Famine, Loss and a Road Home

Read the chapter slowly and observe the movements. A famine in the days of the judges drives Elimelek's family from Bethlehem, which means house of bread, to Moab, Israel's old enemy. There Elimelek dies. The sons marry Moabite women and then they die too. Naomi hears that the Lord has visited his people with food and sets out for home. Two daughters-in-law start with her. Orpah turns back with tears and a kiss. Ruth clings.

Interpret what the writer is doing. Every loss is stated plainly and quickly, without explanation, because the narrator wants us to feel the emptiness before the filling. The book is not chiefly about Ruth's courage, though it honours it. It is about a God who works through famine, migration, foreign marriages and widowhood to bring about a redemption no one in the story can foresee. Naomi's complaint that the Lord's hand has gone out against her is, in a sense, correct. It is the same hand that will provide.

Apply it to this week. God's providence rarely announces itself. It looks like ordinary decisions, hard roads and a harvest that happens to be starting. Ruth's vow shows what faith looks like when it has no evidence yet.

Where in your own story have you called a season bitter that later proved to be the beginning of provision? What would clinging, in Ruth's sense, look like toward someone in your life this week? How do you speak to God when his hand seems to be against you?