Ruth 1:10 – “Carried”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹⁰Then they said to her, “No. We will return with you to your people.”

I’m thinking it worthwhile to pause and consider what is going on here in the book of Ruth. Our girls, Ruth and Orpah, are at a point in their lives where they must make a decision.

They must make a decision.

Here they stand, probably at a ford on the east side of the Jordan River, at the border between Moab and Israel. They must either go forward, cross the Jordan into Israel, or turn around and go back to Moab.

They must make a decision.

Either choice offers attractive possibilities, but is also fraught with fearful possibilities. Apart from faith, I don’t know why the girls would want to go with Naomi. Obviously there was a very strong bond of love between them (much to Naomi’s credit). But faced with a life of destitution with this older woman or “going home to mother,” I don’t know why they would choose the former. On the negative side of the ledger, it would seem like the decision to go with Naomi is social suicide. As I have often noted before, Israel and Moab are bitter enemies. These girls will be foreigners in Israel and widowed foreigners at that. Going to Israel means saying “Good-by” to their families and everything they’ve ever known. It means going to a world of very different customs, and a world where they may, rather than finding a new husband, actually be shunned.

Faith introduces a whole different set of factors to consider. To go to Israel is very deliberately to forsake Chemosh and embrace Yahveh. These girls grew up in a world ruled by this god named Chemosh. To step forward is to forsake him and hope that Yahveh, the God of Israel, is in fact the true God and that He will accept them. To step forward is to walk into Naomi’s world – which I believe was a world the girls saw as a world where people actually love and trust each other – which was very different than their world where they grew up having to fear every moment their parents might choose to sacrifice them to Chemosh. As I have noted before, I do not doubt that the very practice of child-sacrifice would have created a world of suspicion and doubt, where even your own mother’s embrace could not be trusted. So, to go back would mean going back to the comfort of the known, but to a world far less than they now know it could be.

What will they do?

They must make a decision.

I am pausing to point this out because this is precisely where we find ourselves from time to time. We must make a decision.

There simply is no “I don’t want to decide today.” We must make a decision.

And those decisions are sometimes life altering. As Frost wrote, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

People down through the years have been merciless to poor Orpah. She’s the evil, worldly, godless, faithless one who came to this point and chose badly. For myself, I sincerely wish she had chosen to go on with Naomi. I wish she had chosen the God of Israel. But I have a difficult time being so hard on her. She had to make a decision. I know how that feels. I know how it feels when it seems like none of our options are good ones, where no matter what we do, it’s hard to say how it will turn out. Yet we must make a decision. I personally can’t be too hard on Orpah because, having been at this same point in my own life many, many times, I have often made what turned out to be very bad decisions. And I can honestly say that much of the time, I really thought I was making good decisions. I thought I was doing what the Lord would have me to do. I prayed, I even sought counsel, and I had to make a decision, and so I did. But the years pass, I learn more and more to see my world through the Lord’s eyes, and I realize they were bad decisions. How can I be too hard on poor Orpah? There she stands, crying her eyes out, a young girl who ought to have a father’s or a husband’s strong arms around her, but instead she lives in a tragic, bleak world. And now she has to make a decision.

Here is where I believe faith enters. Here is where faith is indispensable to sanity.

Now, I need to insert here that my young idealistic heart would have quoted Prov 3:5,6 at exactly this point: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.” I would have said, “You just pray and trust God and do what’s right and you’ll always be on the right path!” That would be nice, if I had some kind of perfect “follower” button I could push. The problem is that I know from hard experience that I bring to even a promise that simple my own blindness and arrogance and, in spite of it all, can still make what turn out to be very bad decisions.

What I need is a God who is bigger than my endless stupidity. I need a God who is bigger than even my bungling attempts to have faith! I need a God who is bigger than my bad decisions.

And now an old man says, “Praise God – that is precisely who my Lord is!”  In Isaiah 46:3,4 He says to me, “Listen to me, …you whom I have upheld since your birth,

and have carried since you were born. Even to your old, old age and gray hairs, I am He, I am He who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you …”

“From birth, even unto old, old age, I will carry you.”

 He will carry me.

He’s bigger than me.

He’s bigger than my bad decisions.

As I sit here and the events of my life pass through my mind, I see the whole mixed bag of good decisions and bad, and some I still don’t know whether they were good or bad. And what I see is a God who’s been bigger than it all. I see how He took even my bad decisions and used them for my good. Even while I was being an idiot, He was carrying me. He gave me my choices, He let me choose the path, and sometimes the path led straight into the fire. Yet He knew I needed to get burned. He knew He could use it for my good. On the other hand, there have been many paths I would have taken, but He blocked my way. At the time, I couldn’t understand. It seemed like the right thing to do, yet something stopped me. And now I look back and think, “Thank God!” He kept me from bad decisions that would have in fact been my ruin.

You see, I love Prov 3:5,6. I love that promise “Trust in Lord with all thine heart …” But my greatest comfort isn’t to be found in what a great job of trusting I’ll do, of how my choices will turn out so well. My hope is in this One named Jesus, “for He shall save His people from their sins.” My hope, when I look ahead to life, when I look ahead to what seems to me like too many decisions I have to make, my hope is my great Savior God who carries me.

And so, back to our girls, my hope is that, like Ruth, when I come to those momentous, life-changing decision points, that I will choose well. Sadly, I fear for Orpah, she chose to go back “to her people and her gods,” while Ruth said, “Your people shall be my people and your God my God.” My hope is that my faith, even as small and fickle as it may be, will be the victory, not because it is great, but because He is great.

There is no question in my mind, for the Ruth’s and the Orpah’s of this world, for the me’s of this world, the only real hope, the only real sanity in the long run is to lay hold of this great Savior God, our Father, to try to trust Him, to try to have faith, to try to make good decisions, and in the end, to live in the quiet peace of knowing He’s carrying me!