THE GOOD LIFE OR THE GOD LIFE? -- Devotional for April 7, from "Good Seeds"

Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her, and said, “Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.” (Ruth 1:14,16)

A kiss can mean so much (see March 29), but a “cling” can mean so much more! When Orpah kissed Naomi goodbye, she was saying farewell to the faith of her mother, in favor of the faith of her fathers (a false faith, by the way, full of superstition and confusion). In obeying a mother-in-law’s request, she was denying the Lord’s bequest. Now it was not because Naomi didn’t love her two widowed daughters-in-law that she bade them return home, as she herself must now do, but because she loved them. She surely was not thinking in spiritual terms here for she, too, was swallowed up in misery at the loss of her own husband. Her only consolation was to return to her comfort zone – another word for home. She could truly empathize with these two girls and say with great persuasion what they no doubt wanted to hear: “You girls go home now, to your own families, and to your own culture and religion, for there you can make a new start and find a new life, as you surely will find a new husband. Go, my daughters, with my blessing. I go home to die, but you’ll go home to live again.” If this were evangelism Naomi got it exactly backwards. If this were counseling, maybe we could credit her with using “reverse psychology.” But it wasn’t either of these things, but just old depression having its say. Nevertheless Naomi, despite her discouragement, despite her admission of failure, despite her failing faith in God (indeed, she was perfectly content to blame God for her plight) – yes, despite all these things she was still a daughter of heaven, and heaven’s Ruler still had plans for her. Why was it that this outsider, Ruth, was more sensitive to this possibility than her godly mother-in-law? Well, although Ruth didn’t know much about these kinds of things, she surely knew a kind lady, through whom she sensed a connection to the God she had yet to meet, and something inside told her that the God-life is better than the good life. Read the book of Ruth, the love story not just of a wonderful godly husband who swept this trusting young woman off her feet, but of the God of love Himself, who can manipulate circumstances (theologians call this providence) so that the god life and the good life don’t have to be mutually exclusive! What about you and me? What part, if any, can we play while waiting on God’s providential care? Stop dating (kissing) God and His people, and start clinging!