Christ in Ruth

Ruth 1 sets the whole book’s gospel in motion through a single outsider’s “yes.” Ruth is a Moabitess - a daughter of a people long at odds with Israel, by birth a stranger to the covenant and its promises - and yet, with nothing to gain and every reason to turn back, she forsakes her people and her gods to bind herself to Naomi and to the LORD: Intreat me not to leave thee… for whither thou goest, I will go… thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God (…

Ruth 2 turns on a single Hebrew word the rest of the book will not let go of: goel , the near kinsman with both the right and the duty to redeem his own. Naomi names him at the outset - Boaz, a mighty man of wealth, of the family of Elimelech (v. 1) - and by the chapter’s end she sees what his kindness means: The man is near of kin unto us, one of our next kinsmen (v. 20). Boaz pours out on a destitute foreigner a grace she never earned and could not demand: his field to g…

Ruth 3 is the night the redeemer is asked to redeem. A widowed foreigner with no land, no husband, and no future lies down at the feet of a sleeping man and makes the boldest request in the book: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman (v. 9). The word she leans on is goel - the kinsman-redeemer, the relative with both the right and the duty to buy back what a destitute family has lost and to raise up the name of the dead. And the word s…

Ruth 4 is where the book’s great keyword finally pays off. From the first chapter the question has hung over Naomi’s emptied house: who will be its goel - the near kinsman with both the right and the duty to redeem? Here he steps forward. There is a nearer kinsman who has the first claim, but he draws back the moment he learns the cost: I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I mar mine own inheritance (v. 6). What he will not do, Boaz does - he buys back the forfeited land an…