The farther you read in the book of Judges, the worse it gets. Gideon's son murders all of his brothers in a deadly power grab. Jephthah makes a thoughtless vow that costs his precious daughter's life. Samson, empowered by God to do great things, keeps fooling around with Philistine girlfriends. A feud between the tribes ends up causing more than 40,000 deaths. As I said earlier, this is probably the most depressing book in the Bible.
Yet one of the world's most heartwarming stories—the book of Ruth—comes out of this very same era. It begins, in fact, with these words: “In the days when the judges ruled….” It is as if the camera zooms in past all the craziness and bloodshed to focus tightly on one simple family. A man named Elimelek takes his wife, Naomi, and their two young sons to the neighboring country of Moab to escape a famine. Elimelek dies early, but the boys grow up and marry local girls. Tragically, both sons come to early deaths, too—we don't know how. Overcome with bereavement, Naomi decides to go back home to Bethlehem in Israel.
Here is where the story starts to brighten up. Both daughters-in-law love Naomi enough to want to pull up stakes, leave their home in Moab, and go with her. One, named Orpah, lets herself be talked into staying home with her relatives in Moab. But the other daughter-in-law, Ruth, clings tightly to Naomi, determined to follow her to a strange land and keep her company.
The first weeks and months are tough for the two women; Ruth has to scavenge for food to keep them alive. They go on honoring the Lord regardless. Ruth does her tedious work—gleaning leftovers in the grain fields—without complaining. Eventually, a wealthy Prince Charming named Boaz notices her. Love blossoms, and she becomes his wife. They have a little son—Naomi finally becomes a doting grandmother!—and the son grows up to have a grandson, who grows up to have a great-grandson who turns out to be Israel's greatest king.
All of this took place “in the days when the judges ruled,” no less.
God Always Keeps a Remnant
I love the fact that no matter how ungodly the world becomes, some people still maintain their devotion to God and one another. No matter how much betrayal and debauchery we see on every side, some people still believe in duty, love, and honor. God is faithful to bless those whose hearts are attuned to him. They may not be in the majority; in fact, they usually are not. But they don't mind; they keep on doing the right thing.
Many times today, those who love the Lord with all their heart and are sincere about following him feel bereft and alone. They look around at the corruption both outside and, unfortunately, inside the church, and they say, “How can people act that way? Don't they know any better?” The enemy often tries to get us to give up and compromise ourselves.
In such a moment, we need to hear God's voice reminding us of what he told Elijah at a low point of discouragement: there were still 7,000 others who had not bowed the knee to the idol of Baal. Elijah was not the only one after all.
Jesus said, “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13-14). God is looking for people in every age who choose his small gate and narrow road. They want to please him regardless of how opposite the cultural tide is running. They will be his holy remnant.
On these God will pour out his abundance in surprising measure.
Just Ordinary People
Naomi and her family were nothing special in the Israelite society. The Bible says nothing about them being descended from any famous personalities. They held no public office. They didn't appear to own a successful business. When Naomi and Ruth arrived back in Bethlehem, nobody took them under wing or set them up in a comfortable lifestyle. In other words, they didn't have social connections to leverage anything.
Yet the Holy Spirit decided to put their story in the Bible. Otherwise, we would never have known about them. I dare say no archaeologist will ever discover an ancient monument in the Holy Land with their names etched on the side. But greatness and renown in God's eyes is a different matter.
What the world calls great is often an abomination to God. And what the world laughs at—devotion, consecration, faith—is what God calls great. Greatness should not be measured by whether you get your name in The New York Times. What heaven is registering has little to do with what happens in the stock market, on the Broadway stage, or at the next Olympic Games. Heaven is more interested in those who live for God every single day, doing the right thing in ordinary circumstances. Those who show gentleness, kindness, and trust. People like Naomi. People like Ruth.
The everyday decisions of life—how we act on the job, how we pay our bills on time, how we give to God's work, how we treat our children, how we care for our relatives, how we respond to adversity—these are the things God is watching.
The longer we walk with God, the more we realize that greatness lies in the small aspects of life. It is perfectly all right for us to be ordinary and unacclaimed in this world. God knows what is truly going on, and he values the common person of integrity.
I stood recently at the graveside of a man named Carlo Boekstaaf. For a quarter century he was a faithful associate pastor at our church. Born in Suriname on the coast of South America during the colonial period, he got his basic schooling in the Netherlands and then immigrated to America as a young man. He worked in his family's printing business at first. One night while watching a Christian television program, he gave his heart to Christ.
Carlo began serving in our church's prayer ministry, led home Bible studies, and in time headed up our lay training department. Eventually it became clear that God wanted him in full-time work as a pastor.
Carlo never got to attend seminary, he never wrote a book, and he wasn't featured as a speaker at big conventions. Yet he was possibly the kindest, godliest man I've ever known. He was a man of prayer and integrity, and he had a caring spirit to take time with people. In his own unassuming way, he greatly influenced our congregation. We feel his absence deeply.
Ordinary people can make an extraordinary mark as they yield themselves to the purposes of God. They don't need to try to pump themselves up. They simply live and serve with honor and diligence, letting God accomplish what he called them to be, whether small or great.
God Comes Through
for Those Who Trust Him
While it takes some time in the book of Ruth before things start to break positively (almost halfway through the chapters), God was not about to neglect these people. He blesses their faith and trust. Ruth and Naomi are examples of “those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised” (Heb. 6:12). Although they trusted God, they didn't get a payoff in the first five minutes. They had to endure the hard times with patience.
Take Naomi, for example. To lose your husband and your two sons prematurely is almost more than any woman should have to bear. She ended up far away from home in Moab without a blood relative in sight. But God gave her a daughter-in-law who was simply wonderful. By the end of the story, Naomi has a stable life on home turf again. And she has a grandson who is the talk of the town.
The women said to Naomi: “Praise be to the LORD, who this day has not left you without a family guardian. May he become famous throughout Israel! He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.” Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him. The women living there said, “Naomi has a son!” (Ruth 4:14–16).
Can't you just imagine the big smile on Naomi's face? God rewarded her faithfulness and confidence in him.
Or look at Boaz, the man who married Ruth. He had built a prosperous farm, with multiple employees. His business interests were doing fine. He was well regarded in the town gate, which was the commercial hub of that economy. He was an honorable man who treated people with kindness. Still, he was alone in life. From the Scripture text we get the hint that he was no longer a young man. The years were passing by.
And then, out of nowhere comes the right woman for him. He apparently didn't expect romance to strike. Yet God blessed him with a beautiful, godly wife. In time, he became the father of a son as well—which, for a Jewish man, was one of life's most wanted blessings. God came through for Boaz in the end.
Finally, look at the foreign girl, Ruth. She was an early widow, which no doubt broke her heart. She followed her mother-in-law to a strange country, where she began with nothing. Everybody looked at her strangely. She had to go out into a farmer's field and pick up scraps. She was viewed as nothing but a poor immigrant.
If you had seen her trudging slowly along the road at the end of a hot, exhausting day in the field, you might have said, like observers sometimes say today, “Where's the blessing of God? Obviously, something's wrong here. She must not have very much faith….” But you would have been so wrong in your judgment.
I know what it is like for immigrants to try to get a toehold in a new place, because I see it all the time in our church in New York City. I watch them struggle to get their green cards so they can work legally. They come from the islands of the Caribbean, from Central America, from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. One such newcomer is Kumiko Nakamura, who came alone in 1998 from her home in Tokyo, Japan, to attend fashion school. The only trouble was, her English was not strong enough to enter the program, so she was forced to spend a year at a small community college instead, taking ESL (English as a Second Language) and other liberal arts courses.
There Kumiko met a woman named Karen, who befriended her. Karen and her husband loved the music of our choir, so they brought this petite, young Japanese acquaintance to a Sunday afternoon service. “I was really surprised when I entered the building,” Kumiko says now in her quiet voice. “Such a big place! It was quite a contrast to the Buddhist temple I had always gone to with my family back home.”
Kumiko was curious enough to come back by herself. She felt something had always been lacking in her life, although she didn't know what to call it. Maybe this church could help solve the mystery for her.
She eventually made it through fashion school, graduating in 2004. “But then, I couldn't find a job,” she tells. “No one needed me. I lived with a roommate in a small apartment, and I filled in with restaurant work as a hostess three nights a week, just to pay the bills. I was poor. This went on for months and months.”
Discouraged, Kumiko began coming to church more regularly, since she had a lot of time on her hands. Karen gave her a Bible, and she read it—first the New Testament, then the Old Testament, and then back to the New again. She enrolled in one of our Bible classes to try to understand more.
One morning in early 2005, something strange happened. As Kumiko tells it, “I woke up at home—and it seemed there was someone in my bed, holding me closely. That whole side of the bed was warm. It was very real; it was not a dream.
“I opened my eyes to look around—and no one was there. But I knew I was being loved and cared for. I felt like I was in the arms of someone.”
Kumiko was mystified by this experience and told a few friends about it. They said, “You're going crazy. You're just depressed because you can't find a job. Now you're having delusions.”
She decided to clam up about the experience. But the more she puzzled over the event, the more she came to think that Jesus had come to visit her, showing how much he loved her. “It was a big thing for me,” Kumiko says today, as tears fill her eyes. “I had never received that kind of love.”
Kumiko registered at the church to be baptized on a Wednesday night, April 6, 2005. Ever the careful planner, she laid out her necessary change of clothes the day before. She was excited to take this public step.
But on Tuesday morning, the phone rang. A clothing design company to which she had sent her résumé many months before was now calling. “We're looking for an assistant here,” the voice said. “Would you like to come for an interview tomorrow?”
“Oh, yes!” she replied as her heart leaped. “But I have an appointment at 6 p.m. It's very important.”
“That's fine; we won't take long. Just come here at two o'clock.”
She showed up for the interview. Things went well. At the end, the personnel director said, “Okay, would you like to try this job for a couple of hours?”
“When?” Kumiko asked.
“Right now!”
Kumiko looked at her watch and quickly calculated the available time. Yes, she could spend two more hours there and still get to the baptism by six o'clock. She plunged into the work, did the best she could, and then ran for the subway to get to the church. That night she took her stand as a declared Christian.
On Thursday morning, the phone rang again. “We'd like to hire you!” Kumiko wept with joy. Her long nightmare of job-hunting was over at last. God seemed to be taking care of her needs after all.
By the next year, Kumiko was involved in our hospitality ministry, helping visitors and ministry guests feel at home. She also joined a small group of women who share their spiritual walk with Christ. “These are my sisters,” she says, “even closer than my natural sister back in Japan. I feel I belong here.”
The whole idea of telling her parents about her newfound faith in Christ has been scary for Kumiko. With characteristic Asian respect for family tradition, she did not want them to feel disappointed in her. Nearly two years passed before the day came when she happened to be sick and her mother called from Tokyo. The mother said, “I will pray for you,” which led to a discussion about the God to whom Kumiko now prays. Her mother was not happy with this news.
“Even so, I feel much better now that the facts are out in the open,” Kumiko says. “I don't have to hide anything from them now. I can tell anybody.” Subsequent phone calls with her mother have been generally pleasant, “but I can tell she doesn't want to talk about it any further. She stays on other subjects.”
Meanwhile, Kumiko's career shows the ongoing blessing of God. Her employer has indicated that soon she will have her own name brand of women's clothing accessories. She's obviously excited about that.
“I'm a different person now,” she says with a smile. “I am happier. I feel free now. And I'm loved. I want to go on a mission trip someday, to be used by God to help people. I don't yet know in what way, but God will show me.”
Kumiko's story illustrates for us that God keeps track of those who honor him. And he will have the last word, as he had in the case of Ruth in the Bible. Ruth's hard times and sorrow and tears gave way to smiles and laughter and rejoicing. Ruth was destined to be much more than just a Moabite housewife. She became the great-grandmother of King David!
A Fork in the Road
How did all this happen to Ruth? Was there a key moment along the way? A decisive fork in the road that changed everything? Yes, indeed. It was that day on the outskirts of town, right after her sister-in-law Orpah was persuaded to turn back and Naomi encouraged Ruth to turn back as well. That was the point at which Ruth makes a bold statement:
“Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me” (Ruth 1:16–17).
I consider this is one of the greatest verses in the Old Testament. Ruth declares that she no longer categorizes herself by her nationality or her culture. Instead, she belongs to God. God's people, as far as she is concerned, are her people. There is no turning back.
Oh, how that would help a lot of us today! If we could get it through our minds who our people really are, it would make such a difference. I sometimes say to my congregation in Brooklyn, “You're not Jamaican, you're not Trinidadian—you belong to God. It doesn't matter if you're Puerto Rican any more than it matters that I'm Ukrainian and Polish—those are just biological details. We are part of God's family. I don't care where you're from; if you belong to Christ, you are my brother and sister, and I'm yours.”
Those verses from the book of Ruth are sometimes quoted in wedding ceremonies to evoke the commitment of the bride to the groom, and vice versa. That's fine, although a bit astray from the original context. I would like to suggest that the most bedrock application of this statement for us today is its radical commitment to God and his people. Wherever God leads us, we pledge to go. This is our identity for the rest of our lives. Ethnic background, social class, language grouping—they all mean little compared to the fact that we are bonded to Christ and his body, the church.
This is what releases the potential for future blessing, as it did for Ruth. Did you know that her name even shows up in the New Testament? On the very first page, Matthew records “the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah”—all the men in the list, that is. Almost no women get included. But when we come to verse 5, it's as if the writer can't quite help himself; he has to say, “Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth.”
Matthew sneaks in a woman's name—and a Gentile immigrant woman at that! To the traditional Jewish mind, she may not have been “one of us,” but God said, “She's one of mine. And I want her name listed in the official family tree of my Son.”
Whatever hard experiences invade our lives, whenever we come to that crucial fork in the road, we must keep insisting along with Ruth that God is our God, and his people are our people. And we must keep attending to the little things, doing what's right even if it's unpopular, even if it leaves us exhausted at the end of the day. God takes note of these things. He watches the single mother who faithfully cares for her children by day and prays over them at night. He watches the businessperson who treats the customer fairly even if it costs a little more. He notices those who are faithful to God's house in spite of what's on television or at the multiplex that weekend.
God's plans for his people are not to be compared with the passing rewards of this world. What he has in mind for those who love him wholeheartedly is more than you'd ever dream. God has made you for more.