“Your people shall be my people and your God my God.” (Ruth 1:16c)
We come to the book of Ruth. It serves as the great foreshadowing of the ingrafting of the gentiles into the people of God. It is a delightful story following the dreadfulness of the end of the book of Judges. The last three chapters of Judges showed just how corrupt the people of God had become. Israel had forsaken God and sunk into anarchy and confusion in their religious lives (Judges 17, 18), in their moral lives (Judges 19), and in their political lives (Judges 21). As individual people fell away from God, so also the nation quickly followed. As Judges 17:6 states, “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” This led to anarchy and confusion. When we forget God and follow our own interests, ways, and sinful desires, loss and defeat are inevitable.
In the midst of this great apostasy, comes Ruth. She was a Moabite woman (a gentile like most of us reading this blog) who was by birth an outsider to the promises of God given to Abraham and his descendants. And yet while she was not a natural born descendant of Abraham, she showed herself to be of the spiritual lineage of Abraham because of her faith in God. (As we will soon read in Romans and later in Galatians, those who have faith in Christ are the spiritual descendants of Abraham).
Ruth declared to her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi that she would remain with her even though Ruth’s husband had died. Neither law nor custom required Ruth to stay. She was not bound to Naomi, but instead had every right to go home to her own people. And yet, she showed herself to be a righteous person (defined by Jesus as loving God and her neighbor). She forsook the pagan religion of her own people who worshiped many gods to serve the One True God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Thus she was ingrafted into the people of God and serves as a picture of God’s grace. Grace is unmerited and undeserved and unattainable favor. This is what Ruth received as she was saved by and later married to Boaz, her “kinsman redeemer.” Boaz serves as a type for Christ. So we can see a picture of the rescue of the gentiles by grace, who then become the church (the bride of Christ), who are saved by the Redeemer (Jesus).
Here’s the picture: As we walk away from the false gods we have served and place our faith in the One True God, we are saved by the grace of our Redeemer Jesus Christ, who brings us into his church, the bride of Christ. Through the vehicle of faith, we are saved by his grace. Though outsiders by birth, God has ingrafted us into his people and made us his beloved bride!
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