Are You in Moab?

This is a redemption love story.

Who in this story needs redemption?

Everybody, it seems.

Who needs redemption in our stories?

This is why we need to savor this little book.

And how will they be redeemed from being of little value to high worth?

Ah, that’s the beauty of great literature. It really isn’t obvious at first.

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Yesterday’s post was an overview of one of the most enchanting stories anywhere. It just so happens to be found in the Old Testament tucked between two larger books — Judges and 1 Samuel.

It begins this way.

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.

Ruth 1:1 (ESV)

This sets the time of this story to be occurring after the liberation of the tribes of Israel as slaves in Egypt and their wilderness sojourn of forty years ending with their entering the Promised Land or Canaan under the leadership of Joshua. Following Joshua’s death the subsequent generations, as generations tend to do, forgot who they were and how that came to inhabit the land under their feet.

As they forgot their own significance in God’s plan they began to assimilate the behavior of the peoples they had earlier displaced; and as they did this they became weak to invasions.

Time and again they found themselves under a new tyrant reminiscent of their four hundred years under Egypt’s Pharaohs.

Following each loss and domination by a foreign power the people would wake up and cry out and God would send them a judge. These judges were not legal scholars, they were warriors who would essentially stand up and rescue the people bringing them back to God, over and over again. So it makes sense that during this turbulent time many Israelites would lose faith in the God of their people and begin to look for possibly better deals elsewhere.

So here we have a story of such a family — a father, mother, and their two sons who move east of the Dead Sea (a fitting picture) out of the Promised Land of their people and into another country called Moab.

It doesn’t go well.

The father dies. The sons marry Moabite women and then the sons die.

This leaves the mom and two daughters-in-law.

Now, imagine you are the mom.

This begins the redemption story of Ruth.

Meet Naomi. Understand her bitterness. Look around. You know Naomis. You might be one yourself.

One of the amazing things about Bible stories is there is always more buried beneath just a few lines of text than we can see at first.

Anything relatable here to the life we are living today?

Please share your thoughts and we will pick this story up tomorrow.