A Little Bridge to the Kingdom

Order of Service

• Call to Worship — Revelation 5:12-13
• Hymn — Thee We Adore, Eternal Lord (#223)
• Prayer of Invocation
• Confessional Reading — Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 26 (Christ's Kingly Office)
• Hymn — Holy Spirit of the Messiah (#401)
• Pastoral Prayer
• Scripture Reading — Ruth 1:1-5
• Sermon
• Hymn — Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus (#300)
• Benediction — Numbers 6:24-26

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Sermon Title: A Little Bridge to the Kingdom

Scripture: Ruth 1:1-5

I. Overview: The Problem Established in the Opening Verses

A. Ruth is placed between Judges and 1 Samuel, serving as a small but pivotal bridge between two redemptive-historical epochs

1. Judges 21:25 ends with the dilemma: no king in Israel, everyone doing what is right in his own eyes
2. The answer to that dilemma comes through 1 Samuel, but Ruth is the bridge that gets us there

B. The historical setting: the days of the judges (Ruth 1:1)

1. A time of spiritual chaos, anarchy, and abandonment of God
2. Famine in the land — a sign of God's covenant judgment per Leviticus 26:19-20: the land withholds its produce as punishment for disobedience

C. Elimelek takes his family to Moab — an act of unfaithfulness

1. "Bethlehem" means house of bread, making the famine bitterly ironic
2. Bethlehem of Judah is emphasized — pointing toward the scepter promise of Genesis 49:8-10: the king will come from Judah
3. To "sojourn" is to enter as an alien with few rights, placing the family in servitude to a pagan master

D. Meaning of the names

1. Elimelek — "my God is king," ironic since God is not being treated as king in Israel
2. Naomi — "sweet" or "pleasant," a name whose meaning will be inverted by her suffering
3. Mahlon — "weak and sickly"; Chilion — "frailty," foreshadowing their deaths
4. Ephrathites of Bethlehem in Judah — a clan marker pointing toward 1 Samuel 17:12: David is the son of an Ephrathite of Bethlehem in Judah

E. Tragedy compounds: Elimelek dies (Ruth 1:3); the two sons marry Moabite women (Ruth 1:4) — disobedience to the Pentateuchal prohibition on intermarriage with pagans; then Mahlon and Chilion also die (Ruth 1:5)

1. Orpah — "stiff-necked"; Ruth — "friendship"
2. Naomi is left a childless widow in foreign territory — facing destitution, poverty, and potential slavery, with no social safety net

II. God Uses an Enemy of Israel to Carry Out His Redemptive Purposes

A. The Moabites are not a minor irritant but a sworn enemy of Israel

1. Deuteronomy 23:3-6: no Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the Lord even to the tenth generation — because they did not show hospitality to Israel and hired Balaam to curse them
2. Yet God turns Ruth the Moabite into the instrument of his redemptive plan

B. This functions as an indictment on the covenant people of God

1. New Testament parallel: Acts 18:5-6 — Paul turns from unbelieving Jews to the Gentiles
2. Romans 11 — Gentiles grafted in; the covenant people made jealous and drawn back
3. Matthew 21:43 — the kingdom taken from those who reject it and given to a people producing its fruit

C. The fruit of the kingdom belongs to God, not to human strength

1. Matthew 9:37 — the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few; the power of production is God's
2. Deuteronomy's warning: do not say "by my own strength I have gotten all of this"
3. Weakness is a prerequisite for kingdom fruit — God works through weak vessels; when we are weak, then we are strong (2 Corinthians 12:10)
4. Two responses to weakness on display: Naomi's hopeless despair vs. Ruth's faith — both are weak, but one rests in God's power

III. God Looks on the Heart, Not Outward Appearance

A. Israel demanded a king like the nations — handsome, tall, impressive externally (Saul, 1 Samuel 8)

B. The true king David's ancestry is filled with tragedy and scandal — his great-grandmother is a Moabite woman

C. This proves the story is God's story, not a human construction

1. No human author seeking to persuade an Israelite audience would make the hero descend from their arch-enemy
2. Similarly, the gospel writers would not have chosen women as the primary witnesses to the resurrection if constructing a merely human narrative
3. God's ways are not our ways — we must always be ready to be surprised by God

IV. Spiritual Seed Over Natural Seed

A. Genesis 3:15 — the promised seed of the woman will crush the serpent's head; this seed has always been spiritual, not merely physical

1. Eve's mistaken identification of Cain as the promised seed (Genesis 4:1) illustrates the danger of equating physical birth with spiritual promise

B. The genealogy of Christ in Matthew 1 makes the point explicit

1. Matthew is establishing Jesus as son of David and offspring of Abraham for a Jewish audience
2. Yet Gentiles — Ruth the Moabite, Rahab the Gentile prostitute — are included in the lineage
3. The repetitious "he fathered" pattern breaks at Matthew 1:16: Joseph is the husband of Mary, not the biological father — Jesus enters the Davidic line through adoption, confirming that the kingly line is a spiritual, not merely natural, lineage

C. Jesus himself redefines family in spiritual terms (Matthew 12)

1. "Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, sister, and mother"
2. The true genealogy is the Lamb's Book of Life — generations born again by the Spirit

D. Application: the legacy we are called to produce

1. In our homes and in the church, we are to raise up generations born of the Spirit, not merely of the flesh
2. Ruth — a woman after God's own heart — leads to David, to Christ, and to all those united to Christ by the Spirit until he comes again