As with the poem of the excellent wife in Proverbs 31, the book of Ruth is often left for women’s studies. And it makes sense. Ruth and Esther are the only two books of the Bible that have a woman’s name for the title, and within Ruth, two of the three main characters are women. However, while Ruth is largely about those two women, it is a mistake to say that this book is primarily for women. As we shall see over the course of this study, Ruth is a powerfully true story of tragedy, repentance, steadfast love, and (ultimately messianic) hope.

Before we dive in, it is worth Ruth’s placement within our Bibles. Our Old Testament generally follows the Greek ordering, and that is the case with Ruth, which is placed after Judges and before 1 Samuel. Much of today’s sermon will show why that placement is significant.

But we should also keep in mind its Hebrew ordering, which I believe is also significant. Traditionally, Ruth was the first of five smaller books that were written together upon one scroll: Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Esther. All five books are united by the theme of tragedy and hardship, for even Solomon’s greatest song cannot help being read with sadness whenever we think of the king’s folly in his final days. But most importantly, this scroll was usually placed immediately after the book of Proverbs. This is likely because the ancient scribes saw a connection between the final chapter of Proverbs and Ruth. Proverbs 31 presented in verses 1-9 the portrait of a kingly man who does not give his strength (chayil) away and in verses 10-31 the portrait of an excellent (chayil) woman. In the book of Ruth, Boaz is called a worthy (chayil) man, and Ruth is called a worthy (chayil) woman. I believe this is hinting for we, the readers, to consider Boaz and Ruth as real world case studies of an ordinary man and woman who flawed but faithfully lived as the kingly man and excellent woman.

Of course, such faithfulness is worthy of praise in any generation or period of history, but it is particularly praiseworthy given the great era of wickedness in which they lived. Indeed, understanding that time in Israel’s history is our goal today.

IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES…

In the days when the judges ruled… It can be easy to read past this opening phrase to the book of Ruth, but a robust understanding of this book can only be achieved if we are able to first grasp something of the depth of meaning in establishing the period of the judges as the story’s setting. To do this, we will spend most of our time in Judges 2:6-3:6, but before we work through that text, allow me to get us up to spread with the history of Israel up to this point.

Israel began with Abraham, the first Hebrew, to whom God promised the land of Canaan and mighty nation as his progeny. He lived and died in the Promise Land as a foreigner, only owning a burial plot for his beloved wife. The same was true of Isaac and mostly true of Jacob. Jacob was given the name Israel because he wrestled with God, and through his twelve sons, that became the name of the Hebrew nation. Through the mighty providence of God, Jacob and his sons left Canaan to dwell in Egypt, but soon they became slaves to the Egyptians for four hundred years.

But Yahweh heard their cries, and he sent His servant Moses to deliver them. After watching God decimate Egypt and make His covenant with them, Israel ought to have boldly entered Canaan in confidence that Yahweh would both protect them and provide for them. But they were a nation of grumblers, so they refused to enter the land. For forty years, they wandered in the desert until the exodus generation were all dead. Even Moses was only permitted to see the land before his death. But under Joshua’s leadership, Israel entered Canaan and began its conquest.

The book of Judges contains two introductions. 1:1-2:5 give a snapshot of how the conquest of Canaan continued after the death of Joshua. Verses 1-20 describe the success of Judah, which contrasts sharply with the failure of the other tribes that are described in verses 21-36. That introduction ends in 2:1-5 with the angel of Yahweh repeating the same question that God asked Eve in the garden: What is this that you have done? And that rightly sets the mood for the remainder of the book. In Judges, there will be moments of success and triumph, but they always give way to deeper and greater unfaithfulness and disobedience.

A DOWNWARD SPIRAL OF SIN

But the second introduction will be our focus this morning because it is here that the author supplies us with the pattern of behavior that characterized the time of the judges. It begins by again recounting the death of Joshua:

When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land. And the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the LORD had done for Israel. And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the LORD, died at the age of 110 years. And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash. And all the generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel.

Because it said that the next generation did not know Yahweh nor the work that He did for Israel, many have attributed this to simple failure of Joshua’s generation to disciple their children in the faith. And while there were almost certainly families that did fail to teach their children the ways of the LORD (as there always will be in every generation), we should be slow to accuse an entire generation of God’s people without biblical evidence in doing so. Indeed, Miles Van Pelt cites the words of Gideon in 6:13 as implying the opposite. In that verse, Gideon says to the angel of Yahweh: “Please, my lord, if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted to us, saying, ‘Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the LORD has forsaken us and given us into the hand of Midian.” Thus, even by Gideon’s generation, he could still say that he knew of the exodus story from their fathers’ generation.

No, we cannot lay the blame upon a lack of discipleship alone; instead, their failure to know Yahweh was the result of their rebellion against Him, which we read in verses 11-13.

And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals. And they abandoned the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed down to them. And they provoked the LORD to anger. They abandoned the LORD and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth.

This is full-blown rebellious apostasy. Twice these verses say that they abandoned Yahweh. They left Him and forsook their covenant with Him. Rather than serve their Redeemer, they served the gods of the Canaanites. Intellectually, they knew about Yahweh, but they did not relationally know Him because they rejected Him. Barry Webb notes:

We have all seen [this] happen. Perhaps a pastor or high-profile Christian leader abandons his calling for an immoral relationship and ends up justifying his choice by attacking the faith he once preached. Or a son who was an apparently ardent disciple of Jesus in his teens now disdains Christianity as something he has outgrown in his adulthood. There are always contributing circumstances, and in some cases, these may include what others have done or failed to do. But in the end those who have turned away must accept responsibility for their own actions. Seeing themselves as victims will not save them. Nor will it help for others to excuse them by shifting primary responsibility from wrongdoers to themselves. The truth must be told if recovery is to happen: they have done what is evil; they have abandoned the Lord. (45)

Verses 14-15 give us Yahweh’s response to Israel’s spiritual adultery:

So the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the LORD was against them for harm, as the LORD had warned, and as the LORD had sworn to them. And they were in terrible distress.

In response to Israel’s idolatry, God’s anger is kindled against them, and He had every reason to be. In general, we do not like to think of God’s wrath, and I believe the most common reason for downplaying the wrath of God is the simple belief that it is not justified. Many view sins as mere errors or mistakes to be corrected or ignored, not as acts of evil that require retribution. Furthermore, we fail to understand that the eternality and infinity of God mean that transgressions against Him yield an eternal and infinite consequence. A simple analogy helps explain this truth. The very same lie can yield different consequences depending on who it was told to. Lying to stranger is likely to produce little lasting impact. Lying your spouse, however, can produce a long-lasting breech of trust. Furthermore, lying under oath is the crime of perjury and can place you within a very physical prison cell. Likewise, all sins, no matter how small, are of eternal weight to God because He is the eternal Holy One. His wrath against sin, therefore, is not cruel nor is it excessive; rather, it is wholly justified, righteous, and good.

Therefore, he gave them into the hands of their enemies. Matthew Henry notes that “they served the gods of the nations that we round about them, even the meanest, and God made them serve the princes of the nations that were round about them, even the meanest.”

But even though Israel had abandoned God, Yahweh does not abandon or forsake His people. Therefore, in verse 16, we read: Then the LORD raised up judges, who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them. This is pure grace from the hand of God toward His unfaithful and rebellious people. Webb writes:

The statement about Yahweh raising up judges comes immediately after the “terrible distress” of verse 15, with nothing in between. There is no confession of sin on Israel’s part, no repentance, no putting away of their alternative gods, not even a cry for help! These things do happen from time to time in the stories of the judges that follow, but what the program is telling us that they are never the cause of Yahweh’s gracious rescue missions, because Israel’s repentance, if it happens at all, is always shallow and temporary. It never signals a true change of heart and never leads back to true and lasting loyalty. And Yahweh is never fooled by it. The only thing that stirs his heart and moves him to intervene is their distress. He sees it, he cares about it, he remembers they are his, and he raises up judges to save them. That’s grace—grace that reaches out in compassion. (53)

Indeed, that is precisely what we find verses 17-18:

Yet they did not listen to their judges, for they whored after other gods and bowed down to them. They soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed  the commandments of the LORD, and they did not do so. Whenever the LORD raised up judges for them, the LORD was with the judge, and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. For the LORD was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them

God raised judges up to deliver them from the very enemies that He also allowed to triumph over them. He did this because, though His anger burned against Israel, His compassion for them was even greater. Of course, even His allowing them to be plundered was a sign of His compassion toward them. It would be far more terrifying if the LORD gave them over to their idolatry and allowed them to prosper. That would have been Him giving them over entirely. But God is not as fickle as we are. He is abounding with steadfast love and faithfulness (chesed).

The Hebrew word chesed is His covenantal, determined love that he shows to Israel. Israel constantly wanders away from him. But God’s love is steadfast. Their sin and idolatry are like an adulterous wife, but Yahweh is always faithful to her. God’s love is enduring for them. And of course, one of the places where we see that word used the most is Psalm 136, in which every verse says, “for his steadfast love endures forever.” Indeed, chesed is another key word for understanding the book of Ruth, and Ruth’s beautiful commitment to Naomi in 1:16-17 is a wonderful example of human chesed.

In Deuteronomy 32, God instructed Moses to teach Israel a song about their future unfaithfulness to Him, and He says in verse 21 why He gave them over to their enemies: “They have made me jealous with what is no god; they have provoked me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are no people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.” But then whenever His people were brought low, His pity for them would rise, as we see in verse 36: “For the LORD will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants, when he sees that their power is gone and there is none remaining, bond or free.”

But as verse 17 already told us, verse 19 completes the pattern of the judges: But whenever the judge died, they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers, going after other gods, serving them and bowing down to them. They did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways.

So here is the pattern: 1) Israel serves Yahweh, 2) Israel turns to idolatry, 3) Israel is enslaved by their enemies, 4) God raises up a judge, 5) Israel is saved, 6) repeat steps 1-5. Again, sometimes the people cry out to the Lord, but the summary text before us does not mention it.

While we could rightly call this a cyclical pattern, a downward spiral is even more appropriate. Verse 19 said that they became more corrupt than their fathers, and that is certainly how the entire book of Judges plays out. We are not told of any faults of the first judge, Othniel, but they are very much on display in the life of Samson, the final judge in the book. And just as the book begins with two introductions, it closes with two scenes that display how absolute the moral corruption in Israel had become. Indeed, the final story is one of the most hideous in all of Scripture. Benjamites in Gibeah prove themselves to be just as sinful, if not more so, than the people of Sodom, and their sin leads to civil war between Benjamin and the other tribes. This war nearly results in the entire elimination of the tribe of Benjamin, which makes the other tribes feel sorry for them, so they steal a bunch of wives for them from the Canaanites.

Indeed, the book of Judges shows Israel sinful deterioration into being just like the Canaanites that they were supposed to conquer and put to death as the instruments of God’s judgment. That is why the final verses in chapter 2 and the beginning verses of chapter 3 emphasize that God left some of the Canaanites unconquered as a test upon the Israelites, to see if they would remain faithful to Yahweh.

So the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he said, “Because this people have transgressed my covenant that I commanded their fathers and have not obeyed my voice, I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations that Joshua left when he died, in order to test Israel by them, whether they will take care to walk in the way of the LORD as their fathers did, or not.” So the LORD left those nations, not driving them out quickly, and he did not give them into the hand of Joshua.

Now these are the nations that the LORD left, to test Israel by them, that is, all in Israel who had not experienced all the wars in Canaan. It was only in order that the generations of the people of Israel might know war, to teach war to those who had not known it before. These are the nations: the five lords of the Philistines and all the Canaanites and the Sidonians and the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon, from Mount Baal-hermon as far as Lebo-hamath. They were for the testing of Israel, to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of the LORD, which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses. So the people of Israel lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. And their daughters they took to themselves for wives, and their own daughters they gave to their sons, and they served their gods.

The central portion of these verses (2:20-3:6) is Israel’s testing. Again, Yahweh left these nations to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of the LORD, which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses. And the surrounding verses emphasize how they thoroughly failed that test. But this should not have caught them by surprise, for God did the same to the exodus generation when He tested them in the wilderness. Indeed, I believe that every generation of God’s people can expect to be tested by the LORD to some degree, and we should not view it negatively. After all, few students actually think that tests in school are fun, but they are necessary for evaluating where the student is in a particular subject.

But, someone may ask, why does God need to test us if He already knows everything? I believe it is mostly for our benefit. Through such tests, God reveals our own hearts to us. William Bridge says that “Suffering times are sin-discovering times… You see how it is in the winter, when the leaves are off the hedges, you can see where the birds’ nests were; when the leaves were on in the summer time, you could not see those nests” (RST Vol. 2, 486).

I think Webb is right to see a kind of “wistful reflection on what could have been” here.

Israel could have passed the test and continued to have God’s blessing, but they didn’t. They could have grown through the struggle to fully claim what was theirs and be the better for it, but they didn’t. They could have transformed Canaan from a place of idolatry into a place of God-honoring monotheism, but they didn’t. In short, they became “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2). The program of conquest became a program of assimilation, and the critical factor, in the end, was intermarriage. (Webb, 61)

The passage ends with discussing the intermarrying between the Israelites and the Canaanites because it led to their assimilation with the Canaanites. Rahab and Ruth, Boaz’s mother and wife, were both non-Israelites who married into God’s people. But crucially, they assimilated into Israel, forsaking their former gods and worshiping Yahweh alone. But that rarely happened. Back in Deuteronomy 7:3-4, God warned Israel through Moses, saying:

You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.

And that is precisely how things went. As their children married the children of the Canaanites around them, they increasingly looked more and more like Canaanites themselves. We should also clarify that the problem was not racial but religious, as Rahab and Ruth both prove. There is nothing wrong with cultures blending together, but there is a tremendous problem in attempting to blend religions together.

Again, the final chapters of Judges show just how Canaanite Israel became, and those chapters are punctuated by a refrain that appears four times and concludes the entire book. So, if we are looking for a way to summarize the entire book, the final verse, Judges 21:25, is where we ought to turn: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

A FAINTLY FLICKLERING CANDLE

That is the context of the book of Ruth. God’s holy nation, His kingdom of priests, were walking in open rebellion against Him, and each generation proved to be more wicked than the last. Instead of executing God’s judgment upon the Canaanites, they became like them. Yahweh sent judges to deliver them from their enemies, but most turned out to be just as sinful as the people that they were judging. Most significantly, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” This means that Israel had abandoned the fear of Yahweh and had become a nation of fools, stumbling in their sin down the road to eternal destruction. They needed a righteous king to rule over them.

The book of Ruth is a faintly flickering candle in the midst of such darkness. Although it revolves around tragedy and repeatedly gives hints of how evil the days were, Boaz, Ruth, and Naomi are examples of ordinary faithfulness in extraordinarily unfaithful times. While Israel abandons Yahweh, Boaz and Ruth are embodied examples of God’s chesed. While Israel embraces the worthless idols of the Canaanites, Boaz, a kingly man, and Ruth, an excellent woman, are strongly (chayil) devoted to the LORD and to their neighbor.

But what hope can such small and isolated faithfulness bring whenever the entire society is lost in sin? That question brings us the beauty of the Ruth’s concluding genealogy. While Ruth begins by placing us in the days when the judges ruled, it ends with a vision of better days ahead:

Now these are the generations of Perez: Perez fathered Hezron, Hezron fathered Ram, Ram fathered Amminadab, Amminadab fathered Nahshon, Nahshon fathered Salmon, Salmon fathered Boaz, Boaz fathered Obed, Obed fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered David. (Ruth 4:18–22)

This is the key to properly understanding the purpose of the book of Ruth. Judges ended by saying, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Ruth answers that ending with one word: David. The chesed and chayil of Boaz and Ruth are seeds sown into a dry and scorched ground that in three generations bear fruit in the form of King David, who ushered in the greatest time in Israel’s history.

Sadly, David was not perfect himself. Like the judges, David was just as sinful and flawed as the rest of Israel. Indeed, he would give his chayil to another man’s wife, and the sword would not depart his house from then on. Solomon’s reign was both better and worse. Yahweh gave him more wealth and more peace than David, but Solomon gathered hundreds of wives for himself, especially from other nations, who led him into idolatry. And then the stories of other kings begin to resemble the days of the judges again. So, the ending David needs to take our gaze beyond even that God-fearing king.

The only mention of Boaz and Ruth in the New Testament is found in Matthew 1, which gives us “the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). The hope that permeates the book of Ruth is a messianic hope. It is a hope beyond hope that God would one day send the woman’s seed into the world to crush the serpent’s head. At no time did that hope look less likely than during the days of the judges, when even God’s own people were behaving like children of the serpent. Yet even when the darkness seems to hide His face, the book of Ruth shows that the LORD is ever moving the providential wheels of redemption for His people; therefore, we can truly, by faith, rest in His unchanging grace.

May we do just that as we come the Table before us. As we consider the time of the judges, let us be quick to acknowledge that if the LORD were to hand us over to our sinful desires, we would each do what is right in our own eyes as well. We have no moral high ground over the Israelites, but humbling bow our heads and say, “there but for the grace of God go I.” And this bread and cup are visible symbols of that grace. Although our flesh fails the test of sin, Christ took on flesh, which He then broke, to redeem us from all of our sin. Although our hearts are stained with sin, His blood washes us whiter than snow. Therefore, as we come to take this bread and cup, let us cast ourselves at the feet of the only true and righteous Judge of all the earth, who is also our Savior and King.