Breakthrough and Redemption – Hope, joy, and dreams
When I consider the story of Ruth and Naomi, it is always the joy of Naomi at the end that sticks in my head. The final verses give her the spotlight, more so than Ruth. Through the story, we see how Naomi finds hope and is restored her joy. What was lost to her has been redeemed. But her redeemed life is not what she expected at the beginning of the story.
We begin with a woman, Naomi, who has big plans for her family and supports the decision to move away in order to escape the desert of drought. Instead, it seems that she runs straight to the arms of the desert. Naomi sees no way for her life but the wilderness that it has become. She pushes away one daughter-in-law, but the other remains faithfully by her side. It is one of these ending verses that most strikes me in this redemption story: Ruth 4:15 says, ‘your daughter-in-law, who loves you and is better than seven sons.’ The law saw redemption as coming from the sons of the family, not daughters, and certainly not foreign daughters. But God doesn’t seem to stick with what is expected, does He?
Breakthrough to joy
Naomi had to give up her expectations at some point. She had to again see the goodness of the world around her. She had to let God show her that He is bigger than her wilderness. And here we have to note verse 11 of Ruth Chapter 4, ‘may your family be like that of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah.’ The name Perez means breakthrough. How the Lord works mysteriously to have given such a blessing from the elders at the city gates to Boaz! For it is Boaz who fathers Naomi’s breakthrough in joy. The restoration of Naomi’s joy comes as an unexpected blessing arranged by God’s own hand.
More than restoration of a car, where everything is put back just as it was, God redeems our lives, our dreams. He revives our joy. In redeeming Naomi’s dream of having a son, it did not look like what she expected. Naomi still longed for her husband and sons from Elimelek through much of the bitterness. Instead God gave her children of another lineage. He injected life into the dreams, but they were God’s fulfillment of the dream, not Naomi’s. When dreams, people, things are taken from us, we tend to want them back. Only when we hand them over to God, clinging to Him and not the past, do we awaken new dreams, or perhaps see them differently and give them room to change and grow in His hands.
He fulfills our dreams
The book of Ruth ends with the family line of Perez, whose mother was Tamar. Tamar too had her dreams taken from her, but God provided her breakthrough. We also find Boaz in this lineage, whose mother was Rahab (Matt 1:5), a former prostitute. Being a woman from Jericho, a foreigner and prostitute, must have limited her dreams; but God redeemed them as well. God is faithful in fulfilling the dreams He places in our hearts. Even in the midst of the wilderness, our inability to see or hope, He provides a way. ‘Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland,’ (Isaiah 43:18-19) we have got to let go of the old expectations, leave behind the thoughts of the past to embrace what God has planned for our future, a new redeemed future.
