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Problems pile on until life feels more like a grave than renewed life, and we wonder where God is. The Book of Ruth opens with Naomi back from Moab empty and bitter, renaming herself Mara because the Almighty has dealt harshly with her—still certain God is King, yet unable to see whether that King still loves her. Is there hope when we find ourselves feeling the same way?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, sometimes we have little problems, right? One problem right now, in talking to you, it sounds like many of you are right there with me on this, is the fact that because we've had an abnormally early warm spell, there's a lot of pollen in the air. Anyone else feeling that this week? That's a problem. Oh boy, yeah, I thought for a little bit here, actually, maybe preaching sitting down, because I've been kind of just a little on the dizzy side this week from my sinuses. And sometimes that's the sort of problem we face. Kind of a minor thing in general, right? It might be annoyance for a little bit, but it's not an earth-shattering thing. It's just something that we acknowledge in the spring. It's part of the cost of having beautiful springs.
We have a lot of things, though, that are much more serious than that. Issues that haunt us for years, maybe a lifetime. As we come to the story of Ruth, I think one of the most beautiful stories that we read in Scripture. As we come to that story, we're going to be exploring over the next few weeks. We're going to start with not Ruth, but Naomi. Because I think the thing is, we often jump right in and we just go through it. You can easily read the whole story in one sitting. It's a short book of the Bible. But as we're doing that, the temptation is to just kind of whiz right on through it and not stop in the moment, not stop in those problems that haunt us kind of moments.
And yet, what do we find? What do we find? Naomi can't do that. She can't just speed through the book. And so then when we look at Naomi and we think about, well, why does she react how she does? Why is she feeling the way that she feels? Sort of like, well, just check over on Chapter 4, Naomi. You can see everything's going to be good. That's not how it works, is it? It's not how it works for us either.
And I think that's the thing that is important for us as we come to this. This is a story for each of us. God placed this story in here so we can see how he's working in those times where it feels like he isn't. Those times that feel more like graves and less like the renewed life that we proclaimed last week.
So let's go ahead and come before our God and ask that as we come, that we wouldn't just hear a wonderful thing about what God did in the past, but we would hear about how God is doing the same sorts of things today. Let's pray.
Father, we come before you as those who often feel like we're in graves, who often feel like both big things and little things are tearing us down. We wonder where are you, Lord? But as we read your word, as we see how you work over the span of lifetimes and over generations, would you give us the assurance that you are with us now as well? We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.
So we start in the tragic. And sometimes the tragic can lead to more tragedy, and that's what we're going to see in this story. But it starts with what is a tragedy by itself. There's a famine in the land of Israel.
Now, to situate Ruth in the story, this story is happening during the same time as the book of Judges. We're going through the book of Judges right now on Tuesday nights in our Bible study. If you're not in it already, great time to become a part of it. Because while we read those stories, we should be thinking this is the air that Naomi and Ruth are going to be breathing. This is what's going on.
Because I think sometimes we read it and we see how their line is going to lead to David, that this is moving towards David, and we think kings. And we think about the height of Israel, the best moments of Israel, but we're in a broken time. And many commentators believe, and I think they're correct in this, as we look at this famine that's going on in the land, this is not a famine that just is random. This is probably one of those cases where we see in Judges, God brings famine on the land to call the people to repentance.
What does that mean? Well, it means that they haven't been faithful to him, that they've been worshiping other gods, they've been doing all the things that God has told them not to do, and God has then withheld his blessing. Now, of course, famine is a tragic thing. We don't really, we can't really even imagine what famine is really like.
Famine for us is we go to the store and they're out of our favorite brand of snacks, right? Oh, boy. There's a local chip company that makes fantastic potato chips, Billy Goat Potato Chip Company. They're wonderful, but they're always hard to find and they're often out in the store. Well, famine, oh no. But no, I'm not going to starve, right? All of us here, I don't think any of us are at immediate risk of being without food.
Now, we know in our community there are challenges, and that's why we're doing something like the canned drive, but even then we have community resources. Imagine though you live in a culture that's subsistence, where you don't have huge stores of food. And famine comes across the land. You can't just say, well, okay, I'm going to eat the canned green beans tonight. I'm not going to have fresh vegetables. I'm not, you know, I don't have my favorite potato chip. I'm going to have to eat just the generic potato chip. No, I might not eat. So it's tragic.
What's the closest thing that we experience today? Well, I'm not really, it's hard for us. We're so blessed in this country. God has made it so even when we're often, even when we're impoverished, we're blessed by the standards of history. Praise him for that. That's wonderful.
So what is, how do we get our minds around it? Well, one thing that maybe gives us some picture of the challenge I thought was, I've read stories about people who live in various parts of the country where the price of housing has gone up tremendously. It's gone up everywhere. But for example, I was reading about a man, a pastor who grew up in New York. And the real estate in New York's always been expensive, but it's gone up way, way more. It's gotten to the point where you simply can't really, conceivably in a lot of occupations, ever aspire to having a house. It's just not going to happen, right?
They're just a standard house. Like he was in a duplex. He said it was like a million dollars. Well, to buy. Well, that's not going to work for most people. So what do you do? Well, he and then several other stories I was reading about, they went and they picked up their families and they moved. Now they weren't at jeopardy to their lives, but they were at least at jeopardy as far as how do we actually provide for our families? Well, we have to pick up and we move.
And that's sort of the picture we have at the beginning of this book, right? They look at the situation. There's a famine going on. What do you do when there's a famine going on? Well, you pick up and you move and you go someplace where the famine isn't going on. And that's exactly what we see here.
And let's go ahead and turn to verse one of chapter one, where we read about that. It says, “In the days when the judges ruled, there was 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. The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife, Naomi. And the names of the two sons were Malon and Chileon. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi died and she was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives. The name of the one was Orpha and the name of the other Ruth. They lived there about 10 years and both Malon and Chileon died so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.”
It goes from bad to worse, right? It's the sort of thing where you think, oh, probably most of us have experienced, maybe not this, but we've experienced situations where we feel like something is bad, right? Things aren't going smoothly. The pollen's out in the air. It's not a good idea. Pollen's out in the air, it's troublesome, but then something goes wrong, right? You think, okay, I'm just going to cruise along here and then your car breaks down or you lose your job or whatever the case may be. And it starts to pile on and sometimes it feels like we're in those seasons.
Several of you I know are in those seasons right now where it just feels like it's piling on and piling on and piling on. You think, oh, well, Naomi is experiencing, oh, that'd be perfect, thank you, thank you. It feels like it just keeps piling on and then maybe you get a little relief. Then what happens? It piles on some more, right? So they had to leave their homeland. They had to leave everything they knew. They go to the land of Moab. This is not a place people want to go.
For me, a Midwesterner, moving out of New York and moving to the Midwest, that sounds like, ah, hey, welcome to paradise. Come on, this is much better. But if you're a New Yorker, I think most New Yorkers think, if I have to move out of New York to survive, I have to leave everything that is good in this world and I have to come out to the wilderness where bears and stuff roam. And they will probably maul me and I will die, right? That's how they feel.
Going to Moab is not what you want to do if you're an Israelite. In fact, the Israelites were told not to associate with the Moabites. They had not had a friendly exchange during the exodus. In fact, the Moabites lured the Israelites into sin. They hired a professional prophet to try to bring curses down upon them. We've looked at Balaam before, fascinating man. But you have that. They won't allow them safe passage to where they're going. It's not been friendly. And so the Lord says, don't have anything to do with these people. It's not where you want to go.
It is truly, truly whatever place you think. If I had to move someplace else and there was one place I really, really didn't want to go, that's where they're going. So that's where they are. And then, and then Elimelech dies. And then Naomi's sons both died too. Think about that for a moment. Talk about piling on. It is just really, I mean, this is utter disaster. And twice the disaster in that time because Naomi, as a woman in the ancient world, can't go and find a source of income for herself.
She probably has no legal standing in the Moabite world. What is she going to do? I mean, this is bad, across the board bad. What's she going to do? Well, before we get into that, we need to think about the situation a little bit more because one of the challenges, and I think this is something that Naomi's going to confront and Ruth is going to confront. And we see that they confront it in very different ways.
We're going to look at Naomi this week and Ruth starting next week, is are we going to respond in those times faithfully? And as I mentioned, God had said don't go into, don't associate with the Moabites. And yet, what had Elimelech led his family to do? He'd taken them to Moab.
Now, if the famine were a judgment from God, what's the appropriate response to? Repentance. They're supposed to repent. They're supposed to quit doing whatever evil things they did that had caused the famine to come upon the land. But what did they choose to do instead? They chose to go to the place that God told them not to go.
And so over the history of studying this book, rabbis have often speculated that Elimelech, the reason he dies so quickly in the story is Elimelech is receiving God's judgment. He has taken his family, he's run from God's judgment into something that brings more judgment from God. He has not acted faithfully. So just being there would seem to be a sin. So he's compounding sin.
And that's something that I think is important for us to be thinking at the start of this book because, quite frankly, when we find ourselves in Moab, when we find ourselves leaving the land that we love, when we find ourselves in those wilderness situations in life, the temptation to compound the sin in our lives becomes strong because it always seems like somehow it's going to make it better. I think he thought it was going to make it better. We'll just go to the land that's more prosperous.
Here's an irony about Elimelech. His name means God is king. And so you have a man whose very name proclaims God's power, thinking, God isn't blessing me anymore, so I think I'll move to a different land. His name testified to the truth about who God is, but his actions didn't.
Here's a second thing that's really interesting. There's lots of little things that the narrative doesn't really go into, but I think are really key. And the second thing is that when they move to Moab, notice that the sons take what? They take Moabite women as their wives. They don't marry amongst their own people. Why would that be?
Well, more than likely because the others that were facing this famine didn't go to the land of Moab. At least some of them maybe actually understood that God was calling them to repentance. In fact, later in the story, we'll see that it seems likely that's exactly what happened, that the people did respond. But Elimelech, instead of dealing with that, he went for the shortcut.
So we have a sin to travel there and a sin to have his family dwell there. That's going to compound and compound and compound because what happens? Well, the people of Israel were not supposed to intermarry with other peoples. Why? Because it was going to turn them away from the Lord. They'd worship the other gods.
And yet, because Elimelech wanted to short circuit the judgment of God in this famine, he might have thought he was protecting his family, but he actually brings his family into a situation that very likely could be far, far worse.
Isn't that the way it often is when we face sin? We struggle when we're facing those wilderness moments, when we're facing those moments where things feel like they're going wrong, when it goes from, this is annoying to this is really, really bad. We find ourselves going, compounding that sin and drawing ourselves further and further away from God.
Have you ever gone, probably, again, this is something I think most of us have experienced at some point. I was thinking back a number of years. I had a meeting with someone on a committee with a ministry I was involved in. We were supposed to meet at a restaurant at a certain time on a certain day.
So I arrived at the restaurant, sat down to order something to drink and said, no, I don't want to order my food yet because I'm waiting for a friend. It'll be just a little bit. So I sit there and I think it was an iced tea. I drank my tea and then it's empty and the waiter comes by, pours another tea and drink my second tea and waiter comes by, pours a third tea and says, you sure you wouldn't like to order? No, no, I know this friend. He must be running late. He's going to be here.
I think I stopped drinking after the third tea for a little bit at least. Finally, I said, I don't think he's coming. I tried to reach him. I couldn't get a hold of him. I asked how much the tea was and I left. And it's very awkward if you're in that situation where you've made that arrangement to meet somebody and the person doesn't show up, right? Because you're thinking, if this person's late, I'm just going to keep waiting.
But how many glasses of iced tea do I want to drink? How many glasses of iced tea do I want to drink before I finally give up, right? I feel like I'm about to drown here and it's awkward. We do have those nice little devices that we carry around now that we can pull out and fiddle with for a bit. I've done that for a while. Okay, I've done enough of that. I've spent some time just listening to the nice music in the restaurant, done enough of that. Now what do I do?
I think Elimelech sort of felt like that was the case with God. I think he felt like God wasn't showing up. I think that's why he did what he did, right? It felt awkward. Judgment's coming. Judgment, when God does correct us, feels awkward. And so we have to decide what to do. We can see how this keeps compounding and compounding and compounding.
Deuteronomy 7:5 says, “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. And the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you and he would destroy you quickly.”
Elimelech thought of that and to be fair, maybe he was feeling very legalistic in that moment. If you look at the rest of that passage, it does not explicitly name the Moabites as one of the peoples not to intermarry with. It just says you shouldn't have anything to do with them.
Okay, well, we're not having anything to do with them. We're just going to live amongst them and my sons are going to intermarry. No problem. But no, if we actually look at the passages that we see over and over again in scripture, they weren't supposed to do this. They weren't supposed to live there. They weren't supposed to intermarry. Why? Because it was going to turn the people away from the Lord.
Here, Elimelech once was good for his family and what's he doing? He's risking turning them away from the one true source of blessing. Solomon later on, one of the failings of Solomon, he had his many wives from many different nations and one of the nations singled out Moab. Isn't that interesting? It says his heart was turned. Why? Because he intermarried with these different nations and took all these different wives. He started to worship their gods.
God said, if you want blessing, if you want to experience what it's like to be in relationship to me, you don't do something that's going to draw you away from me. People did it over and over again. Here, Elimelech in trying to help his family, he does the very thing God has said not to do.
Now, what about Naomi? Elimelech's dead within the first words of this book. He's out of the picture. He's off the stage left. Now, what about Naomi? How complicit is she in this? And that's an interesting question, I think, to ask of ourselves. How involved is Naomi in the decision to move to Moab?
Well, we don't really know. Is this intentional? Abraham, for example, when there was famine, he went and intentionally went to Egypt. Or is she more like Joseph? She just kind of gets dragged along by her family, just like Joseph's brothers sell him off into slavery. Joseph didn't want to be in Egypt, and yet he ended up there. Which one is Naomi? Well, it's not entirely easy to say. We don't know all the details.
But here's something we do know. We're told Elimelech dies, and then Naomi's sons intermarry. And so I think there's a very strong sense that Naomi is involved in this process of succumbing to the land. Naomi is at least able, certainly, to speak to her sons before they get married and say, you know, you shouldn't intermarry with the people of this land. They don't worship the Lord. They don't want anything to do with the Lord.
And the one thing I want to urge you is that if you want blessing in this life, you need to follow the Lord. She could say that, but it seems that she falls silent at best. Maybe she doesn't willingly say that they should go do this, but she certainly doesn't discourage. So Naomi would seem to be complicit in this messed up decision to go and move to the land. We may not know exactly why, but then we're here at the beginning of what's going to be happening.
We have to ask the question, now what? And I think maybe that ambiguity on exactly how involved Naomi is on this decision, I think that is a helpful thing that the Lord wants us to have because oftentimes we're not really sure why we're in our Moabs either. We know that we're there. We know we're not where we're supposed to be. We're St. Louis and suddenly find ourselves in New York. See, I was going the other way, but imagine this, boy. Where's my St. Louis style pizza and my toasted ravioli and the gooey butter cake and the beautiful muddy Mississippi River and everything else that is good and wonderful?
We don't necessarily know why suddenly we are in a land far away. But suddenly we are. And like Naomi, we need to ask, now what?
Our attention is now caught. We know something is wrong because we're not where we thought we were supposed to be. Now what? That's what she's confronted with. And we see in Naomi both something very good and commendable and something that's not so commendable.
Let's start with what we can commend her on. Naomi's strength is that she never loses sight of what her husband's name said, that God has kingship over all the earth. Take a look at verse six. Then she arose with her daughters-in-law to return from the country of Moab. For she had heard in the fields of Moab that the Lord had visited his people and given them food.
She's in Moab, it's not where she wanted to be, but she hasn't lost sight of her home. And she hasn't lost sight of the fact that God is the one who provides to her homeland. And so when she hears that things have gotten better there, what does she know? She knows that the Lord is showing blessing to his people. So she hasn't lost sight of the Lord to that degree.
And this goes on, for example, if we look a little bit further, verses eight and nine. But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go return each of you to her mother's house. May the Lord deal kindly with you as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The Lord grant that you may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband.”
And she kissed them and they lifted up their voices and wept. Well, there's clearly a beautiful family dynamic here. And we'll talk more about that over the coming weeks as well. This is a joyful moment that they're going to part. But notice something else.
Even as she sends her daughters-in-law back to their respective homes, and says, go back there, go back and see if you can reset and start over. This doesn't have to be the end of life that my sons have died. You have a future still, go back. What else does she do? She gives them the blessing of the Lord. How beautiful that is.
As she looks at them, and we're going to learn more about how desolate she feels. As she's feeling that way, she looks at them and she offers God's blessing to them. She's in Moab. She has Moabite daughter-in-laws. And what does she say? God bless you.
And she doesn't mean some generic God bless you that sometimes we use where people aren't even really defining what it means. She means drink of that refreshment of the blessing of the Lord. I think that's a challenge that each of us should think about. When we're in our Moabs, are we able to say that to others? Are we so confident still that God is King? That God is still in control?
That even as we look and our hearts are broken and we're struggling and we're weak and we're weary. As we look at those whom we care about around us, that we wish God's blessing on them, expecting that God still is capable of it. Sometimes when we're in those times, we're tempted to think God isn't in control anymore. God can't do anything. And then we're maybe not even inclined to think about how we could wish God's blessing for other people.
But here she does. She's wishing that for them. She's praying that for them. Because even as things are tough, she still understands that God is King. Do you understand that? Do I understand that? Most of the time? Not all the time. Most of the time I'm aware of how God is working, even when things aren't going exactly how I wish. I still believe that God is working.
Yet there's those creeping doubts, those times you think, but everything is breaking down. I don't know if God's working in this moment. Where are you right now? You feel those moments? Those grave moments? Those empty tomb moments where you haven't encountered the Savior yet? Those dark moments?
The challenge though, is even as we recognize that God can work in other people's lives, we're still tempted to think that God's working. But even as we recognize that God can work in other people's lives, we can start to lose sight of how He's working in ours.
This is Naomi's weakness and her husband Elimelech's weakness as well. They lose sight of God's grace in the troubles that they face. Take a look at verses 19 to 22. So the two of them, that's Ruth and Naomi, went until they came to Bethlehem. And when they came to Bethlehem, and the women said, “Is this Naomi?”
She said to them, “Do not call me Naomi, call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full. 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?”
She knows God's King. And see, even here she knows that. She's not saying, I'm not sure God's really powerful enough for my situation. She's not saying, I'm not sure God is really there. She's saying, God's brought this upon me. He's broken me. Everything I hoped for is gone. Everything I had when I left this land is gone. I left because our bread baskets were empty. I came back with nothing at all.
We look at the women exclaiming about Naomi, and sometimes people say, well, maybe it's because they're just surprised to see her again, but it seems more likely as it's expressed that what they're saying is, can this really be the woman that we used to know as Naomi? They see the wear and tear of years upon her. Everything that's hard and broken. Can this be Naomi?
She sees how things have gone wrong. She sees everything that she's lost. She knows that God is king, and so she says, well, call me bitter because, why? Because God has brought everything bitter against me.
I saw a video this week of a stork, and the stork had unfortunately decided to build its nest on a pole that had power lines running on it. And this is what happened. Caught fire. And you can see the stork flying around. They had to bring out the fire department. And of course, the nest was lost as they tried to extinguish the fire. And you can see the stork just crying out, trying to rebuild. And yet, as the stork tries to rebuild, the branches just keep falling.
And I think that stork is sort of like Naomi. She'd made some bad choices. Whether initially she thought it was a good idea to move to Moab or not, she'd been complicit in this decade-long adventure there. She'd continued it. She'd approved, it would seem, of her son's becoming even more enmeshed in the Moabite culture. All this had gone on, and everything caught fire. Everything was lost.
She tried to hold on, tried to build something, and the branches keep falling. She built what felt like a secure nest, and it caught fire. Now what? She sees God's power, just like that stork understood something powerful blasted away its nest. But what she doesn't see is God's grace.
And a lot of times when we're in those moments, as we're experiencing those things, that's where we are. That's where I am. I feel God's power. I can see that He's in my heart. I feel God's power. I can see that He's almighty. I can see that He's in charge, but can I understand in those moments, can I understand that He still loves me?
I think that's what Naomi's lost. I'm pretty certain that stork doesn't feel loved at that moment either. So striking is you see it standing there just crying out on top of the pole, and have you ever felt like that? I think we've all been there. We've been in those places where we just want to cry out, we stand in the rubble of what we thought was.
But do we understand that the one who's all-powerful also brings grace and mercy? That even when we're standing in the rubble, it doesn't mean that He's lost sight of us. We lose sight of Him, but He doesn't lose sight of us. Do we understand that?
When we confront death itself, it doesn't feel like God is bringing His grace and His love to us. What did we proclaim last week about the Savior? Let's look again at 1 Corinthians 15. Paul writes, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law, but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
Do we hear that? Paul's saying to the Corinthians, people are going to die. You're seeing people die, but don't think because of that that your labor is in vain. Don't think that that means that everything is gone.
I think about that stork and don't think that everything's gone just because you shouldn't have built that nest there. But we keep building nests on power lines and wondering why they catch fire. We keep bringing ourselves to places that don't work, and sometimes it's not all on us. Naomi, maybe she didn't want to move to Moab. We don't know.
Not initially, at least. We'll become comfortable even in the places we didn't want to be initially. Then what are we going to do? Do we understand God calling us to keep our eyes on him even in those moments? Wherever we are, wherever we should be, and wherever we presently are, do we understand that God's working? Are we willing to wait and watch as he responds in the brokenness and the fire?
That's not the end of the story for our stork. People saw the situation and they realized how much the stork wanted that nest. The stork wanted that nest there, so they built a metal cage and filled it with sticks.
God does that for us. A lot of times we don't know in the moment, and I imagine that storks crying out there, they were actually making that metal nest holder bracket. I bet some of the people doing it wanted to say to that stork, stork, just hold on a moment, it'll all be okay.
Yes, you've made some decisions that weren't so good, stork. You shouldn't have built there. Yes, you've lost your hard labor of building that nest. But it's going to be okay.
Naomi, you shouldn't have built a nest in Moab. You should have encouraged staying there. You should have come back when Elimelech died. You shouldn't have stayed there for 10 years. But God is going to restore. God restores.
And here's the thing that we know, all of us, if we trust in Jesus, if you trust in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, I can't promise that you'll live until the day that he returns, or that your loved ones will, or that everything will go easy, that it won't feel like there's plenty of times where your nest is burning away.
But I can promise that God is building that bracket for you. He's not going to let you go. God is working in your life. He's working in my life.
Naomi doesn't see it at this moment. She is standing on that pole, crying out, saying, why did my nest burn? Everything has been taken away from me. I have no hope. I have nowhere to go. But God was building the bracket for her. He was building something far better than she could imagine.
And how wonderful that is to see affirm, because if we look at this, and we hold on to the fact that Naomi is not a perfect person. Naomi has made mistakes. Naomi has struggled to trust in the Lord, but God hasn't struggled to love her.
Tells us something about what he's going to do for us, too. What are we going to do in those moments we're in, Boaz? We're going to move towards God's land. That's what we see Naomi does, even in her bitterness, even in her discontent.
One thing that she does that's so crucial to everything that's going to come after is even as she thinks that God has abandoned her, she doesn't completely lose sight of him. And she moves back home. She comes back to where God said she should be. And as she does that, God's building that bracket for her.
She gets there and it doesn't feel like it yet. A lot of times when we've wandered off into the wilderness, it doesn't feel like God is building that bracket for us either. It feels like we're still lost. We're still broken. But know that God is. That's what we celebrated last week as we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, that God has built the bracket for us. We can't necessarily experience it yet. The lift hasn't yet put it on the pole a lot of times. But he's built it.
Wherever you are today, wherever I am today, we can move closer to him by turning back to his word, by coming back to him in prayer, by spending time saying, God, I don't understand this, but I know that you are faithful, that you don't let go. And so help me to understand where I am right now.
Because whether you brought yourself into Edom or Moab or some other place that's forbidden by God, whether you find yourselves in Egypt or Lebanon, know that God is there. That's something that thankfully Naomi doesn't lose.
It's my prayer that all of you would know that, that I would know that today, that even in those moments where I am in Moab and I am miserable, I remember that God is still king and that God is not just a king, he's the gracious, merciful, loving king.
And that, friends, is the hope. Because whatever reason we're in Moab, whatever reason we're in the far country, may we see not just God's power, but we can also see God's grace. He loves you. He's calling you closer to him.
Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, would you help us as we come before you? We don't necessarily understand why we are where we are. Sometimes we know. Sometimes we know we've made bad choices. Sometimes we can't see them. Sometimes others have brought us struggling along. We didn't want to be where we are and we've ended up there anyway.
But Lord, would you help us, like Naomi, to remember that you are the king who is in control wherever we are. But also, unlike Naomi, would you help us not to lose sight of your grace? That we know not only that you are in control, but the one who is in control loves us and is with us. We pray this in Jesus' name.
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