This week, instead of a written devotion, John Goldwater and I looked at the blessings and genealogy at the end of the book of Ruth and discussed what they show us about God’s redemptive plan. It is our prayer that this kind of gospel conversation helps you to see how God’s redemptive plan involved ordinary sinners just like us and how God continues to do so today!
Keith Harris: Welcome to this week’s Refresh & Restore [devotion]! We have a special guest today; John Goldwater, say, “Hello”.
John Goldwater: Hello!
Keith: This is going to act as an epilogue to our Ruth series. So, I’m going to read our Scripture passage, and we’re going to have some interesting conversation if nothing else.
11 Then all the people who were at the gate and the elders said, “We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you act worthily in Ephrathah and be renowned in Bethlehem, 12 and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the offspring that the Lord will give you by this young woman.”[1]
Ruth 4:11-12
18 Now these are the generations of Perez: Perez fathered Hezron, 19 Hezron fathered Ram, Ram fathered Amminadab, 20 Amminadab fathered Nahshon, Nahshon fathered Salmon, 21 Salmon fathered Boaz, Boaz fathered Obed, 22 Obed fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered David.[2]
Ruth 4:18-22
If you have been listening/reading, you know we say we are affiliated with Christ Community Church – a cool place. So, John, whatever this turns out as is what we will have.
John: Awesome. I’m excited! Thanks for having me.
Keith: You’re welcome! As we look at this, one of the things I wanted to talk about is how at the end of the book of Ruth, you’ve got this fairly weird blessing that ends up pointing to the genealogy of Jesus, specifically David and Ruth. So, I’m going to just read a section, and, then, we’ll just kind of talk about it. You kick off whatever you think, and we’ll pause every so-often.
John: Awesome.
Keith: The first thing, you’ve got these elders, they’ve just seen Boaz pass the sandal with the unnamed not-the-redeemer, and looking at how Boaz is now going to be the redeemer. They say, “May the Lord make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel.” So, talk to me about that picture of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah.
John: Yeah, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah – and their cohorts, their handmaids who also added to the family – were extremely important to the nation of Israel for building up the twelve patriarchs. But it doesn’t happen in a way where we would say it’s traditionally good. It’s not a great model for home life, marriage, domestic stuff; like we would suppose they would. They’re in the Bible – they’re wives, they’re leaders – they have good qualities, but it was a dysfunctional home. Usually we think that makes us disqualified, but it seems like that wasn’t the case for Rachel and Leah.
Keith: Right. It’s definitely not the thing where if we were talking to our kids today or to someone who is about to get married, we’d say, “Wow! We hope you have a long happy marriage of our great-grandparent!” In this case, it’s not. So, in this genealogy at the end of this time of the Judges, everyone is doing what “was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). You definitely see a picture of a whole situation that amasses on other situations like you say with Jacob, Rachel, Leah, the handmaidens, getting back in with Esau and everything co-mingled. It’s just a huge mess.
John: Yeah. It’s a big mess. When I preached on it, I called it “Putting the Fun in Disfunctional”. And we just don’t think of Bible characters that way. It’s pretty cool that they’re in this blessing like this because it kind of tips God’s hand to where He says, you know, “I know what they’ve done; I know who they are.” And, yet, He chose to work through them – with them. That’s pretty awesome.
Keith: It is. And that’s definitely a theme that we see in the book of Ruth that none of the characters…. And we’re very careful to say characters and not heroes, necessarily. Boaz definitely was a – his name was a literal pillar of the temple (1 Kings 7:21), but he himself was imperfect. His mom, Rahab, was a prostitute, but God redeemed that whole situation. You get that beautiful picture. Which moves on to this blessing that, I have to think probably did not make sense to them at the time. Like, maybe God’s Spirit? What do you think?
John: Well, for sure, God certainly inspires His Word, and I think that’s still true for us today in the sense that we may say things and are not quite sure of the whole significance of it. And the significance of the genealogy that you read, they would have no clue. They were just living life. The fact that God was shaping them and their family, as imperfect as they were, to bring out the perfect and only Messiah for mankind. That’s pretty mind-boggling.
Keith: Absolutely. So, you look as God’s Spirit moves on them – at the time, again, they didn’t know that what they were saying was even going to be a part of God’s Word, but they move from there with Rachel and Leah to “may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to [her father-in-law] Judah”. Ummm….
John: Yeah, we’re calling DHS on them. You know what I’m saying? You’re calling child protective services on them. This is…something went horribly wrong in the Judah-Tamar story. And, because God is our redeemer, He takes our mess makes it a masterpiece, and it’s incredible….
Keith: …and chooses that to be the entire tribe, the entire basis, for that lineage. The entire family tree literally hinges on Israel to Judah. And there were other things that we might be tempted to say, we don’t know that it’s worse, per se, from a human perspective, what Judah did, but God knows what He’s doing. And it’s probably best we don’t get to pick in these situations.
So, you’ve got Rachel and Leah, and Tamar – talking about redeemers, the whole Boaz situation, Judah never should have been in the position to be in that. RIght, he had promised the third son after the first son had died, and then the “issue” with the second one. {John laughs.} Yeah, you can look that one up in Genesis.
John: That’s right. Look up the word “issue” in Genesis.
Keith: Yes. {Both laugh.} We’re not going….
John: We’re not going to tell you that. You have to look that one up yourself.
Keith: Yes, we’re not going to go into that. But there wasn’t a redeemer. He says he’s going to promise [Tamar] his son, and, then, Tamar has her people watching Judah while Judah’s people are watching Tamar. They both try to catch each other at the same time, and they, well, they caught each other. And had twins.
John: Wow. Tamar was in a desperate situation, and, you know, she felt like her back was against the wall. Her father-in-law was not – and he wasn’t keeping his word. He was at least very delayed in it. And, nonetheless, this is who God chose. This is the shaping of the genealogy. It doesn’t look perfect to us, but it was perfect because that’s the way God wanted it. It’s pretty wild.
Keith: It is. Like I said, we probably have more to identify with Jacob, more to identify with Judah, with Tamar – our backs against the wall, making the best decisions we think we know how. But we keep running back to that same problem as the end of the book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his eyes” (Judges 21:25). Ultimately, that wraps us up. We’ll take a break, and come back and talk about the branch of the genealogy from David’s side.
Alright, so when we look at this next part, we’ve already read the genealogy at the end of Ruth 4. I want to shift now and just, kind of, hit it from a different direction.
1 The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, 3 and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, 4 and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, 5 and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, 6 and Jesse the father of David the king.
And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah….[3]
Matthew 1:1-6
You see a lot of familiar names that we’ve already talked about. You have Jacob father of Judah. We know the whole situation: Jacob, Rachel, Leah, Judah, Tamar; it even mentions all of that. I think it’s cool. I think you said when we were talking [earlier] that we, being on the other side of this get to see the full story. Why don’t you talk to that just a little bit, the full side knowing that this leads to Jesus.
John: It’s really awesome. It really shows, in my opinion, that God is in control, and it gives us a reason to trust. Whether our family history is messed up, you know, in the day-to-day life, we see the mess, we feel the pain, we smell the stink of what’s going on in this world. But there’s a bigger Story. God has a plan. God is weaving together a beautiful tapestry of lives and purpose, and we can’t see it all.
So, we look at the genealogy, and it has a sense of being clean – being sanitized – if you just look at it and read through it. But when you stop, like we have and you tap on certain areas, you go: oh, man. It got even worse when we got in the New Testament because we bring in David who father’s Solomon by the “wife of Uriah”. And it doesn’t go into, well, who’s the wife of Uriah? And the sinful mess that brought that about. But we see that God used it. God used it all. Now, we don’t – I always have to caution myself when I think of other folks. We don’t have to make any excuse for sin. We don’t need to go out making our own mess. We live in a pretty messy place, and it just happens. But we don’t need to be fatalistic because a lot of folks get that way too now. You know: well, I can’t do it, my parents, upbringing, I just don’t know what I could be good for….
Keith: Or, what’s the use…? I’m going to mess up again.
John: That’s right – just throw in the towel. A genealogy like this, rightly understood, really can make a big difference in this. The first two names: {this is the book…}. These are like our big hero names, and we know the dirt on them. We know the fear and the lying that Abraham, the father of faith, got caught up in. We know the sin of David, the immorality, the cover-up, betrayal, and murder that he got involved in….
Keith: …with the “wife of Uriah”….
John: …OF Uriah, who is in the genealogy of Jesus.
Keith: With that epithet.
John: Yeah. It’s right there. It’s like the both/and. We’re living in our own time, like these people were. Again, we see the mess, we feel the pain, we go through the struggle, but when you see it in the genealogy, it’s like you see it from God’s perspective. God says, yeah, I still used all that for my glory.
Keith: Right. And I think that is a good example. One of the things you said was sometimes when we read through the genealogies we get this sanitized view. I think part of it is that we don’t…read through the genealogies. We know the parts. Sometimes we have a very Precious Moments, children’s bible view of these things when God has an accurate view of us.
We’ve been coming back to this verse a lot at Jesus Saves Bro and at Christ Community, I guess over the last month, 1 John 2:1-2: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin…” – that’s our ideal, sanitized view – “but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”
John: That’s good news!
Keith: It is. You should make that a catch-phrase.
John: That could be a catch-phrase. Hey, that’s good news. That’s something worth telling the whole world about. When we say for folks, just leave me alone or I’ve tried Jesus – tried church – I’ve tried all these things…. It’s like, maybe you just need to let God do what God [does]. He saves. He redeems. Whatever mess you’re in, I daresay, I know I’ve had my share of mess. Then, I read David’s mess, and I feel like I’m just a baby-messer. I’ve just got baby mess in comparison.
Keith: And I think that’s a good view of it because multiple times in the Scripture – in the Old Testament it was prophesies of David that when basically…Samuel’s talking to Saul saying, hey, your kingship is over; God’s going to send me to get a man who’s after His own heart (1 Samuel 13:14). Then, we see David – he kills Goliath – all these things that give him that hero status – but all the while there’s no perfection. There’s humanity. And it’s in that promise that God made [to] David that one day somebody would be on your throne. I mean, just looking at that, you follow the history of Israel…after Solomon, the kingdom splits, and then, ultimately, after they end up in the exile because of more humanity – more sin – you have people in the lineage of David [like] Zerrubabel who comes back and is just a governor. Like, they’re rebuilding Jerusalem but they don’t….
John: There’s no king.
Keith: There’s no king, there’s no throne.
John: There’s no wall for a minute. No temple. I mean, they’ve got to rebuild from scratch.
Keith: But one thing they don’t have to rebuild is the promise of God – the redemption of God. They didn’t need Zerrubabel sitting on a throne. They’ve had all of David’s grandsons and all of that mess. Now, they’re looking for that Messiah-King.
John: Yeah, who’s going to endure forever. He’s going to be the King over God’s Kingdom forever.
And God used imperfect people – very imperfect – to bring that about, to bring His plan, to bring His promise to fruition. That’s awesome. That’s just the awesome thing about God [being] worthy, He’s brag-worthy. You don’t boast except for in the Lord. Let him who boasts boast in the Lord (2 Corinthians 10:17). We can say, Lord, you didn’t let our weakness spoil Your plan. You didn’t let our sinfulness – our mess – ruin Your promise. And that’s stout. That’s frank and awesome.
Keith: He is willing to let us participate. He redeems us. There’s the verse that L.G. quotes all the time, Ephesians 2:10: For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
That He chose us when we were dead in our trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1-2), knowing full well the gamut when we were enemies – when we weren’t even on the same team. And He died for us, and knew what He alone could do with us. It’s cool.
John: It is cool. In going over these genealogies and looking at the people, to me, it’s always been a cool thing. You know, I guess I’m interested – maybe you, have you ever thought, God shows us these things about some of the people – I wonder what’s the dirt on the other people? You know, we don’t know all these other guys. We assume that maybe there wasn’t dirt, but no…. We know they had dirt, too; it’s just not listed.
Keith: I think that goes back to the unnamed redeemer. It’s tempting to look at it as cut-and-dry; like, oh, you’re the closer redeemer. Obviously, there was some play there. Elimilech didn’t have a brother sitting in the wings. He didn’t have a brother who was supposed to redeem. You go back and look at Deuteronomy 25, past the brother, there ain’t a list. There ain’t a genealogy. Someone could redeem, but none of them had to. And so it’s tempting to want to judge the unnamed guy harshly because he didn’t want to be a redeemer.
John: Strangely enough, he could have already had a wife that he loved and didn’t want to take on another. Imagine that, right?!
Keith: Or some unknown situation….
John: …not enough money, not wealthy enough….
Keith: What makes the lack of the name there is that he didn’t participate in the redemption. Ultimately, that’s going to be the difference. Not us participating in redeeming but us partaking in the redemption Jesus Christ offers.
John: A door was open to him, and he didn’t take it. We don’t know why.
Keith: We know they didn’t give his name. And they make a huge point to not say his name.
John: Hey, you could have been used to be a part of the genealogy. That’s like life though. We don’t always know. We don’t know what God’s doing. For this guy, he just missed – he was so close…. Again, he might have had very legit reasons.
Keith: And, obviously, God had a very specific plan for all of this. You go back and you look…Rahab….
John: He wanted Rahab’s boy in there!
Keith: And that’s another cool thing – we looked at it early on in the [series] where we realize that Naomi’s prayer for Ruth is that God “deal kindly” with her. Go back and look in Joshua, and Rahab’s deal with the spies was, hey, deal kindly with me. That hesed….
John: There’s plenty of hesed in Ephrathah.
Keith: That symmetry that God agreed – deal kindly; God agreed [again] – deal kindly. And then you get that whole cool picture.
John: One of the things we’re studying in the book of 2 Kings right now – that we notice is that God tells these guys things. Like He told Jehu, you’re going to have four generations to reign on the throne and when that was accomplished, the writer tells us that was the fourth one so God’s Word is fulfilled. And so much of Scripture is like that. God says it, and we see the fulfillment of it. God’s never going to forget anything. You know, if He promised to be kind to a prostitute in Jericho, you know, He’s going to keep His Word all the way down the line. That’s just God.
Keith: And, I think it was W.A. Criswell who kind of did a little play on the scarlet cord that was tied to signify, here’s where we are…. It’s really easy to see that scarlet cord of Christ work through God’s redemption.
John: It is, all the way through the Scripture.
Keith: And it’s cool that we get to participate.
John: Thank You, God.
Keith: Amen.
We’ll do one more little, short section after…break.
For our little wrap-up section, John and I have been chatting, talking about this next section. And one of the things that kind of comes just from our separate, yet shared, experiences is that it’s easy to convince ourselves that our failures are catastrophic. So, we want to kind of bring this back in because we’ve been dancing around the idea – and just haven’t said it yet – we are regular people. And you who are listening/reading are regular people; you have sin and failures, but, if you trust in Christ, He is the same God who dealt kindly with all of these that we’ve talked about. So, we’ve got some verses to kind of wrap it up and bring it together.
11 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, 12 training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, 13 waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, 14 who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.[4]
Titus 2:11-14
You look at that first part, and we mess that up quick – self-controlled, upright, godly lives. Well, no checks there. But “waiting for our blessed hope”…. So, talk to us about this, John, and kind of bring it together so we can understand.
John: This is the lynchpin. We look at our sins; we look at our failures, our mess, and we do think we’ve blown it. And we have blown it for ourselves. We’ve blown it in our performance. We’ve blown it in our morality. We’ve blown it, maybe, physically. Maybe you’re in a place where you’ve hurt yourself through stupid acts. But nothing that we can do is greater than what God has done. We can’t undo God’s plan for us – God’s redemptive plan. That’s what we got from the genealogies – the “glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ”. Well, His first appearing came through really regular people like us – sinful, messy folks. And His second appearing is coming to save folks like us – to rescue us. He died on the cross and rose from the grave in the gospel to save us. He’s coming. It’s a rescue mission. He’s coming to save us, not because we’re worthy or because we have everything in a row, our ducks in a row.
I’ve got a sign in my office at The Foundry that says, “I don’t have ducks. I don’t have a row. I have squirrels, and they’re everywhere.”
Keith: The good news is, so is Jesus. {Both laugh}
John: Jesus, He’s the one! So, when we look at ourselves, and we get trapped catastrophizing…we make everything so dramatic. It’s as if we’re discounting what God has come to do and what God can do and what He’s going to do.
Keith: And has done. And is doing!
John: That’s right. And, if anything, we can take courage and say, “Don’t quit. Don’t give up. Keep trusting the Lord.”
Hope is a valid strategy going forward. I hope that my God and Savior – and I don’t say hope as in I’m doubting, I’m saying my hope of any kind of redemption and eternal life all is firmly set on how Christ is good enough. And how He’s big enough, not me, not on my love, not even on my faith. A lot of people say, well, you put your faith in God; well, God gave me faith. That’s a gracious gift from God in the beginning. Everything comes down to God is our Savior – the Savior of real people, messy people, sinners who have blown it bad. And He is the One. That’s good news!
Keith: Man, it’s good news! And again, to bring this together, remember we’ve talked about this multiple times today and throughout this series: a Jerichoan prostitute asked for them to deal kindly with her; an Israelite widow prayed over her Moabite daughters-in-law, and said may God deal kindly with you and give you a husband.
You get this beautiful picture of Orpah who did nothing wrong, she went back home just as her mother-in-law bid her to do. She was obedient. But Ruth who was obedient to a higher thing, God was working in her life and says where you go I will go, where you lodge I will lodge, your people will be my people, your God will be my God. You get that picture from Revelation 21 when Jesus comes back, when our “blessed hope” is not distant but realized and we’re in His presence. All of the things that we struggle with, they’re not going to just magically come untrue; that last tear is going to be wiped away by His hand. Now, it’s not, okay, I’m going to be your people. It’ll be like I’m here with you as my people. I’m here with you as your God.
John: That, especially that Revelation picture, that reveals what God’s heart has been the whole time. You know, He created people in the garden for fellowship. We fell. We rebelled. We betrayed. We sinned. But God said, I’m not giving up on what my original plan is; I’m going to dwell with you. I’m going to be your God. You’re going to be my people. And we see in the book of Revelation that happens. He makes it happen.
Keith: And Jesus was part of that original plan. And none of this surprises Him.
John: We who are looking at the Word and trusting God can afford, like Ruth, to go forward – to go forward in faith, forward in love, forward in hope. Again, you mentioned Orpah, did she do wrong? No, but just think about it superficially…she went backwards, and Ruth went forwards. We make those decisions. I would encourage all of us – I try to do the same for myself – go forward with God. Walk forward with God even if its scary and you don’t think you’re worthy, remembering that God ultimately has a plan for us to be with Him forever through Christ.
Keith: I think this is a good time – and we do this often in the devotions, all the time at Jesus Saves Bro, all the time at Christ Community, where we let people know how to receive that redemption.
Romans 10:9 –
…because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.[5]
It’s just that simple. If you’re listening/reading today, that’s not an accident, but, if you’re placing your hope in what you can do, think about some of the not-heroes that we’ve talked about and the One hero, Jesus Christ, that we’ve pointed to. As always, if you want to talk or have questions, you can contact us through the website. We’d love to talk to you. Or come check us out Grenada, MS – 2950 Carrollton Road – Christ Community Church, and you can talk to John Goldwater in person. Or any number of people who will be absolutely glad to tell you how Jesus is their blessed hope.
[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Ru 4:11–12.
[2] Ibid., Ru 4:18–22.
[3] Ibid., Mt 1:1–6.
[4] Ibid., Tt 2:11–14.
[5] Ibid., Ro 10:9.
Just Keith Harris 