Recently, I have been reading a book by the adventurer Bear Grylls. The book is called, ‘How to stay alive’. It has advice about a variety of survival situations, and the best course of action to take to help ensure a good outcome. In the future, if I am in a helicopter, and the pilot and co-pilot simultaneously have heart attacks, I’ll be in a better position than before I read this book!
Yes, some of the advice in the book is very unlikely to be needed in my life. But some of it could prove beneficial. It tells me that there are four things that are of prime importance in a survival situation. We need shelter, water, food and heat (fire). If we have all of these then we can survive indefinitely.
It strikes me that there is a parallel here with survival spiritually. What do we need to continue in the Christian life? We need shelter, and not just any shelter. Psalm 91:1-2 tells us this, ‘Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’
We also need heat. There is an indispensable warning for believers in Revelation 3. It is the words of Jesus, through John, to the church in a place called Laodicea. That company of Christians was in great danger. Their spiritual survival was threatened. They had lost their initial, burning intensity towards God. It is important that we take note of exactly what they are told. They are not described as cold. Verse 16 says, ‘you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold’. In a natural survival situation, being cold is really dangerous. Being lukewarm means that we are ok at that moment. Spiritually, this is not so. Lukewarm Christianity leaves us in a very precarious place. So, what of food and water? Food, or bread, we will get to this week. Last week, Tim dealt with the subject of spiritual water. We looked at that beautiful account of the gracious dealings of Jesus with that woman who he met at the well in Samaria, where Jesus revealed himself as being in possession of ‘living water’; true spiritual water for the soul.
Tim pointed us to the conflicting statements in that account. This woman was focused on external things. The ‘outward’ was so important to her thinking. Jesus challenged this. Jesus believed that the ‘inward’ is more important.
This woman had a ‘truth’. She had things that she believed were true and absolute. One of her beliefs was that the actual place where God was worshipped was really important. Jesus told her that the important thing was not the place, but the state of the worshipper’s heart. We must worship ‘in the spirit and in truth’ (John 4:1-26).
I think that this woman has a real connection with Naomi, in the book of Ruth, and that this connection can direct our thinking today. The woman at the well had a ‘truth’. She had some firm beliefs. Some of them had been passed down to her. They had been received as historical ‘fact’. Some of the things she believed were on account of how her life had panned out. They were linked to her personal experience. Wonderfully, she proved willing to listen. She was ready to have her ‘truth’ challenged by the words of Jesus. And, as Jesus tenderly pointed out to her, her ‘truth’ wasn’t actually true. It is the same with Naomi. Naomi claims that the Lord has brought her back ‘empty’. At that point in time, this was Naomi’s ‘truth’. But the Bible shows us that Naomi’s ‘truth’ wasn’t actually true, either. When we began looking at Ruth, last time, I quoted the words of Paul in Romans 15, about the value of the Old Testament scriptures - ‘For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us...’ ‘To teach us’! This is so important. The Bible doesn’t unravel the Samaritan woman’s ‘truth’ in order that we will just be better informed about her history. The Bible doesn’t unravel Naomi’s ‘truth’ in order that we will be better informed about Naomi. The Bible undoes these things and, at the same time, reveals real, actual, lasting ‘truth’ for us.
Why? Because, the Samaritan woman and Naomi are just like us. We often view the situations in our life from a narrow perspective. We make claims about how things are from our own position, failing to realise that an altogether different view exists, when our lives are viewed from higher ground. Isaiah 55 tells us this, ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts...’ What we so often lack is a God perspective.
Now, what I am not saying is that Naomi’s life was actually easy in that moment that she returned to Bethlehem. She was in desperate circumstances. Those recent life changes that she had experienced were real, and they were obviously raw and painful. Actually, there is something commendable in the way that Naomi speaks, and this also contains a lesson for us.
We are so inclined to paint a rosy picture of our lives to others. We can be economical with the truth. We love to speak about the good bits. We want to hide the bad bits.
There are 1189 chapters in the Bible. At the beginning of the Bible’s 3rd chapter, the NIV gives us a helpful heading – ‘The fall’. This is the story of life messed up. A quarter of 1 percent of the way through this book from God, life is messed up. And it continues in the same way. In the accounts of the people in the Bible, life is very messy indeed. If we have a lofty ideal that we are, or that we should be, above life’s struggles; if this is our ‘truth’, then, like the Samaritan woman, we need our ‘truth’ challenged by God’s word.
So, Naomi and Ruth arrive in Bethlehem. For Ruth, this is something new. For Naomi, this is a return back from a failed enterprise. She and three members of her family had left Bethlehem over a decade previously. They left in order to escape difficult circumstances. So often, we can wishfully think of escaping away from difficulties. It may be in our family situations, it may be in school, or college, or university, or work life, or problems in the particular area in which we live. ‘If only’, we say to ourselves. ‘If only I lived here, things would be so different’.
I tend to think this way, sometimes, about the job that I do, when things get difficult. ‘If only’ I worked somewhere else. But, this is missing the point. Yes, there may be real obstacles to progress in my present workplace. Yes, there may be people that cause issues. But the real issue is often me. It’s the way that I view setbacks. It’s the way that I respond. It’s the way that I try so hard to bring order to the inescapable messiness of life. I could get another job. But the problem wouldn’t go away, because I’d have to take me to the next job.
Last time, we considered the lack of wisdom in Naomi and Elimelek’s venture into Moab. They left Bethlehem because of present difficulty. There was a famine in the land. Moab seemed a better prospect, but it wasn’t. The crops may have been growing in Moab, but the people there had no relationship with the living God. There wasn’t a natural famine. There was a spiritual famine. Naomi’s problems did not disappear when she moved. Her husband and two sons died. Now she was returning, with someone else who was now dependent upon her.
The years had taken their toll. This is evident in the words of the women of the town, recorded in verse 19. ‘Can this be Naomi?’ She had changed. Compared to the lady who had left all those years before, this was a very different lady who was returning.
Naomi plays on this theme in her response. In her wonderfully exaggerated, pictorial language, she agrees that she isn’t the same person. She claims a new persona. Naomi means ‘pleasant’. Mara means ‘bitter’. She is saying, “it was a ‘pleasant’ woman that you remember leaving, it’s a ‘bitter’ woman that now has returned” She uses the word ‘empty’. ‘I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty.’ She really believed it. Naomi believed that the Lord had emptied her life of all good and all future hope.
The first thing to deal with is Naomi’s claim that she had left ‘full’. The Bible’s reality seems to be that she left because she wasn’t full. She was not filled with a correct view of Israel’s God. And what of the Bible’s reality about her emptiness? She left with a husband and two sons. She left with the prospect of a posterity – future generations descending from her, something that was so important to the time and culture of this narrative. In this regard Naomi appears ‘empty’. Without hope of further children or grandchildren, and so on. We know the end of this book. We know that there is hope, even when there appears to be none.
Actually the language used at the end of the book is really instructive. There are more words from the women of the town, who seem very blessed with insight in what they speak. In chapter 4 and verse 15, they say this about Ruth, ‘your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.’ Naomi’s ‘truth’ is that she left Bethlehem with two sons and returned with none. The Bible’s reality is that she left with two sons and returned with more than seven. That is not the description of someone being emptied. And what a posterity is hers, through her daughter in law, Ruth? Ruth’s new husband Boaz was well aware of the implications of Israelite law. In redeeming the property of Elimelek and Naomi and their sons, he took Ruth as his wife. But the law decreed that this was done so that the first son born would take on the name, and be considered a descendant of, the widow’s first husband (see Deuteronomy 25:5-6). That is why, in chapter 4, the other kinsman who Boaz talks to, eventually refuses to redeem the estate. Boaz tells him that he will have to ‘maintain the name of the dead with his property’. The other man says that he cannot do this, ‘because I might endanger my own estate’.
This means that the child, whose birth is described at the end of this book, is actually, lawfully, Mahlon’s son. This baby, Obed, will take on the surname (to put it into a modern context) of Mahlon, son of Naomi. Legally, Obed is Naomi’s grandson. This is why the townswomen (again) make the statement in verse 17 of chapter 4, ‘Naomi has a son!’ And then the Bible’s reality goes further. We read, ‘He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.’
Compare that with the tale of woe that Naomi speaks to Ruth in chapter one. Verses 11 to 13 detail the impossibility of her ever having descendants. Her womb will remain ‘empty’. Yet, in God’s reality, in a very short space of time, quite possibly not much more than a year later, Naomi, who didn’t have a son, or the prospect of one, now has a grandson! And, under Israelite law, she becomes the great, great grandmother to David, King of God’s people Israel. That is not ‘empty’. Naomi had lost sight of the good things that surrounded her existence. There has been much talk in the media in recent time about ‘privilege’. Some people, by virtue of where, and to whom, they are born, have more privilege than others. Some have greater opportunity to succeed than others.
Naomi was an Israelite. She was privileged. In these two verses, where she tells others to call her Mara, she describes something so true. Many people, when they meet with misfortune, see it as a random happening - it is bad luck and nothing more. Through the privilege of being an Israelite, Naomi understands the sovereignty of God. He orders. He appoints. When she speaks of her present misfortune, she says, ‘the Almighty... the Lord... the Lord... the Almighty’. In her mind God had ordered these circumstances. What a privilege it is to understand this. Proverbs 9:10 tells us this, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.’
Naomi had previously felt that her life was ‘full’. So full, in fact, that she could make independent decisions. Decisions like the one to leave the Promised Land in order to prosper. Actually, that was the issue with the church at Laodicea. Their lives had prospered. They felt full. Jesus says that they were saying ‘I ... do not need a thing.’ Then he says, ‘but you do not realise that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.’ The reality that Jesus saw was the very opposite to their idea of ‘truth’.
When Naomi thought she was full, she was in fact being emptied. She needed to be emptied, in order to be brought back to God to be truly filled.
And Naomi’s restoration happened when she heard some good news from afar. What a gospel picture we have here! Left desolate in Moab, she heard that ‘the Lord had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them’ (Ruth 1:6). She returns to Bethlehem. What a place to return to? Bethlehem means ‘House of Bread’. God was providing bread for his people in the House of Bread! Naomi returns to what we might call the Lord’s own table. She is nourished there in a way that must have been beyond her wildest dreams. In chapter 4:14, in the wonderful narrative of the ladies of Bethlehem, they say to her, ‘Praise be to the Lord, who this day has not left you without....’
Naomi’s life has much to teach us. Bethlehem’s most famous son has even more truth to fill us with. Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. If ever there was a House of Bread in this fallen world, then it is found in Bethlehem. Through Jesus, his people have been fed throughout the ages.
Jesus said this, ‘For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’... ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’ (John 6:33 & 35).
At the beginning we considered the four things needed to survive; shelter, water, bread and heat, and how the ‘natural’ is a picture of the ‘spiritual’. In order to survive spiritually we will need to shelter always under the cross of our own crucified redeemer.
We will need to drink living water.
We will need to live on a constant diet of the bread of life. If we do, we will have heat also.
Remember those two followers of Jesus on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. What was their apparent ‘truth’ that evening? Their whole world had been turned upside down. We read, ‘They stood still, their faces downcast’ (v.17). Then, the risen Lord appeared to them and opened the real truth. ‘They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”’ (v.32)
As we read the scriptures daily may we also burn with love towards the God who has saved us. May we be made willing to proclaim his fame to those around us. I’ll finish by borrowing from the women of Bethlehem for one last time today (Ruth 4:14) - ‘Praise be to the Lord, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel!’
Photo by LAMBROS LYRARAKIS on Unsplash
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