When your faith is in tatters

Do not give up hope in your weariness. Your faith is worth holding onto, even when it is in tatters, shredded and abused by the circumstances of life under the curse of sin. This fallen world of ours has a way of draining us and leaving us gasping for breath. Suffering, injustice and persecution will leave us weary, and so will our own sin, after it leads us astray with its false promises. But God will make a way back to Him for you.

Naomi in the Old Testament book of Ruth teaches us that even when our faith is on life-support, we can revive our hope by shifting our focus from this weary world to the one who will redeem us. The book of Ruth opens up with a young Jewish family, a married couple and their two sons: Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two boys Mahlon and Chilion. They are living through troubled times in Judah, in the town of Bethlehem. This is God’s promised land, but it feels less than idyllic… There’s no King, and the rulers are unrighteous and they’re spiraling further away from God. And there’s no food, famine has settled on the land. And so, the patriarch Elimelech, in an act of rebellion against God, makes the ill-advised decision to flee Judah. Rather than seek and submit to God’s will within the land of God’s choosing, Elimelech decides to run. He leads his family out of Judah to Moab. He leads them into exile, and then Elimelech promptly dies. Naomi is left alone to raise her two sons in this foreign land. And when they are both grown up and married, and you start to think that her job is done and that she should now be able to be taken care of by her sons’ families, both her sons die childless. Her sons leave behind only two widows, Orpah and Ruth. Naomi is still in exile, where there is no support network for the trio of widows, and she finally accepts that she has come to the end of the road in Moab, she has reached a dead-end. The only way forward is the way back to Bethlehem.

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While Orpah starts over in Moab, her homeland, Ruth sticks with Naomi and joins her in Judah, in Bethlehem, in the promised land of God’s people. And as Naomi and Ruth leave Moab and enter back into the promised land, they step through the looking glass into a mirror image world. Naomi, whose name means sweet or pleasant, now calls herself Mara, which means bitter. And she declares that she went away full, and the Lord has brought her back empty. Naomi left amidst a famine and she returns at the beginning of the harvest.

Naomi shows up in Judah empty handed, having been stripped of her ambitions for a better life outside of God’s will. Naomi has lived through an extended season of trials, and her circumstances still appear bleak. There were not too many options available to a widow back in those days in the middle east. And the rulers of Judah are crooked and the people are not righteous, they are not generally inclined to take care of the vulnerable, they are not faithful to God. But the laws of Judah were handed down by God. God’s law is just, and the law does provide hope for the hopeless. So this is the part of the story where we see the dams of God’s Grace are about to burst. Even under unrighteous rule, God’s promised land is a better place for God’s people. Even with a weak faith like Naomi’s, being surrounded by God’s people under God’s law in God’s promised land is a far better place to be. This truth holds up for you today, so plug yourself into a faithful local church and seek to surround yourself with God’s people, spend time in the Bible, get to know and be shaped by God’s love for you, cry out in prayer to God and submit to His will for your life, that is where you will find His blessing.

The laws in Judah were handed by God through Moses to provide for the destitute. The widow Ruth is allowed to glean at harvest time, the law allows for her t