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  (DANGER LINES IN THE DEEPER LIFE) 10. OUR KINSMAN REDEEMER; LESSONS FROM THE BOOK OF RUTH
  by A.B. Simpson
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CONTENT
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"Thy Maker is thy Husband, and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel."
Isaiah 64: 5. The Book of Ruth is really a part of the Book of Judges.
It is a sort of vignette inserted on the background of that mingled
picture of the dark ages of the Old Testament, and is thus a sort of
companion picture to the one last given us, the story of Micah. Both are
incidents gathered out of the same period of Hebrew history and
illustrating the life of the people; the one on the dark, the other on
the bright side.

There is another dark picture on the canvas which we have passed over.
It is the shocking series of incidents recorded in the last three
chapters of Judges, all growing out of a single unholy relationship. It
is the story of a licentious woman destroyed at last by the very
wickedness that she had herself pursued; and of a sinful man who allowed
her to draw him into her wicked life, and who, through her influence,
became unfaithful to his high calling as a priest of the Lord. Out of
their relations grew, at length, a frightful crime which involved in a
destructive civil war all the tribes of Israel -- a war which did not
cease until three armies had perished and one whole tribe in Israel had
become almost extinct. So fearful are the consequences of even the
slightest sin. How solemn and how true is that little verse in James
which gives the pedigree of sin: "Then when lust hath conceived, it
bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death!"

But we pass over this dark picture, and we come to the story of Ruth. It
is like a little oasis in a desert. Goethe has called it the finest poem
in human language; and yet how few of the children of God really
understand its beautiful meaning and teaching. It is said that a
literary man once read it in an English drawing-room to a select company
of cultivated people, slightly changing the principle names and the
style of the story, but reading it substantially as it is given in the
Bible, and his audience was delighted with this new and wonderful
literary production, and eagerly questioned him about its authorship and
origin. They retired, with significant silence, when they learned that
it was one of the books of their neglected Bible.

It is scarcely necessary to recall the incidents of the story -- the
famine in Bethlehem, the emigrant family, Elimelech and his wife Naomi,
with their two boys, Mahlon and Chilion. Then came the death of the
father and the marriage of the two boys to two maidens of Moab, named
Ruth and Orpah And then, in due time, they died and the three widows
were left alone in a foreign land. Then Naomi turned homeward, but with
unselfish consideration, she tried to dissuade her daughters-in-law from
the journey which promised so little for them or her. Orpah, the more
demonstrative of the two, expressed great affection, and went home; but
Ruth clung to Naomi with those ever memorable and noble words, which
have been inscribed with the point of a diamond as the loftiest
expression of loyal affection and devotion: "Entreat me not to leave
thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I
will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my
people, and thy God my God; where thou diest will I die, and there will
I be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death
part thee and me."

And so two lone widows came back to Bethlehem and began to seek a
livelihood in the humblest way. Ruth took upon herself, as a loving
daughter, the support of the home, and went out, like Jewish maidens, to
glean in the wheat and barley fields. It was there that she met Boaz,
the rich farmer, who had heard of her kindness to her mother and her
maidenly modesty and who became attracted to her, and showed her special
kindness without sacrificing in any way her own womanly independence.
Naomi, meanwhile, kept watching with motherly intuition the whole
situation, looking constantly to God, in whose wings they had come to
trust. At length, Naomi found that Boaz sustained to her and Ruth the
peculiar relation of the Goel, or nearest of kin, whose duty it was to
redeem her husband\

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Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/ab-simpson/danger-lines-in-the-deeper-life-10-our-kinsman-redeemer-lessons-from-the-book-of/
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