Week 5 – Ruth

Intro

I don’t think I can summarize the book of Ruth any better than the Bible Project video included here; just go watch it.

Towards the end of the video, the narrator points out one of the unusual aspects of Ruth: God is hardly mentioned in the entire book. Sure, characters like Boaz and Ruth talk about God, but the book’s author never once mentions God actively doing anything. In Ruth God is a background character, participating through things that seem either coincidental or inevitable. That helps us understand today how God can be intimately at work in the lives of his people even when it isn’t terribly evident. Also, we see in Ruth something God has done multiple times in our sermon series, taking someone who initially doesn’t know or worship him and bringing that person into his family. Ruth’s story is both an example of redemption and an ancestral building block of Jesus’ work of redemption, considering Ruth became the great-grandmother of David, the forefather of Jesus.