Friday, August 13, 2010
God Is At Work - The Story of Ruth Part II - A "Chance" Meeting, Part 23 of 44
TEXT: "In those days Israel had no king and everyone did as they saw fit" (Judges 17:6; 21:25).
IDEA: How Bible books are arranged forces us indirectly to think about how God works.
PURPOSE: To help listeners understand that what we are inside matters more than how we look outside.
Have you ever thought much about how the books of the Bible are arranged?
Who decided the order of them?
I. In most of the ancient lists, the story of Ruth is attached to the book of Judges (as it is in our Bibles).
What is Judges about?
It's a record of spiritually crippled, charismatic "warlords" who are tragi-comedy figures. They "lead" the people of Israel each time the nation gets away from God.
The book's governing statement is "In those days Israel had no king [they had warlords and Levites], and everyone did as they saw fit" (Judges 17:6; 21:25).
The book presents a sharp contrast between the devotion and success of Joshua and the generation that followed him and the tragic spiritual failures of the next generation.
Joshua, in God's strength, defeated the Canaanites and their gods and received God's blessing. During the period of the judges, the people built altars to the Canaanite gods and handed back the land to them. Although Israel periodically tore down a pagan altar and replaced it with an altar to Jehovah, in reality the people became increasingly Canaanized. The book ends in one of the most sordid passages in the Bible.
Why do you think Ruth would be attached to a book like Judges?
It takes place during the time that "the judges ruled" (Ruth 1:1). So what?
People in the small village of Bethlehem had suffered the judgment seen in the famine, but they remained faithful to God. They are in sharp contrast to their broader environment.
II. The arrangement of Judges and Ruth tells us that even though the people seem to have abandoned God, He had not abandoned them.
God was at work in ordinary ways and in desperate times to accomplish His purposes to bring Israel its greatest king, and the world a Savior.
