📖 Bible Characters — Unit 8: Ruth — When Life Looks Hopeless, There Is Always Hope and God

Benjamin Franklin once read the book of Ruth aloud to a club of skeptics, changing the names so they would not recognize it. They praised it as one of the most beautiful stories they had ever heard — until he told them it came from the very Bible they scorned. It is a beautiful story, but it is more than that. It is the story of a destitute woman who comes looking for grace and finds it, and it carries one shining message: when life appears hopeless, there is always hope, and there is always God.

Subject: Ruth — when life looks hopeless, there is always hope and God.

Proposition: In the seasons of grief, change, and blessing, God redeems the destitute who come looking for grace.

We will trace three times in the story of Ruth, and the keyword running through them all is HOPE.

I. A Time of Grief

The very names preach the tragedy before it unfolds. There was a man named Elimelech, which means "My God is King," and his wife Naomi, which means "pleasant," and their two sons, Mahlon, "sick," and Chilion, "pining away." A famine drove the family from Bethlehem to the foreign land of Moab, and there the blows fell one after another. Elimelech died. Then Mahlon died. Then Chilion died. Three widows were left standing in the wreckage — Naomi and her two Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. When at last Naomi came home, the women of Bethlehem hardly knew her, and she said:

Naomi means "pleasant"; Mara means "bitter." Here is a woman so crushed by loss that she felt her very name no longer fit.

I understand pleasant Naomi asking to be called bitter Mara. My own mother, like Naomi, lost a husband and three of her children to the long cruelty of Huntington's disease. And I have stood at more gravesides than I can easily count — I have buried my grandparents, my parents, two brothers and a sister, and my wife of forty-five years. I know something of the stages grief drags us through: the doubt, the anger, the guilt, the depression, and at last, by God's mercy, some measure of resolution. Grief is real, and the Bible never asks us to pretend otherwise. Naomi was honest about her bitterness — and even in her bitterness, she turned her steps back toward Bethlehem, back toward the place of bread, back toward God. That turning is where hope begins.

Bethlehem means "house of bread," and Naomi had heard that the LORD had visited His people and given them bread again. Sometimes the first step out of grief is simply to turn back toward the place where God provides, even when the heart is still heavy. Faith does not require that we feel pleasant; it requires only that we keep walking toward God.

II. A Time of Change

On the road, Naomi urged both her daughters-in-law to go back to their own people. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye and returned to Moab — and we never hear of her again. But Ruth clung to Naomi and spoke words that have echoed for three thousand years:

This was a complete change of life — a new land, a new people, a new God. And God often molds and shapes us through exactly such changes. When the prophet watched a potter at work, he saw that a marred vessel was not merely patched up; it was crushed back into a lump and made over again. Sometimes God has to remove things from our lives, even break what we were, in order to conform us to Himself. Jesus said that new wine cannot be poured into old wineskins, or the skins will burst; the new wine of the Holy Spirit cannot be contained by the old structures of the carnal nature or by mere outward religion. The lesson is to keep the heart soft and pliable in God's hands. In the wilderness, when the cloud of God's presence moved, the people had to move with it; they could not camp where the cloud no longer was. Too many believers live by what someone once called the seven last words of the church: "We never did it that way before." I have lived in three countries and five states, and God used every uprooting to change me. A time of change, painful as it is, is often God's tool to prepare us for a time of blessing.

III. A Time of Blessing

Naomi and Ruth arrived back in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest, with nothing. And notice what Ruth did, for it is the heart of the whole book: she did not pretend to be something she was not, and she did not scheme to manipulate her way up. She simply took the place of destitution and went out looking for grace. Under the law of Moses, the corners of the fields and the gleanings were to be left for the poor and the stranger (Leviticus 19:9-10), and Ruth went humbly to glean among the leftover grain. If you will seek for grace, you will find it, for "he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him" (Hebrews 11:6).

As it happened, Ruth came to the field of a man named Boaz, whose name means "strength" — and Boaz was a near kinsman of her dead father-in-law Elimelech. The text says she "happened" to come to his field, but it was no accident at all. God has His holy "happenings." Zacchaeus just happened to climb the one sycamore tree Jesus had already chosen to stop beneath; it looked like chance, but it was a divine appointment. So it was with Ruth. Boaz showed her kindness, protected her, and provided for her. He blessed her with words that capture the whole book: "The LORD repay your work, and a full reward be given you by the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for refuge" (Ruth 2:12). He told her to stay in his fields, to drink from his vessels, and to eat at his table — grace heaped upon grace for a foreign widow who had come with nothing. And when he learned who she was, he took up the role of the kinsman-redeemer. Under the law, a near relative could redeem the property and the family line of one who had died. Boaz redeemed the heritage of Elimelech and took Ruth, the Moabite widow, to be his wife.

Their son was named Obed, which means "worship." And here the little book opens onto something vast: Obed became the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the king. The women of Bethlehem said to Naomi of Ruth, "Your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is better to you than seven sons, has borne him" — for in that culture seven sons was the very picture of a full and blessed life, and one faithful Ruth was worth more than all of them. The destitute Moabite outsider became the great-grandmother of King David, and through David's line, a Gentile ancestress of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

Hope and the Redeemer

This is why Ruth is the Old Testament's great picture of redemption. A destitute one, with no claim of her own, comes looking for grace and finds it. A kinsman-redeemer pays the price, takes the outsider as his own, and brings her into the family — and Boaz is a picture of Christ, our Kinsman-Redeemer, who took on our flesh to become our near relative and paid the price to make us His own. The Gentile is grafted into the very line of the Messiah, which is the gospel in miniature: those who were once strangers and outsiders are brought near and given a name in the family of God.

The apostle Paul reminds us that the things written in the Old Testament "happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition" (1 Corinthians 10:11). Ruth's story is not merely ancient history; it is a mirror in which every sinner can see the way home — coming empty-handed to seek grace, and being received by a Redeemer who delights to give it.

So when your life is in a time of grief, or a time of bewildering change, do not despair. The same God who walked with Ruth from the graves of Moab to the wedding feast of Bethlehem is walking with you. The keyword is hope. When everything looks hopeless, there is always hope, and there is always God — and there is a Redeemer who is looking for you even as you come looking for grace.