August 19, 2007 Sermon

God's Covenant Renewed
Ruth 4

God redeems. But what does this mean? The word redeem originally applied to things or people brought back from death. That definition still works for our purposes. God redeems in the sense that God brings us back from death. We are sinners. Not one of us can perfectly follow God’s perfect law, therefore, we are sinners. And as the Bible tells us, “The wages of sin is death.” We earn death with our sin. But God brings us back from death through Jesus Christ.

God redeems. Ruth shows it.

We have reached the final chapter of Ruth. We have read how she and Naomi, her mother-in-law, suffered the deaths of Naomi’s husband and two sons (one of whom was Ruth’s husband). Naomi now lived without male sponsorship in a foreign land. She could not depend on the natives to provide for her. She decided to return home. Ruth decided to go with her—despite the fact that she was already home. She loved Naomi enough to risk trying to make a new life in an alien country.

They returned to Naomi’s home town, Bethlehem. There they met Boaz, a close relative of her late husband. Ruth had gone to his fields to gather grain left over from the harvest. (God’s law required the Jews to leave a portion of their crops for widows to gather. This way they could work to survive.) Boaz noticed and asked about her. He learned that she had married into his family, but then lost her husband. He began caring for her immediately. He did it because God’s law told him to, and because he wanted her to become his wife and bear him children.

Naomi rejoiced. She counseled Ruth to approach Boaz in secret and ask him to propose to her. Boaz agreed, but he and Naomi had one male relative with a prior claim on Ruth—and a field that had belonged to her late husband. Today we read how Boaz meets this man at the town gate in front of witnesses, and asks him if he wants the field. The man does. Boaz replies, “The day you acquire that field from the hand of Naomi you acquire also Ruth, the Moabitess.” The man loses interest. He already has a wife and children. And though, as a woman, Ruth cannot own property, should she ever have a son he would inherit that field. (This was all according to God’s law as found in Leviticus.) This man does not want to pay good money for a field that may not stay his.

Boaz now has the right to acquire that field and the woman who goes with it. It’s the woman he wants. Now he has her. He has brought her back from the living death her life might have become. He has redeemed her, as certain translations of the Bible make clear. They call the closest male relative to any dead man the “kinsman redeemer”. The kinsman redeemer under Jewish law was that man with first right to a dead man’s property. When the first kinsman redeemer renounces his right to Ruth and her field, Boaz becomes the kinsman redeemer for them.

Boaz marries Ruth. In time they have a son, Obed. Obed’s grandson would be David, King David, the great military leader who would conquer Jerusalem and make it his capital, the great poet who would author many of the Psalms, the man whose family line would lead, centuries later, to Jesus. Ruth’s faithful love for her mother-in-law takes her to the land of the Jews. Boaz’ love for Ruth leads him to redeem her. Through these two faithful, loving people, God renews his covenant.

God’s covenant arches like a rainbow over the Old Testament. In fact, God had marked an earlier form of the covenant, the one made with Noah after the flood, with a rainbow. From the start of Genesis to the close of Malachi, God makes and remakes this covenant with the people. God repeatedly states through prophets like Moses and Jeremiah, “I will be your God if you will be my people.” The covenant is God’s holy contract with the people. It has two parties. Each enters into a legally binding agreement to perform certain duties. God will be our God. God will continue to provide and protect us. God will, as we emphasize today, redeem us. We must be God’s people. We must believe in God and attempt to obey God’s Law.

God worked through Naomi, Ruth and Boaz to renew the covenant. Oh, the story of Ruth lacks a statement of the covenant. It has no words of the Lord from prophets, no tablets of stone, no rainbows. But Ruth does tell us how God advanced his plan toward the perfect and eternal fulfillment of the covenant. Ruth tells us about several generations of Jesus’ ancestry. Ruth tells us how God used the love and faithfulness of three people to keep the covenant alive. And Ruth can inspire us to try to love and to keep the faith just like Naomi, Ruth and Boaz.

We need inspiration from time to time. As we live our little lives we encounter death. Ruth and Naomi lost three men. We encounter fear. Ruth faced the fear of moving to an alien country. We encounter hunger—for us, usually spiritual hunger. Ruth and Naomi faced physical hunger, but also the hunger for security. Ruth gives us the stories of three real people facing the real problems of real life. That’s why their love and faithfulness have such power for us. It they can do it, we can too. If they can love with the love of God, and if they can persist in their attempts to stay faithful—to each other and to the law of God, we can too.

Do you know anybody who reminds you of Ruth or Boaz? I have often complained about the time I spent on the staff of a very large church. In fairness, I ought to lift up the inspiring examples of loving, faithful people I encountered there. Our staff had a kind of Ruth, a woman named Kathlynn. Single and in her late thirties, she had to deal daily with certain personality and medical issues. But Kathlynn loved the Lord and was prepared to go wherever He sent her. (Her career had uprooted her numerous times.) She also loved with purity and tenacity. She loved me as a brother in Christ, even though I occasionally took advantage of her. She had no children of her own, yet she loved the children of the church with fierce determination. Watching Kathlynn face her inner demons while at the same time pushing through professional and personal obstacles helped me keep going through my comparatively minor problems.

We had a Boaz-type character on that staff, too. His name was Ollie, and he was the head custodian. Ollie was not an educated man, yet he had risen in his home church to become an elder. He had to deal with a staff full of overeducated men and women, and he did it by keeping faith with the church and his calling to make it shine. Often I would find Ollie, then in his sixties, on his knees polishing the brass staircase fittings with a toothbrush, or lifting massive loads of cleaning supplies, or picking up cigarette butts in the parking lot. Ollie strictly followed rules and policies, and he expected others to, as well. But once he decided you were okay he always had a twinkle in his eye for you. I think I might have cared more about Ollie’s opinion of me than anybody else’s in that entire church. He did his duty and tried hard to love everybody. His upright ways helped me walk the straight and narrow.

Kathlynn and Ollie believed in Jesus as their Lord and Savior. They believed in the covenant God has made with us forever through him: that when we believe in him God will redeem us from our sin. They lived their lives in that light. We loved and kept faith with God’s law as best they could. Can we?

Who are the Ruths and Boazes in your life? Draw your inspiration from them. Find new hope through to keep going in the sure and certain knowledge that in Jesus Christ, God has already redeemed us. God redeems. Ruth shows it. So do certain people in our lives. Draw from these people the inspiration to love and to obey God.