Naomi, Ruth and the Promised Land

Beginning in verse five of Genesis 13 we get the story of Lot moving away from Abram.Take note of the location of Moab. So on the map it’s down by the end of the the Dead Sea on the right side. As the passage begins they are located in the land of Canaan,

“But the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together. And a corrflict arose between Abram’s herders and Lot’s. The Canaanites and Perizzites were also living in the land at that time.  So Abram said, Let’s not have any conflicts between you and me are between your herders and mine. We are close relatives. Is not the whole land before you?” 

Now he’s talking about the land of Canaan, which is on the left side of the Jordan river below.

“Let’s part company. If you go to the left, I’ll go to the right and if you go to the right I’ll go to the left.

In ancient times, maps were oriented not to the north, but toward the east, which is exactly why it’s called “orientation.” You started from where the sun rises: the Orient or east.

So when Abraham is saying, “you go left and I’ll go right and if you go right I’ll go left,” he’s talking about the north-south strip of land that is Canaan.. So what does Lot decide to do? He decides to go east. So he’s deciding not to choose the left or the right, but is going straight ahead. So he crosses over and ends up settling in the plain that’s on the right side of the of the Dead Sea, where Sodom and Gomorrah are.

In other words, Lot chooses to go outside of the land that was promised by God. Does anybody remember what happens to him? He lives there for a while and then he and his family are caught up in a war and are captured by the enemy. Abraham had to form an army and rescue them, as well as all of the inhabitants of the valley..

Then Lot and his family go back to Sodom. A while later angels show up at the gates of the city. And Lot says you have to come to my house because it’s dangerous to be out late. A crowd came along to gang rape the angels..The angels blind these people so they had trouble finding the door.

Chapter 19, verse 15. The angels say “Take your wife and two daughters and leave or you’ll be swept away as the city is punished. When he hesitated. The men grabbed his hand in the hands of his wife and his two daughters and led them safely out of the city”.

I suspect they were being dragged out.

“for the Lord was merciful to them.” 

“As soon as they had been brought out one of them said. ‘Flee for your life, don’t look back and don’t stop anywhere in the plain, flee to the mountains or you’ll be swept away.’ Then Lot said, ‘No. Your servant has found favor in your eyes and you show great kindness to me sparing my life. But I can’t flee to the mountains. This disaster will overtake me at all that I have.”

So so he persuades the angels., “Okay, we’re not going to destroy that little town there. You can stay there.” So his wife turns, looks with longing back to the city and ends up turning into a pillar of salt. Afterwards, he decides to go to the mountains anyway. (Go figure.) 

So now he’s lost all the rest of his family except for his two daughters. He’s lost all of his property because it just went up in flames and now he’s living in the mountains and his daughters decide to take matters into their own hands to produce children from him by getting him drunk and sleeping with him. (They presumably figured that this was the end of the world and dad was the only man alive.)And there you have the beginning of Moab and Amon, descended directly through Lot from his own daughters.

So, how well did things go for Lot when he decided to walk out of the Promised Land? Not very well.

All of this was because the grass was (literally) greener over there.They were promised that things would be good for them in the Promised Land and Lot apparently did not believe. 

Okay, let’s move on to Numbers chapter 14.This is where Israel is headed toward the promised land. So Moses sent spies to go into the Promised Land and they come back to report. And actually, we go back a little bit into chapter 13. Starting in verse 30.

“Caleb settled the people before Moses and said, ‘We should go up and take possession of the land for we can certainly do it.’ But the men who had gone up with him said, We can’t attack these people. They’re stronger than we are. And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, ‘The land we explored. devours those living in it. All the people we saw were of great size. We saw the Nephilim (they’re the descendants of Anak. They come from the Nephilim.) We seem like grasshoppers in our own eyes and we look the same to them.” 

So So here we have a panic attack. Be afraid, be very afraid!. This land is going to eat us up alive (or maybe not so much alive.) Chapter 14, verse one:  

“That night all the members of the community raised their voices and wept aloud. The Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and in the assembly said to them, ‘Oh that we died in Egypt!, not here in this wilderness! Why is the Lord bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword?

Reality check: Egypt’s army drowned in the Red Sea at the hand of God.

Notice how the effect of propaganda often outweighs the truth in the minds of the many. That’s human nature. They go on:

“’Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt?’ And they said to each other, ‘We should choose a leader to go back to Egypt.’” 

And understandably God is not pleased.

Wasn’t the cloud and the pillar of fire still there? Yeah. “Oh, let’s choose a leader to take us back to Egypt.” Let’s ignore what we have seen with our own eyes. Let’s ignore the fact that God is right there in the pillar of fire, watching and hearing all of this.

We dropped down to verse 20.

“The Lord replied, ‘I have forgiven them as you asked. Nevertheless as surely as I live and as surely as the glory of the Lord fills the whole earth, not one of those who saw my glory and the signs I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, but who disobeyed me and tested me 10 times, not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their ancestors, and whi treated me with contempt will ever see it. Because my servant Caleb has a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he went to and his descendants will inherit it.’” 

They chose not to go into the Promised Land. God basically said, “Okay, since you don’t want to go, you won’t. Period. I’m not going to let you go into there.” 

Are you seeing a pattern here? God has a land that he promises for his people. When the ones who should be there either wander away from it or don’t want not to go into it, that doesn’t work well for them in the long run.

Okay, now we get to the story, the introduction to the story of Ruth. Chapter one.

“In the days when the judges ruled,” 

This is a time of chaos in Israel.

”There was a famine in the land.” 

Why might there be a famine in the Promised Land during the time that the Judges ruled the land? Well, it’s because the people are not following God and need to be turned back to Him. But God usually does some things that make them uncomfortable first. He lets enemies overrun them. He causes famines and other  kinds of things.

“So a man from Bethlehem in Judah together with a wife and two sons went to live for a while in the country of Moab.”

Not only are they leaving the country, but where are they settling? If you know the story of Lot, you have to suspect they’re probably going into the wrong place. They’re leaving the promised land. Now. Yes, there is a famine but there has to be a way of dealing with the famine from within your own country.

“The man’s name was Elimelech, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Killion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there. Now Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died when she was left with her two sons.

So far, not so good.

“They married Moabite women, one of them Orphah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there  about 10 years, both Mahlon and Killian also died and Naomi was left without two sons and her husband.”

Now, here’s the thing. How long was that famine? We’re not told but it’s probably not the length of the Egyptian famine that made Joseph so famous. But they’re still in Moab.

Things are just not really going well. They are outside of the promised land and it is not going well for Naomi at all.

“And 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.” 

I don’t know how long it took for her to get word but I suspect the famine didn’t last 10 years.

“So with her two daughters in law, she left the place where she’d been living and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah. Then Naomi said to her two daughters in law, ‘Go back, each of you to your mother’s home. May the LORD show you kindness as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me.’”

So think about it. Here’s Naomi, an Israelite. She has two Moabite daughters in law. And yet they seem to have a really close relationship. So Naomi is not the the mother-in-law of mother-in-law jokes. She actually gets along really well with her daughters in law, which presumably means that she was a good mother who took care of the extended family. And she’s commenting on how the daughters in law love her and show her kindness.

“’May the Lord grant to you that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.’ Then she kissed them and they wept aloud and said to her, ‘We will go back with you to your people.’ But Naomi said, ‘Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons who could become your husbands? Return home my daughters for I am too old to have another husband even if I thought they were still for me. Even if I had a husband tonight if they give birth to sons, would you wait till they grew up?

Notice the closeness. She calls them her “daughters.” They clearly all love each other deeply.

She is telling them that going with her is just not practical. But what she’s telling them about though, is actually all based on Israel’s law. She’s in Moab. These are Moabite women and yet they seem to be functioning in a way that respects Israel’s law with their mother-in-law. 

“’Would you remain unmarried for them? No, my daughters it’s more bitter for me than for you because the LORD’s hand has turned against me.’” 

So now she is feeling like God is against her, persecuting her. But if you if you recall, you know what happens to the people who leave the promised land. Then one could argue that this is kind of their own fault. They decided that they have to move away from God’s blessing because he’s not blessing them the way they expected. So they decided they would have better fortune outside of God’s promise.

“At this they wept aloud again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.

‘Look,” said Naomi, ‘your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.’

But Ruth replied, ‘Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”

Wow.

So here, Naomi had set such an example, even living outside of the promised land, that her daughter in law, not even her own daughter, is willing to go where she goes and even worship her God. What kind of faith is that, right? 

You can’t blame Orpha. Orpha was realistic about the situation. On the other hand, Ruth had faith even though she couldn’t see how it was going to work. She decided that she would throw in her lot with Israel’s God. “Where you die, I will die. And there I will be buried.” Where you’re buried, in that culture, was a big deal. It’s a testament to Naomi’s example that she would want to be buried in Naomi’s ancestral homeland rather than her own. You normally want to be buried among your people. It was a big deal for her to decide she’s going to be buried among Naomi’s people.

When she says, “May the LORD deal with me ever so severely, if even that separates you and me.” She’s taking an oath in the name of Israel’s God. This is powerful stuff that we in the modern world, kind of look at but don’t understand how deep that is. How much faith that involves. The commitment is intense.

When she swore by God’s name, she proved she was really determined to go with her. At that point Naomi stopped urging her. When you start taking oaths in God’s name that you’re not going to leave you’re not going to back down.

“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?’” 

I recently heard a pastor talk about the story from the perspective of loss that Naomi had lost everything except one daughter in law. Of course only one because she insisted. She could have had two daughters in law with her.

This story is one of the earliest incidences of “if you if you love something set it free, if it comes back it was always yours.” So the in some ways, this pastor also said, this is more the story of Naomi than a story of Ruth. One can understand this perspective, because she her response is, “Don’t call me Nanomi. Call me Mara because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. Presumably because “Naomi” means “pleasant one.” She doesn’t sound very pleasant at this point. “Mara” means “bitter.”

“I went away full but the Lord has brought me back empty.” And yet, Ruth is standing beside her. This must have been hard for Ruth, too. Ruth is now uprooted from her own people, standing among strangers, and her mother in law is so wrapped up in her loss that she has nothing left over for Ruth.

So they so they arrive and settle in. And Ruth ends up gleaning, which is another aspect of Israel’s law. You could go in behind the harvesters and if there was anything left behind, you had the right to to harvest it. This is a way of letting poor people make a living. And now we do things really strangely in our society. We have this welfare thing that seemes to want you not to work. Whereas there they were allowed to keep their dignity by working. And it was self employment, if you will.

So she ends up in in Boaz’ field but doesn’t know he is Naomi’s relative. He is the second-closest relative to Naomi. He notices her, knows that she is connected with Naomi, and that she’s helping her mother in law, which actually impresses him.

So he tells his harvesters “Hey, leave a little bit more behind for her. She’s a good woman. She may be a foreigner, but look at what she’s doing for her her mother in law. Obviously she’s a woman of character. Let’s give her a break. So as you’re harvesting drop the occasional sheaf.”

When Ruth comes back home she’s got a full bag of barley. Naomi asks where she got this from. This is not your usual harvest in gleaning. Where were you? Whose field were you at? Oh, I think his name was Boaz, replies Ruth. Ah. The light bulb lights up in Naomi’s mind.  Knowing who Boaz is, she coaches Ruth and sets up a not-so-blind date.

Ruth, goes under cover of night and goes down to the threshing floor, but doesn’t let him know she’s there until he’s finished eating and drinking and lies down. Naomi had said, “He’ll tell you what to do.”

Okay, but does Naomi know this guy really well or something?

This story is beautiful and fun on a whole bunch of levels. But it’s also very deep right there. They’re back in the Promised Land and what’s starting to happen they’re being blessed. God is redeeming her situation.

So now verse 16. When Ruth came to her mother in law, Naomi asked how did it go? Naomi wanted all the details so she told everything that was done for her and added that he gave her the six measures of barley saying, “don’t go back to your mother in law empty handed.” 

Naomi replies, “Wait my daughter till you find out what happens, for the man will not rest until the matter is settled today.” So obviously she knows this man is also known as as a go getter. So he does that. He manages to embarrass the other guy into not marrying Ruth.

[Side note: Boaz has he has reached a certain age, and Naomi seems close to the end of her childbearing years. But he is older. And he’s actually happy that she’s not chasing after the younger men. So that tells you that there’s a significant age difference between the two. It was interesting that God seems to help all the very extremely old people to have children that became part of all the covenants. That’s a pattern that you see in the Bible.]

Chapter four, verse 13. “So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When he made love to her the Lord enabled her to conceive. [So as noted, she seems to be pretty close to the end of childbearing age, if not already there.] Then she gave birth to a son. The women said to Naomi, ‘Praise be to the LORD, who this day has not left you without a guardian Redeemer at the Configure throat Israel. It will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. Your daughter in law who loves you, but who’s better to you than seven sons has given him birth.’” 

This is what I find interesting: “Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him. The women living there said, ‘Naomi has a son.’ 

And then this son becomes the grandfather of David. So the Moabite woman integrates into the Israelite community, adopting their culture and their God, and adopting the people of Israel as her own. And then her son becomes part of Israel’s royal lineage. Wow.

What are the people saying about Naomi here is very interesting in terms of the story. The are saying,  Ah, here’s a son for Naomi. In other words, Naomi ends up basically becoming the mother figure for this child.

Among Aboriginal people I have known here, The person who often ends up raising the kids is the grandmother. So there’s a kind of a cultural thing that seems to go beyond nationalities. Often parents are out working in the fields or other kinds of employment, and grandparents can be a handy source of care for the children until they are old enough to participate in the work.

There’s the love story, which is actually a surprisingly short part of the book of Ruth. You look at what happens. What’s mostly going on is a story of the repatriation of Naomi back to the promised land and the blessing that comes, including to the stranger who comes into the promised land with her.

Okay, so I wanted to finish this up in Hebrews chapter three. So in verse six, the writer is going on about how Christ is higher than Moses in several different ways. And so in verse six, he says, “But Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house, [as opposed to Moses, the servant, God’s house], and we are his house, if indeed we hold firmly to our confidence in the hope in which we glory.” 

So he’s talking about how we have to hold on to Jesus. We have to hold on to the promise of eternal life. But if you have to hold on to it, it means it’s something that you could potentially let go of.

Verse seven: “ So, as the Holy Spirit says: “’Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the wilderness, where your ancestors tested and tried me, though for forty years they saw what I did. That is why I was angry with that generation; I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.’ So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’ See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”

“We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end.”

“As has just been said: ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.’ Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies perished in the wilderness? And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed? So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief.’”

God called them out of Egypt, but only two men who were adults at the time of the rebellion, Joshua and Caleb, entered the Promised Land.

Chapter four verse one: “Therefore, since the promise of entering his rest, still stands, let’s be careful that none of you will be found to have fallen short of it. For we also have had the good news proclaimed to us just as they did but the message they heard was of no value to them, because they did not share the faith of those who obeyed. Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said, “So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”And yet his works have been finished since the creation of the world. For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: “On the seventh day God rested from all his works.” And again in the passage above he says, “They shall never enter my rest.”

“Therefore since it still remains for some to enter that rest, and since those who formerly had the good news proclaimed to them did not go in because of their disobedience, God again set a certain day, calling it “Today.” This he did when a long time later he spoke through David, as in the passage already quoted: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”

The point, if you will, is that our job is to keep faith in Christ. So that we may enter because of our belief.

Verse nine says “there remains therefore a rest to the people of God.” Our job is to stick with Jesus, no matter how hard things get. Whether in feast or famine, there is no better place to be than following Jesus to the Promised Land.