Welcome to Truth for Life, where we are studying the story of Ruth, a widowed Moabite living in a foreign land and caring for her poor Jewish mother-in-law. Ruth played a critical role in God's overarching plan. But do you think she realized that at the time? Today Alastair Begg looks at Ruth's response to her circumstances and God's providential provision. Alastair is teaching from Ruth, chapter two.
Everything that God gives any of us. and every opportunity of obtaining what we need. our undeserved mercies. from the giver of every good. When a man or a woman, when a young person actually believes that.
and has that written into the corner of their existence. Then it will transform how we approach any task. And every day Everything that God gives us. And every opportunity of obtaining what we need is an undeserved expression of His favor. And in a society that is preoccupied with its rights.
The Word of God calls us to focus on privileges.
So Naomi, who doubtless might have wished for better circumstances for both herself and Ruth, Responds kindly, in just a little phrase, she says, go ahead, my daughter. In other words, I wish that it was very different from this, Ruth. I wish I could have brought you back to a really nice place. I wish we'd been able to come back at a different level. I wish that we'd been able to slot right back into wonderful circumstances.
And here you are out picking up aluminium cans, you know, that are the equivalent of. And you're doing it because you love me and Because you say you love God now. Yeah, go on, my daughter. Incidentally, the passing Parents have to learn to respond to the good graces of their children in an equally graceful fashion. There are many children who, in endeavoring to do well for their parents or for their parents-in-law, have been so soured in the process.
By the reaction of the parents, which instead of being grateful and gracious, has been cantankerous and onerous. and so dulled the joy of service. and the privilege of the opportunity. If it is true that the young must learn to serve the elderly, Then it must equally be true that the elderly need to learn with good grace to accept the offerings of the young. And you see this perfectly in harmony here.
And so off she went. and began to glean in the fields behind the harvesters. I hope you'll notice as well that Ruth is not actually sitting around waiting for some miraculous intervention in her life. She doesn't arrive here in Bethlehem and begin to have these very lengthy prayer meetings which last all through the night and into the early hours of the morning and then through half of the day up until lunchtime. Oh, you say, well, that sounds like a bit of a heresy.
You mean she didn't pray?
Well, there's no indication of her praying. I'm sure she prayed, but she didn't pray when she should be doing what she should be doing. which was getting up and getting out and looking for a job. She was, in many senses, the answer to her own prayer. She was hoping to find favor in someone's eyes, but she wasn't going to find favor in someone's eyes unless she put herself in front of someone's eyes.
And she wasn't going to be able to put herself in front of someone's eyes unless she got out of her bed. Unless she got out of her bed and went to the place where she would meet the people in whose eyes she might find favor. Do you know how many Christians are sitting around waiting for some miraculous intervention before they proceed with the plan of God for their life, or worse still, with their plan which they're sending up to God for the future? Common sense is not in abundance in the Christian church, in my observation. There's a great lack of common sense.
I have the privilege of listening to A fair amount of uh observations and investigations and Over the last twenty-five years of pastoral ministry, I've heard a fair selection of it all. And one of the glaring omissions that I have noticed. is the omission of common sense on the part of the people of God.
So, when they come and tell you how it is that they believe that they're going to make these discoveries of God's plan for their lives, it's a quite incredible process. And it seems to pass them by that maybe in the routine, humdrum, ordinary ins and outs of life, God may actually be ordering their events. You're sitting around waiting for some miraculous intervention, waiting for a special letter that arrives by a dove dropped on your roof or something like that? You're waiting for your chimney to fall off. Have you done some bizarre pact with God and you're waiting now?
And this is the 17th year you've been waiting for the fleece to dry out or to soak up or whatever else it is.
Now, if Ruth had done that, Naomi would have starved to death waiting for her to come home.
So common sense. led to careful thinking, and careful thinking led to sensible action. See it? Common sense, careful thought, sensible action. There's no great mystery to this.
The Christian life is a practical thing. Use your common sense, think carefully, and proceed accordingly. The will of God is not a package let down from heaven on a string. It is a scroll that unrolls from day to day. And the way that we discover the plan of God for our lives is proceeding on the basis of common sense, careful thought, and specific action.
Not relying on our own insight, trusting in God, but nevertheless using the faculties with which He has entrusted us.
So what we discover is that she was prepared to do what she could do and to leave in God's care what she was unable to make happen. Also, you should note that she sought the advice of others close to her. That's the inference in verse 2. She said, Let me go to the fields. In other words, I'm not just going to dash off here.
There's a sense in which he's saying: if you think this is okay, if you concur with this, and so on. In other words, she found the will of God in the sensible advice of those who cared for her most. I'm going to say that to you again. She discovered the will of God in the sensible advice of those who cared for her most. Do you know how many girls would be prevented from marrying a complete clone if they would pay careful attention to the sensible advice of those who love them most?
Don't tell me that some miraculous intervention of God is propelling you towards this marriage when those who love you most and care for you deepest know that it's a flat-out bad idea. And don't hide under the disguise of prayer. when the matters are so crystal clear. How do we discover the will of God? By careful thought.
By common sense. By taking action. By listening to the advice of those who care for us most. And then you see. that God's provision follows it is undramatic, it is certainly not miraculous.
In fact, from one perspective, it looks like the whole deal unfolds by accident. Look at that little phrase there in verse 3.
So she went out and began to glean in the fields behind the harvesters, as it turned out. She found herself working in a field belonging To Boaz. Remember Boaz from verse 1? As it turned out. The jumbled patchwork of fields bore no identifiable markers.
It was not that Naomi said, now I've got somebody that's a member of the family here. If you can go out and try and find Boaz's field, that's probably a home run, you know. No, he the the writer is making the point that at the moment, unbeknown to either of these women, there is this individual, Boaz, who is a kinsman through marriage to this lady Naomi. But it is an unrelated fact to this girl going out in the morning and determining that she's going to glean in the fields. The authorized version The King James version.
Translation of this phrase is Her hat. H A P Was to light on a part of the field belonging to Boaz. Her hat. Was to light on the field. The best contemporary translation or paraphrase of that would be: as luck would have it, She worked in the field of Boaz.
In other words, as far as she was concerned, she went walking down the road, she went in a field, she just chose a field and she said, is it okay in this field? And somebody says, yeah, go ahead.
So she started to pick up the stuff in that field. And as it turned out, Apparently, accidentally. Without being led down, you see. Go here, turn here, go here, go. Then she found the will of God.
No, she went down the road. She's going to work in a field. She has a field that's working it. And as it happened, She was in the field of Boaz. You don't need to be unsettled by that.
This is not a heresy, this is life. Many of the circumstances of our lives Our joys and our sorrows are directly related to happenstances. We could never say that we made this decision on the basis of certain divine intervention. No, we said we knew that we had to go to a school and we said, well, I could go to that one, that one, or that one, and we went to that one. And as it turned out, It was in that context that X or Y unfolded.
So what was to Ruth sheer coincidence? in an unplanned set of circumstances. Was actually, as it becomes apparent later in the chapter, an indication of God's gracious. care. We've seen this in the story of Joseph before, haven't we?
that even our accidents such as we would view them from our perspective. are under God's care. The misery, says one, or happiness of our lives is often derived from accidents that appear quite trivial. But you see, God has the whole world in his hands. As Ephesians 1:11 says, He's working everything out according to the purpose of his will.
Romans 11.36 says, For from him and through him, and to him are all things.
So, even the way in which Ruth steps out in the morning, even the way in which she exercises her free choice. All of that is from him. And through him, And to him. Abram Kuyper, who was the Prime Minister of Holland, he was also the founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, which he founded in 1880. giving the inaugural address at the founding of that great institution.
He said, in the course of his uh talk. There is not an inch. in the whole area of human existence. of which Christ the sovereign of all does not cry. It is mine.
There's not an area. Not an inch in the whole area of human existence of which Christ, the sovereign of all, does not cry at His mind. He's got the whole world in His hands. Do you believe that? Then do you live do we live as though we believe it?
Charles Simeon in 1759 says to his congregation, What is before us? We know not whether we shall live or die, but this we know: that all things are ordered and sure. Everything is ordered with unerring wisdom and unbounded love by Thee, our God, who art love. Grant us in all things to see thy hand through Jesus Christ our Lord. In other words, here we are introduced to this paradoxical situation.
Where we have God's sovereign overruling of everything, even our stupidities, our mistakes, our disobediences, our rebellions. All of this being ushered into the unfolding plan by which he is conforming everything to the purpose of his will.
Now we need immediately, and I'm going to wrap this up now. We need immediately to distance ourselves. From a view of God's sovereignty. which is deterministic and which is static. There are a lot of Christians I hear talk about the sovereignty of God, and they just sound exactly like Muslims.
You know, it is it's in the will of Allah. Or in the Latin, quesera, sera, whatever will be will be. Doesn't matter, you know, you can drive on the wrong side of the road, you can jump off 40, you can jump out of a 40-story building, you know, and you will be caught by an angel and deposited safely on the ground if it is in the will of God for you. I got news for you. It isn't.
Prepare to hit the ground real hard.
So, a belief in the sovereignty of God is not determinism. whereby we would view ourselves as pawns being moved arbitrarily on a divine chessboard. Or that we would be viewed as puppets. With strings that are being moved without any reference to our own freedom and choice and responsibility on the part of a divine puppeteer. The Bible nowhere teaches such a thing.
Rather, as I say, it introduces us to this paradox. leaves us to wrestle with a juxtaposition. of the fact that we have real choice. that we are moral beings, that we have real responsibilities. That the providential care of God does not override human decision.
or human action. How did Ruth end up where she was? Because she woke up in the morning, she said, I think I'll go glean in the fields. Whose choice was that? Ruth's Why did she go there?
Well, really, because of Naomi's encouragement. Whose encouragement? Naomi's encouragement. How was it that she could glean in the field of a guy called Boaz? Because Boas had determined that this would be the time when he harvested his field.
Who decided that? Boys So Boaz said, okay, we're going to harvest this field. Ruth said, I'm going to glean in the field. Naomi said, why didn't you go ahead and bleed in the field? And these were the instruments of God's providential care, which his hand uses in order to move forward actually his purpose of redemption Because out of the lineage of this Ruth is coming King David, and down through the same line is coming the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
This is phenomenal. Oh, you say, but surely God couldn't leave it up to human choice. I mean, what if Ruth had gone to the wrong field for crying out loud?
Well Stay up late and have coffee and think that one out. But she sure didn't go to the field as a result. of being sent to the field. She said, hey, this looks like a good field. And through it all, God.
is working everything according to the council of this will.
Now, loved ones, we do need to hold on to this. It's much easier to put these issues of providence in place. When the sun's shining and the band's playing and everything seems to be moving in a great confluence of encouragement. It is for me much harder when I walk out of here as I did this morning and have one of the members of our congregation ask if I and others of us would pray for her eleven-year-old nephew. who has just been diagnosed with a form of Soft cell carcinoma, which is a most virulent form of cancer and for which there is absolutely no treatment at all.
Now you see, this is where the doctrine of providence. Stands up and demands attention. You know, this is where we're not going to play fast and loose with whether God. Has the whole world in his hands, and whether he has this wee boy in his care. And we're not going to do the silly stuff of the openness of God notion of saying, oh, well, that's not one that God has in his portfolio.
You know, that one is in the devil's portfolio. He's in charge of that one. And that's taken God by surprise. That's just an ancient heresy brushed up and repackaged for the 21st century. No, you see.
We need to hold on to this. That God's providential care is expressed. Through the outworking of our free human choices and decisions and responsibilities. And especially when life appears as it must have appeared to Naomi, to be simply a jumble of unconnected threats. Can you imagine how often she must have said to herself, you know, if Alimelech hadn't been so impatient and taken us away off to Moab?
And my sons as well. Goodness gracious. Maybe if we'd stayed back in Bethlehem, perhaps this, perhaps that. Lord God, Yahweh. This whole thing just looks to me like it's all, it's like it's like fuse wire, it's like the electrical system in a hundred-year-old house.
I can't make head nor tail of any part of it at all.
Well you see, where are you going to go on that day?
Well, the only place you can go is to say that to trust in God's favor. will allow us to get Enough of an inkling of this truth to keep us marching for another day, namely. that the unconnected and in Disconnected and entangled threads that we see in the tapestry of our crazy lives. is actually only the back view of what God is doing. And then eventually one day when we get the chance to see it from the front.
All of these strange and dark threads and difficult joins and knots and disappointments and discoveries. will prove to have been. Absolutely right. and absolutely best. The hymn writer says Praise him.
for his grace and favor. to our fathers in distress. Where are you going, Ruth?
Well I'm going to go out and Pick up some of the stuff in the fields if that's okay, Naomi. I'm going to do it behind somebody. in whose eyes I find favour. Praise him. for his grace and favor.
Praise Him. Still the same. Forever.
Some of us tonight Probably need just to have a silent time with God.
Now or later. Because We've been riling against things. We've been so overwhelmed by the disconnected bits and pieces, by the tangled threads. The devil has used so much of this as a messenger from himself to make us doubt God and to be disrupted in the journey of our lives. We've been waiting for a miracle.
We've been waiting for somebody to pull a flag out of the chimney or a dove out of the top hat or some kind of spiritual thing. And nothing seems to be happening at all. And suddenly it just seems so sensible. That if we would just read our Bibles. And trust God.
And use common sense. and apply careful thought. and get on with the next thing. Might be a lot more straightforward. You're listening to Truth for Life, and that is Alastair Begg reminding us that the Christian life is sensible and practical, even as we fully depend on God.
Alastair returns in just a moment to close today's programme.
Well, if you're enjoying this study in the book of Ruth, we've got a great resource today for your Bible study group. It's a brand new study in Ruth called God of the Ordinary. This is a study that takes you verse by verse through the story of Ruth and Naomi as they navigate loss, loyalty, and redemption.
Now, let me point out that Ruth's story is not just a story for women to read. If you're a part of a men's Bible study, think about taking a deeper look at this book of the Bible. This is an encouraging story for everyone. It tells of God's providence and his faithfulness to work things out for the good of his people. The events in Ruth reveal a profound truth.
The God who is in charge of the whole universe is intimately involved in the lives of individuals. This study is also unique because it includes brand new video teaching from Alastair. You can request the God of the Ordinary Study Guide when you donate to Truth for Life today using the mobile app or online at truthforlife. org slash donate, or you can call us at eight eight eight five eight eight seven eight eight four. And if you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book, write to us at Truth for Life, Post Office Box thirty nine eight thousand, Cleveland, Ohio, four four one three nine.
Okay. By the way, if you'd like additional study guides for other group members, they're available for purchase at our cost of eight dollars. Go to our online store at truthforlife. org slash store.
Now here is Alastair to close with prayer. Father, these thoughts are In many ways disconnected, we pray that you would join the dots for us in our own minds. That you would banish from our recollection anything that is actually untrue or unhelpful. and that you would instill in our hearts. a genuine sense of dependence upon you and increasingly unwavering trust in the fact that Eventually when the silver cord is broken and We no longer see as now we see that when we see you face to face, we'll be able to say it will be worth it all when.
when I see Jesus, and life's trials will seem so small when I see Christ. And in the meantime, Will you help us then? to read our Bibles. To trust you. to use common sense.
to think carefully. and to do the next thing. For Jesus' sake. Amen. I'm Bob Lapine.
Tomorrow we will see how events that may have seemed like fortunate coincidences actually point to a truly glorious God. The Bible teaching of Alastair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life. Where the Learning is for Living.
