Fear, Faith, and Fruitfulness
The book of Joshua ends on a high note: “Israel served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and had known all the work that the LORD did for Israel” (Jos. 24:31). The book of Judges picks up from here, and, with a turn of the page, one hopes to find this same height of obedience displayed in the twenty-one chapters that follow.
Yet the book of Judges presents a record of Israel that is marked by a downward cycle of depravity and chaos. Because the people do not fully obey God’s command to drive out the nations He has declared for destruction, Israel is ensnared by them instead, giving their sons and daughters over in marriage, and bending both heart and knee to the foreign gods of the peoples around them.
This begins a cyclical rhythm in Israel’s history. Israel turns to foreign gods, which provokes the LORD to anger. The LORD gives Israel over to their enemies. Israel remembers the LORD and cries out to Him in distress. Hearing their cries, the LORD is moved in compassion and raises up judges to deliver His people from their enemies and to save them from their plight. With each iteration, the people are saved, only to return to their former apostasy once the judge appointed over them dies.
There is a problem in Israel, not only in the collective fickleness of the peoples’ hearts but in the very framework of their nation. The influence of the judges does not last beyond their deaths, and even in life, they are not often models of moral virtue, but reflections of the very people they serve.
“In those days there was no king in Israel,” the author writes; this is the problem the nation faces, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Jud. 21:25). After a horrific display of human cruelty and religious apostasy in the chapters that lead to the book’s grim conclusion, this assessment of the nation is the segue that leads into the book of Ruth, a portion of Scripture so different than its predecessor.
The book of Ruth takes place within the period of the judges but stands out in stark contrast against the backdrop of faithlessness and apostasy of Israel’s wayward affections. Ruth is a Moabite widow of an Israelite man, who chooses to forsake her household gods after her husband’s death to follow her mother-in-law back to Israel, thus choosing the LORD as her God, and deciding to follow Him in ordinary, everyday obedience and faith.
Amidst the disobedience of Israel, God chooses to use a foreigner herself, who no doubt began as just another daughter of the nations the Israelites sinned against God by intermarrying with, to continue the line that He would raise His chosen king from. At the time of the judges, there was no king in Israel, but God remained faithful in the midst of disobedience. Not only would he raise up a king in David from Ruth and her husband Boaz, but he would raise up the true king, Jesus, from David's line to rule in holiness and uprightness, to reverse the cycle of sin, and to lead a people back to Him, in ways no human king or judge ever could.