Ruth’s Genealogy, God’s Grand Story
POST BY BRUCE LARSON
3 minute read
Matt and Jessie sketched out a sequence of topics tied to the book of Ruth that all focused on helping us understand this big idea:
On Sunday, we will wrap up Ruth trying to remember all that we have read and thought about for the last couple months. Here is the target we want to hit together as we close the book of Ruth:
As we aim for this target, let’s read scripture backward starting with the last verses, revealing a bit of the punchline from the entire book.
Ruth 4:18-22
Why this genealogy at the end? Genealogies are ways of tracking God’s action or faithfulness through history. It’s a spoiler to the book—so here’s a spoiler alert—Boaz had a child named Obed (v 21) and Obed was the child of Boaz and Ruth! Yes, they married and had a baby boy. But there is more! Obed is also the grandfather of King David! Which places him in the genealogy of Jesus! I wonder why the writer of Ruth placed a genealogy at the end of the book? Genealogies are ways of tracking God’s action or faithfulness through history, and seeing Ruth’s role in the linage of the great King David is amazing. In a culture that was male-dominated, and where women did not have much influence, God took a Moabite woman who was a widow (today we would call her an immigrant facing great challenges) and transformed her into the future great-grandmother to King David. It is amazing and quite remarkable that God chose to have Ruth in the lineage of His Son, Jesus.
So we just saw the end of the story, but it seems to me to be so important to know from the start and remember the big idea from this book:
If you recall, the Book of Ruth starts with famine and death. By verse 5 we learn that Naomi’s husband dies, as do her two married sons. So Naomi “was left without her two sons and her husband.” One daughter-in-law is Ruth who makes this wild and unbelievable commitment to stay with Naomi as she travels back to her home town. Ruth became a stranger in a strange land as she went to Bethlehem with Naomi. Remember, we just found out that a baby comes out of this at the end who is the grandfather to David and in the lineage of Jesus. Who would have expected that? We will return to chapter 4 in a bit to get more of the story.
Tim Mackey the co-founder and co-narrator of the Bible Project has these brief descriptions of the three main characters in the book of Ruth:
All three of these people eventually become very close, but in the beginnings of their relationships they had very clear differences from each other. Those differences would make us declare that they were “uncommon friends.”
Let’s now jump back to reading the end of Ruth from 4:13-17
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.
These three main characters were part of this unpredictable story of God working almost unacknowledged in their lives. They saw beyond their roles and spoke truth into each other lives. And as they moved forward, it became apparent that God was at work.
As a church, this is an example for us about how God speaks truth in His church to each other and through his people.
How, as a church, can we be encouraged by this and take up the work of encouraging, affirming, and speaking truth about someone? What do we need to practice moving beyond our individual thinking to the whole thinking? On Sunday, we will wrap up the evening with the exercise of naming one example of how the book of Ruth gives us encouragement about how God uses people in our lives to speak truth to each other and carry on his work in and through us all.