Return from Exile: A Homily on Ruth

The story of Ruth is one of the most beautiful stories in Scripture. By faith, a young gentile woman is delivered from a pagan land, blessed with a faithful husband, and gives birth to a son renowned through the land who becomes part of the lineage of Jesus Christ.

There is so much to the Book of Ruth that we could spend weeks talking about it. Now don’t worry, I’m not going to keep you here that long. But I do want us to spend a little time together so that we can share in the richness of the many stories that can be found in Ruth.

The story of Ruth is also about Elimelech, a man who led his family out of the Land of Promise into disaster and even death.

It is about Naomi, a woman who went out from the land of her birth and abandoned it searching for rest in a place where it could never be found.

It is about Boaz, a man who welcomed Naomi and Ruth back into the land and redeemed Naomi and her family from a situation that—at least to Naomi—seemed hopeless.

It is a story about King David and how he became the King that the Israel desired.

It is about you and me, how we struggle to do what is right in the eyes of the Lord.

But most of all, this story is about Jesus Christ, who redeemed a people for himself, became the King the people had always hoped and prayed for, and brought us home out of exile to the land of promise and rest.

Ruth is about all these things because it is really a portrait in miniature of the story of redemption of God’s people that we see portrayed throughout the Bible.

In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden of Eden and from the presence of God because of their disobedience:

Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand rand take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

From there, the rest of Holy Scripture is the story of the return, or exodus, of the people to God’s presence through His grace in Jesus Christ. So the Bible is really one big story of Exile and Exodus, with many micro-stories of Exile and Exodus throughout. We are probably most familiar with the Exile and Exodus story of Israel when Jacob and his family leave the land for Egypt and return four hundred years later under Moses. But Ruth is also a story or Exile and Exodus, and that’s what I want to focus on today.

As the book of Ruth opens, we find the Israelites living under judges in a land of famine. The sad state of the land in famine should be no surprise because we are told in the last verse of Judges, because “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

So rather than enjoy the blessings of Deuteronomy 28:

And if you faithfully obey the voice of the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the LORD your God. … Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out. … The Lord will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you. They shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven ways.

The disobedience of the people had caused them to experience its curses:

But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. … Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out. … The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them.

It is likely that the curse of famine in Ruth came by way of the Midianites, who God was using to punish the nation and came every year at harvest time to raid the land and steal the crops. There was “was a famine in the land” because the Israelites refused to repent from its idol worship and turn to the Lord.

The same was true for Elimelech and Naomi, who had no thought of finding food through repentance. Instead, they packed up their family and left the Land of Promise where they lived in God’s presence and sought what they lacked in Moab, the home of historical enemies of Israel and God.

The results were as we might have expected. Elimelech and his two sons died as a result of their disobedience, and Naomi was left with only two Moabite daughters in law. Both of whom she tried to send back to their homes when she decided to return to Israel. We see a glimpse of the state of Naomi’s faith at the moment when she told Ruth and Orpah that they would have a better chance of finding rest in pagan Moab than in the Lord’s Land of Promise.

However, the Lord had a surprise in store for Naomi—just as He does for us at times today. Where she lacked faith, Ruth, a daughter of pagans, did not. Ruth told her, “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

Despite the blessing of a faithful daughter-in-law, Naomi returns to Israel in bitterness, telling the women, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi, when the LORD has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?”

I wish we had time to read the entire book of Ruth today so we could see more fully just how completely wrong Naomi is. But in short, the truth is that Naomi has it backwards; when she and her family went into exile to Moab, they were empty in both body and spirit. They had no food, no faith, and no trust in God that He would provide for them.

It is in Naomi’s exodus out of Moab to the Land of Promise that she was truly full. She left home with a faithless companion in Elimelech, but returns home with a faithful companion in Ruth. She left the land when it was empty of food but returns to the land at the time of harvest where “the LORD had visited his people and given them food.” By leaving the land she had forfeited her inheritance, but God provided for her for a kinsman redeemer in Boaz, who would “perpetuate the name of the dead [that is Elimelech] in his inheritance,” take Ruth as his wife, provide her (and Naomi) a son, another redeemer who “shall be to [Naomi] a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age, for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has given birth to him.”

God has done for us the same thing he did for Naomi. We too were cast away from God, bereft of hope, in need of a Redeemer. Then God sent to us the greater Boaz, Jesus Christ, who redeemed us. He “set at liberty [we] who [were] oppressed,” “bruised the head” of our oppressor, “obtained [for us] an inheritance” once lost, was the “the propitiation for our sins,” and became our Husband so we would remember “the reproach of [our] widowhood … no more.”

Even more than this, through these events God sent to us our King. No longer are we like the Israelites during the times of Judges. At the end of Judges, the people had no king and did what was right in their own eyes. But Ruth ends quite differently, with David, a man and a king after God’s own heart. And of course the line of Boaz and David points us directly to Christ, our King who will rule forever.

So, like Naomi, we have returned from exile. In Christ, we have had our exodus out of rebellion and into obedience, into a land in which we can dwell forever, where all our needs will be met. In Christ, there is longer a cycle of exile and exodus. In Christ, we have the King who was always there for the people if they had only sought Him. So friends, let us live in this hope and truth today by seeking Christ our King, worshipping Him, and doing what is right in His eyes.