God’s Resource for the Empty

Yesterday we celebrated Mother’s Day, honoring the mothers or mother figures in our lives that God has graciously given us.

Yet, Mother’s Day is quite a painful day for many. If you scrolled through any type of social media over the weekend, I’m sure that you-like me-saw tender posts about that very topic.

There are women who long to be mothers, but they haven’t found the right spouse to make a family with. Or their bodies aren’t capable of producing children. It was painful for mothers who have lost their children to miscarriages, disease, or accidents, or violence. Painful for women and men who have heart-breaking relationships with their own mothers.

There were many who felt left out, empty, rejected, grieved, and bitter.

But pain and emptiness aren’t limited to Mother’s Day. Grief and suffering aren’t limited to one holiday or one category of difficulty. Pain and difficulty and heartbreak come to everyone – no one is immune.

Who do you know that’s feeling this way? Who in your family is suffering? Who has lost hope and joy? Who can only see the hand of the LORD has gone out against them?

Is that person you?

Once you’ve identified who you know, especially if you are at all close to them, we start asking things like, what are we supposed to do about it? How do we help? What does God have to say about this?

To start answering those serious questions, I want us to turn to the Book of Ruth and connect with the resources God has written into it for His people. Not just for those who are suffering like Naomi, but for His sons and daughters who He sends out to help those who need filling up.

Tragedy in the Life of a Woman

Ruth is a family story that begins in darkness, death, and emptiness. The opening line places us squarely in the “days the judges were judging.” If we have any passing familiarity with the time of Judges, we know that God’s people were doing terrible things and terrible things were being done to them.

So the very first words of the story of Ruth are setting the reader up in a remarkably dark time. Then we immediately get the information about a particular problem: there was a famine in the land. Because of this, a man from Bethlehem Judah went to sojourn in the fields of Moab, with his wife and two sons. Then, immediately, the story jumps to Elimelech dying.

And Naomi is left there in Moab without him, she and her two sons (Ruth 1:3)

The author of the story, in short order, states that the sons take Moabite wives and resided there for 10 years. Then, swiftly, conveys that Naomi’s sons die. How quickly the narrator moves from the death in the ground (famine) to the death of the father to the death of the sons is conveying the sense of back-to-back tragedy.

And look how poignant the text is, emphasizing the mother’s pain (vs. 5): And they died, even her two, Machlon and Chilion.  And again, the text says, she was left without her two children and her husband.  

This woman is experiencing calamity.

It’s important to point out here, too, that the text says the sons took wives and they remained in Moab about 10 years but they didn’t produce any offspring.

The first, short 5 verse of this book begins with back-to-back death: death in the ground, in the family, and death in the wombs of these women.

 

Echoes of the Garden
From a Canonical perspective—looking at the interconnectedness of all Scriptures—the pain of what Naomi is experiencing rings with the echo of the Fall in Eden[1] – the consequences of sin. In Genesis 3:16-24, God curses the ground, introduces the consequence of death, as well as troubles related to childbirth, and living outside of the Promised Land.

 

Naomi’s Perspective

So here’s Naomi, this poor, tragic woman in wretched Moab, experiencing all this painful death and is left alone.

But she’s about to leave Moab – she’s heard that God had visited His people and given them bread[2]. So she gets up and starts returning to Bethlehem. Her two daughters-in-law decide to go with her. Naomi starts urging them to return, go back to their families in Moab. But they won’t leave her.

And now we hear Naomi, in her own words, discuss what’s happened to her:

“Return, my daughters! Why would you come with me? Are there still sons in my womb that could be your husbands?”

She repeats: “Return, my daughters! Go! For I am too old[3] to have a husband again. Even if I were to say there is hope for me, even if I had a husband tonight, and even if I bore sons, would you wait until they were grown? Would you remain unmarried all that time?

No, my daughters, you must not come with me. It is more bitter for me than for you. The hand of the LORD has gone out against me.”  Ruth 1:11-

 

Continued Perspective:

As Naomi and Ruth return to Bethlehem, let’s look at what she says about what’s happened to her. This is where we discover her inner-life, revealed through conversation. This is what her tragedy has worked in her:

 They arrive and the women of the town excitedly call out to her, “Is this Naomi?”

And she gives a blunt response: “Don’t call me Naomi (“pleasant”). Call me Mara (“bitter”), because the Almighty has caused me to be very bitter.

I left here full, but the LORD has caused me to return empty.

More repetition for emphasis: “Why do you call me “Pleasant” seeing that the LORD has testified against me and the Almighty has caused me harm?” Ruth 1:19-21

That’s the picture of Naomi. This empty mother has returned to the Land, but her arms and her womb are empty. She’s childless, husband-less, and essentially powerless, homeless, hopeless, and joyless.

 Do you know someone like this? Do you resonate with Naomi’s experience?

But as I suggested at the beginning, Ruth is a book that is God’s resource to those who feel like Naomi and to those who know Naomis.

Join us next time to see how God sovereignly, lovingly brings a man and a woman – a new Adam and Eve[4] – into the life of this empty mother.

 

NOTES

[1] There is resonance with Deut. 28 here too, where God delineates blessings for obedience to the covenant and curses for disobedience. Both Judges and Ruth have God’s people experiencing the results of either covenant faithfulness or disobedience. Which Deut. 28 itself resounds with the Garden of Eden. If the man and woman obeyed the commandment, they would experience blessing. Upon their disobedience, they received consequences (pain in work, pain in relationship; exile) and in the end, death.

[2] Narratively, here starts the reversal of the pain of 1:1. There was a famine in the land. Now, God visits and gives bread. Naomi probably doesn’t see this reversal yet – we the readers have a privileged perspective on what all is going on in Naomi’s life because the inspired author records the detail and shapes the story for us to learn. We see here the clue that the author has inserted to the text that there might be hope for Naomi on the horizon.  

[3] There is so much intertextuality within Ruth (this text is written to intentionally allude to other Old Testament passages. And by reading Ruth in light of those other texts, we’ll much better understand what the purpose of Ruth is.) The way that Naomi is talking about herself, she is pictured like an old, barren woman, sounding like a second Sarah, Abraham’s wife.

[4] There are clues within the book of Ruth that Ruth and Boaz are a new and BETTER Adam and Eve. Better representatives of God and a better son and daughter.