Book of Ruth, chapter two, beginning with verse one. There was a relative of Naomi's husband, a man of great wealth of the family of Elimelech. His name was Boaz. So Ruth the Moabitess said to Naomi, please let me go to the field and glean heads of grain after him in whose sight I may find favor. And she said to her, go, my daughter. Then she left and went and gleaned in the field after the reapers, and she happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz, who was of the family of Elimelech. Now behold, Boaz came from Bethlehem and said to the reapers, The Lord be with you. And they answered him, The Lord bless you. Then Boaz said to a servant who was in charge of the reapers, Whose young woman is this? So the servant who was in charge of the reapers answered and said, It is the young Moabite woman who came back with Naomi from the country of Moab. And she said, Please let me glean and gather after the reapers among the sheaves. So she came and has continued from morning until now. though she rested a little in the house. Then Boaz said to Ruth, you will listen, my daughter, will you not? Do not go to glean in another field, nor go from here, but stay close by, my young women. Let your eyes be on the field which they reap, and go after them. Have I not commanded the young men not to touch you? And when you are thirsty, go to the vessels and drink from what the young men have drawn. So she fell on her face, bowed down to the ground, and said to him, why have I found favor in your eyes that you should take notice of me, since I am a foreigner? And Boaz answered and said to her, it has been fully reported to me all that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband, and how you have left your father and your mother and the land of your birth and have come to a people whom you did not know before. 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. And she said, let me find favor in your sight, my Lord, for you have comforted me and have spoken kindly to your maidservant, though I am not like one of your maidservants. Now Boaz said to her at mealtime, come here and eat of the bread and dip your piece of bread in the vinegar. So she sat beside the reapers and he passed parched grain to her and she ate and was satisfied and kept some back. And when she rose up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men saying, let her glean even among the sheaves and do not reproach her. Also let grain from the bundles fall purposely for her, leave it that she may glean and do not rebuke her. So she gleaned in the field until evening and beat out what she had gleaned and it was about an ephah of barley. Then she took it up and went into the city, and her mother-in-law saw what she had gleaned, so she brought out and gave to her what she had kept back after she had been satisfied. And her mother-in-law said to her, Where have you gleaned today? And where did you work? Blessed be the one who took notice of you! So she told her mother-in-law with whom she had worked, and said, The man's name with whom I worked today is Boaz. Then Naomi said to her daughter-in-law, blessed be he of the Lord, who has not forsaken his kindness to the living and the dead. And Naomi said to her, this man is a relation of ours, one of our close relatives. Ruth the Moabitess said, he also said to me, you shall stay close by my young men until they have finished all my harvest. And Naomi said to Ruth, her daughter-in-law, it is good, my daughter, that you go out with his young women and that people do not meet you in any other field. So she stayed close by the young women of Boaz to glean until the end of barley harvest and wheat harvest, and she dwelt with her mother-in-law. Amen. We'll end our reading there at the end of Ruth, chapter 2. Let's once again ask for God's help in prayer. Our gracious God and Heavenly Father, we thank you for the wonderful opportunity that we have to come together to hear your word and to see in what in one way are very ordinary details of very ordinary lives from Israel of long ago, that you were at work, that those who sought refuge under your wings were not denied, that the one who thought she had been made empty, is beginning to find again a little bit of fullness. So Lord, help us from the book of Ruth to see that our Lord Jesus Christ is not absent, is not distant, is not irrelevant to the daily cares and concerns, but that he cares for us in all our need. And so teach us to cast all our care upon him. In his name we pray, amen. Ruth does not waste a lot of time. She had been warned by Naomi that she was going back into a hard life, a life of poverty. When Naomi and Elimelech left Bethlehem because of famine, first of all, we can probably imagine without inaccuracy, that they did not leave in great financial shape. There was a famine. Times were hard. And then they're moving to Moab. They're going to need some operating capital. So if we read between the lines of the Book of Ruth, we can discover that Naomi had sold, or more technically had leased, her land, so it is not under her control. You might remember the legislation in Israel. You could lease your patrimony, you could lease your inheritance for up to 50 years, but in the year of Jubilee, everything went back to the original owner. Now, we don't know when the years of Jubilee took place. In fact, there's no mention of them actually being practiced historically. So it could be that that was a law that was broken more than it was observed. But that was, at least in theory, how things work. The family land, what you inherited, you could lease for 50 years, but you couldn't sell it forever, unless it was a house in a walled city. That was a different matter. But what did that mean? Well, it meant you had the right of redemption if you had the cash. You could get your land back before the year of Jubilee if you had the resources to do it. But Naomi does not have the resources to do it. She would have had some land in virtue of her father, in virtue of her husband especially, but that land had been leased when they went to Moab. Now her husband and her sons are dead. She's moving back. She's moving back in poverty. So we don't know, as I said before, whether she had a house where she could stay or whether they had to put up some sort of temporary shelter. We really don't know the living conditions except that Ruth and Naomi were together. That was the whole household. So in a sense Ruth knew what she was getting into and when they arrived she asked for permission to go and glean. Now this was a provision that was made in the law. The Israelites were prohibited from making a second sweep through their fields, through their vineyards, through their orchards. Instead, they were supposed to leave the corners of the fields. They were supposed to leave what had fallen on the ground. They were supposed to not go back over the olive trees again, beating them with a stick. They were supposed to leave that for those who didn't have access to their own fields, to their own trees, to their own vineyards. And the poor of the land would come and glean. But it was the poor of the land Now, Ruth is not from the land. I don't know if you noticed this, but the emphasis put upon Ruth's foreign identity here is very striking. Verse 2, Ruth the Moabitess. Well, we haven't heard of any other Ruths. There are no other Ruths in the whole of Scripture. We already know what Ruth this is. And yet, it's emphasized, Ruth the Moabitess. And when Boaz asks, who is this young woman? Oh, this is the young Moabite woman. And just in case Boaz missed it, who came from the country of Moab? Well, yes, that's where Moabites are from. They come from the country of Moab. That could have gone without saying. But it was said, it was emphasized. These little details are not insignificant. It's showing the perception of Ruth on the part of the community is, well, the main thing we know about her is that she's a foreigner. Now we know she's attached to Naomi. We know a little bit of her story, but this is what we're leading with. This is the prevailing fact in mind. Ruth is from Moab. So do the provisions made for the poor of the land apply to Ruth? Well, she doesn't know, but she goes out, quote unquote, to take her chances. And she came to the field of Boaz, not knowing who he was, not knowing that he was related to her deceased father-in-law, Elimelech. And she asked for permission. Now, verse seven in chapter two is, the hardest verse to interpret in the whole of the book of Ruth, I think. And there's all kinds of different opinions. My personal view, the most likely way to understand this verse, is that Ruth came and she asked for permission to glean. And they didn't give her permission to glean. So she stayed standing there, except that when the sun got too hot, she would go and sit down in the shelter that was provided for breaks from the heat. And then she'd get up and she'd go stand in place again, waiting for permission to start gleaning. I think that's the most plausible understanding of the foreman's report to Boaz. Well, now that the owner of the field has come, he can make this decision. If Ruth had not been a Moabite, the foreman probably would have felt authorized to say, sure, that's fine, you can go ahead and glean. But she was a foreigner. He didn't know whether that would be okay or not. So he waited for the owner to come. And, of course, the owner... went above and beyond. He said that she could glean. He said that she didn't even have to wait. She could follow close by the reapers, not just the people who were cutting down the grain, but also those who were bundling it into sheaves. So as I see it, the picture is the young men went through and cut. The young women came through and bound that into bundles or put it in baskets and then Ruth came along behind and any other gleaners there might have been and picked up the little bits and pieces that were left. But she didn't have to wait till they were all done she could just follow right behind them. He also allowed her to drink from the water that was supplied for his workers and then when it was mealtime he shared with her knowing she probably had brought nothing to eat he shared with her and she had A great day of gleaning, she took home about 30 pounds of barley, which is quite a lot of barley. I mean, that's a fair amount of barley. It's going to take you a little while to work through that, right? And of course, she was going to sell some of it to variegate the diet. So that's a little overview of the story. But what does it mean? What are we supposed to derive from this? Well, there's lots of different lessons that are available here. For one thing, you could see just in passing, it was normal for young women to go out and work in the field. Ruth is not doing something nobody's ever done before. There's other young women who are also working for Boaz and who are working, may I just point out, outside of the home. in passing. But that's not really where the text puts its emphasis. Now, again, with chapter two, I'd kind of like to go through it more than once, because there's a lot here. But for today, let's look at it from the standpoint of Boaz. He's the first person to be introduced. There was a relative of Naomi's husband. His name was Boaz. He was from the family of Elimelech. And we have the statement there that he was a man of great wealth. Now, that's definitely one way to understand the phrase, He was, but when that's used in a military context, you would translate that same phrase, a mighty man of valor. It's the male equivalent of what is said in Proverbs 31 about a woman of worth. And in some canonical arrangements of the Hebrew Old Testament, Ruth comes right after the book of Proverbs as though she's an illustration. What does a woman of worth look like in practice? What does a woman of worth from a different social class look like in practice? Because in Proverbs 31, that woman is clearly well-to-do, and Ruth is not clearly well-to-do. But both are women of worth, and Ruth will be called a woman of worth before the end of the book. But here you have a man of worth, a virtuous man. Now, that certainly can refer to ability and prowess, if you're speaking of a general or a soldier. It certainly can refer to prosperity, to importance, to prominence, if you're speaking in economic or social terms. But then what's the portrait that we're given of Boaz? Well, we're told his name, we're told this evaluation of him, and then when he appears on the scene, how does he greet his workers? He says, the Lord is with you. These are the first words we hear from Boaz. He comes, he's checking up on his workers, and you can see, you know, he provides for them. He has a shelter for them. He has water for them. He has food for them. He's generous to his workers as a general rule, as well as to this extra stranger, this foreigner. He's a person who fears the Lord. And I think we should let what we're told about Boaz later inform this evaluation of him. Is he well-to-do? Yes. He clearly has a pretty good group of workers, right? But that's not the only thing that's going on. He's a man of worth, not just economically, not just socially. He's a man of worth spiritually. because he fears the Lord, because his worship of God influences every aspect of his day-to-day life. It influences how he says hello. You know, when the fear of God comes down to that level in our lives, you know it's reached pretty far, because how we say hello is not the biggest deal in the world. But wouldn't it be wonderful if our profession of faith, wouldn't it be wonderful if our trust in God reached so deep that it changed everything about the way we live, that it left no area untouched, that it would influence how we relate to workers, to employees, to customers, to clients, to vendors, to everybody. He says, The Lord is with you. And they respond with, the Lord bless you. And that's one of the key themes of this chapter is the blessing that is pronounced or the blessing that is evidenced, that is demonstrated. Here, it's in a very small thing. There's a verbal blessing back and forth just as they say, hello. The Lord is with you, the Lord bless you. But it gives you a whole image, doesn't it? Here's a man of worth who leads by example and in whose community the fear of God really makes a difference. Now, when you remember when Ruth took place, Ruth took place during the period of the judges, when of the bulk of Israel, you could say everyone did what was right in their own eyes with disasters that we've studied in recent weeks. But here's a difference. Here's a community where they know God has visited them. Here's a community where they honour, where they acknowledge the Lord in all their ways. Because if you're acknowledging the Lord in the way of how you say hello, odds are you're acknowledging the Lord in other ways also. What a blessing to live in a community like that. What a blessing for that to be your boss. What a blessing to have workers who reciprocate What a blessed place to be because God was acknowledged in everything. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths. It's Proverbs 3, that's the passage I'm alluding to here. Well, then you see blessings during the workday. I've already explained, you know, there was a shelter, there was water, there was a meal, there was kindness, there was generosity, there was the restraint of evil. Boaz told his workers, don't bother Ruth. Don't get in her way, don't make her feel embarrassed, and certainly nothing above and beyond that. He did not want Ruth to encounter a hostile workplace environment, if I can use the HR jargon from today. He wanted Ruth to have good working conditions. And Ruth experienced all of this as a blessing. You see, blessing is not just we say God bless you. Blessing is not just we want something good for somebody else, but God works through us to communicate blessings to them. He worked through Boaz's generosity, Boaz's generosity in anticipating Ruth's needs. in letting her know, not making her wait. I'm really thirsty, could I have a little water? But saying, feel free to use the water cooler. Well, she wasn't one of the workers, she wasn't getting paid, she had no rights, she had no claim, but he opened that up to her anyway. And so through Boaz's generosity, The Lord blessed Ruth and blessed Ruth abundantly. Can you imagine the trepidation with which she went out into a strange place and a strange country to do her best to do the very poorest of work, the work that was reserved for those who had no resources of their own? What kind of a welcome would she encounter? Well, during the period of the judges, a lot of women received some very rough treatment. But in God's grace, she came to the field of a good man. And what a difference that made, his generosity to her. But you know, Boaz didn't just see himself as being a blessing to Ruth. She asks him, why are you doing all of this? Why have I found favor in your eyes? Well, he had heard about her loyalty. He had heard about her steadfastness to Naomi. And so in kindness to Naomi, in kindness to his deceased relative, Boaz is generous to this young foreign woman. Oh, that God would work through us as well, that the news people hear about us, on the one hand, would make them open their hearts to us, but also that we would be generous, we would be giving like Boaz, that we could really imitate this example, be people of worth in the spiritual sense, which is, the spiritual is not the impractical sense, right? I hope you see that. Boaz's virtue is not theoretical. Boaz's virtue is not from his teeth outwards. Boaz's virtue is also seen in what he does, just like Ruth's. Now they're on very different social scales. Boaz is at the top of the pile in the little society of Bethlehem. Ruth is at the bottom of the pile in the little society of Bethlehem. Ruth recognizes that, Ruth acknowledges that. But Boaz personally serves her food. Boaz invites her to dip her bread in the vinegar, the dipping sauce that they had available there. This is a Mediterranean culture, so you know there's gonna be some kind of dipping sauce, right? For your bread. In all of that, God's kindness was at work. The word blessing isn't used. But surely we don't think Ruth was so blind not to see God blessing her through this man. And of course, that becomes very evident when she goes home for the evening, carrying a big bundle of grain, and she opens it out before Naomi. And before Naomi even knows what happened, Naomi is already saying, blessed be. the one who took notice of you. She realizes this is not normal. This is not what Ruth would have gotten all by herself. Somebody saw Ruth. Somebody understood her situation. Somebody had compassion on her plight, and somebody helped her to do much better than she would have done all by herself. So without even knowing who it was, Naomi already pronounces a blessing on him. Why? Well, why do we pronounce blessings on other people? Either because our hearts are overflowing with gratitude or because we see that they need it. That's, I mean, you can boil it down to that sort of thing. Why did Boaz bless Ruth? Because he saw that she needed it. Why did Naomi bless Boaz? Because she received the blessing, she experienced the blessing, and she responded with blessing. You know, that word bless is a little bit ambiguous, like we read it in the call to worship. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Well, we're not doing good to God. We're not giving him anything he needs. We're not saying that God really needs our blessing. So when we bless the Lord, We're pronouncing that he is blessed. We're recognizing and acknowledging the blessings that he gives. Naomi doesn't have any way to do Boaz a favor. Well, she hasn't thought of it yet. She does, but she hasn't thought of it yet. But what she can do is she can recognize, she can acknowledge that blessing. She can look to the Lord to reward Boaz for his kindness. When Boaz was being generous to Ruth, he said, the Lord rewards you. But he didn't just say the Lord rewards you, he also did something, he pitched in. He was God's agent to reward Ruth that day in that particular way. Well, the ambiguity of blessing leads us to think about that. Well, we want to be blessed. We want to receive blessing. We want to reciprocate with the blessing of worship, with the blessing of praise, with the blessing of acknowledging God's goodness. But we also want to respond to the blessings we receive in turn by being a blessing to others. Part of that is recognizing what they've done well, praising them for it, and pitching in to help if we can. But maybe we're not able to do that. Maybe we're closer to Naomi's situation than to Boaz's. Well, we can still bring our benefactors before the Lord in prayer. We can look to Him to do them good, even when we can't do much directly by ourselves. And Naomi blesses Boaz for not forgetting kindness to the living and to the dead. Kindness to the dead, well, Elimelech and his male relatives are gone, they're deceased. But Boaz didn't, well, you know, you're not my problem anymore, you're out of the family. He continued to care about them. So he cared for the living, and by caring for the living, he demonstrated ongoing kindness for their deceased relatives. The pattern that had been established when Elimelech was still alive continued now that Elimelech was dead. Boaz is a great character, isn't he? It's easy to warm to him. It's easy to love him for his kindness to his workers, for his consideration towards Ruth, for his genuine, realistic piety, for his humility about himself. He doesn't give himself airs. He doesn't act like the big boss. He sits down and eats with his workers and personally serves the Moabite girl. Boaz is a really likable character. Well, we should learn from that. We should imitate Boaz within our own situation, in our own way, according to our possibilities. Boaz is a good example for us. But Boaz is also a type of Christ. And he's a type of Christ in more ways than one. But the way that I think particularly comes up in this chapter is through what Ruth says to him. She says, why have I found favor in your eyes that you should take notice of me since I am a foreigner? Now, couldn't we all make that? recognition our own. We were strangers from the covenants of promise. We were alienated from the life of God. We were without hope, without God in the world. And yet we who were far off have been made near by the blood of Christ. Couldn't Ruth's words be our words? Could we not turn to the Lord Jesus and say, why have you taken notice of us? Why should we have found favor in your eyes? Now, when Ruth said that to Boaz, Boaz had a reason. Ruth had demonstrated some good qualities. Of course, Jesus can't tell us about the good qualities we've demonstrated. because to the extent that we have, it's because he found us first and put them in us. So he has to give a higher answer than Boaz gave. He has to give the higher answer, well, you found favor in my eyes because my father chose you from before the foundation of the world. You found favor in my eyes because I have compassion on the miserable. You found favor in my eyes because I am willing to die to redeem the guilty. You found favor in my eyes because I am full of grace and truth. As I've said before, every type of Christ truly reveals some aspect of Christ, but Christ transcends every type. Boaz is a type of Christ in showing favor, demonstrating kindness to somebody who didn't have a claim on him, to somebody who couldn't say, you ought to be kind to me, you have to be kind to me. Ruth had no standing to make that claim. And in that, Boaz is a type of Christ. But the reality, the truth, Christ transcends the type because Boaz had heard good things about Ruth, but Christ has not heard good things about us. That was not his motivation. His motivation was his own abundant fullness of grace and truth. Now, in social and economic terms, in any congregation, there will be some people who are closer to Boaz, some people who are closer to Ruth. But in spiritual terms, none of us are Boaz. We are all foreigners. We are all destitute. We are all desperately hoping for a scrap of mercy, for a little bit of kindness, for the tiny little leavings on the edge of the field. But when we come to Christ, we're not given the scraps. We're not given the leftovers. We're welcomed into the very heart of the home. Now, that's still coming with Ruth. I don't want to anticipate too much. But the welcome that you find when you turn to Jesus, the welcome that you find when you come to Christ is even greater, more gracious, more compassionate, more considerate than the welcome that Boaz gave to Ruth. Amen.