"The Book of Ruth"

by James Jacob Prasch

The book of Ruth tells the story of a rich powerful Jewish man who takes a Gentile Bride and exalts her, the way that Jesus, on the day of Pentecost, raised up the Gentile church, as the Bride of Christ.

  1. Introduction
  2. Ruth's Loyalty
  3. Ruth Gleans in the Fields of Boaz
  4. Boaz Will Redeem Ruth
  5. The Marriage of Ruth
  6. The Line of David Began Here
  7. Why Us?
  8. Something Special
  9. Orpah
  10. Ruth
  11. Levirate Marriage
  12. Imortance of Genealogy
  13. Gleaning
  14. I Will Bless Them That Bless Thee
  15. Sacrificing Babies to Demons
  16. Learning from Israel's Mistakes
  17. Second-Class Christians
  18. A Woman of Excellence
  19. The Key to Their Redemption
  20. Take the Grain to My People
  21. Redeemer and Restorer
Download the PDF version of this sermon.Download or email this sermon (~165k)

This sermon was transcribed from a recording and edited as appropriate for presentation in a published text format more suitable for reading. Purchase the audio version of this sermon from the Moriel online store.

Gleaning

Another form of social provision was gleaning. We need to understand this. Narrow pathways would separate the fields of the different farmers or families. The Jews were forbidden from harvesting the corners of their fields. Why? As a form of social welfare provision, the poor, the widows, the orphans, the socially disenfranchised, even sojourners (foreigners traveling through the land), had the right to glean.

This is what we see in the book of Ruth. Ruth arrives with her mother-in-law who says, "Don't call me Naomi, call me Mara; for the Lord has dealt bitterly with me." When Jewish people today come back to their own land after the holocaust and after what happened with the Communists, they have a feeling of "God did this to us”.

Orthodox Jews will look at Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 and admit that their experiences reflect the curse of the law as recorded in those passages. What happened to them was somehow God's hand. Not all Jews make this admission, but the ultra-Orthodox certainly will.

Return to the Previous Page • Continue to the Next Page

This is Page 13 of 21

Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.