a future. Ten years later the family was still in Moab.

Then the unthinkable happened – the two sons died and we are presented with two primary problems in the book of Ruth.

Problem one was widowhood. Widows in the Old Testament had very little means of providing for themselves and here are three of them. As a foreigner, Moab would have no social net for Naomi and no motivation to help her.

The second problem is extinction. To the Jewish mind, passing on their lineage was the most important thing and her lineage has come to an end. To Naomi it is as though God has taken every bit of hope from her and there is nothing left to her life. It is the ultimate dead end.

Some thoughts would have been running through their minds.

• Were they being punished by God?
• Was it wrong of them to have moved to Moab in the first place?
• Was it wrong of the sons to have married Moabite women?

It was forbidden for Jews to inter-marry with idol worshippers (Deuteronomy 23:3-6 & Exodus 34:12-16).

However, there are exceptions such as Rahab, who, years before, had been a gentile from an idol-worshipping city who came to believe that the God of the Jews was the One, True God, and she put her life on the line to prove it. She is an example of a non-Jew who was welcomed into the Jewish nation. (Joshua 6:22-25, Hebrews 11:31)

The answer to the question “Was God mad at them?” is: we just don’t know.

If God wasn’t mad at them‚ if they weren’t being punished by God‚ why was all this happening to them?

It’s possible they were a little family doing the best they could, and life just beat them up. If that’s the case, then God, whom they worshipped, let it happen. Why? By the time we get to the end of this book, we’ll know.

Now, I am NOT advocating that we can walk in sin or out of the will of God and expect God to put back all the broken pieces of our lives. There will always be consequences to being out of God’s will.

And we cannot use providence as a reason to disobey what God commands. If I find a bag of money on the street, that is not a sign in providence that God wants me to keep it.

But all is not lost…

⁶ When she heard in Moab that the Lord had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them, Naomi and her daughters-in-law prepared to return home from there. ⁷ With her two daughters-in-law she left the place where she had been living and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah.

After suffering such devastating loss Naomi heard good news that the famine is over and so she made a decision to return to Bethlehem.

There is hope for a…

FUTURE

Along the way, Naomi’s two daughters-in-law were presented with choices.

• Orpah chose survival by going back to her family and to their gods. She went back to a future in a familiar place. She made a practical choice.
• Ruth begged to stay with Naomi, choosing to throw her future into the hands of the God of her mother-in-law, a God Ruth had come to know in the last few years. A God, apparently, who had been proclaimed to her by her new family, the family she had come to love. Ruth made a faith choice. And a love choice.

But that is a story for another day. Let us continue with Naomi’s story.

¹⁹ So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?”
²⁰ “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. ²¹ I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”

Naomi’s response to the women of the town when they arrived back at Bethlehem reveals the state of her heart and mind.

She was bitter. She was beaten down, defeated, ashamed, abandoned. She believed the One, True God is against her.

What is “bitterness”?

Bitterness is that hard place in your chest which you won’t or can’t let go of‚ because someone has chosen to fail you utterly.

Naomi was bitter against God. She believed in Him but she thought He had not loved her. She thought He was not all He had claimed to be. He was either not good enough or not great enough. She thought He had failed her.

• Bitterness is private. It is a cancer which hides within. Sometimes it hides a very long time before it is acknowledged. While it hides it does damage. But very often what is inside us comes out through our speech and behaviour.

Proverbs 14:10 (NIV84)
Each heart knows its own bitterness,
         and no one else can share its joy.

• Bitterness runs deep and stays long. Roots that are difficult to remove.

Hebrews 12:15 (NIV84)
See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.

• Bitterness is a characteristic of evil. Romans 3:14, in describing the wicked of the world, says, “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”

But there are indications that things were not as dark as Naomi thought

1. Naomi talked about her bitterness – a good sign. She was not keeping it private anymore, locked up inside where it would poison her even more.
2. Naomi was going back to God’s land. Even when she was not sure that He liked her anymore she was subconsciously choosing God. Even when she spoke bitterly of Him she was turning towards Him, going in His direction.
3. Naomi’s friends surrounded her at her return – she had community.
4. Ruth, her lovely daughter-in-law was with her – she had family.
5. The famine was over.

²² So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.

6. The barley harvest had just begun‚ there would be food to survive.

Why couldn’t Naomi see these good things?

She was bitter. She was beaten down, defeated, ashamed, abandoned.

In the midst of her troubles and struggles God is saying…

Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV84)
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

APPLICATION:

In Ruth chapter one, we have people who had trusted God in the past, but now the question is will they trust Him again – after this last disaster?

What is your trouble? What causes you anxiety? What keeps you up at night? How have you been hurt? Take you trouble to God and Trust Him again.

Why?

1. First, God is sovereign. The key verse is verse six. “When she heard in Moab that the Lord had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them…” The Lord stopped the famine – and gave them food.

The God we have here is a God that stops a famine in an instant. God is sovereign over the weather, natural disasters, life and death, the large and the small. Our God is a powerful God.

2. You can take your trouble to God and trust Him again because God loves and cares about you.

The God of the book of Ruth in verse six paid attention to his people’s needs. He “came to the aid of his people”!

God is sovereign, but the author of Ruth gives no explanation for the tragedy. And that is so frustrating to us. Our sovereign God does not have to explain Himself to you.

When we demand from God an explanation, His answer to us so often is – Trust me. I will take care of you. Believe in Me – even when you do not understand.