Ruth: Little Did She Know | Associate Pastor: Matt Armstrong

Good morning.

My name is Matt.

I'm uh an associate pastor here at Redeemer, and um just about coming up on my one-year anniversary.

Started in mid-July last year, and it's been uh a real joy and evidence of God's grace and provision in my own life and the life of my family to be here.

So thank you.

Um this morning we are beginning a new short summer series in the month of July in the book of Ruth.

Um and if you're not familiar with the book of Ruth, I highly commend it to you.

It's only four chapters.

You can read it in a sitting, uh, and it is a beautiful and powerful book.

It's uh it's a book about grief and loss, it's about unexpected faithfulness, and ultimately it's about God's startling grace in the midst of the lives of God's people.

Uh, and since it's a new book and an Old Testament book, I wanted to give you guys some background before we jump in.

As Roger just read in those first five verses, we're told that this book takes place in the days when the judges ruled in the land of Egypt.

Uh, this book comes right after the book of Judges.

And if you're familiar with the book of Judges, you know that it's not a very hopeful book, the book of Judges.

It's it's really a downward spiral as we look at the nation of Israel after the generations of Moses and Joshua as God has led his people out of slavery and into the promised land.

This is really where, you know, the story should say, and they lived happily ever after.

But if you live in the real world, as the Bible does, what we see is that God's people kind of slowly devolve as what the Lord warned them about happens.

They they uh they get they are tempted, they are drawn to worship other gods, they kind of intermingle with uh the other uh tribes and and peoples in there.

And the book ends on this down note in those days there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes, and not in a good way.

Right?

So it's a real, it's no real wonder that as the book of Ruth opens, we find that Israel is experiencing a famine.

Famine is one of the ways that God said and promised to his people if you wander away from me and chase after other gods, I will send famine into your land as a way of drawing you back to myself.

And this is where our story begins.

And because of the famine is so severe, this one family that the story zooms in on, uh a man named Elimelech took his wife and his two sons and sojourned in the land of Moab, the neighboring land of Moab, where the famine uh had not struck.

While they're in Moab, uh Elimelech dies tragically, leaving his wife Naomi and his two sons.

Now his sons come to marrying age and they each marry, one woman named Orpah and one named Ruth.

These are Moabite women, these are not Israelites, and that will be key as the story continues.

But then they they continue to live in the land about 10 years, but then Naomi's two sons die.

Now, on some level, we recognize that this is a tragedy, but but for those of us living today, we need to know it's very important for us to know that this is a calamity.

This is uh the worst thing that could happen to Naomi.

She lives in a world where everything happens through men.

They literally live in a patriarchal society.

She is destitute.

She really only has two options begging or prostitution.

Or what she chooses is to return home where maybe in Bethlehem, her hometown, there will be a bit of a social safety net to care for her, because she really has nothing, culturally speaking, to care for herself.

And that brings us to our first point.

At the beginning of this book of Ruth, we see that in a fallen world, suffering and loss is part of life.

Um, by the end of chapter one, we've we've gone through about 10 or 12 years, and Naomi is a woman whose life has turned from a dream into a nightmare.

Despite the famine, she had a husband and she had two sons.

She was culturally wealthy in her day and age.

And a few years sojourning in another land probably didn't disturb her very much.

But as she returns home, she has lost everything.

She returns bitter, she returns shamed, she returns uh sad.

Now, like any good story, this one begins very quickly by this rising tension, right?

There's a crisis that emerges that needs to be resolved.

But before we move too quickly on, I believe that it's important for us to sit with Naomi in her loss for a moment.

We talked about this a few weeks ago, but who among us can't relate to either our plans or our whole lives not turning out the way we had hoped?

I'm now over 40.

I'm closer to 50 than to 40, and I relate to the story in a way I don't think I could have 10 or more years ago.

But all of us have experienced our plans not coming to fruition.

Last week, my daughter and I went for her to take her driver's test finally to get her driver's license.

We were all so excited.

She's put in hours and hours.

There are so many more hoops and tests to take today than there were when I turned 16.

It's kind of incredible.

And we got there uh full of anticipation and excitement, and because of some red tape and some bureaucratic black holes, we had to leave without taking the test.

The last thing I said to the to the worker there was, there are no open exams until August.

I just wanted her to feel my pain and frustration.

Um so whether it is simple plans in your life that have not come to fruition, or you have found yourself in a place where you're experiencing something, your life has gone down a path that you did not expect.

Ruth uh bids us good company.

Sometimes Christianity can be framed or even sold as the victorious life or a way to live your best life now.

But if you really read the Bible and you look at the people and the lives that they lead, there are very few heroes, if any, and very few victorious lives.

And I think, if we're honest, that's very good news because these are people and these are circumstances, though hundreds and thousands of years old, they are stories that speak to us, relate to us.

What I love about Naomi and the way the author of this book depicts her, is how human and raw she is.

And that's our second point, that sometimes grief becomes visceral and even unmooring.

On the journey back to Bethlehem, Naomi's hometown, she realizes that as she's going with her two daughters-in-law, she realizes uh this would not be good for them.

As they return to Bethlehem, there there are no prospects for these uh widows.

And so she urges them strongly, return to the house of your mothers.

Go back to where you grew up, because you're young enough to still get married if you go back there.

If you go with me, things may not turn out very well for you.

And in that encouragement, we get to see how deeply affected she has become by her loss.

In chapter one, we read, Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me?

Have I yet sons in my womb that they may become your husbands?

No, my daughters, for it is exceedingly bitter to me, for your sake, that the hand of the Lord has gone out against me.

Later in chapter one, she continues to express her grief in this way.

When they returned to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them.

Remember, Bethlehem is a village.

Uh it is a small town where everybody knows everyone and everybody's business.

So the whole turn town was stirred.

And the women said, Is this Naomi?

And she said to them, Do not call me Naomi, which sounds like in Hebrew the Hebrew word for pleasant or joyful.

She says, Don't call me Naomi, call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.

Mara means bitter.

I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty.

Why call me Naomi when the Lord has testified against me, and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me.

Do you hear the rawness in Naomi's voice and her words?

She is full of sadness and grief.

She's angry, and she's angry at God.

There are some truthful things that she says in her grief.

She confesses that the Lord is sovereign over all things.

And yet she is wrong about other things, that the Lord, his hand is against her, that he has become unjust and unloving.

But what I want us to see here is the emotions that emerge, that naturally emerge, out of grief and loss.

You see, I believe we live in a culture and a time where mourning and grief are avoided at all costs.

Suffering is avoided.

We use technology to distract us, we use medical developments to avoid and forget about death.

Now, these things can be great.

I don't want us to go back and live in the stone age, but there is something inherent in every human heart that when we have the opportunity, we will flee from suffering death and loss.

And when it inevitably comes, because we are so uh ill-equipped, we don't know what to do.

And so we run from our grief.

We run from our sadness, we self-medicate.

We self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, right?

That's that's an old story.

We know that.

Behind every alcoholic, there is some kind of sad story, something to be running from.

But we also self-medicate with Netflix, with Candy Crush, with Twitter, uh, with work.

Become workaholics.

We can self-medicate and run from God through serving in our local church.

The human heart uh runs from the Lord in all sorts of ways.

And we see this in Naomi's expression of real emotion.

But too often we shame ourselves and we shame one another, somehow expressing our deep grief and sadness and even anger at God is a form of unfaithfulness.

You see, God already knows what's in your heart.

And as Jesus taught us, it is better to bring out of darkness those emotions, those feelings, those words that we may even be ashamed to admit are there.

But again, God knows.

And it's only as we draw them out into the light and actually lay them at his feet that he can deal with them.

And so this is what I love about Naomi and the author here.

She gives us her authentic self in all her bitter glory.

And so I believe this book of Ruth, and especially this opening chapter, it's an invitation from God not to be afraid of those emotions.

Not to run from them, not to stuff them, not to hide them, not to be ashamed of them, and certainly not to see them as unchristian.

You see, God gave you all of your emotions, and they are there for a reason.

They play a purpose, they are neutral.

When our emotions come out, what they are doing is revealing what is going on deep inside our heart.

So we do well to look at them, to pay attention to them, not to ignore them.

One teacher uh explained it this way that our emotions are like the dashboard lights on our car.

When the light comes on, it says, hey, there's something going on in the engine that you need to be aware of.

How much sense does it make to like put a piece of tape over that light?

Or to like bash in the screen so that this light doesn't come on anymore.

It does no good, right?

Because it's simply telling us what's there.

And so the Lord, through Naomi, he invites us to feel those emotions, not to run from them.

And Jesus himself, he models this at the tomb of Lazarus, knowing that Lazarus will be resurrected, yet he weeps, he rages against the reality of death, even knowing resurrection will come.

So it's okay to be angry.

It's okay even to be wrong about God in our anger and our grief, right?

Naomi shows that to us.

And the book doesn't judge her, neither should we.

This is the signal that the famine has ended in Israel.

And though it's a passing comment, and this signals to Naomi, I can return home now because there's food and sustenance there.

This is uh a message from the author saying that God has not uh left his people.

All right, he sent a famine into the land, and yet he did not forget them.

He returned to them, and he provided for them.

We get another little glimpse at the very end of the chapter, which we didn't get to read, but at in verse 22, this is the close of chapter one, we read this.

So Naomi returned to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.

Right?

Not only has the famine ended, but as Naomi returns home, she's coming at harvest time.

It's a time of sustenance, of abundance, of grace.

This is a hopeful end to uh this literary end to chapter one.

The author is giving us a bit of literary foreshadowing of what is to come.

The Lord is bringing life out of a dead ground.

But the clearest evidence of God's grace in chapter one is Ruth herself, right?

She's the one that this book is named after, even though if you read this book, she is not the main character.

Naomi is the main character.

So Naomi presses uh both her daughters-in-law to return home.

Um, and Orpa eventually concedes.

She does return home.

But Ruth gives an amazing display of faithfulness, totally unexpected, from a non-Israelite woman.

Listen to what she says to Naomi.

She says, Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you.

For where you go, I will go.

Where you lodge, I will lodge.

Your people shall be my people and your God my God.

Where I where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.

Even if you're not familiar with the book of Ruth, you've probably heard these words.

They are incredible.

These are the first words recorded in the book from Ruth, and they show a depth and complexity to her faithfulness that marks a special Hebrew word.

Uh, you're not usually supposed to talk about original languages except for this one word in the Old Testament, Hesed.

H-E-S-E-D.

Hesed, it means uh faithfulness, covenant faithfulness.

It describes God.

It's a faithfulness that goes beyond kind of rational understanding.

And that is what Ruth is showing to her mother-in-law Naomi.

But here's the thing, Naomi can't see it yet.

As she returns to Bethlehem, she is bitter and angry.

And yet we, the readers, can see amaz God's amazing faithfulness even in the midst of this deep tragedy.

Deeper grace is present.

Um, there's a great movie uh with Will Farrell that I love.

It's from 2006.

Here's a little uh thing.

It's called Stranger Than Fiction.

Um, it's actually not a comedy.

Will Farrell is always funny, but this is actually kind of a serious movie.

I highly recommend it to you.

Um the premise is that Will Farrell is kind of a boring, lonely IRS agent.

And as he's going through his life, uh he suddenly begins to hear a woman's voice narrating his own life.

She can't hear him, but he can hear her.

And as she begins to narrate his life and he realizes that she's, you know, she's narrating what's actually going on in his life, she tells, or she says, that uh he's about to die.

He's gonna die a sudden and tragic death.

And so he begins to freak out, of course, because he realizes this voice knows uh some true things.

And so he uh goes to find a professor of literature.

I won't get into why he does that, but he goes to this college professor played by Dustin Hoffman to try to get some help to understand why this narrator uh says that he is about to die.

And and Hoffman just thinks this guy's crazy and he's he's about to tell Will Farrell to get lost until he he says one of the things that the narrator, in narrating his life, she says, little did he know.

Little did he know.

And this this catches Dustin Hoffman's character, and he begins to help Will Farrell.

Um, and in helping him and trying to figure out what's going on, this is what Dustin Hoffman's uh character eventually says.

He says, the last thing we need to determine conclusively is whether you are in a comedy or a tragedy.

To quote Italo Calvino, the ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces the continuity of life and the inevitability of death.

Tragedy, you die, comedy you get hitched.

These are the two stories that we all live or that exist.

So, what kind of story is Naomi living in?

At this point, she believes she is in a tragedy, right?

All her loved ones have died.

She has very good reasons to believe this.

She is destitute, and she believes God has turned against her.

But for those of us who know the rest of the story, we know where things are going.

Uh, we know she's in a comedy.

We know things are gonna work out.

We know that her daughter-in-law is gonna get married and is gonna produce a son, and that son will be uh the grandfather of King David.

So we know where she's where she's living.

Um for all of us who call the name of Jesus, this is true for us.

As we walk through our lives, we experience suffering and loss, we experience grief.

And there are times when it is deep and we can only imagine and believe that we live in a tragedy.

But here's the thing: the story of our lives has been written, and we've actually been given the book, right?

Here's the thing we have the end of the book.

Now, our part, our daily lives, it's not written here, and most of us don't hear narrators narrating our lives.

But we know how things are gonna end.

We know that Jesus is gonna come back.

We know that he's gonna make all things new, we know that he's gonna wipe away every tear from our eyes, and we will live with him for eternity, apart from sin and apart from death.

And all the sad and hurtful things of this life will become untrue.

Now, I think this is one of the hardest things for Christians to believe and to live in light of.

That we know that our lives are ultimately a comedy, even as we experience the reality of death and loss.

But that's why the book of Ruth is here.

The Bible is full of people who have lived in this fallen world and have experienced tragedy and loss and despair, and God met them, and God made promises to them, and they all doubted.

Just like me, and just like you.

But you see, little did Naomi know that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was doing something incredibly beautiful in her life.

Little did she know that her grandson, again, would be King David, and that one day her daughter-in-law's name, Ruth, would be included in the genealogy of Messiah, of Jesus himself.

And beloved, the same is true for all of us.

Even as we continue to experience grief and loss and visceral emotions, believing that God has turned his back on us at times, God's goodness and grace is always present.

He remains with us and faithful to his promises, and his grace is present in the midst of our suffering.

So let's keep our eyes open.

Let's look for those places of grace and believe, hope against hope, that all of God's promises are yes and amen in Jesus.

Let's bring our bitterness and our questions, our anger and our sadness to the Lord and allow him to meet us just there.

Because little do we know that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us in time.

Let's pray.

Our Father and our God, so many of us need to remember your promises.

We need to hear your promises.

We need to be reminded that you are always faithful.

Lord, some of us are experiencing extreme suffering.

Some of us are experiencing bitter loss.

And we are hoping against hope that you are true, you are faithful and good.

Lord, thank you for Jesus.

Thank you for your Holy Spirit.

Thank you for the scriptures that tell us the story of our own lives.

And Father, we ask that even now as we turn to the communion table, that we would taste your goodness.

You would restore and refresh our faith.

And we ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen.