Today, we are starting a new series. As I mentioned previously, since I’ve been here, we’ve focused exclusively on texts from the New Testament. In the coming months, we’re going to focus more on some Old Testament passages.
Today, we’re going to begin to look at one of the greatest love stories of all times! It’s a love story that is set in a very bad period of time in Israel’s history. That is the time of the Judges.
You remember the Book of Judges…it was the time when people did what was right in their own eyes instead of following God whole-heartedly. Perhaps it was a time very similar to ours where people preferred to do their own things instead of doing what God and His Word told them to do!
Judges was the time period after Joshua died and the people would disobey and God would send a judgment on the people. That judgment would get increasingly harsher until the people returned to their senses and begged God to rescue them. At this point, God would send a Judge to rescue the people.
Some of the more familiar Judges: Ehud…the left-handed judge who was able to kill a foreign king. Deborah and Barak who defeated a Canaanite army. Gideon destroyed the mighty Midionite army with trumpets and lamps. Samson was another Judge with all of his escapades with women and with the Philistines. There were many more Judges who ruled in the nation for generations as the people entrusted God for His leadership.
Sometime during this time period, a drought broke out and caused major problems for the people who depended on farming for a living. The drought was so bad that it caused a major famine. Now, I married a farm girl. I know that sometimes farmers think that there are struggles when the rain doesn’t come at just the right time or they can complain like they are going to die when their corn is down a couple of bushels an acre. Do you know farmers like that? However, this was evidently REALLY bad. It was so bad that people were leaving their land and moving out of the country.
I know that there were times when things were not good on Karen’s farm and the yield was substantially lower than what was needed or expected. However, I never remember Karen’s dad talking about renting a semi, putting the tractor and combine on it and moving to Indiana or Missouri…let alone Canada or Mexico!
Think about it…things have to be REALLY bad for farmers to abandon their property and to go looking for better fields somewhere far away!
Maybe some of you can relate in a different way though. How many of you lived in this area in 1992 or 1994-1995? Does anybody remember any struggles with a little yellow company over in Peoria during that time? Does anybody remember struggles with a car company over on the west side of Normal over the past ten years?
What happens during those times? What happens when Cat is on strike? How does that impact Parsons? How does that impact the IGA? How does that impact Pizza Hut? Droughts…whether they are meteorological and are caused by a lack of moisture or are labor related or are generated by problems in the economy cause major problems for individuals, families, and communities!
So, after twelve or fifteen months of the Cat strike, does anybody know someone who lost their home or car or who lost their will to stay at Cat? Did anybody move out of the area? Did anybody figure out how to work somewhere else…even doing something different?
Now, let’s go back to the Book of Ruth. Please open your Bibles up to Ruth 1.
Ruth 1:1 In the days when the judges ruled there was a famine in the land, and a man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons. 2 The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. 3 But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. 4 These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. They lived there about ten years, 5 and both Mahlon and Chilion died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.
We’re introduced here to Elimelech and his family. In the midst of this famine that was plaguing Israel, he decided that his best option was to pick up the family and move them to a different country. This move was at a minimum of moving 50 miles and of course could have been much more depending on how far into Moab they went.
However, there was a problem! Moab was a country that God had told the Israelites to not associate with. The country had started by the incestuous relationship of Abraham’s nephew Lot and one of his daughters. Despite this close ancestral heritage, the Moabites did not let the Israelites pass through their land after the Exodus. They were also a people who were known for their idol worship.
So, at the best, this was a pretty poor choice to leave Israel and go to Moab. At the worst, it was sending his family into an idolatrous nation that would not be supportive of their faith in God.
Now, we are told that Elimelech planned to only sojourn, or “spend a little time” in Moab. So, the plan was not to become part of the Moabites, but rather to go there until the famine was over in Israel and then return. However, he was making some serious choices for his wife and sons.
I think this is an important lesson for us to look at as we get started in this study. Ultimately, which is most important in our lives…living in a nice environment or living a life that is pleasing to God? They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but often times in our society, I see Christians who are much more interested in fitting with the culture than they are following what God has told us to do!
Many years ago, a young couple showed up at our church in Pontiac. As we got to know them better, we discovered that Tim had been offered an incredible job in Pontiac. However, upon being offered the job, he told the interviewers that first, he had to determine if there was a church that he and his family would be able to be actively involved in. Wow! What a testimony for their faith…they were willing to turn down this dream job if they couldn’t provide for the spiritual growth of themselves and their family. Just a fun note…later, this guy worked at a company with Craig Maynard for several years…and Tim was still making job decisions based on spiritual opportunities.
So, while Elimelech plans to just go on an extended vacation in Moab, we’re told in verse 4 that they ended up staying there about ten years. So, this short trip turned into something totally different didn’t it?
Stop and think about the changes in your life and your family since the year 2000. In your families, has anybody been married, born, gotten really sick, or died? For those of you who worked at some point during this decade, have you changed jobs, have you seen major changes in your field, have others (or you) retired, have people come and gone at your place of work, have you had the plant leveled by a tornado? Think about the changes that have taken place in our world: 9/11; tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan; Hurricane Katrina; the election of Barak Obama as president; the end of the space shuttle program; wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and on and on that list could go!
Ten years is a LONG time in a lot of ways…isn’t it. Of course, it is also a short time depending on your perspective. But at any rate, Elimelech was gone to Moab for a long time.
During the ten years that Elimelech and his wife Naomi were living in Moab, things changed in their lives too. At some point their boys reached the age where they were old enough to get married, and they found Moabite girls to marry…instead of Israelites.
This is another one of those consequences that arose out of Elimelech’s decision to move to a place where there weren’t other believers for their children to build their closest relationships with. We’ll look more at the next section of the text next week, but down in verse 15, Naomi acknowledges that the sons’ wives were idol worshipers…NOT God worshipers!
Now, I don’t know how that has worked in your family, but I know there can often be pain in families as children choose to not follow in the steps of the Lord and they marry non-believers. I know that families can really struggle as they see the faith that they worked so hard to establish in their kids being cast aside or even worse. My Karen had three of her brothers go directly against the solid Christian upbringing in their home as they chose a wife and their lives have been very hard as a result of those choices. My brother’s oldest son got married yesterday, and it wasn’t a situation where things went the way the family had hoped.
I want to encourage you though to keep on praying for those of your kids and grandkids who aren’t walking with the Lord. Pray that God will raise up a co-worker or friend at school who will build a relationship with them. Pray that they will hear or read something that reminds them of their early training and that will challenge them back to Jesus. Pray that their hearts will be open to the Holy Spirit’s work in their lives. Pray that God will give you that opportunity to speak truth into their lives…in a gracious way.
We aren’t told in this particular story about who was married to whom, or even how long the boys had been married. However, since neither son had children and there isn’t a note in the text about their childlessness, it’s probable that they hadn’t been married too long.
At any rate, tragedy has struck this family! The order of events is given here that at some point during the ten years they were living there that Elimelech died. Think about the struggles that this gave to the family! A foreign widow with two sons living far from home in a time when most women didn’t work outside of the home…what do you do? Who do you call?
Many of you are from this area or have married someone from this area, and so you at least would have some family to help you if a catastrophe like this happened. However, if you were relatively new, and you didn’t have a phone to call with or a computer to send email with, or any other quick way to contact people back home, what would you do? How do you recover? How do you even try to pull your life back together?
Evidently, one part of that solution was that Mahlon and Chilion married the Moabite ladies, Orpah (NO! it was NOT Oprah!) and Naomi. The marriages evidently kept the family there in Moab for at least a couple more years. Perhaps, this arrangement provided some stability as now there was some connectedness with the local community.
Think about that around here. Is there a difference between, “Boy, those Smiths have only been here seven or eight years.” And “Boy, isn’t it nice that the Smith boy married Kenny and Madaline Coulter’s granddaughter?” Those are two totally different things aren’t they? One is disconnected, and the other solidly grounds you to the community.
However, this situation with the boys marrying into the community was short lived as both boys died too. Again, we aren’t told how or why they died, or what the timeline was between Elimelech’s death and then the sons’ deaths.
WOW! Can you imagine how devastating this must have been? Remember, the plan was: since things are tough in Israel we’re going to move over to Moab for a short time because the grass is greener on that side of the proverbial fence. But now, everything has crashed down! Elimelech, the father of this clan has died. The two boys have married idol-worshiping Moabites. Then, the boys die.
Now Naomi is stuck leading this little family unit that now is only comprised of herself and the two foreign women that are her sons’ widows. Three widows kind of alone in the world. What an incredibly tough spot to be in. What kinds of emotions are going through Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth’s minds?
Questions about how they were going to survive? Questions about why Naomi had ever let Elimelech drag her to this God-forsaken country? Questions about whether it would be wise to go back to Israel? Questions about whether they could have done anything differently to keep any of the three men alive…second-guessing the doctor they chose, the prayers they said, etc…. Questions about which God to follow…should they follow the God of Israel or the god of Moab? Questions about who would take care of them if they didn’t have any husbands or children?
I’m sure many of us can relate to these questions and concerns! Just in the past year, people here in our church have had parents pass away. Several people have had others that are close to them enter into eternity. Yes, there are times when we aren’t totally surprised when that 85 or 95 year-old parent dies, but how prepared are we when it’s our baby, our teenager, our young adult, or our child at any age who gets to the grave quicker than we do?
Despite the inevitability of death, it seems like there’s rarely a “good time” for death and we often seem to be so surprised when it comes! Many people have lost a child or a niece or nephew at a young age, and it’s always really hard. The emotional stress can be incredibly debilitating. Often times, when young people die, those around them end up in need of counseling to help them deal with the grief and the subsequent depression that often comes into our lives in this situation.
If that’s a situation that you’re dealing with, please see me or someone else that you can talk with as you work through the issues.
This opening section of this book is very sad: we start out with a family who choses their “luck” with a foreign god and his country instead of allowing the sovereign Lord of lords to protect them. Then, the dad dies, leaving his family to really struggle. After that, his boys marry idol worshipers and then they die too. This leaves a widowed mother and her two widowed daughters-in-law to somewhat fend for themselves in a land that is strange and far from home.
As I was working on this week’s message, it felt like preparing the Maunday Thursday service. Hope is lost! Everything is a mess! Where is God in all of this?
The good news is that next week, we’ll move into the next section and see how God is indeed working in the midst of this tragic set of circumstances. God has NOT forgotten Naomi! God is still involved in this family…even if it doesn’t look that way in the first five verses.
So, please come back next week to hear more of the story! You should also feel free to read ahead and start thinking about Ruth and Naomi ahead of the service.
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