Ruth 1:16–17
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Good evening church. It is a joy to be with you. As Greg said, our text is to be found in Ruth chapter 1 verses 16 and 17. I think it's on page 222 in those pew Bibles in front of you and you'll probably want to turn there. We'll be in the text and around it this evening. So no surprise to those of you who know me, but I love weddings. I love marriage. I love weddings. I think they're fun. I think they're great and there's so many things about a wedding to love. There's the beauty of the bride coming down the aisle. I got to officiate three weddings this summer, so it was a blast. There's the beauty of the bride coming down the aisle. There's the stupefaction of the groom as he stares at the bride and thinks, how did this happen? And we're all wondering the same thing, but congratulations, man. It's awesome. Praise God. There's the joy. There's the celebration of it all. It's just wonderful. But one of the things that happens in all weddings and should happen is these things called vows, right? These promises are kind of, in one sense, insane. What we say to another human being. We say, hey, I'm for you for the rest of life in sickness or in
health. I'm for you for richer or for poorer. I'm for you and I'm with you for better or for worse. In premarital counseling, I'll often say to young couples, you never know what you're saying when you say that you do at the altar. You never know what you're saying when you say that you do. Because to covenant with another person is just going to radically change your life. It's going to change everything about you. Well, in a very similar way, our text tonight plays with that idea. This young woman, Ruth, covenants herself with this woman, Naomi, and it will change everything about her life. It will change, in fact, the history of the world. So let's read our text and dive in. But Ruth replied, don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you.
where you go I will go and where you stay I will stay your people will be my people and your God my God where you die I will die and there I will be buried may the Lord deal with me yet ever so severely if even death separates you and me the main idea of the text that I want to look at with you tonight is simply this the redeemed people of God covenant with one another for the good of the church. The redeemed people of God covenant with one another for the good of the church. I'm going to break that down into two simple points. Point number one, a covenantal promise. We're going to just look at the promise in general. And then secondly, a covenantal life. What sort of demands does that now put upon Ruth and ultimately upon you? A covenantal promise and a covenantal life. Let's dive into it. A covenantal promise, point one.
So if you don't know the book of Ruth, it starts as a tragedy. Ruth is a short story. It's, in my opinion, the most beautiful short story ever written. But it starts as a tragedy. We read it this morning in the sermon. A woman by the name of Naomi is married to a man named Elimelech, and because of a famine, they move to the country of Moab. They have two sons. While in Moab, the two sons get married, and then Elimelech dies, and then both sons die. And Naomi is left bereft of her husband and her two sons. She just has Ruth and Orpah, her two daughter-in-laws, left. Well, she hears that there's food back in Israel, so she packs up and moves back to Israel. And on the road, her two daughter-in-laws are with her. On the road, she says to her daughter-in-laws, don't come back with me. Don't come back. Things would be way better for you in Moab. You should go back to Moab. Well, Orpah hears this and agrees. She abandons. She says, yeah, that makes sense.
And she goes back. But Ruth clings to Naomi. And it comes to the text that we just read. She actually just gives her life and covenants to be with Naomi for the rest of her life. So let's look at this promise a little bit, Ruth's promise here. First, I want you to see that Ruth makes this promise in spite of Naomi's demand for her to go back to Moab. Naomi says, go back, and she says, no, I'm not going back. Now, Naomi's not quite right for making this demand upon her, but it's kind of understandable given Naomi's life and how difficult it's been. She's saying, look, my life is terrible and God's hand is against me. You don't want to be with me.
But Ruth says, no, I do. I want to be with you. Think here of the temptation for Ruth to go back to Moab. Think about this for a second. I mean, she could go back to her people, something very familiar. Her family, very familiar. To a land she knows, very familiar. Naomi is probably right that she has a better chance of finding rest in the home of a husband back in Moab than she does in Israel. Naomi is severing all these reasons that Ruth would have to go with her. And she says, look, you're not even responsible for me. Don't even worry about me. Just go back to Moab. Your life would be way better. You would probably buckle under that. So would I. It'd be a very hard thing to take that offer and say, I'm going to go with this bitter old woman to a land I don't know, versus going back to everything that I do. But Ruth doesn't buckle. Instead, she doubles down with some of the strongest language of covenant that you can find in the Bible.
Why do I say that? Well, look at the text there, especially the dead center. She says this line, for example, your people will be my people and your God will be my God. That language sounds incredibly similar to God's covenanting language with his people when he says, you will be my people and I will be your God. Somehow Ruth, in probably living in the home of this Israelite family, has picked up on this covenantal language and she's using it with Naomi and saying, The way that God has covenanted with his people, I'm in on that. I want that exact same thing.
She's using the same language. No longer, Ruth says, am I with the gods of Moab or the people of Moab? No longer does that family matter to me. I am now with Israel, and I am with the God of Israel. This is exactly what it is like to become a Christian. In fact, Christians have looked at this passage for a very long time and said, this is a beautiful example of conversion. It's a forsaking of a previous life of all others. It's a forsaking all advice, even from the world. Advice maybe even from wayward Christians. It's a turning from everything that you have ever known to embrace God and to embrace his people in covenant.
It comes to this point for Ruth that there's something that she wants so bad, she needs so bad, That everything else is just expelled from her mind. It's like in Pilgrim's Progress when Christian just puts his fingers in his ears and shouts, eternal life, eternal life, and runs out of the city of destruction. Ruth believes here, hope against hope, that to be aligned with the God of Israel and his people, even if it means the loss of everything she's ever known, is a trade that is totally worth it. So have you made that calculation?
Maybe you're here tonight and you're not a Christian. Well, here's the gospel. Like Ruth, you're from Moab, as it were. You weren't part of the people of God by birth. None of us were. We were all born outside of the kingdom of God, outside the family of God, and on a road to destruction, a road, as it were, to hell. Becoming a Christian is turning from that and turning in covenant to a Savior. Like Ruth turns from that in covenants with Naomi, the Christian is one who turns from that road and covenants with Jesus Christ. And this is why Jesus says that the new covenant is made by his blood. Because it's by the blood of Jesus Christ as he dies on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins and rises again to give us new life. We can now covenant with him in a new covenant that is eternal and secure. What am I saying? Simply, you can find forgiveness, new life, and eternity in Jesus Christ. You come to him in faith and enter the covenant that he offers to you.
Jesus died and rose and enacted a new covenant. And the offer is for you. Come to him in faith. And you know, Jesus says in Matthew 19, everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, sounds like what Ruth just did, for my namesake will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. Friend, come to Christ and believe. And if you're a Christian, you have done this. This is why we're here together as a covenant community before the Lord, because we have turned from the world and we have turned to Christ and embraced him in the new covenant.
But what is actually contained in what she promised? What does it actually mean? What kind of demands is that put upon her and therefore upon you? Well, that brings me to the second point, this covenantal life. Look back at the text with me here. There's three things I think she brings up that this new life is going to demand on her. first, presence. Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Her presence is going to be with Naomi now. Secondly, there's a new people, a new society, a new religion. Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God. And then there's a promise of longevity. Where you die, I will die. The promise is presence, being together. It's a new people, a new religion.
and you do that for life. What a phenomenal picture of who we are as Christians. We're together, we're a new people, we are under the new covenant with Christ, and we're going to do this to the day we die and then spend eternity with him. But you see, I think the point underneath that though is that this covenantal life that Ruth is entering, it's going to completely reorient her priorities around God and around his people for life. And therefore for you too, a covenantal life is going to reorient your priorities around God and around his people for the rest of your life.
Two things to think about with this. First, this new covenantal life that you enter when you become a Christian is not flashy in any way, shape, or form, but it is world-changing. It's not flashy, but it is world-changing. The book of Ruth starts with the line, in the days when the judges ruled, and if you don't know much about the days when the judges ruled, you can just turn the page back and you can read, you know, the book of Judges before. But the book of Judges is hideous. It's absolutely awful. It's violent and terrible.
But it's filled with, like, these big, huge stories, things that would grab your attention. It's clickbait galore, right? If you woke up in the morning and picked up your phone, you, like, go to the news and be like, Samson, like, killed all these guys with the jawbone of a donkey or whatever. You'd be like, that's incredible. Wow, what's the next story? Gideon did this. Wow, that's amazing. And then the next story says an immigrant woman promised that she would spend the rest of her life with her mother-in-law. You'd be like, whatever, you just keep scrolling. You wouldn't care. You wouldn't care. The book of Judges is filled with all of these huge stories. The book of Ruth, who cares?
Who cares about this woman on the road promising her life to Naomi? But you know, the end of the book of Judges is horrific. And if you don't know it, I'll give you the very cliff note. It ends with a man, a Levite, chopping up his concubine's body into 12 parts and sending it to the 12 tribes of Israel to incite a civil war. If you didn't think that was in the Bible, it's in there, I promise you, okay? It's in there. You can read it. It's horrific. For all the glitz, for all the glamour, for all the bigness, the big stories, all the things that catch our attention, it just ends in civil war and violence and bloodshed.
This little covenantal promise on a road between Moab and Israel results in a baby by the name of Obed, who has a baby by the name of Jesse, who has a little baby boy by the name of David, who receives an eternal covenant with God, that he would have a son that would reign forever, who is Jesus Christ. It's not flashy. It's not going to make the news, but it is going to change the world. And brothers and sisters, the same thing is true of what happens in this church. Do not despise the small ways that we can love one another. Do not despise. Do not turn from the ways that we can care for one another. Brother, sister, your small acts of love that seem so inconsequential, that seem so pitiful in the eyes of the world, are massive in the eyes of God and are used for great purposes. How we engage and love the people of God matters. What Greg preached about this morning matters, and it matters for eternity. It could be, brother, sister, if the
book of Ruth is teaching something, it could be that how you treat your wife after work tomorrow is more important than what happens on Wall Street tomorrow. It could be that how you love this church in the next week is more important than any news out of D.C. or Moscow or Beijing. The eyes of faith see that this eternal community and the actions done in it of love and grace done to one another are eternal things and profound things in the eyes of God. God honors what we do in faith.
The covenantal life might not be flashy, but it does change the world. Secondly, under this point, we see this covenant that she makes with Naomi demanded things of Ruth, and therefore it's going to demand things of you too. Things like long-suffering, patience, forgiveness, and love in the community of God. So just look down at verse 19 to 21 for a second. So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem. And when they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirring because of them. And the women said, is this Naomi? She said to them, don't call me Naomi. Naomi means pleasant she says call me Mara that means bitter for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me I went away full and the Lord brought me back empty now it's it's almost it's almost comical right Naomi comes back into the town they say hey Miss Pleasant is here she's back in town she says don't call me don't call me pleasant call me bitter I went away full the Lord brought me back empty and she's standing beside somebody that she just brought back I mean it's kind of kind of
insulting to Ruth there, but now Ruth, you know, you think Ruth's probably thinking, you know, I just did this amazing thing on this road where I said I would care for you for the rest of life, and now I'm finding that I'm committed to a woman who defines herself as bitter, believes that God is against her, and tells a crowd of people that she returned from Moab with nothing, even though I'm standing right here. Do you think she might have had some second thoughts? Do you think she might want to bow out right away but brother sister in this church where we are covenanted together we're called to faithfulness like ruth despite the sin and suffering that happens here maybe actually or especially because there's sin and suffering here the very purpose of a covenant is to hold something together that would by nature fall apart on its own. And we by nature will not unite. We by nature will not love. So God has given us new hearts and then brought us into a covenant together that we would strive to love one another. Covenants, in other words, are contra sin.
They're working against our very sin. Maybe the gospel's great light shines in the darkest places of sin when the people of God forgive and forbear with one another. In a world where everyone is out to defend, number one, the church is out to love, to serve, and forgive. In a world dedicated to retribution and revenge, making things even, the church is called to cover a fence and bear with one another. The world might call that weak, but it's true strength, because maybe the most strong thing that ever happened in the Bible is Christ hanging on the cross with the ability to call down 10,000 angels, or 10,000 legions of angels, and crush his enemies, and instead he says, father forgive them they don't know what they do does that define how you think about one another do you have that level of a heart of forgiveness and love and compassion and forbearance and patience with your brother sisters in this church so who in your life or in this church are you
holding back this covenantal love this covenantal life from who are you refusing to show what a covenantal life looks like? Would Jesus hold back eternal blessing from you, even though you mocked and despised and scorned him, should you hold it back from them? And for others here who maybe aren't dealing with long-suffering or forgiveness, how are you just doing in general at showing a covenantal life in the midst of this church? If somebody could open your life history feed, would they find someone who loves the eternal people of God? Would it be evidenced to them? Brother, sister, this covenantal life, this covenant that you've entered, this new covenant with Christ, is going to reorient your life. Engage it. Last brief thought on all of this. Look at the text one more time. Look at verse 17.
Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried, and at the very end, more also of anything but death parts me from you. Ruth knows at the making of this covenant that the covenant is going to end because one of them is going to die. You do know that death eventually separated them, right? We don't know who died first, Naomi, Ruth. We don't know, but death, the last enemy, did in fact separate these two. It did, if you will, end this covenant.
So are all these covenants in the Bible, or our marriages, or the ones that we have in this church, are all these covenants ultimately fruitless? Do the promises we make ultimately not matter? everything meaningless, as Ecclesiastes repeatedly tells us. Well, yeah, yes. If, and this is the world's biggest if, if death is the final say on everything, then all these covenantal promises are completely meaningless. Standing in here and repeating our church covenant to one another, if death is the final say, has about the same worth as just blowing your nose. It means nothing. But death did have a really bad day about 2,000 years ago. Death woke up as confident as ever and went to bed in more anguish on that Sunday morning than you and I have ever experienced because there was a man, Christ Jesus, truly God and truly man, who actually broke through the forces and power and relentless torture of death over the human race. He crushed death under his foot and then promised to lead a host of captives from that imprisonment. You see, all promises that
we make do, in fact, end with death, but the promise of Christ does not, because he is never going to die again. Death has no dominion over him. And Paul, after going over all of that in 1 Corinthians 15, tells us this, and I leave this with you. Therefore, brother, sister, your labor in the Lord is not in vain. Brother, sister, death will not crush your deeds done in faith. It will not have the final say in your life. It doesn't make the small things meaningless.
Jesus will be sure to honor all of our labor done by faith in him. It is not vanity. So get to work to the glory of God and the love of the church. Let's pray. Father, we're so thankful for the book of Ruth and all of its instruction to us. Father, we're thankful that this humble woman on this road some 3,000 years ago covenanted her life with Naomi. And that it changed the world. Father, we pray that this church would not seek glamour, would not be tempted by the lies of the world, but that we would find that what we have in Christ and what we have in the community of the church would be satisfying to us.
Father, we pray that this place would be filled with love and that that love would be a witness to the world. We pray that you change our hearts and our minds to see this, to know this, to savor this, and walk in obedience and love all our days. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you.