The Book of Ruth
A famine, a widow who wouldn't go home, a barley field, and a man at a city gate. Read the Book of Ruth once and you have a story about loyalty and kindness rewarded. That reading isn't wrong. It's simply not all that's there.
Paul took a verse out of Genesis 2 —
Ephesians 5:31
"For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."
— and wrote underneath it -
Ephesians 5:32
"This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church."
He read a marriage in the opening chapters of the Old Testament and told us it was about something still to come. He wasn't inventing a way of reading. He was using one, and he expected his readers to follow him there. He says the same thing outright about Israel's history:
1 Corinthians 10:11
"Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come."
The word behind "examples" is the one we get type from. The events were real. They were also written down on purpose, in a shape, for people who would read them much later.
Ruth is one of those shapes, and the people in it are the key to it.
Naomi is Israel — and the Word of God that came to us through Israel. Her husband dies in a foreign country, then both her sons, and she is left holding nothing of her own: no husband, no heir, no claim on the family land. That is a nation set aside. It is where Israel stands today, not feeling estranged but actually estranged under God's own verdict, with a restoration promised and certain.
Ruth and Orpah are her two daughters-in-law. Both married into the family. Both are widows. Both start down the road to Bethlehem with her. One turns back — Orpah goes home to her people and her gods, and nothing in the book says she stopped belonging to the family. She simply isn't there at the end. Ruth keeps walking.
Boaz is the kinsman-redeemer. Under the law of Israel a forfeited inheritance could be bought back, but only by a relative, and only by one willing to take the widow along with the land. The two couldn't be separated. A man who redeemed the field married the woman.
So Ruth leaves the land of her birth, goes with Naomi to Bethlehem, works through a full harvest in Boaz's field, prepares herself on the night it matters, and makes her request. He redeems the inheritance and takes her as his wife. A son is born, and the line runs down to David. This study walks those steps in order, because the Christian life runs the same road: the journey out, the work in the field, the preparation, the threshing floor, the redemption at the gate.
The threshing floor is where it turns. Boaz winnows his barley at night, the grain separated from the chaff, and Ruth goes down to him there. That is the Judgment Seat of Christ, where a believer's work is tried by fire and either stands or burns —
1 Corinthians 3:14-15
"If anyone's work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire."
Naomi gives Ruth three instructions for that night: wash yourself, anoint yourself, put on your best garment (Ruth 3:3). Three parts of this series are given to those three instructions, because between them they are the whole of what preparation means.
And what is decided there is not whether a believer belongs to Jesus. That was settled the moment he believed, and it isn't on the table. What is decided is an inheritance — whether this one reigns with Him in the age to come. Ruth and Orpah were both in the family. Only one of them was at the threshing floor.
The book doesn't end at the marriage, either. It ends with a child, a genealogy, and a throne. What was lost comes back, and it comes back with a king on it.
The twelve parts below work straight through the book, a passage at a time.