It’s always good to remember that good exists in this world when it seems like darkness is everywhere. The Book of Judges was in that time when Israel had no king and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. In this time period we come to the Book of Ruth with a beacon of hope and of God’s purposes that will come to pass in faithful love. I love this story! It’s a reminder of what Gandalf the Grey said in The Lord of the Rings series The Hobbitt: “I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay…small acts of kindness and love.” (Gandalf the Grey, in The Hobbitt) by J.R.R. Tolkien, first published September 21, 1937.

This book of remembrance in Ruth is about two women but it begins with a woman named Naomi who is married to a man from Bethlehem and who has two sons. During a famine in Israel, they move to Moab and lived there. The two sons marry Moabite women and one of them is named Ruth. After ten years, Naomi’s husband and both sons have died leaving Naomi with her two Moabite daughters-in-law. When she decides to return alone to her own people she first urges her two daughters-in-law to return to their parents homes and find new husbands to care for them. Naomi feels abandoned and knows she cannot provide for these two young women and herself. She is in a desperate situation as a widow and now also as a woman who will travel alone bereft of the protection of a husband and sons. In the note below it said: There was almost nothing worse than being a widow in the ancient world. Widows were taken advantage of or ignored. They were almost always poverty stricken. God’s law, therefore, provided that the nearest relative of the dead husband should care for the widow; but Naomi had no relatives in Moab, and she did not know if any of her relatives were alive in Israel.

One daughter-in-law loves Naomi but agrees to return to her parents home. Ruth, however, says the words that have been recorded and remembered for us. “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” v. 16-17.

Can you imagine how God responded to those words of enduring love and faith during this time when Israel was determined to go “its own way” apart from God?

The two women arrive in Bethlehem and Naomi tells her neighbors, “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.” v. 20-21.

Did the Lord bring Naomi back empty?

He brought her back with Ruth. A woman of faith in God even though she wasn’t raised in a country that knew God. She came to know God from her husband and his family. Can you imagine her listening to stories about the Children of Israel from their perspective? Can you imagine how learning about God’s miracles must have affected her? They returned to Bethlehem. But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from the ancient times. Micah 5:2

Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David and an ancestor of Jesus. Is it any wonder given her heart of enduring, faithful love for others and for God? Small acts of kindness and love that keep the darkness at bay. How we all need that kind of love in ourselves and for others. Then can we magnify the Lord as Ruth did in so simple and faithful a way. Small things show great love!