"The eternal significance of small things"
Ruth 4


This is the last Sunday of advent and also the last Sunday in our study of Ruth. Today we come to Ruth chapter 4. You'll find that on p. 261 in your church bibles. We'll read that in a minute.

But before proceeding I'd like to ask for a volunteer from the congregation. Now what I'm going to ask of this volunteer is very simple. For someone of talent and education and spiritual discernment it should be no problem at all. We've recently started a 1000 piece puzzle in our home. I have here a piece from that puzzle. Take a second to study it. What do you see? Could you describe it for the ladies and gentlemen in the congregation?

Have you had long enough to look it over? I don't want to rush you here. OK, now that you've had a chance to study it, I have a very simple question for you. Can you describe for us what this puzzle will look like when it is all put together?

You can't! You can't help me on this? Why not?
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Here's the point: This puzzle piece is meaningless apart from the whole puzzle. Without knowing what its connected to none of us can make any sense of it. We can make guesses, but that's about it. On its own, without fitting it into the bigger picture, this piece has no value. Put together with 999 other pieces, it becomes a stunning picture of the Taj Mahal.

Now what does a disconnected puzzle piece have to do with the book of Ruth? Keep that question at the back of your mind as we read Ruth ch. 4:

Here in Ruth ch. 4 we finally get the happy ending we've been anticipating. The story of Ruth began bleakly. In ch. 1 Naomi suffered tragedy upon tragedy, leading us to ask, where is God in the worst of times? She faced famine, the fear of starvation; she became a refugee, an exile from her homeland; her husband died; both of her sons died; she was left destitute, alone and bitter. And at the end of ch. 1 she returns to Bethlehem with Ruth, her daughter -in-law, and when she cries out when she arrives, "Don't call me Naomi (which means pleasant); call me Mara (which means bitter), for the Lord has dealt bitterly with me. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. The Lord has afflicted me, the Almighty has brough misfortune upon me." (21)

But in chapters 2 and 3, Naomi's bitterness starts to melt away as she experiences the goodness and mercy of God. Little by little Naomi and Ruith see that God has not abandoned them -- that they are not alone. In particular, God shows his goodness to them through a wealthy, God-fearing relative named Boaz.

Now we all know from the first mention of Boaz's name what is going to happen. This is a Cinderella story and at the end of every Cinderella story, Cinderella marries the Prince. It is clear enough to us that Ruth and Boaz are meant for each other. But of course they don't know that yet. They have the disadvantage of being trapped inside the story, so they actually have to go through a good bit of trouble finding out that they are meant for each other.

But then finally after one last legal drama at the beginning of chapter 4 we come to the happy ending. Boaz and Ruth are married. They have a child. And the story ends with Naomi holding her new grandchild in her arms. And in the last scene the women of the town crowd around Naomi, to bless her and to give a name to the child. Verse 17: "And the women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, 'A son has been born to Naomi.' They named him Obed."

It's a perfect satisfying ending to a great story. You might say that all the puzzle pieces are in place. Naomi who began the story filled with bitterness, is now filled with joy. She came to Bethlehem empty -- now she is full. She came hopeless, now she is filled with hope.

But there's a problem. The problem is that verse 17 is not the end of the story. Just when the book should end, bringing the story to a perfect close, we find these verses tacked on:

read verse 18-22

A genealogy. Don't you just hate genealogies! Why ruin a perfectly good ending by tacking a genealogy onit it. Nobody is going to read it. Honestly, how many of you actually pay attention to genealogies in the Bible?

So why doe the book of Ruth end with a list of names? Is it just an afterthought? Or did some scribes class notes from Rabbinic college accidentally get included in the text? The story is a perfectly balanced story without the genealogy and a fair number of Bible commentators think that the genealogy is just a later addition that doesn't really belong.

They are wrong, of course.

There's a very good reason for the geneaology at the end of Ruth. By ending Ruth with a genealogy, God reminds us that this is not the end of the story. It is just the end of one very small chapter. The lives of Naomi and Ruth and Boaz are connected with a bigger story -- a story that was going on before them and a story that will continue after them. The genealogy is like the connecting part of a puzzle piece. It reminds us that the puzzle piece is not complete in itself; it is just a small piece of a much bigger picture.

What I'd like you to imagine is that God's purposes in history are like an enormous interlocking puzzle. And our lives and the events of our lives are the pieces to that puzzle. With that image in mind, I'd like to make a few observations about Puzzles and puzzle making.

1. Let's start with the lesson that Hutch taught us at the beginning: When you work on a puzzle it is very helpful to have the picture in front of you. The pieces of a puzzle don't make sense on their own. Puzzle pieces only make sense when they are fitted into the whole puzzle.

Let me give another illustration: I have a copy here of Jane Eyre. It's a great novel. I would love to be able to read it to you, but unfortunately I don't have time. So, in order to give you an idea of what a great story this is, I'm just going to flip through and pick out a page to read from. This page should do. So let me just rip this page out, and read some of it to you.

From this excerpt you can tell this is a great story, right? Doesn't it make you really want to read Jane Eyre? Of course not! It makes no sense at all. A page ripped out of the middle of a novel means nothing unless you can fit it into the whole. But we do this all the time --

First of all, we do it to the Bible.
Oh we don't literally tear pages out. But we might as well. We take stories or verses or even whole books from the Bible and we read them as if they were complete in themselves. But the Bible isn't a collection of stories that can be ripped out and understood. Unless you understand the grand plot of the Bible, you can't make sense of the pieces. It just won't make sense to you unless you have the bigger picture in front of you.

From beginning to end, from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible has one great plot-line. It has thousands of characters and hundreds of subplots, but they all weave together into a single story. It's a rescue story -- the story of God's plan to rescue people who are in bondage to sin, to make a people for himself.

Every part of the Bible builds in some way on this bigger story. So what that means is that every part of the Bible in some way points to Jesus. How about the book of Ruth? The book of Ruth is not just about Naomi and Ruth and Boaz and how God brings turns their grief to joy. If that was the case it would be a pleasant story, but no more. But it's much more than that. The book of Ruth is about God laying the groundwork for his saving purposes. The story of Ruth shows how in the midst of the darkest time in Israel's history, God was at work for the salvation of his people -- first by preparing the way for David's kingdom, and then through David's line laying the foundation for the coming of the Messiah. Ruth also points to Jesus in another way. The redeeming love that Boaz shows to Ruth is on a small scale a foreshadowing of Christ's redeeming love for us. Ruth is a foreigner, a widow, poor. Yet Boaz loves her and redeems her.

But you know it's not just the Bible that we rip pages out of. We also do something similar with our own lives.

What I mean is that we have a tendency to see the things that happen in our lives like this disconnected puzzle piece or this ripped out page. We act as if we can make sense of our lives on their own. But we can't . Our lives are part of the same big picture that Ruth and Boaz and Naomi were part of. And like their lives, our lives only make sense when they are fitted into God's larger plan. Your suffering or joy, your pain or loss, your success or failure -- all of these will only make sense in light of God's eternal purposes. Naomi's hardship made no sense to her at the time, but God used it for good.

So the first puzzle making lesson is that the pieces of the puzzle -- whether in the Bible or events in our own lives -- have to be seen in light of the magnificent picture that God is preparing. Otherwise they are as meaningless as this puzzle piece.

I have a second observation about puzzles and puzzle-making:


2. On their own, the pieces of a puzzle are useless. But when you are putting a puzzle together every piece is important. There are no unessential pieces.

My older brother taught me this. My brother Stan didn't care much for puzzles. They were too much work. But he did like the glory and power of putting in the last piece. So when our family started a puzzle, he would sneak a piece and hide it. Then he would triumphantly produce it while the rest of us were grieving that a piece was lost.

Did it matter which piece he took? No. Every piece is essential to the completion of the puzzle. We think that our dog may have eaten one of the pieces to the puzzle we are working on. We will only know when we complete it. But you can be assured that there will be great mourning and gnashing of teeth if we come to the end and find one missing.

The analogy is imperfect, but in a similar way, for Christians there are no pieces of our lives that are unimportant. Every event of your life, whether joyful or tragic, is connected to eternity. There is a weightiness to our lives here. Not because WE are important on our own, but because we are part of something bigger. Every conversation, every errand, every task at work is important because they all have eternal consequences.

For Ruth serving a widowed and bitter mother-in-law, gleaning in a field, falling in love, having a baby -- these may have seemed insignificant things. But they were not! All of these things were part of something much bigger than they seemed.

Recognizing that the small things in our lives have eternal consequences has a huge effect on how we view our lives:

One final observation about puzzles . . .

3. In our house puzzles often sit for a rather long time, neglected. Oh, we start with a rush of enthusiasm, and its fun to begin with. But puzzles take time and concentration. It's very easy to get distracted from them. There are so many things competing for what little time we have.

And in a similar way, it is all too easy for us to be pulled away from the great purposes of God by trivial things. One of the great disease of our generation is triviality. The things on which most people spend most of their time are utterly trivial. What makes this tragic is that we who were created in the image of God were meant for bigger things. None of us is really content with the trivial pursuits. Our souls won't be satisified by sports and television and comics.

The book of Ruth teaches us that God's purpose for the life of his people is to connect us with something far greater than ourselves. When we follow him our lives will have far more meaning than we think they do.

What a tragedy then, to be pulled away from the grand puzzle of God's purposes by things that don't matter -- pursuits that are utterly trivial.


In the book of Ruth we have a story about ordinary people, facing the ordinary conflicts, tragedies and joys of life. It's a quiet, domestic story. A small town. Far from the arenas of power. A poor, young woman, far from her home. The birth of a baby.

Does it sound familiar? The Christmas story and the story of Ruth come together on this point: God takes apparently insignificant people and events -- a poor young woman, far from her home, a scared young man, a group of shepherds, a helpless baby -- he takes ordinary things like this to accomplish his grandest purposes.

And the great lesson of the book of Ruth and of Christmas is that God can take these ordinary people and events -- these seemingly insignificant puzzle pieces -- and fit them together into a magnificent picture. Don't make the mistake of thinking that history is being shaped in Washington, or London, or Moscow, or Beijing. It is not in those places that eternal destinies are being shaped. God still uses the ordinary, the seemingly insignificant things to work his purposes.