Read Time: 10 minutesRuth 1–2
After the long darkness of Judges — no king in Israel, every man right in his own eyes — the scene opens in the days when the judges ruled, and the contrast could not be sharper. Where Judges ended in dismembered bodies and stolen brides, Ruth begins with a quiet story of grief and loyalty that will end at a threshing floor and a wedding, and trace the line to David. The book is the gospel hidden in the wreckage of the Judges: while every man did right in his own eyes, Yahweh was quietly weaving the line of the King.
The names carry the story, and they are chosen to preach. Elimelech — my God is King — leaves Bethlehem (house of bread) in a famine and goes to sojourn in Moab, the man whose name confesses the kingship of God abandoning the house of bread for a foreign field, and there he and his sons die. His two sons are Mahlon (sickly) and Chilion (wasting, pining away) — the names are the line’s own death-sentence, sickness and wasting, a family dying out in exile among the gods of Moab. Naomi — pleasant — returns emptied, and asks to be called Mara, bitter: I went out full, and Yahweh hath brought me home again empty. She is more than a grieving widow; she is Israel in miniature — driven from the land, emptied among the nations, embittered, and now turning home at the barley harvest to be filled again through a Gentile bride and a redeemer. The famine that drove them out has ended — Yahweh had visited his people in giving them bread — and Naomi turns back to the house of bread now that there is bread in it again. The book turns, in truth, on turning: the Hebrew shub — to turn, to return — tolls through the chapter as Naomi returns, Orpah turns back, and Ruth turns to Yahweh, so that the book has long been called the book of the returning.
The hinge of the book is Ruth the Moabitess and her vow. At the parting of the ways stand the two daughters-in-law, the two responses to the call: Orpah — whose name is the back of the neck, she who turns her neck — kisses Naomi and turns back to her people and her gods; Ruth — friendship, companionship — cleaves. The verb is covenant-language, the same cleaving a man owes his wife and Israel owes Yahweh. And her words are the convert’s confession in its purest form: whither thou goest, I will go… thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God where thou diest, will I die. A daughter of Moab — the nation barred from the congregation to the tenth generation, born of Lot’s incest, Israel’s old enemy — renounces her gods and her dead-end people and binds herself to Yahweh by free covenant love. This is the Gentile turning from idols to the living God, the firstfruits of the nations grafted in, the living answer to the Servant who is a light to the Gentiles (Isa 42). Orpah turns back to the idols Isaiah mocks; Ruth comes under the wings of the God of Israel. The barred-out Moabitess becomes the great-grandmother of David and stands in the genealogy of Christ himself (Matt 1:5).
Chapter 2 brings her to the field of Boaz — the name means in him is strength — a mighty man of wealth, of the family of Elimelech. He is the go’el, the kinsman-redeemer, and the office is the key to reading him as a type of Christ. The go’el was the near kinsman on whom three duties fell: to buy back the lost inheritance of an impoverished relative (Lev 25:25), to redeem the kinsman himself out of bondage (Lev 25:48), and to raise up seed to a brother dead without an heir (the levirate duty, Deut 25:5). All three converge in Christ — he buys back the forfeited inheritance, redeems his people out of the bondage of sin and death, and raises up seed to the dead. Ruth, poor and a stranger, gleans in Boaz’s field by what looks like chance — her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz — but the providence behind the hap is the whole point: the foreign widow is steered to the one man who can redeem her. Boaz shields her, bids her glean only in his field and drink of his vessels, feeds her at his table, and Ruth marvels: Why have I found grace in thine eyes, seeing I am a stranger? — the gospel in one sentence, grace shown to the stranger by the wealthy kinsman. And his blessing over her names the figure that the whole book turns on: a full reward be given thee of Yahweh God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust. The word is kanaph — wing, and also the skirt of a garment — the same word Yahweh uses of spreading his skirt over Israel to take her as his bride (Ezek 16:8), and the same word Ruth will turn back on Boaz at the threshing floor: spread thy skirt over thine handmaid, for thou art a near kinsman. The wing under which the convert takes refuge becomes the marriage-skirt of the redeemer; the redemption itself waits for chapters 3 and 4.
Out of the famine and the kingless dark, Yahweh quietly weaves the line of the King. The barred-out Moabitess cleaves to the God of Israel and finds grace in the field of the kinsman-redeemer — the Gentile bride gathered under the wing of the one whose right it is to redeem.
Isaiah 44
The chapter pours out the promise that the courtroom of 41 and the Servant Song of 42 were building toward: the Spirit on the seed. Fear not, O Jacob my servant… I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring. The water poured into the desert of chapter 41 is now named outright as the Spirit — the latter-day outpouring on the offspring of Jacob, the dry ground of the nation made to spring up as willows by the water courses. And the response of the renewed seed is the writing of the Name on the hand: one shall say, I am Yahweh’s… and subscribe with his hand unto Yahweh — the very opposite of the idol that must be nailed lest it fall.
Then the second great self-declaration: Thus saith Yahweh the King of Israel, and his redeemer Yahweh of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God. The title the first and the last is the one the risen Christ takes for himself in the Apocalypse (Rev 1:17, 22:13) — Yahweh’s own name worn by the Son who manifests him. And again the challenge to the idols to declare the future, and the witnesses called: ye are even my witnesses. Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any.
The centre of the chapter is the most devastating satire on idolatry in all Scripture, and it answers Micah’s graven image directly. Isaiah follows the idol from the forest: a man plants an ash, the rain feeds it, he cuts it down, and with one half he kindles a fire, warmeth himself, roasts his meat, and is satisfied — and of the residue thereof he maketh a god, his graven image: he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god. The same log that boiled his dinner becomes his deity, and he knoweth not, neither considereth… none saith, Is there not a lie in my right hand? The idolater feeds on ashes; a deceived heart has turned him aside. There is no sharper exposure of the folly Judges showed Israel practising in earnest.
And against the worthless thing, the word of redemption: Remember these, O Jacob… I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins: return unto me; for I have redeemed thee. The same free pardon of chapter 43, now in the figure of the cloud burned off by the sun — the sin that hid the face of Yahweh dissolved as morning mist. The heavens are called to sing, for Yahweh hath redeemed Jacob. And the chapter ends naming the instrument: Yahweh is the One that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure — Cyrus called by name, a century and a half before his birth, to send Judah home and lay the temple’s foundation. The God who declares the end from the beginning names the deliverer before the deliverer exists, sealing the whole argument of these chapters: only Yahweh foretells, only Yahweh saves.
The Spirit poured on the dry seed, the Name written on the hand — against the man who warms himself at half a log and worships the rest. Yahweh is the first and the last; there is no God beside him; he blots out the sin as a cloud and names the deliverer before he is born.
Jude
Jude meant to write of the common salvation but was compelled instead to write a battle-letter: earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. The faith is a deposit, delivered once, to be guarded — and the reason for the urgency is that certain men crept in unawares, ungodly men turning the grace of God into lasciviousness and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ. The same denial of the Son that John fought, now treated as a present infiltration that must be resisted.
Jude proves the certainty of judgment by three examples stacked from history — and the triad is deliberate, for Jude builds by threes throughout (three judgments, three apostate-types, a threefold doom). The three are: the people Yahweh saved out of Egypt and afterward destroyed for unbelief; the angels — the messengers — that kept not their first estate; and Sodom and Gomorrah, set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. One lesson binds them: privilege is no protection when faith is abandoned. Redeemed out of Egypt and still destroyed in the wilderness — the very warning Paul presses from the same history (all our fathers… drank of that spiritual Rock… but with many of them God was not well pleased, 1 Cor 10). The apostates are then painted in emblems drawn from the natural creation, each a thing that betrays its own purpose: clouds without water, carried about of winds — promising rain to the parched and giving none; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots — the autumn tree that should be heavy with harvest, barren and uprooted; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars — the planets that keep no fixed course, for whom the blackness of darkness is reserved for ever. Cloud, tree, sea, and star: the four realms of creation each yielding a figure of those who wear the form of the people of God and have none of the substance — the dry cloud over Isaiah’s thirsty land, the fruitless tree of the kingdom, the troubled sea of the nations, the star fallen from its place.
Their pattern is named in three men, the three archetypal rebels of the Pentateuch: the way of Cain (worship offered on man’s own terms, that hates the righteous brother — the same Cain we met in 1 John 3), the error of Balaam (prophecy prostituted for reward, the prophet who sold his gift), and the gainsaying of Korah (revolt against Yahweh’s appointed priesthood, the rejection of authority that ended with the earth swallowing the rebels alive). And Enoch, the seventh from Adam, is brought as witness — the seventh from Adam, the number of covenant completion, the man who walked with God and was not, for God took him, the one taken without death set to prophesy the judgment of the ungodly. His oracle reaches across the whole canon to the day of Yahweh: Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all. The Lord coming with his myriads of holy ones is the multitudinous Christ — the King not alone but at the head of his glorified body, the saints made one with him, the same gathered host of the day of trouble that Joel, Zechariah, and the Apocalypse all see descending. Enoch, before the flood, already saw the coming Peter sets at the end of all things: the same day of Yahweh, by fire, when the Judge comes surrounded by the redeemed who are his own body.
Against the apostates Jude sets the saints’ own work: building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. The hope is held forward — looking for the mercy… unto eternal life, the life bestowed at his appearing, not a settled present possession. And the saints are to have compassion on the wavering, pulling some out of the fire, hating even the garment spotted by the flesh — mercy and vigilance together. The letter ends in the great doxology that is the answer to every fear of falling away: Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy — the keeping is his, the presenting is his, the glory is his.
Contend for the faith once delivered; privilege did not save Egypt’s redeemed, the angels, or Sodom from judgment. Build yourselves up, pray in the Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy unto eternal life — and trust the One who is able to keep you from falling and present you faultless.
Synthesis and Exhortation
The week that began with Samson grinding blind in a Philistine prison and ran through the dismembered concubine and the near-extinction of Benjamin now ends in light: a Moabite widow gleaning in the field of a kinsman-redeemer, the Spirit poured on the dry seed, and the Lord coming with ten thousand of his saints. The arc is from the kingless dark to the coming King, and Ruth is the hinge — in the days when the judges ruled, yet here is no anarchy but loyalty, grace, redemption, the quiet weaving of David’s line out of grief and a stranger’s faith.
The thread that ties the three is the gathering of a redeemed people, Gentile and Jew, by a redeemer who covers them. Ruth the barred-out Moabitess comes under the wing of Boaz and stands in the line of Christ — the firstfruits of the Servant’s light to the Gentiles. Isaiah pours the Spirit on the seed and names Yahweh the first and the last, the redeemer who blots out sin as a cloud and names the deliverer Cyrus before his birth. And Jude sees the end of it: the Lord coming with ten thousands of his saints, the multitudinous body gathered and glorified, the keeping and the presenting all of grace. The kinsman-redeemer of Ruth, the redeemer-King of Isaiah, and the Lord who keeps his saints from falling in Jude are all united — the Boaz who spreads his wing, the Yahweh who is first and last, the Christ who presents his bride faultless.
And the same two enemies haunt the whole week to its close: the idol and the apostasy. Isaiah’s satire on the man who worships half a log answers Micah’s graven image and the nations’ nailed-down gods; Jude’s clouds without water and wandering stars answer the false brethren John warned of. Against both, the saints are given the same defence — keep yourselves from idols, John said; keep yourselves in the love of God, says Jude; and over both stands the redeemer who blots out the sin for his own sake and is able to keep his people from falling.
Out of the famine, the bread; out of the kingless dark, the King; out of the field of gleaning, the redeemer’s wing. Contend for the faith, keep yourselves in the love of God, and look for the mercy — for the same redeemer who gathered a Moabite stranger into the line of Christ is able to keep you from falling and present you faultless before his glory with exceeding joy.