The Road of Famine | Sermon 06/16/2024

Would please turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Ruth, the book of Ruth.

That's after Judges, before 1 Samuel in your Old Testament, Ruth chapter one.

Sorry, they've changed the lighting a bit here for the play as well. And this might be the first worship service you need sunglasses.

Like this is not a combination that works, I think. So forgive me, bear with us.

We're gonna be in verses one through five today. And the title of the sermon is the road of famine.

The road of famine. This is gonna be probably unlike any

Ruth sermon you've heard. Well, you've probably not heard many Ruth sermons, but for this particular section, verses one through five, you may have heard this a different way.

And I want to make sure I honor the text of the living God. And this is not to build hype or suspense or anything like that.

I just want you to be aware that this is going to be possibly unlike what you expect.

Very heavy stuff here. But as we move through Ruth, it's just going to be so triumphant.

But starting in verse one of the book of Ruth, chapter one, hear now the words of the living and true

God. Now it came about in the days when the judges governed that there was a famine in the land.

And a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the land of Moab with his wife.

That can be hard to do. Judges in Israel.

So if you can kind of think about, they have already gone to Sinai, Mount Sinai.

They've received the commandments. Moses received the commandments. He and Joshua then led the people to the promised land in Cana.

They made a holy conquest and war against the pagan tribes.

Pagan tribes that were by the way, killing their children, committing sexual perversion and idolatry of all kinds.

And that has already happened. They've moved into the land of Israel. They've proclaimed it as their own as God has given it to them.

The problem, however, the Israelites now no longer called the

Hebrews because they're what? They're in the land of Israel. They're Israelites now, no longer Hebrews. They did not expel all of the

Gentiles in the land. They did not do what God said. They did not remove them all. God warned them that failing to do this or failing to be holy and separate would result in catastrophe of both the spiritual and physical kind.

And so we're at the time where the people have not yet asked for a king.

Judges are governing Israel. There's been no Saul. There's been no David yet.

There's certainly been no exile, no captivity. Those are centuries later.

This is earlier in Israelite history right after taking the land, okay? And so in the

Israelite reign of the judges, you have people like Gideon, Jephthah, you have

Samson, you have Deborah, Elon, people like that. And those judges governed the people right after Joshua's death.

When Joshua died, judges took over. That was from 1374

BC all the way to 1052 BC. Remember, it works backwards as you get closer to the birth of Christ.

So that was just about 300 years the judges ruled in the land.

And the prophet Samuel was the very last judge before the kings.

And so it's estimated that our story, our context takes place, this is the story of Naomi and Ruth and Boaz.

This takes place around 1140 BC, kind of towards the last hundred years of the reign of judges.

Not quite in the middle, but towards the end getting closer to the kings. And this probably would have happened with Naomi and Ruth and Boaz before Jephthah, before Samson.

What we possibly think is this was during the time of Abimelech.

Abimelech was, by the way, Gideon's son who wickedly took leadership away from the judges.

So this could be where they're at. Right now, Abimelech is trying to rule wickedly and taking leadership away from the judges.

Now, as far as who wrote this book, it's anonymous. Like many biblical narratives, we don't ultimately know.

The Jewish Talmud attributes authorship to the prophet Samuel.

That is often tradition that the prophet Samuel wrote this book. The problem is the

Jewish Talmud is the only one that says that and that was made a couple hundred years after Christ.

So, you know, that's over a thousand years removed. And Samuel was, again, not alive during 1140 at this time.

It's possible Samuel the prophet would have heard this story by oral tradition. It's possible, of course, as a prophet of God, God told

Samuel this story of Ruth and Boaz and Naomi. Others believe that Nathan the prophet during the time of David wrote it and possibly he wrote it to quiet Saul's family.

Saul's family was in an uproar possibly going, we should have the throne back and Nathan wrote it as kind of an apologetic that David's family deserves the throne.

Some even suppose that Solomon, David's son, wrote this book after his father had died.

Others, and this is where it gets pretty wild. Others based off of the type of Hebrew that's used here, they're trying to distinguish if a

Northerner or a Southerner wrote it. You know, there was the kingdom split into the

Northern and the Southern kingdoms. And some scholars believe that a

Northerner, remember all the 10 tribes were taken into the Assyrian captivity. Judah and Benjamin and some of the

Levites were taken to the Babylonian exile. Some believe that a Northerner was taken by Assyria and then the

Northerner came back and that was during the reign of a good king in the

South. Specifically, the Northerner was trying to get his other tribesmen to go, look,

Josiah is in the throne and Josiah is of the line of David.

Josiah is of the line of David. And so maybe a Northerner wrote this to go, guys, we've got to stop following Ahab and all the men after him.

We've got to follow David, the line of David. And this would show that the

Royal line that came to Josiah went all the way back to Judah even. We'll see that at the end of the fourth chapter.

Ultimately, we don't know who wrote it, but it has been accepted as canon from the very beginning.

The book of Ruth's four sections were even found in the Qumran caves when the

Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. Incredibly, this is the only book in the entire

Old Testament named after a non -Israelite, a Gentile, and it is one of only two books in the entire

Bible that are named after a woman. And what's interesting is

Ruth is not even really the main character of this book. Ruth speaks the least between Naomi, Boaz, and herself.

So why is it named after her? And I will allude to why that is possibly later in the series.

But with all that said, verse one begins, now it came about in the days when the judges govern that there was a famine in the land.

Boom, right? Verse one, story starts famine, tragedy, calamity.

This isn't once upon a time at the beginning of a fairy tale and the author is not simply trying to give us a point in history to grasp onto.

By mentioning the judges, we are thrust into the immoral period of Israel.

If you've ever read the book of Judges, you know what is the theme of Judges? What's the slogan?

Every man did what was right in his own eyes. He did not regard God. You have the cycle of relapse and retribution, then repentance and rescue.

You see, during the time of the judges, Israel would go into idolatry. They would go after other gods.

They would sin. They would turn from the one true God, Yahweh. He would discipline them with foreign invaders or with pestilence, or in this case, famine.

In fact, Leviticus 26 says this, it's in your printout or you can follow along. Leviticus 26 says, "'But if you do not obey me "'and do not carry out all these commandments, "'your strength will be spent uselessly.'"

Here it is. "'For your land will not yield its produce "'and the trees of the land will not yield their fruit.'"

Now, after the foreign invaders would come or famine would come or judgment, reason would return to the people of God and they would finally repent.

They'd finally repent and they'd cry out, God, deliver us from this famine, from these foreign invaders, deliver us.

And in God's mercy, he would raise up a righteous judge, although a lot of them are imperfect, but raise up a judge, a deliverer to rescue them, no doubt a picture of the future

Christ. And so the image we have is not just a famine of food, but what the author of Ruth is trying to show us is there's a famine of righteousness right now.

That's what we're in, a famine of righteousness. Kind of reminds you of America a little bit, right?

A famine of righteousness, it's nowhere to be seen. And so if you can imagine,

Judges gives us the overview. Ruth then kind of zooms in on Judges and gives us a closeup shot of one particular family in one particular village in Israel, really cool.

That's what we get to see here. This is showing us that there's currently very little distinction between God's covenant people and the rest of the world, they're just like them.

The people of God have become like the people of the world. Their commitment to God has disintegrated.

Sin is prevailing in the land and there seems to be very little hope. In fact, there seems to be so little hope that one entire family is thinking about leaving.

The rest of verse one reads, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the land of Moab with his wife and his two sons.

They're leaving their home village of Bethlehem. You know what Bethlehem means in Hebrew?

It literally means house of bread. So it's just pure irony. There's a famine in the land and they live in the house of bread, but there's no bread.

There's none to be seen. To have bread, by the way, is to be considered blessed of God. So stop being gluten -free, number one.

Jesus calls himself the bread of life. No bread in Bethlehem means one can't have life.

You can't live without it. And so this man of Bethlehem in Judah went with his wife and two sons to be dependent sojourners in a foreign nation.

Verse two gives us more detail. Look at that. The name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife,

Naomi, and the name of his two sons were, and typically this would be like Maclan, you know, like this really thick

Hebrew, Maclan and Kilion, Ephrathites of Bethlehem in Judah. Now they entered the land of Moab and remained there.

The name Elimelech literally means my God is king.

My God is king. And Naomi's name means sweet or lovely or pleasant.

And what we will find is the opposite will become true for the both of them. Naomi will rename herself and we'll cover that later, but Elimelech shows by his actions that he desires a different king than the one true

God. I told you at the beginning that we're often faced with forks in the road of this life, and Elimelech was facing a fork now.

Will he stay in the breadless country of Israel and mourn his nation's sin?

Will he spur his neighbors onto faithfulness? Will he be a catalyst for repentance that the cycle would complete in judges?

Right now they're facing the retribution of God. Will they be part of the repentance toward God?

And then therefore God might bring the rescue of God. Will they be part of that?

We'll see later that almost everyone in Israel stayed there as Naomi's kin is still there when she returns.

The text says they, they personally, they entered the land of Moab. This family, they left.

And this isn't like having two righteous decisions before you, am I going to serve

God here or am I gonna serve God there? Sometimes you and I have those scenarios, this isn't that situation.

This isn't it. Elimelech's family is in the promised land.

They're in a covenant with the Lord, Yahweh. This is their home. And this isn't just their home, this place is their inheritance forever.

This is a gift from God. They are in the place near the tabernacle of God where the presence of God is.

To leave Bethlehem is to leave their God. To leave is to seek another.

That's why the name God is my king is a poor name for Elimelech.

To have that name for you and I or to have that as a true statement in our hearts, one must be faithful to God, one must be loyal to God.

Dwelling in the land is wrapped up in covenant keeping. And you think to yourself, look, if my family was faced with famine,

I'd do whatever I could for them. Would you do it at the expense of disobeying

God and believing he won't care for you? That's the question. And so we're confronted with our first lesson in the text.

We've all had to make hard decisions in our lives or in the lives of our families. I had to make a hard decision for my family just this past week.

You might have to make one pretty soon. And this isn't a rebuke to simply stay put where you're at, right?

Like, oh, Pastor Wade's saying they should have just stayed in Bethlehem. And so just, we just stay put.

That's faithfulness. That's not what I'm saying. You're to examine every situation. What is being faithful to God?

What's being faithful to God? Sometimes you're gonna have to move from your home.

I believe that. Sometimes you'll have to sojourn. Sometimes you'll have to change jobs.

Sometimes you'll have to leave people for various reasons. Sometimes you'll have to make significant decisions that will greatly impact the future of you or your family.

That happens. I don't disregard that. But we aren't just talking about, again, two possible righteous routes.

Elimelech isn't coming to the fork in the road and going, there's an arrow that says righteousness and righteousness.

That's not what's happening in this situation. That's not here. When we come to a fork in the road of our lives, we must, we absolutely must ask ourselves several things.

First, will one of these decisions demand that I use wicked means to get there?

Do I have to sin to take one of these routes? Does this route require sin?

Don't take it. Maybe the means are good, right?

Like, the way to get there is not bad, but the end is bad. Well, God cares about the means and the ends, right?

The end doesn't justify the mean. Will taking this job compromise my fidelity to God?

Will this relationship lead me after other gods? We just, we sometimes get people riding into our church.

You know, they don't have a church of their own, and our first thing is we say, go to your pastor, and I don't have one.

Where do you live? We'll help you find one right away. I'll even make the call. And we could have a three -way call. I'll help you find a church.

But they ask for advice. Someone just said, hey, you know, I know I shouldn't do this but I'm a

Christian and my faith is strong. I just found the most wonderful Mormon woman.

I'm dating her. I think we should get married. And it's like, these kinds of questions come.

And that's, you may have a different conviction there. I can show you from scripture why that is unwise.

I don't have time to go into that. But the thing is, will this relationship lead me after other gods?

Can this take me away from fidelity to God? Am I leaving because I don't want my sin confronted?

Right? Am I leaving because I don't want my sin confronted? In an age where there are probably just as many churches as Starbucks, could you leave your church because you were in sin and your church lovingly came to you, your pastor lovingly came to you, and you're just like,

I'm gonna bolt. Fork in the road. I'm not gonna stay. I'm gonna leave.

That wouldn't be right. That wouldn't be a good decision. Is this decision

I'm making just feeding my sin? You know, me and my wife were once counseling a woman years ago, many years ago, no one that you would know, of course.

Of course, I wouldn't talk about anyone you would know. And this woman said her marriage was going fine.

We made sure to do all our investigation. There was no abuse, no infidelity. Her husband was providing, he was loving her.

And she said, I don't know, I just pray and I feel like God is telling me to leave my husband.

I think I just, I need to go. I want something different. I just gotta be free from this.

And it's like, does God really come down and give us visions or dreams or words or spirit confirmations that would save for you to sin, to leave your husband when things are going well, that you don't have biblical reason for?

Am I making this decision just to feed my sin? Am I running from responsibility?

And here's the hard one to measure. Am I going down this path because I'm faithless?

I can't stand the trials. And so instead of seeking God in the trial, instead of seeking

God through the famine, instead of examining myself, I will simply seek with all my might to turn to my own wit and my own devices and I will rescue myself.

I'm the deliverer. I'll remove myself from it. Not only do

I make my plans, I establish my steps. Right, you see the pride in that? You've got to think about the context for an

Israelite at this time. They're not far from remembering that their great grandfathers were fed by manna, miraculously by God in the wilderness.

The rocks would split open and give them water. They're not far from remembering the fact that God's very presence led them in the wilderness by a pillar of cloud and fire.

They aren't far from the fall of Jericho and the cheers of their ancestors as they walked into the promised land flowing with milk and honey.

You can almost hear it. They're not far from this. They're several generations away.

But that also means that they aren't far from the commands that God gave to be holy and separate.

Look at Deuteronomy 12 in your print out or in your Bible. Deuteronomy 12, 29 through 30.

God says, when the Lord your God cuts off before you the nations which you are going into to dispossess and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, beware that you are not ensnared to follow them after they are destroyed before you and that you do not inquire after their gods saying, how do these nations serve their gods that I may also do likewise?

In the letters that Paul and Peter and John and James wrote, they quote similar things.

Be holy, be separate, be set apart. And for Elimelech's family to leave their inheritance, to leave

Bethlehem essentially said, we don't trust you God. We don't trust that you will provide for us.

We don't trust that you'll be our salvation. We don't want to spur everyone else onto faithfulness and repentance.

We don't want to do what is hard but right. We wanna do what is wrong and easy, right?

And as we will see, they also say, we don't regard your commandments to be set apart and distinct from the world.

So they went to Moab. They went to Moab, not the one here in Utah. This is again in the

Middle East, the Fertile Crescent. They went to Moab and this is baffling in and of itself.

I'm gonna tell you why. Going to Moab makes this act even more egregious.

First, Moab started as a people from what? Does anyone know this? Genesis 19.

Moab literally came in Genesis 19 from Lot and one of his daughters having incestual relationship.

That's how Moab began. Lot and his daughter had sexual relations. Who was born?

A young man named Moab. And Moab became a great nation and this is his progeny now.

Moab started that way and this is an affront to the people of God. That's offensive to them.

Second, when the Israelites were making their way to the promised land after fleeing Egypt, they had to pass through Moabite territory but there the

King Balak tried to curse them and stop them from becoming a great nation.

He went against them and they remember that. That was not too long ago. Maybe just 200 years prior or so, the

Moabites went against them. Third, Numbers 25 details that during that time of getting to the promised land, the daughters of Moab came up to Israel and started to seduce the

Israelites and Israelite, both men and women, started to come to Moab and offer sacrifices to their gods.

They bowed down to their gods, gods like Baal and Chemosh. And so if you remember what happened there in Numbers 25,

Moses ordered all the elders of Israel to slay those who had joined themselves to Baal.

And in that triumphant story, Phineas comes up and saves everyone with his mighty spear.

And it says that he stopped the plague that was occurring upon all of Israel. And that plague killed 24 ,000 people.

Phineas rose up against that, against the Moabites. Fourth, at the second reading of the law by Moses in Deuteronomy, God said in verses, chapter 23, verses three through four, no

Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the

Lord. None of their descendants, even to the 10th generation, shall ever enter the assembly of the

Lord because they did not meet you with food and water on the way when you came out of Egypt.

And because they hired against you Balaam, the son of Beor from Pthor of Mesopotamia to curse you.

And finally, the reason why Elimelech and his family should be so even offended at the idea of sojourning in Moab is because of this.

Here's the fifth reason. This is the most recent. In Judges chapter three, King Eglon of Moab, this is the super obese fat king

Eglon in Moab, and he was oppressing the people, killing the people of Israel.

Probably not himself. I imagine sending people out like some sort of Jabba the Hutt guy. And it required what?

A left -handed warrior, a left -handed swordsman, because they would check, if you remember, they would check the, what is it?

They would check the left side of all men, Israelite men coming in, because that's, if you're right -handed, you would draw your sword from the left, right?

And so they would check the men coming in, like when you see in a crime show, they frisk men for their guns, and they check the left side.

But this man, Ehud, Ehud was left -handed, and so his sword was on this side, and they checked him, and he was able to draw his sword, and he took his sword, and he went into Eglon, King Eglon's belly, and it said that he was so fat, the rolls of his fat came over the hilt of the sword, and his body just like absorbed this sword, and it killed him, killed him.

This left -handed Israelite giving redemption to all left -handed people.

They're not as weird as we think. Pastor Andrew, he's left -handed, he's been redeemed.

I'm just kidding. So Moab, if you get with me now,

Moab represents false gods, it represents demons, it represents all the things the

Lord detests. Chemosh was their supreme false deity.

Chemosh demanded human sacrifice, often children. They had ritualistic orgies for their religion to this demon, and God hates it all.

This is a nation that has on numerous occasions tried to destroy God's people, and so then to go seek aid in Moab is like lying in bed with the devil.

Do you get it now? This is a big deal. In the end, the journey to Moab did not turn out like Elimelech's family expected.

They may have sought to flee what is called ra 'ab in Hebrew, that is the divine agent of famine, but they walked into something far worse.

And that's often how it goes, doesn't it? Things may seem like they're going well at first when we sin, just like the prodigal son in Luke chapter 15, he requested his inheritance early and he was spending it, boy,

I bet for a time when the prodigal son had that money, he was living high on the hog.

Things were looking good before he squandered it. And that's our second lesson.

Remember what Elimelech did was sin, and this isn't just leaving to a place that has more food.

As the covenant people of God, they're deserting the Lord, okay? They're placing their faith elsewhere.

And so the lesson is, like the prodigal son, that when one sins, it will not give sustained prosperity and joy.

When one sins, it will not give sustained prosperity and joy.

You see, the man who is bored with his wife and family and finds his life too ordinary and seeks an adulterous pursuit with his female coworker, and he finds it as exciting and worthwhile, soon this man will find out what it's like to lose everything that matters to him, everything.

Feels good for a moment, enjoying a few drinks, calling it a blessing of God is fine, according to the

Bible, that's actually true, until you molest that blessing of God and you drink in excess and become a drunkard.

And then the Bible says that you will make yourself poor in pursuit of your drink. The Bible says you will become lazy, you will not work, you will squander money, and you will alienate yourself from your family and friends.

Sin has consequences, always. But it also always promises pleasure and delight and life, come get it, come take this route.

You ever read Pilgrim's Progress? You see that, you see these towns, these carnival towns.

Family fun carnival church, right in the middle of it, right, that sort of thing. These pursuits of wickedness that lure you and try to take you away, always promises pleasure and delight, but sin brings hardship, it brings calamity, it brings often death.

Paul says as such, for the wages of sin is death. No one makes decisions on the road of this life thinking things will be permanent either, by the way.

These people who sin this way, when we sin even, we think,

I can always go back, I can always change it, I can undo this, if I do this now,

I can change it later. And that can be the case sometimes, but it's often a delusion.

It's a delusion we tell ourselves, it's a delusion the unbeliever tells themselves as they go off and take these roads of sin.

We do the right thing right now. We do the right thing right now on the road of this life, okay, because it's not always possible to reverse the bad thing later, is it?

Sometimes we have to live with the ramification of our sins. I'll have to tell you sometime, there's this wonderful brother that I went to seminary with at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, and he had murdered a man when he was 19 and was in prison for a couple of decades.

And somehow they lost the evidence at the convenience store where he murdered the clerk.

And even though he came to the judge 20 years later, he didn't appeal it, he said,

I murdered him, I murdered him. They threw the whole thing out, he got free, he's not been in jail ever since, he has a family now, he serves the

Lord and he's dedicated his life to prison ministry, and he sat with me every class.

And he told me that story and first I was like, no, I'm just kidding, I didn't do that. But I was like, that's incredible.

And he said, I should still be there, I should. I murdered a man, I absolutely did.

And he may be out of prison, but he said, I'll have to live with that for the rest of my life. And that man,

I tell you what, that man was relying upon grace alone. Talk about relying upon grace alone for salvation.

Sin has ramifications, sin has consequences. Can't always reverse the bad thing later and so permanence struck this family.

A permanent thing happened to this family, verse three, look, then Elimelech, Naomi's husband died.

She was left with her two sons. This is very difficult. Not only are they all already facing hardship,

Elimelech has died, the main provider. According to Amos chapter seven, it is considered a curse for an

Israelite to die and be buried in a foreign nation on foreign soil. And it says here that she was left with her two sons.

That word left in the Hebrew, sear, carries with it connotations of survived or escaped, survived the judgment of God.

And so here, Naomi is with her two sons. In that day, a widow had to rely upon her adult sons.

It was the only way. Otherwise, being a widow in the Old Testament period was often a death sentence or a prostitution sentence or a begging sentence.

And when they beg for alms, you better believe that men would come and take advantage of them.

It was a death sentence. It was horrible. Well, what the text doesn't say, but was probably on their minds was what do we do now?

This is another crossroads. The path has been disrupted. Where do they go from here?

And you know what's not said is they could repent right now. They could turn back. They could go to Israel.

They could go home. They could, they could go to their own land. They could go to their own God, or they could stay in Moab in self -inflicted exile.

And we see here their decision was to stay. Weighing the two options before them,

Naomi and her sons considered that they would fare much better in Moab than back in Judah.

As one commentator stated, they felt more at home in the land of compromise than in the land of promise.

Okay. Okay. As a result of taking the wrong way, verse four says this, they took for themselves

Moabite women as wives. The name of the one was Orpah, and the name of the other was

Ruth. And they lived there about 10 years. Malon and Kilion took wives from among the

Moabite women. This Hebrew word for took was used not in the traditional marriage sense or courting sense.

This word took in Hebrew is often the kind of wife kidnapping or wife abduction that can take place in the

Middle East. You take, you forcibly take a wife away. There are negative connotations with this word in Hebrew.

Eventually this word would not only be used for wife abduction. It would be used also for an illegitimate marriage to a foreign woman.

Okay. And this may sound like no big deal to you. Most of us have spouses from different states, states that are far away than Israel was from Moab.

Most of us have spouses that are even maybe from different countries or different ethnicities.

Excuse me. What's the problem? Here's the problem. Deuteronomy chapter seven verses three through six.

Look at that. Deuteronomy seven. Furthermore, this is God's command to the covenant people of Israel.

Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with neighboring nations. You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons.

For they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods. Then, you notice by the way, they don't even mention they will turn your daughters away from following me.

That was a given. If your daughter married a foreign man, she's for sure worshiping a different God.

So God just says, by the way, right here, if your sons take different foreign women, they will go after other gods.

The other one's definitely a given. And it says, then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will destroy you.

But thus you shall do to them. You shall tear down their altars, smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their

Asherim poles, and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a holy people to the

Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession out of all of the peoples who are on the face of the earth.

So you've got to think. This isn't just about geography or nationality at this time.

It was about faithfulness to God and his precepts.

In Christ though, right, we know now in Christ, the people of God come from what?

Every tongue, tribe, people, and nation. There's no longer Jew, nor Greek, nor Barbarian or Scythian.

We are all one in Christ. That's the amazing thing about Christ. Christ unites us.

That's why, by the way, it's more important that we are in Christ before we're

American. We're in Christ before we're anything. That's controversial today, by the way.

People want to say, no, before we're in Christ together, we're American first.

That's happening today. We're in Christ first. The kingdom of God has spread from the river to the sea and even to the ends of the earth.

There is not one square millimeter that doesn't belong to King Jesus now, but this was a time when they were practicing.

They were rehearsing for the day when the Messiah would come. Just like how we practice now.

Right now, we're waiting for the final day when all will become new. We worship God here, but one day we will worship

God in his presence. They practiced, the Christ came. Christ left, we practice in a new way now, waiting for the fullness of everything to come when all will be made new.

However, for Naomi and her sons, they chose to go against God, and that's how sin can become.

It gets easier to do the wrong things, church. It gets easier to do the wrong things once you've gotten started.

Things like pride. Pride can keep us from returning. We hate the thought that we might have to explain to other people why things didn't work out.

Don't we hate that? Or what we know really led us into hardship.

We know it and we won't tell anyone. We're pride. Even when we get humbled by God, we don't wanna walk in humility.

Humbled, but not humble. We miss the purpose of that humbling.

And so many people continue to live miserable lives because of this desire not to return, not to go back to what they know is right.

And so the tricky thing is sin can sometimes feel like it's working out. And here we see that for a time, things can run smoothly.

Sometimes things can run smoothly when we sin. Malon and Kilion have found wives.

There is hope that the name of Elimelech will carry on. His progeny will come.

They even lived in Moab for 10 years like this. That's not temporary sojourning.

They've really built lives there, right? Orpah, we look at these two women.

Orpah means neck, by the way. And so some have speculated if that's really her name because some have said maybe the author gave her the name neck,

Orpah, as if when Naomi had to leave, she turned her neck on her.

We'll see that next week, okay? Ruth's name is a little trickier. Some have stated that it means friend or companion.

What we think it's most likely to mean is Ruth means refreshing or satiating.

We don't really know much about these two women from the text other than that they're Moabite women.

But there's one detail here that can be easily missed. Did you notice that in 10 years, neither of the women have born a single child?

Not one. Not one child was born to Malon and Killian, Orpah and Ruth.

What they thought would carry on their father's name only brought more pain.

Famine, death, oh, marriage and some sense of stability, but no children.

And in that day, especially, a marriage was considered blessed by how many children were brought in this world by God.

And certainly children are a blessing. And so you have barrenness now. No children.

It doesn't stop there, however, it only gets worse. Not only do these women get no children,

Naomi loses hers. And we'll end on this verse, verse five. Then both

Malon and Killian also died and the woman was bereft of her two children and her husband.

And we don't just scoff at this. We don't scoff at someone in their tragedy.

And that's what this is. No matter how you cut it, this is a tragedy.

No matter what they did, this is one of the most difficult things that could happen to a family.

All of their husbands are dead. All three are dead. You have three widows.

Three widows now, no children, not just famine, but death.

What road can Naomi take now? Where do you go from here? You have this aging woman in an era that doesn't typically care well for widows and she has no family in this foreign nation.

No one will cover what ends up happening to Naomi next week.

So for now, I'll end the sermon on a few points, okay? From this moment in the book of Ruth, as we finish it, we will see that all it takes to turn things around is a faithful remnant, just one to repent.

And this is only possible by grace. We'll see a picture of this next week. It's got to be

God. During the time of judges, God was often giving blessing and curses, priming his people for the eternal reality ahead.

On the final day, it will either be a day of extraordinary eternal blessing or a day of horrific eternal curse.

For us though, we don't experience the blessings and cursings yo -yo effect that they had in the

Old Testament. Christ became the curse for us. Our punishment for all our sin and all our wrong choices and wicked roads that we followed was put on Jesus, amen?

They were put on Jesus. Now this doesn't mean that there aren't spiritual elements to these things.

This doesn't mean that sometimes we don't experience what's called the loving chastisement of God.

You read that in Hebrews chapter 12 especially. But there can be spiritual famine, spiritual barrenness.

Our wrong decisions as Christians can lead us to these things. Paul says, don't grieve the

Holy Spirit. Don't partake of the deeds of the flesh. James says, if you feel far from God, it's probably you.

It's not God, it's probably you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. You know, in Pilgrim's Progress, as I said, there are so many paths leading off from the

Christian road to the celestial city. And what Christian had to figure out was now in Christ, there is always a way out.

By the way, Pilgrim's Progress, written in the 1600s by John Bunyan, is

I think supposedly the second most read book after the Bible.

If you have yet to read a modern version of Pilgrim's Progress, you should read it as a family.

It's wonderful. I have a particular one that I love. I can send you the link from Amazon, 10 bucks or something like that.

You would love reading Pilgrim's Progress. It's amazing. But as I said, what

Christian found out in that book was that there was always a way out, no matter where he went, no matter where he veered off to, there was always a way out because he was in Christ.

There always was. You can always turn back to the road.

You don't have to stay where you're at. Elimelech had a choice. Naomi had a choice after he died.

Malon and Kilion could have turned back. And the apostle reminds the

Corinthian church, there's always a way out. In fact, in 1 Corinthians 10,

Paul brings up the errors of the Israelites from centuries prior. And he says, let's not act immorally as some of them did.

But then look at this. 1 Corinthians 10 verses 11 through 14 says, now these things happened to them as an example, and they were written for our instruction upon whom the ends of the ages have come.

Therefore, here it is, let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall.

Let the person who's a Christian now and thinks, sin doesn't have a hold on me, right?

We sing that. Don't stand too proudly because you're gonna fall,

Paul says. No temptation has overtaken you, but such as is common to man.

What Paul says here is, now that you're a Christian, there's not these new sets of temptations that are harder for you.

These temptations have been there since the fall of man. There's nothing new. And he says, but God is faithful who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able.

But with the temptation will provide a way of escape also so that you will be able to endure it.

Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. This means as a follower of Christ, we're wrapping up here, as a follower of Christ indwelt by the

Holy Spirit, there will never be a situation when you must sin. You will never be in a situation as a

Christian now where there's a fork in the road, righteousness, unrighteousness, and you go,

I've got to, I've got to take this. You will never be in that situation now. No temptation will be so strong to overcome you.

God always, always has a way of escape for you. And so since you can flee everything,

Paul says, therefore flee idolatry. Since you can flee when you're tempted, that means then, get this, you must actively choose to sin if you sin.

As a pastor in my counseling, I often hear people, I stumbled into it again.

I fell into the pit of sin. No, you jumped, son. You jumped into the pit.

You didn't trip, you ran for it. I often tell guys that when they're dumbing down stuff, when

I'm trying to hold them accountable, I say, please don't say it like that anymore. Say what you really did.

If we change definitions like the world does, we'll never really turn from them. Don't change definitions.

God always has a way of escape for you. You don't have to choose to sin. And thank

God for his grace, though, when we do. Thank God that his grace transcends our rebellion.

Or you and I would be just like Elimelech and Malon and Kilion and death would be the end for us, but it's not.

It doesn't matter what you've done. You can change it now, by the way. It doesn't matter what you did from this moment all the way to your past.

It doesn't matter what you've done now. You can change what you're doing right now as a

Christian, whether it be pride or porn, drinking or disobedience, neglecting

God or neglecting your family, squandering your money or squandering your time, bitterness or backbiting, gossip or greed, anger or envy, whatever sin that you have as a pet today, you can throw it away.

That's what this says. That's what this says. You can abandon it by the power of God and only the power of God.

You can take the road home. You can go back home today, back to God.

Don't be deceived. The grass isn't always greener. In fact, the

Bible says over and over again, what the green grass, we look on the hills in the next couple of weeks, that green grass on these mountains will fade.

It'll wither, it'll turn brown. The Bible says, if you have the bread of heaven, you don't need to compromise for the bread of the world.

Pastor Wade, are you saying that faithfulness to God is worth dying for? Absolutely, because the

Christian never dies. I've seen it time and time again. The road of the world looks easier.

It's more appealing. It's more pleasurable, but don't do it. And you can't do two roads at one time, by the way.

If you're on Redwood, you can't be on State Street, can you? You can only be on one.

You can't take two roads at once. They each lead to different destinations, so stay the course.

And lastly, you might ask, how can God's loving hand be in Ruth chapter one?

How is this God's love? Just wait, you'll see. You'll see.

You might even ask, how can God's loving hand be in my situation that I'm going through right now?

We just learned two weeks ago how suffering for the believer conforms us into the image of Christ, how none of it is purposeless, how it always produces good for the believer now.

And Jesus received worse. I'm gonna tell you, Jesus received worse than what this family experienced.

He received worse than what they went through. Jesus received worse than what you've ever gone through.

And so grace is what keeps us down this path. It was grace that started us on this path.

It will be grace that takes us home. Every tear that you've shed for whatever loss

God may have given to you or let you have, he has shed equal tears for you.

Tears that were culminated at the cross. The good news is like the prodigal son, like what

Naomi and Ruth will experience is when you come home and run into the father's arms, he gives you a ring, his own ring, and puts it on your finger.

The father gives you what is his. The father, when you come home, he gives you a new robe, and that's a robe of righteousness that no one can snatch away, that covers your sins and your mud.

He gives you a robe of righteousness you didn't deserve. Now, when you run home to the father, you get an inheritance.

No one can take it away. No one can snatch you out of his hands. And here's the biggest thing in the book of Ruth.

In the Hebrew, it's called the goel, the redeemer. We all get a redeemer.

And we'll see that in the coming weeks. This book is gonna be more about Christ than you will ever think, all right?

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for today. Thank you,

Lord, for this word. God, thank you for this book, what you're gonna teach us through it,

Lord, to us. God, I pray, pray,

Lord, that we wouldn't just be emotionally driven. I pray, Lord, that you, by your spirit, would transform us.

Lord, I pray today that you would help us to walk the right road.

Help us to not do what's easy, but sinful. Help us to do what can often be hard, but is right.

Because we know you'll be with us. We know you won't leave us. But God, some of us have blinded ourselves to that, we've deluded ourselves to that.

We've sought our own devices. We've thought that we can run from these things, but we need to run to you,

Lord. So help us to do that today. Help us to forsake our sin. Help us to come after you,

Lord. Help us, God, to see your goodness through all of this, Lord.

And God, I pray, too, that you would comfort your people. There are people in this body,

Lord, who have faced loss. There are people here who have lost their fathers. There are people here who have lost their brothers or sons or daughters.

There are women here who have been barren or experienced barrenness,

Lord. And I didn't preach this sermon, Lord, to make light of that.

So God, you're the God of all comfort. Bring that to us now. Help us to see these truths in light of eternal life.

We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Well, let's come to the table, church.

This is something we do every Sunday at Apology at Church, and it never gets old.

It doesn't become a ritual for us. It's not just a religious rite. It's something that is to remind you of Jesus Christ.

This extension is strange, sorry. But it's nice,

I can get closer to you guys, look. There we go. This table is for the believer.

It's nice to be out of that light, too. If you are not a believer today, this table isn't open to you.