God’s plan for His people wasn’t going very well, because they wouldn’t cooperate. Time and time again, they turned their backs on God and His benevolent care, choosing instead to do whatever seemed right in their own eyes. The book of Judges is so full of violence and immorality, it’s amazing that any of it made it into the Bible.
God’s original plan was for His people to live according to His laws and be a guiding light to the rest of the world, to show other nations what it looks like when a people live in harmony with God and with one another for the sake of everyone’s highest good. But God’s people wouldn’t stick with the plan; they wanted to do their own thing, and that always leads to disaster.
Just when you might be tempted to think that God may have to wipe everyone out and start over, we encounter this story about a foreign woman named Ruth. The story of Ruth shows us that God is not above going outside of His original plan to get His purposes accomplished.
Ruth was a Moabite. Moab was not a good place. Its origins can be traced back to a terrible story about a man named Lot and his daughters doing something we shudder to consider, even today. Technically, the Moabites should never have been a nation to begin with. Furthermore, they should have been chased out of the land or killed well before Ruth was born. If Lot had been a righteous man and avoided incest (as even most unrighteous men manage to do), there would have been no Moabites. And if the people of Israel had done as God instructed, the Moabites would have been long gone.
Plus, there’s no way God would have advocated that any of His people marry one of those pagan people. They were, well pagans, for crying out loud!
But God had promised Abraham way back when that He would bless everyone, not just the Jewish people. And God never welshes on a promise.
We’ve learned by now that this YHWH is unpredictable. He doesn’t do things the way we would. Just when you think you’ve got Him figured out, He dips and swerves and goes underground, only to appear where you least expect Him.
And He loves strays, and keeps bringing them in at night even though He knows that if you feed them once they’ll keep coming back. He did this with Rahab (who ran the best little whorehouse in Jericho), and now He’s doing it again with this Moabite woman, Ruth. Orphans, widows, street urchins, mongrels, they all matter more to God than maybe we think they should.
Ruth’s an unlikely character who has nothing much going for her. We expect God to take an interest in a guy like Samson (who lived during this same period of time). Samson was big and strong and powerful. He was born into a good family, had the pedigree. Ruth, by contrast, was a mutt.
Maybe that’s the point of the story, though. When the purebred, the physically, mentally, spiritually gifted people, the privileged insiders who have been called by God, fall down on the job, God’s not above going down to the pound and picking up a stray. Strays, as it turns out, have really good memories and rarely forget what it was like to be this close to death and then be rescued by the kindness of a benevolent person.
Father God, I rejoice in the truth that You have chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and have chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things that are strong. I acknowledge that You have the power to use me in remarkable ways in spite of my inadequacies and weaknesses. You are not impressed with the things that impress people, but You deign to use those who, through humility, are willing to depend entirely on You and not on their position or power. I see that the things that are highly esteemed among people are detestable in Your sight, and that it is foolish to be impressed by the things that impress people. I ask for the grace to live and serve others out of my weakness and thus out of Your strength. Let me be impressed by the things that are truly pleasing to You.
In Jesus’s name, Amen
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