Meet Ruth #1

Welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, Founding Pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello, I'm Bill Wright. Thanks for joining us as we continue teaching God's people God's Word. Don begins a new message today, so without further delay, let's join him right now in the Truth Pulpit. I don't think it's overly pessimistic to say that these are bad days in our country for those who love biblical righteousness. We live in a crooked and a perverse society which could not possibly be condemned strongly enough. Sexual perversion, abortion, violence on college campuses, and political corruption are all so common that we've lost the capacity to be shocked about it anymore.

Our parents presupposed without thinking about it the meaning of man and woman. Now celebrities change genders and receive awards for their courage. Schools and cities debate who should go into which restroom in the name of tolerance and inclusion to say nothing about the continued perversion of God's truth from those who profess to be Christian pastors. If you measured the success of biblical righteousness in our day by outward trends, you would think that it was dying, especially as so-called Christian leaders abandon historical biblical positions and join the parade. It's easy for us to get discouraged as we watch the headlines and watch these things unfold before our eyes and you long for a voice to speak up for righteousness that has some kind of public power and some kind of public notice and you're met with a deafening sound of crickets and silence as people just continue to let it go.

The question for us is, is there any good news in the midst of this? Stated differently, is there a perspective that provides confidence to the people of God even if the mountains fall into the sea? Well Romans chapter 15 verse 4 gives us a clue as to where we should look and where we should go. It says that whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction so that through perseverance and the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. Now for in a society that's conditioned to love the next best thing, to view history as that which is irrelevant and simply to look forward to whatever our own desires might take us to next, the idea of looking back for truth and looking back for encouragement would seem foreign and even a little bit silly. But that's not the biblical perspective, that's not what scripture teaches us to do. Scripture teaches us to look back to the Bible, to look back 2,000, 3,000 years to what God spoke and inspired through his writers so that we would have hope going forward. We're not to be those who cut the umbilical cord with that which gave us life and to back away from truth and to separate ourselves in the pursuit of the latest, greatest idea from the choir boy guys that have expensive dentists to give them big million dollar smiles so that they look good on their million dollar books.

We don't care about any of that. What we want to do is to go back to scripture to find the hope and the clarity and the instruction that we need in order to understand the times in which we live and to have a proper biblical perspective on these things. So over the next few weeks, beginning tonight, I want to take you to a book in the Bible. I want you to meet Ruth. The book with her name is the eighth book in your English Bible. It is one of two books with a woman's name attached to them, the other being, of course, the book of Esther. But Ruth's improbable story teaches us something vital, something that applies today and will always be true. The book of Ruth teaches us the certain accomplishment of God's redemptive purpose in history. Her unlikely triumph provides light in our dark age. It lights our path going forward. It shows us direction and gives us a certainty and confidence that we otherwise would lack.

Now, let me ask a different question. Why would we, meaning you and I, why would we turn to Ruth at this time in the life of our church? When we've been studying Psalms and other things, why would we do that? Well, this is a little bit of a justification for spending a few weeks in a book of the Bible that maybe some people never get around to reading.

First of all, I want to give you three reasons for why we would do this at this time in the life of our church here in late 2015. First of all, all Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness. We could turn to any passage in the Bible whatsoever, whether we go to 2 Samuel or we go to Jude or we go to Esther or we go to Amos. You could go to any passage in the Scripture and properly taught you would find food for your soul that instructed you in righteous living the ways of God in a way that would provide encouragement and hope to you. And so there's a general affirmation that the Bible would give that any Scripture we would study would profit us and it just so happens that Ruth is in the Bible.

So we can't go wrong there. At another level, earlier in the past 12 to 18 months, we surveyed the books of Genesis through Judges, the first seven books of the Bible. And if you haven't heard those messages, perhaps you're new to our live stream, you should go to our website, truthcommunitychurch.org, and look in the Scripture sections for those messages on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges that kind of give you a little bit of an overview of and a sense of what the early books of the Bible teach. Well for those of us who were here for those times, Ruth is the next book after those seven.

It's number eight if you're keeping score. And it gives us an opportunity to reinforce and to remember some of those vital truths that we saw over the past year and a half or so. Things that are vital and a crucial foundation for understanding Scripture and yet which we're all prone to forget as time goes by.

This is an opportunity to reinforce some of those things that we've studied recently. The Scripture writers didn't hesitate to say that they were delighted to stir us up by way of reminder. Well Ruth is going to give us some reminding opportunities that will profit our souls, each one of us, as we study together.

The final reason, and this really isn't as important, it may sound odd to you, but it's important to me and I want to share it with you to just kind of give you a little bit of insight into the life of a preacher. Back in 2008, seven years ago, almost to this day, I was doing a lot of work on the book of Ruth. I purchased several commentaries to fill out my library on the book of Ruth and I had done a lot of reading and a lot of writing in preparation to teach Ruth back when I was in that other state, wherever that was. It's been so long I hardly remember anymore. Wherever that was, providence directed me in another direction.

It sent me to something else at that time and I never was able to teach on Ruth as I had planned to do. And so as I stand before you tonight and with these next several weeks in front of us, I have a deep sense of unfinished business of what was started several years ago and I want to finish it. And I am confident that if I am faithful to finish the business that was begun several years ago, it will prove to be a blessing in your lives as well. And so I'm looking forward to that.

When it's all said and done, here's what's going to happen. When we study Ruth together in the full context of biblical revelation, you and I are going to end up standing in awe at the power and the wisdom of God and the certainty of his ability to accomplish his redemptive purpose. Ruth teaches us that through a wonderful piece of literature, a wonderful biblical narrative that is an endearing story on its own terms standing alone. But then when you read it in the bigger picture of biblical revelation, you are stunned at the magnitude of what it teaches. And I want us to have the ability and the time to go through that. We will be renewed in our confidence, we will be renewed in our hope, and we will turn our attention back to the world in front of us that we are living through. And in all of the degradation of what we described earlier, we will be able to view that from a sense of being above it, understanding it, seeing through it, knowing that the ultimate accomplishment of God's will is certain. It cannot be thwarted and being united to God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, it can only come out well for us in the end. Don't you want to live life from that perspective?

I do, and Ruth will help us to do that. It will give us the sense of assurance that God is mightily at work, even in our own wicked society, but watch this, even though his work may very well be completely hidden from our eyes. And here's the thing, God's purposes are always at work, that's the meaning of the doctrine of divine providence that God is at work in absolutely everything that happens, whether it be a minor detail such as what a church chooses to study at its midweek study, or in the magnitude of world events and the rise and fall of nations, God is in perfect sovereign control of all of that, and he is always working out his will in everything that happens. Now, you and I, on the front end of this, going forward, we are not able to see all that that means. We don't know the significance of seemingly chance encounters that we might have with a man on the street, or what takes place in the church, or where you choose to live at any particular time in your life. But what you see from the book of Ruth is that the details that seem inconsequential to us may be the very thing that God is using to accomplish things of incalculable, eternal importance going forward. One pastor has said that God is doing a thousand things in everything that he does, and we cannot plumb the depths of the mind of omniscience, we cannot begin to scratch the surface of understanding even why God has brought you and me here together in this church at this time in our lives. We don't understand the consequences of that. All we need to understand and all that we need to do is to be faithful to our role in it and know that in a realm that we cannot see, in the realm where secret things belong to the Lord, God is doing things that go beyond all that we could ask or think.

And we need to love him and be confident of him to that great degree. Now, here's what I want to do. That's why we're studying the book of Ruth here tonight and in some days to come. Let's step back for a moment. Let's step back and remember some basics to set the context as we meet Ruth in the flow of redemptive history. Go, first of all, to the book of Genesis, in Genesis chapter 12. I know I probably had you turn to Ruth immediately, but I just wanted to see if you were paying attention, I guess.

I don't know. Get you used to that place so that you can turn to it quickly in the future, and I would encourage you going forward as you're all so faithful to be here week by week. Take some time over the next few days and read through Ruth two or three or four times. Let it get familiar to you.

Let it sink into you. And that will make our future studies on Tuesday evenings all the more valuable to you as the Word of God is cycling through your mind. But for now, we want to set the context and remember some very vital things that we saw in those survey messages some time ago. Remember that in the book of Genesis. We saw that God made promises to Abraham. He promised Abraham that he would give him a land, he would give him a nation, even though at the time Abraham was a solitary man with Sarah without a child, and he had simply come out of paganism to follow God.

And here he was, a man on his own, and God makes these stupendous promises to him. Look at Genesis chapter 12, for example. You could also see this in Genesis 15 and Genesis 17. But we'll go to Genesis 12 verse 1. The Lord said to Abram, Genesis 12 verse 1, go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house to the land which I will show you, and I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, and so you shall be a blessing.

And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. Now that's a stupendous promise, and you know if you put yourself in the sandals of Abraham being on the receiving end of that, you've just stepped out of paganism and God makes these great promises to you. It's hard to comprehend the magnitude of what that would entail, but it didn't depend on the strength of Abraham in order to bring these things to pass. What guaranteed the certainty of the deliverance of these things was the power and the wisdom of God to accomplish his redemptive purposes with certainty. Look at Genesis 13 verses 5 and 6. Genesis 13, 5 and 6 as time developed. Lot went with Abram, Lot also had flocks and herds and tents, and the land could not sustain them while dwelling together for their possessions were so great that they were not able to remain together. And so Abraham was a wealthy man, he had these resources to draw upon, and it came time for God to start to deliver on them. And yet, as the years turned into decades, and the decades turned into centuries, and the centuries eventually turned into millennia, there were times where the fulfillment of these promises seemed remote, even unlikely, where the line of Abraham seemed to be threatened. And without turning to all of the scripture passages, you'll remember these items of history, biblical history, as it unfolded. God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on an altar.

Well, if he does that, the line is gone. What happens then? Jacob's descendants went to Egypt only 70 in number. They left the land and went into Egypt. Where is the fulfillment of the land promise ever going to happen when the whole family and only 70 of them at that go to a foreign land?

How is God's purpose going to be accomplished? How is God going to fulfill his promise to Abraham under those circumstances? Well, fast forward 400 years, and the people are in slavery to Egypt, crying out under the bondage of harsh task masters. God calls them out, sends them on their way, and Pharaoh's army has them trapped, backed up against the Red Sea, descending upon them. What's going to happen?

The future is in grave danger at that point. And you know what happened? God opened the sea and they went through and Pharaoh's army was drowned behind them. But even on the other side, God had to judge them in the wilderness so that all of them but two fell dead in the wilderness over 40 years because of their disobedience to Yahweh.

And so just with those little bits of illustration, you see that in different manners and in different ways at different times, their very existence was threatened. From a human perspective, and this is what I want you to do, viewing it from inside their human perspective as the water is in front of them and the army is pressing down upon them, as they're wandering in the wilderness and day after day dozens of people are dying around them under the judgment of God. From inside that human perspective, there must have been times where it seemed like it was utterly unlikely, if not impossible, that God would actually deliver on the promises that he had made to their patriarch. There was nothing by way of external circumstantial encouragement to make them think that this was actually working out, that it was prospering along the way.

Just as we look about us in our sick, degraded society, at least here in America, and we see wickedness is winning the day, what do we say about that? Based on their external observations, the people of Israel could have well concluded that it was unlikely that they were going to survive at multiple times in their history. And yet, God led them into the land, didn't he? And yet, they flourished under Joshua for a time, and so things start to be looking up, but it's only a generation or two after Joshua that the whole thing goes south again. And in the book of Judges, which we surveyed, the people fell into a cycle of decline in the book of Judges that was utterly contradictory to the momentary success that they enjoyed under Joshua's leadership and the elders who survived him.

Looking at it humanly speaking, you see a lot of failure, a lot of threats, a lot of sin, and there just doesn't seem to be, where is the visible evidence that this is actually going to come to fruition and be fulfilled? In Judges, they were idolatrous people. Look at Judges chapter 10 verse 6.

All of this by way of review and reminder. Judges chapter 10, the seventh book in your Bible. Judges chapter 10 verse 6, giving us a little snapshot of Israel in those wicked days of the judges. Judges 10 verse 6 says that the sons of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord, served the Baals and the Ashtaroth, the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the sons of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines. Thus they forsook the Lord and did not serve Him. In this period of Judges, in the snapshot of that 300 or so year period there, idolatry rampant among the chosen people. Where is the purpose of God being carried out then?

Where is the certainty of God's redemptive purpose being accomplished in the midst of His own chosen people falling into such varied idolatry? The book of Judges describes them at times as being wicked, violent people. Look at Judges chapter 20. Judges chapter 20 in verse 4.

And again, I'm just giving you little quick cameos here. Little snapshots to just kind of set the context for the book that we actually want to study here tonight. Judges chapter 20 verse 4. So, the Levite, the husband of the woman who was murdered, answered and said, I came with my concubine to spend the night at Gibeah, which belongs to Benjamin. But the men of Gibeah rose up against me and surrounded the house at night because of me.

They intended to kill me. Instead, they ravished my concubine so that she died. The people of God ravished a concubine.

She's dead. What did this Levite do? He took hold of his concubine, cut her in pieces, and sent her throughout the land of Israel's inheritance saying they have committed a lewd and disgraceful act in Israel.

The sheer violence and the decadence that is represented in that one brief passage is just incalculable. These are not sanctified people as we would define sanctification in New Testament terms. They were degraded, debased, violent, idolatrous people carrying the name of God's chosen upon their mantle. And so the period of Judges, realizing that there were cycles and that God raised up some men to kind of arrest the cycle for a period of time, we understand that.

We're just not delving into that here tonight. The pattern in the book of Judges was that when God withdrew his hand, the nation fell into a depraved chaos without national or spiritual leadership to provide a way forward. Look at Judges 21.

It ends on this sad note. Judges 21 verse 25, a verse that is descriptive of our own day. When it says, in those days there was no king in Israel.

Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. And so, from the perspective of humanity, looking at it from a human perspective, things were pretty bleak during this time in the period of Judges. False religion, immorality, violence among God's people. This is not what you would expect based solely on what was promised to Abraham in Genesis 12. If you just started there and that was all you knew, you would expect this flourishing spiritual dynamic taking place among his people.

And yet that was not what marked things nationally, as Judges records for us. And so, if you go back and you compare the promises that God made to Abraham. Great nation, great blessing, a land to come.

It's going to be through your seed that I bless all the nations. And you look at those promises and then you compare what happened. And in the days of Judges, what's going on, the inconsistency almost fractures your mind.

It was horribly bleak in a way in which we can sympathize today. Righteousness in the biblical sense at a severe discount. The hand of God not being too visible and evident as you look on the national scene. And that was with the chosen people.

I mean, here we are in the United States with no promises to call our own. But we can sympathize with the society that we found in the book of Judges. And beloved, all that was background.

Introduction, you might say, for a 15 minute message maybe. It's in the days of Judges. It's in that horribly bleak spiritual condition. It is precisely there that we meet Ruth. It's from my ministry. The Lord has given us opportunity to put some of the things that I've taught over the years in print.

And I have one book in particular that I would want to call your attention to. It's the most popular book that I've published so far, called Trusting God in Trying Times. It's a book born out of deep personal sorrow and is brought into context, you might say, through the word of God. How to trust God when you are going through the deepest valleys and the most sorrowful things in life. How do you trust God through those times when you can't see your way forward?

I've been there, my friend. And the book Trusting God in Trying Times speaks to that spiritual experience in the life of the believer. You can find all of my books at thetruthpulpit.com. That's thetruthpulpit.com. Just click on the link there.

You'll find links to different books and you will find that they take you to an easy place to purchase them for your reading enjoyment. So thank you once again for joining us on The Truth Pulpit. We'll see you next time as we continue to study God's Word together. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.