Decisions That Determine Destiny

the book of ruth chapter two verse one through three and naomi had a kinsmen of her husbands a mighty man of wealth of the family of elimelech and his name was boaz and ruth the moabitess said unto naomi let me now go to the field and glean ears of corn after him in whose sight i shall find grace and she said unto her go my daughter and she went and came and gleaned in the field after the reaper's and her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging to boaz who was of the kindred of elimelech her hap was too light sounds

like good fortune good luck fortuitous occurrence but in reality it put her in god's redemptive plan amen i want to speak just for a few moments on decisions that determine destiny decisions that determine destiny god bless you and you can be seated in jesus name the story of ruth really is the story about two mothers one mother who lost two children and then adopted two children and another mother uh who gave up her son what a sacrifice it was for her but there are about as i counted eight major decisions that are made in the book of ruth and and the beauty of these things

is that god can work even when we make bad decisions when we when we make bad choices i'm so glad that god doesn't just write us off at that point there there is a perfect will of god but i dare say there are few even even among those giants of the faith that we consider there are few who have found that perfect will of god and followed that all their lives but god takes these decisions and somehow brings about a good thing in our lives the the book of ruth is full of misdirection and surprises the it's only 85 verses long and there are many

types revealed in the book and i think that we we have to explain the setting there's a lot of anomalies here i i've i've studied the somewhat the the laws of redemption the levitt laws the laws about the brother-in-law supposed to marry the the wife who is childless of a brother who died and and thank god that some of these laws have passed away amen but uh there there are elaborate laws there are laws of redemption of the land of houses of people there there are laws of adoption and redemption based in in this book of ruth it's it's just chock full of of all

kinds of good stuff if you haven't bothered to read it you need you need to read through the book of ruth uh and if you have read it again maybe with some new understanding but uh there are major decisions that are being made here elimelech just decided because there was a famine in the la in bethlehem that he was going to take his family and move them out down to moab now this was uh superficially we we can justify things by making them sound like they're good decisions and and we talked about this uh but decisions that we make have a domino effect they don't

just affect us they affect everybody around us and they may have effects for generations and so elimelech when he made this decision to go down to moab he took an entire family out of god's will god didn't tell him to go to moab he just made the decision since it looks like things are drying up here i'm just going to move my family and do what's best of what i think is best for them uh and so uh we we we say like this the pastor uh it's my job i have to move well is there a church there well you know not really but

we'll find something it's a promotion for me you got to understand our pastor my education is dependent upon me going to this school this particular school well is there a church there no but i'm sure i can find something pastor uh i i met this guy or i met this gal and and i is she in church well no not really but this is a great person you got to meet him it's a great person and on such decisions destinies are determined it's but a small step or a small journey to moab but it's a long way back and it takes a toll in in

only 146 words in five verses of scripture ten years of story is told in the book of ruth down to moab elimelech died maelon died kilian died and now naomi who had said i went out full we we came out of of bethlehem and we had a lot of things going for us it was because we needed to make this move but all of a sudden in 146 words the world has burned around them nothing's left because of a decision that one person made for his family be careful when you leave bethlehem because when you leave bethlehem it really doesn't matter where you settle the

outcome will always be the same when you leave the house of bread when you leave your good situation where god has promised to sustain you when you leave that you are leaving everything that is secure in your life and it takes sometimes a long time to get back and some never make the journey back to bethlehem and so in in my thinking because of things that i've studied about this i believe that elimelech probably had put some land into a land lease program they sold their land there was a law of redemption about the land and people and and a house if you had a

house in a wall city and you sold it because of poverty you had one year to redeem that house so obviously they didn't sell their house to move to moab because when naomi came back she had a house in bethlehem to come back to whereas she would not have because it would have had to have been redeemed in one year it was over 10 years later when she came back but the land was sold i i have a scripture i i think i can back this up that the land was sold to support them while they were in the land of moab now the law

of redemption for the land said this uh if you have land and you've fallen on hard times i will lease your land from you and i'll pay you whatever value we assess the crops at on a yearly basis so if your crops bring in a hundred dollars a year and i want to lease it for 10 years i'm gonna pay you a thousand dollars at any time during that time if you come into money you can come back and that's the law of redemption you can you can purchase the remainder of that lease on your land back so if i've had it for six years

and you've got four hundred dollars you come to me and you say okay i want my land back that's the law of redemption of the land amen so it's about its value the value of the land is based upon whatever the crop brings in so redemption's price the ransom price is based on how much value is the harvest so if you want to see the price of redemption you look at the value of the harvest and it's so in our redemption also if you want to know how much god values the harvest you look at the price of redemption that he paid for the harvest

to bring it in if you want to know how much god cares about people you look at the price that he paid and what he gave to redeem man from his sin my friend he values you he cherishes you you mean something to god this morning he he loves you so much that he poured himself out and gave his life to redeem us from our sin so the ransom was determined by the value of the harvest elimelech made a bad decision but in making that decision it placed them in the stream of god's grace thank god for his grace that finds us even when we

strayed from the path when we've made bad decisions when we've done wrong things it puts us in a position now for redemption naomi decided i'm going to go back to bethlehem i've lost everything here my sons are gone and she she turned to her daughters-in-law and she says to them i'm going back to bethlehem and you need to go back home to to your moabitish families and and of course you know the story orpah said i'm going to go back but ruth ruth said i will not go back i've seen something in your life that i am committed to and and we often rehearse her

words when we're talking about commitment she said i will follow you i'll go where you go she made a pledge to proximity i'll follow you wherever you go she made a pledge to relationship she said your people will be my people she made a pledge to the spiritual she said my your god will be my god she made an unconditional pledge that says i'll die where you die i'll be buried where you are buried and this my friend is what god is is desiring and wanting when we come to him he wants us to make that kind of commitment i will follow you your people

will be my people listen you've come into a new family when you're baptized into this body of jesus christ it's the family of god and so in the in the narrative when ruth renounced her heritage she renounced her possessions she renounced her religion and she came under the adoptive auspices of naomi naomi adopted her as her daughter in the narrative of the book of ruth she is never called by naomi my daughter-in-law she is called my daughter the other people call her daughter-in-law but naomi says she is my daughter when god brings you in you are not a stepchild you're not a grandchild you're not

a stranger you were strangers as as ruth was you were foreigners as ruth was but when you the adoption of sons god embraces you and brings you into the family of god and makes you his child you have a relationship not with a priest not with a man you have a relationship with abba father back to bethlehem she was a widow carrying a foreigner they had no status in israel they could not inherit they were lumped into a group sister sue called widows orphans and strangers they were subjects of benevolence of the other people but ruth gets up one day after they had gotten back

to bethlehem and said i'm going out to glean in a field what she did on that day it says it was her hap it was her happenstance she chanced to land on a field no no no no no no this was a field that belonged to boaz who was a relative to her father-in-law elimelech and it put her right in the vision of somebody who would ultimately fall in love and embrace her and make her his bride it wasn't just happenstance it put her squarely under the auspices of the grace of boaz god provided for this contingency in law he said that when the strangers

the widows and the orphans come behind you don't reap the corners of the field leave them i want to provide for them and and and boaz goes beyond that he's being drawn to this woman who is a stranger and a foreigner and he says to his servants the ones that are working in the field you can just go ahead and let some handfuls drop on purpose and and if you see anybody messing with this woman you tell them to take their hands off of her because i see something special in her he was not bound by legalism of the law the storyline suddenly changed and

desire became our duty became desire and and that law that bound him suddenly became love that became stronger than the law and so now boaz makes a decision boaz makes the decision and says i've got the price and i can redeem but there's a nearer kinsman over here to be approached who has first right of refusal you know the story and and and we base it on the fact of the leverage marriage but it wasn't really about this brother-in-law thing because neither of these guys were brother-in-law's of elimelech so it went beyond this and and the man that was approached says i'm not going to

mar my own heritage number one it will either cost me money to do this now i know the narrative change gets confused here but but ruth was not part of the package there was something not kosher here brother willaford he didn't have to marry ruth he just said you got to buy the land from her you got to purchase the land there was no mention of marriage to ruth in this whole situation it was about redeeming the property so this man thinks okay it's either going to cost me money or i'm going to have to give my son that i might have up to become

the redeemer of elimelech's land he's going to inherit elimelech's land not mine and he said no way i'm not going to corrupt my own inheritance inheritance by doing this and so uh boaz makes this statement in ruth chapter 4 four verse nine after the man had refused he said to the elders and to all the people ye are witnesses this day that i have bought everybody say all i bought all that was a limoulex and hall that was killians and all that was maelons of the hand of naomi but it was the moreover that got them rocked on their heels moreover that stranger that ruth

the moabitus i have purchased her to be my wife this was a noble man this was a man of high esteem and he says i've purchased her to be my wife to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance let's stand i got to quit musicians come i have bought the whole package when jesus purchased this church he didn't just and i've studied calvinism they believe that there's only that jesus only died for the elect when jesus bought the field he bought the whole field everything i'm buying everything and i'm going to marry that bride that i see there this was the above

and beyond of desire over duty he didn't do it because he had to oh if we could get this concept in our heads he didn't do it because somebody twisted his arm and said you you got to get down there and save them people no he looked at us and he said i love them i love them i'm willing to pay the price to buy everything just to get that jewel out of the earth got to quit on his mother's side she gave the world an heir to everything that boaz had but his father gave that son to a covenant relationship that he was a

part of she gave the world the form he gave the world a savior she gave boaz a son but he gave that son to naomi and to ruth to be their redeemer in the future oh the price that jesus paid the price that god gave for our redemption mary gave the world a child but god gave the world his son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but would have everlasting life that's the price that's the jewel that's the nugget that he gave his son that you might enjoy redemption let's praise him right now