Boaz , Kinsman Redeemer | Part 1
In this episode, we explore how Ruth’s act of gleaning in Boaz’s fields was more than a means of survival—it was a step directed by divine providence. When Naomi reveals that Boaz is their kinsman redeemer, Ruth courageously seeks him out, unveiling a story rich with hope, restoration, and faith. We unpack the powerful significance of the kinsman redeemer, not only as a legal protector in ancient Israel but as a beautiful reflection of God’s redeeming love and grace for us today.
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Transcript
Welcome to the Fortifying youg Family podcast.
Speaker A:It can be daunting to navigate through an anti marriage and family culture.
Speaker A:Our teacher will expound biblical principles to help fortify our families and keep these sacred institutions strong.
Speaker A:And now, here's this week's teaching from Sam Wood.
Speaker B:I want to ask if you would turn in your Bibles to Ruth, Chapter two.
Speaker B:I've been preaching as I've had opportunities in the Book of Ruth, a series of messages through the Book of Ruth.
Speaker B:And I want to continue that here this morning.
Speaker B:So turn with me, if you would, to Ruth, chapter two and verse 17.
Speaker B:Ruth, chapter two and verse 17.
Speaker B:And I remind you this morning, as we turn into the Word of God, that this is the word of God that's breathed by the Holy Spirit of God.
Speaker B:It is a sacred word.
Speaker B:It is a living word that is God speaks to us through His Word.
Speaker B:And I hope this morning that you won't let your attention be on anything else.
Speaker B:Thinking about going home, thinking about lunch, thinking about anything else except what God has to say to you this morning through His Word.
Speaker B:That's all that we need to be thinking about right now.
Speaker B:May he be glorified through his holy word.
Speaker B:Ruth, chapter two, verse 17.
Speaker B:And I'll read down through chapter three and verse 11.
Speaker B:Ruth, chapter two and verse 17.
Speaker B:So she gleaned in the field until evening, and beat out that she had gleaned.
Speaker B:And it was about an ephah of barley, and she took it up and went into the city.
Speaker B:And her mother in law saw what she had gleaned, and she brought forth and gave to her that she had reserved after she was sufficed.
Speaker B:And her mother in law said unto her, where hast thou gleaned to day, and where wroughtest thou?
Speaker B:Blessed be he that did take knowledge of thee.
Speaker B:And she showed her mother in law with whom she had wrought, and said, the man's name with whom I wrought today is Boaz.
Speaker B:And Naomi said unto her daughter in law, blessed be he of the Lord, who hath not left off his kindness to the living and to the dead.
Speaker B:And Naomi said unto her, the man is near of kin unto us, one of their near kinsmen.
Speaker B:And Ruth, the Moabitess said, he said unto me also, thou shalt keep fast by my young men until they have ended all my harvest.
Speaker B:And Naomi said unto Ruth, her daughter in law, it is good, my daughter in law, that thou go out with his maidens, that they may that they meet thee not in any other field.
Speaker B:So she kept fast by the Maidens of Boaz to glean unto the end of the barley harvest, and of wheat harvest, and dwelt with her mother in law, Chapter three, verse one.
Speaker B:Then Naomi, her mother in law, said unto her, my daughter, shall I not seek rest for thee, that it may be well with thee?
Speaker B:And now is not Boaz of her kindred, with whose maidens thou wast?
Speaker B:Behold, he winneth barley to night in the threshing floor.
Speaker B:Wash thyself, therefore, and anoint thee, and put thy raiment upon thee and get thee down to the floor.
Speaker B:But make not thyself known unto the man until he shall have done eating and drinking.
Speaker B:And it shall be when he lieth down that thou shalt mark the place where he shall lie.
Speaker B:And thou shalt go in and uncover his feet and lay thee down, and he will tell thee what thou shalt do.
Speaker B:And she said unto her, all that thou sayest unto me I will do.
Speaker B:And she went down unto the floor and did according to all that her mother in law bade her.
Speaker B:When Boaz had eaten and drunk and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn.
Speaker B:And she came softly and uncovered his feet and laid her down.
Speaker B:And it came to pass at midnight that the man was afraid and turned himself.
Speaker B:And behold, a woman lay at his feet.
Speaker B:And?
Speaker B:And he said, who art thou?
Speaker B:And she answered, I am Ruth, thine handmaid.
Speaker B:Spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid, for thou art a near kinsman.
Speaker B:And he said, blessed be thou the Lord my daughter, for thou hast showed more kindness in the latter end than at the beginning, inasmuch as thou followest not young men, whether poor or rich.
Speaker B:And now, my daughter, fear not.
Speaker B:I will do to thee all that thou requirest.
Speaker B:For all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman.
Speaker B:At the end of chapter one, we see that Naomi and Ruth returned to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.
Speaker B:The timing of their return, as I stated in a previous message, is very significant.
Speaker B:Because they were very poor and they were very destitute.
Speaker B:They had no way to take care of themselves.
Speaker B:So God in his providence brings them back into the land at just the right time, the time of the barley harvest.
Speaker B:A time that the poor can go in, out to the fields, and they can glean in the fields and have their needs met.
Speaker B:To provide for herself and her mother in law, Naomi Ruth, an outsider to the Jews, a Moab, a Moabitess, who has come into the land of Israel makes herself very vulnerable by going out into the fields to glean, knowing that she possibly could be abused, knowing that she is an outsider, she's an alien to Israel.
Speaker B:And so she makes herself very, very vulnerable.
Speaker B:In chapter two and verse three, it says in the Bible that she just happens to land in a field owned by a man by the name of Boaz.
Speaker B:She has to go into that field.
Speaker B:CS Lewis says that coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
Speaker B:I like that.
Speaker B:And I don't believe it's just a coincidence as we see in this story.
Speaker B:And hopefully you've seen through these messages that God is working all through this little book.
Speaker B:It's a beautiful book of the sovereignty of God.
Speaker B:So when Ruth just happens by God's providence into the fields of Boaz, he shows her kindness.
Speaker B:He shows her grace and protects her by commanding her to stay in the fields near his maidens.
Speaker B:He also welcomes her into the community and tells his workers to purposefully drop some extra barley handfuls on purpose behind them so that Ruth can pick them up.
Speaker B:Ruth is so overcome by Boaz kindness that in total humility, and I love this verse in chapter two, that she falls down in humility in front of him and says, why have I found favor?
Speaker B:Or why have I found grace in your eyes, seeing that I am a stranger?
Speaker B:Every child of God this morning should fall on their face before God and say, God, why have I found grace in your eyes, seeing that I was an enemy of God, a stranger to God.
Speaker B:Boaz replies that he has heard about all that she has done, all the sacrificial love, the Hebrew word, the hesed love that she has given and practiced the relationship with Naomi by forsaking her family, forsaking her country, and coming back with Naomi to Bethlehem, Judah.
Speaker B:This brings us to a text in verse 17 of chapter 2, and we see that Ruth has sacrificially and tirelessly worked all day long in the fields.
Speaker B:And now at the end of the day, she's beating out, beating out this wheat, this barley.
Speaker B:And to beat it out means she's cutting the heads of the barley off of the stalks.
Speaker B:So she's beating it out.
Speaker B:I'm sure she's very, very tired until she has an epa of barley.
Speaker B:Now, epa was an enormous amount of food.
Speaker B:In fact, it was over a bushel, we might recognize, over a bushel of barley grain that she had beat out.
Speaker B:And she is now going to take this barley back home To Naomi.
Speaker B:This was enough, really, for one person to live on for about two weeks.
Speaker B:So God had blessed abundantly above all that she could even imagine and all that she could even think.
Speaker B:So that night she goes home to Naomi, and she doesn't have just a few gleanings, but she has a bushel full of gleanings, really about £40.
Speaker B:She must have been a pretty strong girl back home.
Speaker B:In verse 19, Naomi says, wow, where did you get all this?
Speaker B:If you can imagine, and you were in that scene and you would have seen Naomi's face, I believe you would have seen it light up.
Speaker B:She says, wow, I thought you might get some today.
Speaker B:But how in the world did you get all of that?
Speaker B:Kind of reminds me, this week I told Debbie, I said, I sure would like to have a BlackBerry cobbler.
Speaker B:How many of you like BlackBerry cobbler?
Speaker B:And they're really good.
Speaker B:If you warm them and put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on them, that makes them really, really good.
Speaker B:I know I could get you to amen about something here this morning.
Speaker B:So I said, I'm going to go in the backyard and I'm going to pick blackberries.
Speaker B:We got some vines that God providentially put across the back of my yard.
Speaker B:I didn't plant them, but he put them there for me.
Speaker B:God is good, brother, in so many ways.
Speaker B:And I went back here and picked about a quart of blackberries, brought them up there, and praise God, it was enough for several cobblers.
Speaker B:But if I'd have brought those blackberries back up there and I would have had 2 gallons of blackberries, when I'd been out there for about 45 minutes, Debbie thought would have lit up and said, wow, where did you get all of those?
Speaker B:How did you do that this quick?
Speaker B:This is astonishing to Naomi that she has brought all this barley back, and she knows that it couldn't have been just what she did alone.
Speaker B:Then Ruth tells her the story about the gleanings in a field that a man named Boaz owns.
Speaker B:What a pivotal verse, verse 20 is in the story.
Speaker B:Look at verse 20 again.
Speaker B:Let me read it again to you.
Speaker B:She says, blessed be he of the Lord who hath not left off his kindness to the living and to the dead.
Speaker B:And Naomi said unto her, the man is near of kin unto us, one of their next kinsmen.
Speaker B:The Hebrew word for kinsman that Naomi uses there at the end of this verse.
Speaker B:You might want to underline it.
Speaker B:You might want to circle it.
Speaker B:It's a very significant word, is the word goel.
Speaker B:G, O E L Goel.
Speaker B:He is one of their goel's the word go there means kinsman, and the word el means redeemer.
Speaker B:Or Naomi says, wow, this man named Boaz that you just mentioned, whose field you just happened to be in, is a kinsman redeemer, a goel of ours.
Speaker B:So Naomi says, this man that you were in his field today, he could be a kinsman redeemer for our family.
Speaker B:Now, to understand why Naomi is so excited about this, we need to understand some background.
Speaker B:Apparently, when Elimelech in chapter one left Bethlehem, Judah and he went into Moab because there was a famine in the land, he was in enormous financial straits.
Speaker B:That is, he had tremendous debts and probably had lost his land because he could not keep it up, he could not keep the payments or whatever he owned on that land.
Speaker B:So he lost his land.
Speaker B:That's why when Naomi and Ruth get back to Bethlehem Judah, they're poor and destitute.
Speaker B:They have no way to live.
Speaker B:The land holdings at Elimelech once owned, are now owned by someone else.
Speaker B:But God had made two very important provisions in the law that would make it easy for families to get a second chance to get their lands back.
Speaker B:In Leviticus, chapter 25, God instituted something called, and we know about this, the year of what church?
Speaker B:The year of jubilee.
Speaker B:The year of jubilee.
Speaker B:In fact, In Leviticus chapter 25 and verse 10, it says, and you shall hallow the 50th year and proclaim liberty throughout all the land and to all the inhabitants thereof.
Speaker B:It shall be a jubilee unto you, and you shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
Speaker B:Here's what this means.
Speaker B:Every 50 years, the land holdings that had been bought up or lost by someone that they did not originally belong to would be restored back to that person.
Speaker B:In other words, the heirs or descendants of the people who had lost the land would get back their land and the family would get a second chance.
Speaker B:Aren't you glad that God is a God of second chances?
Speaker B:They would get a second chance.
Speaker B:So if Naomi could have waited out the 50 years, and if Ruth could have waited out the remainder of the 50 years, then they could repossess their land rightfully and legally, even if somebody else had bought the land.
Speaker B:However, by the time that Naomi could do that, she would have likely have been around 90 years old or have passed away or have died, and even Ruth would be probably in her mid-70s, early mid-70s, by that time, and too old to have children and possibly even in slavery and have no hope to repossess this land.
Speaker B:But there was Also another provision in Deuteronomy, chapter 25.
Speaker B:It was a second aspect of the law that God gave to them.
Speaker B:Before the 50 years are up, the land could be bought back, but it could only be bought back by a goel, only be bought by a kinsman redeemer.
Speaker B:So the land could be redeemed out of debt, but it could only be redeemed out of debt by a goel.
Speaker B:This was God's way of keeping families together, and it was a way of making sure that the land stays.
Speaker B:And the original tribal distributions, we might say that they had when Joshua came into the land, the Israelites came into the land that God had distributed to them.
Speaker B:It was God's grace and God's protection for families.
Speaker B:So when Naomi realizes that Ruth has just happened to find one of the relatives she has left named Boaz, she says, do you realize what this means?
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker B:Do you realize what this means?
Speaker B:Naomi, who had been so depressed, so discouraged, is now seeing a glimmer of hope.
Speaker B:She's saying, you know, Boaz is a kinsman redeemer.
Speaker B:Maybe there's hope for us.
Speaker B:She sees that God has not abandoned her, but his unseen hand that is working behind the scenes is all around her for his glory and for her good friends.
Speaker B:Let me just stop here this morning and say, whatever you may be experiencing today, you may be here today, and you feel like God maybe has abandoned you.
Speaker B:You may not see the hand of God working in your life, but the unseen hand of God is working behind the scenes in the lives of all of his children for his glory and for your good.
Speaker B:God never abandons his children.
Speaker B:He's right there with you.
Speaker B:He hasn't left you.
Speaker B:But the plot thickens at this point, and here's why it thickens because of redemption.
Speaker B:That Boaz would have to do in this case is enormous.
Speaker B:First of all, he would have to buy the land back.
Speaker B:He would have to repurchase or purchase all this land that Elimelech had lost.
Speaker B:And it would probably require a very large or enormous sum of money.
Speaker B:But secondly, in this case, the family couldn't really be restored because there were no male heirs to restore it to.
Speaker B:There are no male descendants in this family, that is Elimelech, Mahlon, and Chilion.
Speaker B:In chapter one, we see in Scripture that they had all died, so there were no male family members left to pass the land onto.
Speaker B:For the family to be restored, Boaz would have to marry the last family member, which would be Naomi, and raise up children by her.
Speaker B:And the law provided for that it was called levirate marriage.
Speaker B:I mentioned this several messages ago.
Speaker B:You could marry the widow and raise up children who had the name of the dead family member.
Speaker B:They would be your heirs.
Speaker B:They wouldn't be your heirs, but also they would be the heirs of the people that were dead.
Speaker B:But who would do that?
Speaker B:Who would do such a thing?
Speaker B:This would be an enormous sacrifice for someone to come in and pay this enormous debt, to marry someone in that family, raise them up, and they would take on the name of the person who had previously died.
Speaker B:That is, they would pass on the name of Elimelech and his household.
Speaker B:But there's another wrinkle in this story.
Speaker B:That is, you can't marry Naomi because she's too old.
Speaker B:She can't raise up sons.
Speaker B:This is what Naomi explained to Ruth and Orpah in chapter one, when she was trying to get them to go back home.
Speaker B:In verse 11, she said, turn again, my daughters.
Speaker B:Why will you go with me?
Speaker B:And there are yet any more sons in my womb.
Speaker B:They may be your husbands.
Speaker B:She's saying, I'm not going to have any more kids.
Speaker B:I'm not going to have any more sons, so why don't you just go back?
Speaker B:So since Boaz could not marry Naomi, he would have to marry this young lady by the name of Ruth.
Speaker B:He'd have to marry someone who is not an Israelite.
Speaker B:He'd have to marry someone who's an outsider, a pagan woman from Moab, whom God in Deuteronomy had commanded them not to have any affiliation or anything to do with at all.
Speaker B:So for Naomi and Ruth, there needed to be someone, there needed to be a Goel, there needed to be a kinsman Redeemer who could step into the story and repurchase the lands that were lost by their indebtedness.
Speaker B:But not only that, but also carry on the name of Elimelech by marrying the widow of Moab from Moab called Ruth.
Speaker B:Who in the world would do such a thing?
Speaker B:Who would pay this kind of price?
Speaker B:Now, all of this understanding is in the background of this little book of Ruth, and it's important.
Speaker B:We can't understand the story if we don't understand this background.
Speaker B:So it's extremely significant when Naomi says in chapter 2 in verse 20 that Boaz is a Goel or a kinsman redeemer.
Speaker B:This goel would be saying, have you got a debt, let me pay it.
Speaker B:Have you got a burden, let me bear it.
Speaker B:Have you got a problem, let me solve it.
Speaker B:Have you got a need, let me meet that need.
Speaker B:Goel didn't just give his advice to someone, tell someone where they could go, get help, or even just give some money for a temporary solution to a problem.
Speaker B:A Goel owned the problem.
Speaker B:They took total ownership of the problem that that person had.
Speaker B:It's a very, very strong term.
Speaker B:But for Boaz to be the Goel of the kinsman Redeemer, there had to be three things that were true of him.
Speaker B:Now this is very important.
Speaker B:We see.
Speaker B:First, he had to have the right to redeem.
Speaker B:Secondly, he had to have the resources to redeem.
Speaker B:And thirdly, he had to have the readiness to redeem.
Speaker B:He had the right, he'd have to have the right, he'd have to have the resources, and he would have to have the readiness to be that kinsman Redeemer.
Speaker B:You have listened to the first part of a two part message by evangelist Sam Wood.
Speaker A:Thank you for joining the Fortifying youg Family podcast.
Speaker A:And if you feel encouraged by today's teaching, give us a follow so we can invite you back and share us on your socials so more marriages and families can be strengthened and fortified through the truths of God's Word.
Speaker A:Remember, fortifying purifying your family starts with a strong belief in God's Word.
