The Contrast of Grace:

Ugliness and beauty are most themselves in each other’s company. On the backside of Cinnamon Pass, Colorado, headed for Silverton, Sue and I drove through a valley that had been ravaged by mining. It’s treeless, red mud slopes were littered with the rusting tools of someone’s fortune. The miners left it looking like the surface of Mars. Just around a bend was another valley so verdantly pristine that my eyes felt like a direct connection to my Creator. Man’s worst and God’s best in the space of half an hour.

I felt that way in my Bible reading this week. I slogged through the heart-sickening end of the Book of Judges. My Bible innocuously entitled the story, “The Levite and His Concubine.” It’s a drama so dark and bloody you couldn’t even show it on network television. God’s brutal honesty about the depravity of man and the consequences of evil. It’s ugly.

Just on the other side of that dark valley, you come to the Book of Ruth. Ruth isn’t beautiful all at once … like passing between those valleys in Colorado, there is a transition from the scarred to the sacred. The book begins with disobedience, tragic consequences and a woman so bereft she changed her name to “Bitter.” But in four short chapters, the full beauty of God’s providential love unfolds.

Noble, wealthy Boaz puts his reputation and fortune on the line to rebuild the name of a disobedient dead man. Boaz is a vivid Old Testament picture of Christ. What impressed me with this reading was how Boaz treated his destitute relatives. The Law of Moses required that he leave the edges of his field uncut and to allow the poor to pick up what the harvesters missed (Leviticus 23:22). Boaz went beyond law and showed grace to Ruth. 

Boaz gave orders to his men, “Let her gather among the sheaves and don’t reprimand her. Even pull out some stalks for her from the bundles and leave them for her to pick up, and don’t rebuke her.” Ruth 2:15-16

Ruth went home after a day in the field with so much grain that Naomi instantly knew that some field owner had gone beyond the expected and deep into grace. Though I sometimes forget, that is the way my Father treated me in Christ … the gleanings, plus the full heads of grain and no rebuke. My worst, answered and abundantly covered by His Best. (See Romans 8:32)

 


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