The Beautiful Gift of Friendship

This spring I've taken part in a study called People Like Us, a look into different people highlighted in the Bible whose lives and stories can teach us something about what it looks like for a healthy, spiritually mature person to love and serve God. It is vital to begin any such study with a long look at the other end of the spectrum of spiritual health; namely, the fact that the core of our relationship with God does not have anything to do with what we do or do not do. Rather, it has everything to do with Jesus and His graciousness. Still, it is a continuum, and when we are a healthy Christian, our lives will show it by the things we think and do and say. When we are a spiritually healthy follower of Christ, our lives will remind people of Jesus. 

So we have discussed all kinds of people's lives in this series: Elijah, Joseph, the servant girl in the story of Elisha and Naaman, Gideon, and now Ruth. I did not realize it before, but some theologians consider that the book of Judges (which is where the story of Gideon is told) and the book of Ruth are actually one book written by the prophet Samuel. We can learn so much from these two very different parts of the same whole. 

​The Old Testament begins the story of God's beautiful plan for restoration and redemption, and is an in-depth look at the nation of Israel. Judges tells the story of several different cycles' worth of Israel, representing the people of God, getting into a lot of trouble, and God continually delivering them from it. The way the cycle begins is generally like this, “Everyone did what was right in their own eyes." This can often be taken to mean that people were purposefully thumbing their noses at God‘s way and the law, and doing whatever they please instead. But I would like to point out that it actually says they were doing what was right in their own eyes, meaning they thought that what they were doing was right. That means either they totally forgot what God‘s law said, or they had just changed it around in their minds to suit their own ways, both of which are a lot like what we all do all the time.

In any case, the people do what they think is right, and then they drift toward idolatry, which is really just another word for religion. With religion they attempt to manipulate their circumstances to get what they want, and they end up getting into a huge mess because of their idolatry. Somebody comes in and overruns them or takes all their stuff again and again, and it is the same story every single time: make their own way, turn to idols, get ransacked, get delivered by God, remember for a while, but forget again and do what’s right in their own eyes… The cycle goes on and on and on, seven times in this one book alone. When you read all of Judges from cover to cover, you consider tearing your hair out by the end. Stop! What in the world are you people doing?

But we can’t say too much, because we do this too. Judges simply tells the story of the human condition. Israel in the Old Testament was to be the snapshot of what it looks like to walk with God in covenant relationship. They were supposed to be the roadmap for everyone else, and as they walked with God, they were to invite the rest of the world to walk with God with them. But of course, they kept forgetting, and thought that God had chosen them simply because they were fantastic and fabulous, not because He was choosing the smallest and most foolish thing in the world to show his greatness and power to the rest of the world, which is actually the case. 

But we do this all the time, too. We who walk with God continually put the cart before the horse, and mistakenly think that God loves us because we follow the rules so well. In fact, we make all of life about following the rules, and we forget entirely that the whole point of a relationship with God is the relationship with God, and not some sort of scoring system where we get points for what we do or don’t do. We, too, fall into a weird cycle of forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering, again and again all the way until we die. It is actually just as exasperating as the picture Samuel painted in Judges.

We spent quite a bit of time this spring looking at the story of Gideon, who was one of the deliverers that God raised up during the time of the Judges. He really was a person just like us, in that it took several chapters for God to convince Gideon that yes, He really meant him, even though Gideon and everybody around him thought he was the last person that anybody would choose to deliver the nation. It’s a great story, and very inspiring! But still, it is an epic story, and most of us cannot relate to the idea of being the one person that God picks out of a generation to deliver the entire nation from the trouble we all got into together by doing what was right in our own eyes.

So how amazing then, is the part of the story about Ruth. I think Samuel was brilliant to write Judges and Ruth as one book. Judges paints a painfully accurate picture of the endless cycle of chaos into which God continually reaches His hand to set us upright again. Ruth is a much deeper and slower-paced look into one person‘s life, and how her relationships and choices allowed her to become a part of God's unstoppable story of redemption and restoration. 

The years of her life story commemorated in this book take place at roughly the same time as the story of Gideon. But Ruth is not a Jew, and at the beginning of the book she is not a follower of God. She is from a totally different people who worship totally different gods, and just becomes part the story when she marries a Jewish guy whose family left their hometown of—guess where?--Bethlehem, to escape a famine. A woman named Naomi followed her husband Elimalek, and their two sons found wives while they were in the land of Moab. We don’t know what happened, but all three of the men died. That left Naomi and her two daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah, as widows on their own, which at that time especially meant they did not have an amazingly bright future ahead of them. Naomi recognized this, and encouraged her daughters-in-law to leave her and go back to their own people and their own land and their own gods to try their luck there.

And here’s where my point for today comes in. Up to this moment, Ruth is not part of the story of the people of God, and what God is doing on the Earth to reconcile men unto Himself. At least she does not appear to be, because she is not from Israel. In this account, she is a young widow woman from Moab, an outsider, someone with no impact or influence at all. She’s the wrong race, the wrong gender, the wrong status, the wrong everything. But look what God does, and especially look at how He does it!

Many commentators would say that in Ruth chapter one, we actually witness the moment in time when Ruth decides to give her heart and life to God. Here she is with her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, and they’re counting what they’ve got, which doesn’t take long because they have nothing. Ruth watches and listens as Naomi does an incredibly unselfish thing in offering to release her and Orpah to go back to their own people and support network. In doing that, Naomi is basically taking what very little she has of hope for a future, namely, two daughters-in-law who might be able to get married and have some children so that they’ll all be cared for, but instead looks out for their best interest over her own.

Orpah takes the opportunity to go home and start over, but something about Naomi's incredibly unselfish act is the thing that tips Ruth’s heart over the edge. She’s heard a lot about this God of Naomi‘s over the last few years—Naomi and her husband and sons surely talked a lot about Him, and must have taught her a lot about God‘s ways and truth. Now the thing that sets Ruth’s life on a brand new course and trajectory is this unselfish demonstration of unconditional love.

When Naomi releases Ruth, Ruth sees that there is something really different about the God of Naomi‘s, so different that Ruth does not want to go back to her own people and the gods that they worship. She recognizes that this God, the very one that actually is so uncompromising in the fact that He claims to be the God of all gods, has a love greater than anyone or anything else in the world.  Jesus talked about this great love the night before He demonstrated it on the cross when He said, "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." (John 15:13)

This unselfish love is the greatest witness that any of us carries. 

We get so hung up on the rules, that we forget that the thing that makes any of us different is the fact that we have been beneficiaries of the unmerited favor of the God of the universe, Who longs for relationship with each of his sons and daughters. Understanding and demonstrating this kind of unconditional love and friendship is the kind of spiritual maturity to which all of us should aspire. Nobody around us who doesn’t know God really cares much for our rules or for our religion; they’ve already got their own, and frankly, more rules and more religion don’t help anybody. People desperately need transformed hearts, and only God can do that. God wants us to share His unconditional love with others, so that people will recognize Him and know Him and turn to Him.

Samuel brilliantly painted a picture for each of us who will read his books. We are all part of the drama of generations rising and falling, but we can also be a part of God's unstoppable plan of redemption and restoration. I love what Ruth‘s story says about the heart of our good Father: she was an outsider in every way, and yet her acceptance of Him, and frankly, her bold insertion of herself into the grand story of what God is doing on the Earth, made her one of Jesus‘s foremothers. She became the grandmother of the greatest king in Israel’s history, but so much more than that, one in the line of the One True King, who saved the whole world. Her life and story give us a glimpse into what God has in mind for each of us as carriers of the Christ.

Be encouraged today, and may the Lord bless you and the ones you love!

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Thinking of friendship is one of my favorite things to do—I believe there is so much evidence pointing to the fact that it is one of God's favorite subjects, too. If you're interested in more, please consider picking up a copy of my book Living Stones which has an entire chapter on friendship...

Living Stones: Learning to Walk in Community as a Follower of Christ