Thursday 29th October

Ruth 4 vs 13 - 17

So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When he made love to her, the Lord enabled her to conceive, and she gave birth to a son. The women said to Naomi: ‘Praise be to the Lord, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. 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!’ And they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.
 
As we have followed the account of Naomi and Ruth’s journey from Moab to Bethlehem; from sorrow to joy, can there really be any question of God’s hand upon the whole situation. Doubtless someone reading the account will still say, “Coincidence !”.  Well, it is a point of view but on the other hand Albert Einstein the famous physicist is reputed to have said “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous”.  

Predictably not everyone accepts that Einstein actually said this given his background but the point is well made; God’s doesn’t always trumpet his purposes in advance or announce his involvement in a dramatic way at the time, it is only later that we discern his direction of events. That is the case here as verse seventeen connects Obed the son born to Boaz and Ruth to David, and David then, through the covenant God made with him and by the psalms he wrote, points us to Jesus Christ his descendant in the human sense. So Ruth the foreigner and once stranger to God’s grace was included in the family tree of Jesus the Son of God.

It’s a fact we easily lose sight of in discouraging periods of our walk with Christ but we may not always know the part we play in God’s story. It may be that eternity alone will reveal how God worked through us and wove our story into his. His providence doesn’t always mean that we will be happy or have pleasure in life, which is the pre-occupation of today’s generations but it does mean that he will always work simultaneously for our eternal blessing and for his glory. All our ways are known to Him.