Ruthless (Part 1): Seeing God in Loss

In 1873, Horatio Spafford was getting ready to send or go with his family to Europe on a trip.

A few years earlier, he had lost most of his holdings in the Chicago fire.

He had been a wealthy businessman, had bought many pieces of property, but the insurance companies that did exist went out of business in the Chicago Fire, so he lost everything.

But he thought, it's okay because I have my family, I can rebuild.

But then his son died, and so now he's left with his wife and his four daughters, and together they were planning to go to Europe to accompany D.

L.

Moody in one of his evangelistic crusades.

D.

L.

Moody think Billy Graham of the 1800s, that's D.

L.

Moody, kind of a man who did a lot of traveling and proclaiming of Jesus Christ.

So Horatio Spafford, a devout Christian, was ready to go, but just as he was ready to get on the boat, he realized that he needed to attend to some of the business that had been broken through the fire and different things.

So he said, I'm going to stay.

And he sent his wife and his daughters on the boat.

And as they traveled toward Europe, an accident happened.

Another boat T-boned the boat that they were in, and the ship sank.

And before all the help could arrive, his four daughters all drowned.

And as he waited for news on this crash, he finally got a telegram from his wife that said, survived alone.

Well, Horatio Spafford knew that he wanted to be with his wife, so he arranged to get on the next boat that he could to get to Europe.

There were no planes, obviously, at that time.

And so he he was trying to get there.

And as he finally got on a boat and began to make his way across the ocean, about the place where they believed that the boat sank, the captain came and said, you know, it was probably right around here.

And as Horatio Spafford sat on the deck that day, he wrote the words to a song that Christians have sung for generations.

Maybe you've heard the story of how this came about.

You've most likely, certainly heard the song.

In fact, you heard a newer rendition of the song just a moment ago.

He wrote the words to the song, It Is Well.

Let me just read to you some of what he wrote that day on the deck of that boat.

When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.

Then he repeats the refrain.

Just as an aside, sometimes people are critical of modern Christian music for repeating words too much.

They did it back then too, but just an aside.

Second verse, though Satan should buffet, though trials should come, let his blessed assurance control that Christ hath regarded my helpless estate and hath shed his own blood for my soul.

Then he repeats the chorus, and the next verse says, My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin not in part but the whole is nailed to the cross and I hear it no more.

Praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord, O my soul.

Again, repeats the chorus, a couple more verses, and then the final verse.

And Lord haste the day when the faith shall be sight.

So, Lord, bring it quickly when I can see what I've only now believed, is what he's saying.

The clouds be rolled back as the scroll, the trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend, even so it is well with my soul.

Now I don't know how that strikes you, but when I read those words and I think about the reality of somebody losing his four daughters and writing that within a short season, I think, I don't know how you do that.

I have four sons, and if an accident took all four of my sons at once, I think I would have a hard time singing that song, let alone writing the words to it.

And so it begs a question.

And the question is this how does somebody have that perspective that can say, even when I'm going through incredible loss, it is well with my soul.

And Lord haste the day when my faith shall be sight.

Today we're beginning a new series that we're calling Ruthless.

We're looking at the Old Testament book of Ruth.

And I believe that the first chapter of Ruth, you heard a little bit of it read, shows us something about dealing with loss, about seeing God in loss.

And in fact, I believe that there are two truths that the first chapter of Ruth gives us that if we can hold these truths that seem to be opposites, seem to be moving in different directions, if we can hold these two things together, that we can find a way to navigate the highs and lows of whatever comes in our life.

And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you kind of the first truth and then read and comment on some of the section of the text, then give you the second truth, and then talk about how we can hold these together.

So here's the first truth.

The first truth is this, and that is life is ruthless.

Hence the title of the book or the series.

And what I mean when I say life is ruthless is just life is hard.

And here's how we see this, verses 1 through 22.

So really the whole chapter tells about the hardship of life.

It starts with this.

It says, In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land.

And so right away, this sets the context.

Judges is the book right before Ruth in the Old Testament canon, and it's saying that at the same time this was happening, that Judges is the season when the people of Israel were basically, and the phrase that's repeated in Judges over and over is did what was right in their own eyes.

So people were doing what was right in their own eyes.

In other words, they'd worship God, say we're about God, but in reality they said, we want to do what is good for us.

Can you imagine that there was ever a culture that did that?

But that was the culture of the book of Ruth.

And it says there was a famine in the land.

And this is something that's hard for you and I to really understand.

Because chances are, even if you've ever been on the margins, you've never really worried about food.

Maybe you've missed a meal or two, maybe a few meals.

And I know there are people maybe who live on the margins, and as a church, one of the things we do is we we partner with Light of Life to make sure that meals are provided for people in our city who have needs, but not only that can help address generational poverty through some of the ministry there.

But chances are most of us who are gathered here in this room, who are at our different campuses, we can go to a grocery store and get what we need.

In other words, we don't know the desperation that famine really is.

But here they're at a place where there's famine.

It says, so a man from Bethlehem, and names are important in the book of Ruth.

Bethlehem means house of bread.

So there's a famine in the house of bread.

And a man from Bethlehem and Judea, together, Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live in the country of Moab.

The man's name was Elimelech.

Elimelech means God is king.

So the author here is basically saying Elimelech was living as if to honor God.

He lived in a time when people did what was right in their own eyes, but he lived as a way to try to honor God.

At least that was his name.

And his wife's name was Naomi.

Again, names are important.

Her name means sweetness.

We'll come back to that.

And the names of the two sons were Malin and Killian.

Now, Melin and Killian means weak or sick, is Melan, and Killian means frail.

You could say that these names are like weak and weaker.

You remember the movie a few years ago, Dumb and Dumber, this is weak and weaker.

Okay, this is, and you might think, who would name their kids weak and weaker?

Well, when infant mortality was as high as it was, what would happen is that people would typically not name their children right away.

They would wait until they thought they would survive.

So likely because of the famine, these kids were surviving, but they named them weak and weaker, saying, we're not sure that they're going to make it.

And so now you have the scene that's set here.

And then we're told that they went and they lived in Moab.

Now, just to set the idea, here's a little map.

Judah is here on the left, Bethlehem up to Jerusalem, across on the north side of the Dead Sea, and then they'd go down into Moab.

Now, the significance of this is something that's debated among biblical scholars, commentators, pastors who look at this.

Probably most seem to make a case that they should not have gone to Moab, that there was this sense of disobedience because they went to Moab because they weren't trusting God to stay in the house of bread, and instead they went to the world's resources to get what they needed.

And I understand that line of thinking, but I'm not sure that it's accurate because there's never a command that says don't go to Moab to eat.

In fact, we know that Abraham went and different people went to avoid famine and went to other countries in order to be fed.

And so I don't know if we can make that much of a case out of this, but here's what's significant: they were in a desperate place, and they went as foreigners to a foreign land in order to say, we just need to make it.

Verse 3, now Elimelech, Naomi's husband, died.

So now that they get there, and now the man who was providing, he dies, and she was left with her two sons.

And it says this, they married Moabite women, one named Orpah the other named Ruth.

Orpah, which is where Oprah got her name.

She was named after Orpah but transpose the letters.

I don't know if it was intentional or not.

Orpah means stiffnecked.

So you have weakness marrying stiffnecked.

And then weaker marries Ruth, whose name means refreshment or breath of fresh air.

And it tells us in the text here that they lived there ten years and then the two sons died.

In other words, this is more just devastation.

And the 10 years, the idea of 10 years, was that they had enough time to have had children, but they didn't have children.

And in that society, having children, especially sons, was so important because sons would work, they would provide for their parents as they aged.

And so now you have three women living here together that are on the margins of society.

In other words, their survival, their very survival, is in question.

And then it says, This after they lived there about ten years, both Malin and Kilean also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons or her husband.

When Naomi heard in Moab that the Lord had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them, she and her daughters-in-law prepared to return home from there.

Verse 7.

With her two daughters-in-law, she left the place where she had been living, the place and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah.

So now they're ready to go back.

And there's some, again, disagreement among those who write commentaries on these things about this whole next scene, because what she does next is she urges Oprah Urpah and Naomi or Ruth to stay there.

There's too many names here.

To stay there.

And she says, Go back to your husbands, or find a husband.

Find people here that will give you a life, basically.

And some say that she didn't want to bring two Moabite daughter-in-laws home with her because she would have been maybe embarrassed because it would have shown their disobedience.

And here's what they're saying: the Bible's never against interracial marriage, but it is against interfaith marriage.

In the Old Testament, the idea was that the people of God would be distinct.

So if they married outside of faith, what it would do is it would delude the faith.

It would be like two ships moving in opposite directions, and the next generation would no longer be distinct, and the people of God would not worship together and have a sense of community in the same way.

And in the New Testament, by the way, it's repeated in 2 Corinthians where it says, don't be unequally yoked together with unbelievers.

In other words, this is a principle from God that transcends time, saying, if you are looking for a relationship, only look among people who believe if you are a believer.

But the two sons didn't practice this.

They took Moabite wives, and as a result, now she is potentially telling them, listen, you just go back to Moab, I'm gonna go home.

But they refuse.

By the way, this is a pretty poor evangelistic strategy.

Because if they would believe in coming back to Israel, she's saying, look, I would rather that you find a husband and get a life than have an eternity.

Because that right now is what's important.

In a way, if you do want to find any fault with what Elimelech and Naomi did, you could say that the pattern is now repeating itself, where they're prioritizing the temporal over the spiritual.

And it's an easy thing for any of us to do.

Verse 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 as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me.

May the Lord grant each of you to find rest in the home of another husband.

She kissed them goodbye and they wept aloud and said to her, We'll go with you to your people.

But Naomi said, Return home, my daughters.

Would you come with me?

Am I going to have more sons who could become your husbands?

Now, this is one of those verses when you read it, you think, What?

Who's becoming husbands?

But the culture was that the mom, if her sons died, would take the next son and promise him in marriage to her daughter-in-law so that the family name could continue.

And if she didn't have sons, she would take her next son who was born and give him to her daughter-in-law, so that that would be the family line.

And here's what she's doing: she's saying, listen, Orpa, Ruth, I'm getting up there in years.

And I don't think I have time to get on Tinder, swipe right, connect with some guy, have a baby, have him grow up old enough so that you can have a husband in your youth and still have children.

The math just doesn't work.

By the way, I'm paraphrasing.

But that's in essence what she's doing.

She's saying, This just isn't going to work for you.

And so then she says, again, go back to your people, and Orpah says, okay, and she goes, and again, some people like to point and say this isn't a good thing.

She's just doing what's natural to her, but Ruth, we're told, clung to her.

And then Ruth gives that speech that is heard at so many weddings, where she says the words that that so many see as this covenant language.

She says, Don't urge me to leave you, verse 16, or turn back from you.

For where you go, I will go.

Where you stay, I will stay.

Your people will be my people, your God will be my God.

And I believe that this is a conversion moment for Ruth.

And I believe it's true because in verse 17 she says, Where you die, I will die, and there be buried.

May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.

And she moves from God language, saying, Your God will be my God to Lord language here, and Lord is the covenant name for God.

In other words, she isn't just saying God in theory, but she's saying a personal God, your God will be my God.

And so through all of this, she now has said, I'm going to leave Moab, I'm going to come back with you, and I'm going to live a life of faith with you, and I'm going to be for you and with you in whatever comes, is what she says.

But through all of this, what we see is that life is ruthless.

It's hard.

And you may not be facing things that are similar.

You probably aren't facing a famine, but maybe you've had loss.

You've lost people that are important to you.

Maybe you got a bad doctor's report.

Maybe your career didn't work out.

Maybe you moved somewhere, and when you moved there, everything went the wrong direction.

Maybe you've you've prioritized something with your kids, and the stuff you've prioritized hasn't materialized, and you're saying, this just isn't working.

And it's important that we understand this first side of the equation, the first truth, and that is life is ruthless, life is hard.

But there's a second piece that we need to know just as importantly, and that is God's heart is loving kindness.

God's heart is loving kindness.

And the reason I say this is because in verse 8, where Naomi makes this little speech to her two daughters-in-law, she says, Go back, each of you, to your mother's home.

May the Lord show you his kindness.

And the word that's used here is the word Hesed in Hebrew.

Can you say Hesed with me?

Say Hasid.

Alright, now we're gonna say it like the Jewish people would say it.

Hasid.

Can you say it like that?

Oh yeah, look, listen to that.

You guys are awesome.

All right, one more time, all together.

All right, now the reason I tell you that word is because when you read the word kindness in our NIV translation, we read it and we're like, okay, God show you kindness.

But Hasid is actually a word that has incredible theological significance.

It's used all over the Old Testament, and it means to show kindness, mercy, covenant faithfulness.

In other words, what she's doing in this moment is she's saying, not just, oh yeah, God is good.

She's saying, God will show you his covenant faithfulness.

May he work in your life, basically.

Now, Hassed is a word that, as I said, has a lot of significance.

And let me just share with you what one writer writes about this in a big theological dictionary.

This actually comes from the New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and exegesis.

It's a five-volume work, has all the words of the Old Testament like done out.

Don't worry, I'm gonna give you the cliff notes.

The biblical writers seem persuaded that life is fragile.

One lives surrounded by the threat posed by calamities of nature, the hostility of enemies, and the weakness of self.

The same writers plead for God to save them by his Hesed.

The Psalms, in particular, are full of this motif, and then they show all the Psalms that talk about how God is being pleaded with to show his Hesed to these people.

But then listen to this line.

Says the dynamic.

Now again, these are Hebrew scholars who like look at all these words and say, this is the range of what this means.

This is what he says.

The dynamic whereby one must discover God's loyal love all over again at each new crisis seems central to God's ways.

And here's what he's saying.

And that is, whenever you go through something that's hard, every time you have to come back and say, God's loyalty, his faithfulness, his goodness is still something that I can rest on, that I can believe in.

Because otherwise, what will happen is we'll end up too far down one road or the other.

Either we'll we'll live so beholden to the life is hard kind of thinking that what we'll do is we'll say, I'm depressed, I'm I'm defeated, and I can't ever get any traction.

Or we'll get so far into the God is is good kind of kind of lane that we'll say, if I ever have any hardship, it doesn't square with my experience or with my way of thinking.

You see, our theology, our thinking has consequences.

And so what some of us will do is we'll say, you know what, God is good all the time, God is good, God is good all the time.

And if I just believe it, I can make it happen.

And so what we'll do is we'll say, as long as I'm good and I do good, then God will give me good.

And as soon as something bad happens, we say, I don't have a box for this anymore.

I prayed about it, I declared it, I called it out, and then we run into a hardship and it rattles us.

See, we love the idea that we can control things, but one of the things we see in the Bible over and over again is that the people who were faithful couldn't always control things.

See, even Naomi.

Now, again, I know some people will say, well, she brought this on herself by going to Moab.

But even people who didn't bring anything on themselves, Job, where the text goes out of its way to say he was righteous and he did what was right, experienced hardship.

David experienced hardship.

In Psalm 3, he's fleeing for his life as Absalom, his son, is taking control of his throne.

In other words, he's going through the pain of losing the life that he had, but not only that, it was his son who was taking it from him.

And he's having a hard time sleeping.

It says in Psalm 3, 5 that the Lord gave him sleep, basically, and sustained him.

See, one of the ways that we know that that we don't really believe in God's Hasid, God's loving kindness, is we have a hard time sleeping.

Now, I'm not talking about the medical reasons for not sleeping, but I'm talking about just our anxiety.

When we're anxious and we're we're trying to get glory out of things of this earth, what happens is we're saying, I have to I have to make it all happen.

But when we can say God's loving kindness and his heart is for me, then what we're able to do is we're able to sleep and to rest because we know that even though life is hard.

That God's heart is loving kindness.

Now, Naomi comes back to Bethlehem, to the house of bread, and when she gets there, she says to her friends, she says, Don't call me Naomi.

What does Naomi's name mean?

Sweetness.

She says, No, call me Mara.

Because the Almighty has made my life bitter.

Mara means bitter.

So now she's saying, Listen, just call me Mara.

Because God's made my life bitter.

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.

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

So here's what happens.

She comes back and she says, Listen, don't call me sweetness anymore, because my life is bitter.

Now again, a lot of pastors' commentators look at this and say, Oh, Naomi, Naomi's bitter.

She's disappointed with God.

Bad Naomi.

Don't be like Naomi.

And if you've been here for any amount of time and heard me teach on the Old Testament, you'll hear me often say the point of the Old Testament stories is not to be like or not to be like the characters.

These aren't Aesop's fables that we say, well, I'm going to choose which qualities I want to emulate and which ones I don't.

The stories are always about God.

And the point of this is not to say, either be like or don't be like Naomi, as much as to understand how faith and how our understanding of God transforms people.

And here's what I think is happening.

I think because Naomi has already mentioned the Hasset of God, the kindness, the loyalty of God, that here when she is saying, God's done this to me, and I'm bitter, that what she's doing is she's just being honest.

And if you read through the Psalms, what you see over and over again is that God is able to handle the honesty of his people.

How many times does a psalmist say, God, how long will you let this be the case?

And here you see Naomi's authenticity, which I think was part of Ruth being able to say, even in hardship, even in your bad evangelistic strategy, God, your God, is a God I want to worship.

Because it was a God who was big enough to account for the hardships of life, but also give her a sense of saying that there's something greater.

You see, what will happen for you, for me?

If we live just on the side of saying life is hard, we'll have no hope other than to say, I just have to get through life.

And if we and if we say God is good all the time and there isn't, the life is hard.

Again, God is always good, but but if we say, and therefore I shouldn't have a hard life, then we'll be destroyed when life is hard.

I saw a social media post recently from a girl that I was in high school with.

I haven't talked to her since college, so I didn't know all of this account.

But she she talks about in her post how she was been disappointed early in life by the relationship she had with her parents, how she went to college, had some job troubles, married, had kids, how the kids and she had some troubles, she got divorced, how her husband won the custody battle, her husband took all her money, how she had job challenges, and like she went on through all of this, and then she talks about the death of her parents.

She says, This, I'm devastated because no matter how hard I work at living a life of integrity, no matter how hard I work to be the best worker in my field, no matter how much I earn, no matter how hard I try to be a good mom, a good wife, a good friend, no matter how hard I try to be a good Christian, no matter how hard I try to treat people with dignity and respect, I somehow still seem to get the short end of the stick.

In other words, my life is hard, but I've done everything I should have done.

At one point, I had hope that this hard work was not for nothing, but I'm questioning this.

What am I doing wrong?

Am I bad at making decisions?

Am I so naive that I allow people to short me?

Am I not praying hard enough?

Am I not being a good enough Christian?

Am I cursed?

I don't know.

Do you hear her theology that's impacting her way of thinking?

She's saying, I have done everything that I know how to do to the best of my ability, and life is still hard.

Her theology says, if I'm a good Christian, a good mom, a good person, then I won't have hardship.

So when she has hardship, she has no box to put it in except to say, where is God in this?

And you see, the theological answer for why there's hardship, and this is how we hold these together, I realize doesn't help us when we're in the middle of it.

And what I mean is the theological answer is we have hardship for at least two reasons.

Sometimes because we bring it on ourselves.

And this again is the point some people say this was Naomi and alimelech as they went and did this, but but sometimes we bring stuff on ourselves.

We drink too much, we're not faithful with our responsibilities or our commitments, we're stupid with what we do with money, and then we say, God, where are you?

And it's like, well, you did that.

But sometimes we have hardship even when we do everything right.

And that's the one that's harder because, and here's the theological reason, we live in a fallen world, meaning sin entered the world, and because there's sin in the world, there are things like disease and death that sometimes happen even when we've made great choices.

But what we need, if we're going to navigate the hardship of that, is to be able to say God's loving kindness, his goodness is still there.

There's an old line that people have said for years, and that is when you can't see God's hand, trust his heart.

And this is what Horatio Spafford was talking about when he said, Lord, haste the day when faith shall be sight, when I shall see.

But do you know what ultimately gave him the hope?

What ultimately gave him the hope was that he looked past his circumstances and saw God's loving kindness in something much greater.

And that is what he did, verse 3 of his song, My sin, O the bliss of this glorious thought.

Now again, he's sitting on the boat where his daughter's drowned, approximate space.

He says, The glorious thought.

My sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I hear it no more.

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, oh my soul.

So he was able to say, Life is hard, it's ruthless, but God's heart is loving kindness, it's goodness.

And I see it in the cross, even if I don't see it in my circumstances.

And because I see it in the cross, I can trust it when I can't see it in my circumstances.

For Ruth and Naomi, this shows up this way.

Naomi's little phrase, I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty, is where she missed it.

She didn't come back empty.

She had Ruth.

She came back at the time of the barley harvest, and when she came back, she wasn't empty because Ruth would ultimately be her savior in the sense of she would leave her land, come into her new country, and she would glean for her.

And then she wouldn't just glean for her, but spoiler alert, she married a man named Boaz and had a son, and that son became a provider for her, a redeemer in a sense.

But he didn't just redeem her, he had a son who had a son, who had a son, and the line led all the way to Jesus Christ.

And here's what this is saying: that Ruth, being included in the genealogy of Christ as a type of foreshadowing of Christ, she became a savior for Naomi by giving up what was rightfully hers so that she could give Naomi something that she didn't have.

And Jesus gave up what's rightfully his, so that you and I could know his loving kindness and experience it and be confident.

Even when our circumstances don't match.

So when you can't see God's hand, trust his heart.

There's one more thing I need to say, and then we'll pray.

And that's this, and that is this is not just a generic word Hesed that means God's just good to everybody.

I it does have that connotation at times, but the bulk of the material on the word Hasid means it's his covenant relationship with people who are in a covenant relationship with him.

And what that means is if you just simply say, you know what, I want to do what's right in my own eyes.

I don't really want a God, I only want a God when it's hard, he hasn't promised Hasid to you.

The promise of Hasid, the promise of loving kindness is for the people that are in a covenant relationship with him.

Which means if you aren't in a covenant relationship with God through Jesus Christ, if you haven't come to that point of saying, God, you have done for me through Jesus what I could never do, what you're simply doing is going to go through life saying life is hard with no promise of how it's working on the back end.

But it is the promise of God to those who have come into a relationship with Him through Jesus Christ, that even the things that are hard, He has a purpose, He has a promise in, and He's bringing about something that maybe you can't see today, but yet His loving kindness is at work.

So, with that, I'd like to invite you just to pray with me, and I'm just going to pray for those of us gathered here in the room for a few different scenarios.

So, would you pray?

Father, I would imagine that gathered here today that some of us come with really heavy hearts because we've experienced loss.

Oh, maybe it's not loss as grand as Naomi or Horatio Spafford, but it doesn't make it any less painful.

Maybe we lost a loved one, maybe we got a bad doctor's report, maybe we've had bad news with one of our kids.

Maybe we've had the death of a dream or the just repetitive dullness of a marriage that we wish were different.

But either way, we've experienced loss, and God, I pray that just in this moment that you would let the two truths that life is is hard, but that your loving kindness, your heart is loving kindness, just merge and give hope.

Father, for those who are here and just saying, you know, that my life right now is good.

Lord, remind us that in this world we will have trouble and let these two truths settle into our minds now so when trouble does come, that our sense of being able to say it is well would transcend even those situations.

Give us perspective.

And Father, for for those who are really in a hard situation right now, God, I pray that with Psalm 3.8 would be true, that we wouldn't just be delivered, but we'd be able to say that your blessings would come on us.

Because God, your heart isn't just that we're delivered from a difficulty, but that you would bless us on the other side of it.

And I pray that would be true for those in the midst of their darkest hours.

And Father, for those who maybe have been doing what's right in their own eyes, I pray that even just the unblemished promise of your loving kindness would draw each of those individuals just to say, I want to know the bliss of my sin, not in part, but the whole, being taken.

So I can say, Lord, haste the day when faith shall be sight.

And we pray it in Jesus' name.

Amen.