The first time a doctor spoke the word infertility to me, one of my closest friends had just had twins. Another close friend was pregnant, and then another and another until I tasted the bitterness of desperately wanting what you cannot have. Years later, in my husband’s new pastorate, we sustained loss after loss in a church implosion that left us both a little bit broken inside. The stress of our ongoing trials eventually resulted in the loss of my physical health. I dealt with chronic pain and sleeplessness for years on end.
At various points in all those difficult years, I questioned whether or not God loved me. The ongoing feelings of failure and rejection emptied me of confidence in His goodness toward me. If God was keeping track of my tears, I wasn’t sure why they mattered to Him.
I’ve recently begun a study of the book of Ruth with my Bible study group, and as I’ve sifted through all the little details in Ruth against the backdrop of the gospel, I’ve been struck repeatedly by Naomi’s commitment to bitterness.
You’re likely familiar with the story of Ruth. It doesn’t actually begin with Ruth, the woman. It begins with a family during the time of the judges when everyone was doing what was right in their own eyes. It was a pretty demoralizing time in Israel’s history when leadership was questionable, morale was low, and obedience to God was minimal. A certain Israelite called Elimelech set off to the foreign and pagan land of Moab in search of food during a time of famine in Judah.
Commentators question Elimelech for leaving Judah. He should have known he could easily be led astray in an idol-worshiping locale like Moab. We’re not told why, but Elimelech died, leaving his wife Naomi with two sons who took wives from the Moabites, a people reputed for leading Israelites to idolatry (See Deut. 7 and Num. 25). Again we’re not told why, but Elimelech’s sons died in Moab as well.
The sons died childless, which means that Naomi was left a childless widow in a foreign land. It’s a substantial sorrow. There is nothing opaque about the fact that Naomi’s loss was significant. Husband, dead. Sons, dead. Grandchildren, none. And to complicate matters: foreign daughters-in-law, two. Naomi returned to Bethlehem in Judah bereft of the family she left with years before. She changed her name, resigned herself to bitterness, and tried to figure out what to do with the daughter-in-law she couldn’t convince to remain in Moab.
After we get through the catalog of Naomi’s swift losses, we see her assignment of motive to God. She says, “my life is too bitter for you to share, because the LORD’s hand has turned against me” (1:13). When explaining her name change from pleasant to bitter, she said “the Almighty has made me very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since the Lord has pronounced judgment on me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?” (1:21).
We can agree with Naomi that she has been dealt a difficult hand. Regardless of why things happened in Moab the way they did, she returned to Bethlehem changed by her sorrow. Naomi assumed that her losses were evidence of God’s judgment towards her. And perhaps her losses came as consequence for disobeying God’s command not to marry your children off to idol-worshipers. We don’t know. We can no more assume God’s motives than Naomi could, though she tried. Her declaration of God’s judgment seems to be a resignation to continue her days in bitterness and grief. There doesn’t seem to be any room for hope in Naomi’s story.
But then there’s Ruth, now also a childless widow, who expressed great kindness and faithfulness to Naomi; her service is displayed in stark contrast to Naomi’s resignation. Later a good man called Boaz redeemed the family name and married Ruth to continue the lineage of Naomi’s deceased husband and sons (see Deut. 25:5-10 for an explanation of levirate marriage). The child born of Boaz and Ruth’s marriage was the grandfather to Israel’s great King David, and ancestor of Jesus Christ.
There’s so much going on in the book of Ruth that I can’t boil it all down in one blog post. We have one family’s story of despair becoming one of redemption. We see shadows of the gospel in the way God redeems what was lost and gives hope to the downtrodden. We see God’s care for women in a time where destitution was a childless widow’s reality. We’re shown God’s commitment to send Jesus in spite of the disobedience and despair of His people. It’s a big and little story tied up with the strong thread of God’s sovereign, faithful love.
But this one small corner of the story keeps injecting itself into my thoughts and conversations. Naomi didn’t know what God was doing, but she assumed He was against her. She assigned motive to Him when her life fell apart. She couldn’t have conceived of the way He would restore her hope in the end. She couldn’t have imagined what came from Ruth’s kindness or the birth of Obed. She only knew that life was bitter and God must be behind it.
I understand why she felt that way. In her day, tangible blessings were associated with righteousness. It stands to reason that that absence of such would be associated with judgment. Think of Job’s friends who just knew he must have sinned against God to have merited all his suffering. In his case, we know Job didn’t sin against the Lord like his friends projected. And though we don’t know Naomi’s culpability in the move to Moab or the unions of her sons to Moabites, we do know that she looked at her losses and assumed God’s hand was against her.
Do you see yourself in Naomi? Sometimes I have a “Naomi lens” through which I view God. Because I believe God is sovereign over my suffering, I sometimes fumble with my belief in His goodness.
When the losses in my life pile up in great heaps of grief, I tend to let them tell me who God is and what He is about. It is so tempting to look at the difficult trials and sufferings we walk through and let them define God’s character. If I lose my spouse, if I can’t have a child, if I’m lonely, if my husband leaves me, if I can’t pay my bills, if people betray me, if I never get married—then God must not love me like He loves others. Perhaps I am beneath His love. Perhaps He is even angry with me.
Our circumstances are painfully real. But sometimes they are liars when it comes to telling us what’s true about God. We cannot base our thoughts of God upon what has happened to us. We need to know Him as He has revealed Himself to us through the Word. His declaration of His character in His own words—that is our proper lens. This lens helps us view the trials we face with eyes that look to His goodness first.
Our circumstances are painfully real. But sometimes they are liars when it comes to telling us what’s true about God. Share on XI don’t want to be too hard on Naomi. She saw through a mirror much more dimly than we do. We have the whole gospel, specifically replete with the future hope the people of God leaned upon before the birth of Christ. But I suspect Naomi wasn’t recalling the faithful love God had demonstrated to Israel for generations. Her losses overshadowed what she knew to be true about Him.
We do the same thing, don’t we? We know that in Christ we have confidence that God is never, ever against us (Rom. 8:1), yet we look at our sorrows, our pains, our frustrations, and we decide God isn’t near or loving or kind or concerned. We might even be a little fearful that He’s punishing us.
Let me encourage you today: your circumstances will not always tell the truth about God’s character, His motives, or His plans. Though you cannot always guess at His motives, you can look for the ways He is loving you. Even in loss. Even in grief. Go to the source of what you know to be true about Him and ask just one question of the Bible: Who does He say that He is? Write it down–every phrase about His faithfulness, His kindness, justice, mercy, holiness, goodness, patience. In so doing, you are building a new lens, the right lens, through which to view your life–even the hard parts. When you look at your trials through the lens of God’s faithful love, you will see the ways He is loving you. You will see that He loves you by being with you, by using trials to make you like Christ, by teaching you to hold fast to Him, by holding fast to you.
Naomi saw it later. She saw the restoration of hope and family and a future. God proved that He wasn’t against her and hadn’t forgotten her. But what Naomi didn’t know is that her losses were a chapter of a bigger story, the climax of which came in her town of Bethlehem generations later when Jesus was born. We’re still benefiting from the story of Naomi’s family.
We can’t always guess why God works in the ways He does, allows the suffering He allows, or waits when we think He should move. But we can trust that His good character remains unchanged and that the God who saw Naomi’s despair also sees ours. He is never sitting idly by, arbitrarily turning His hand against us. For those who are in Christ, He is always for us. We might not see how our circumstances bear witness to that until we see them through the lens of His enduring faithfulness. Know that God is sovereign, but remember that He is kind.
Know that God is sovereign, but remember that He is kind. Share on XPhoto by Youssef Aboutaleb on Unsplash
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.