The following message is by pastor John Piper.

More information from Desiring God is available at

W.W.

D. Desiring God.

O. R. G. Well, this is a strange chapter.

And more is going on perhaps than you realize.

We'll get to it in a moment. Let me do a little review.

Chapter 1, God is at work in the darkest of times, a famine in Judah, Bethlehem where Naomi and her

husband-in-L live, so they, whether right or not, I don't know, went to

Moab and in Moab found food for a season and Illimelek died. Her sons, Melon and Chilion, married foreign women and for 10 years, had no children,

and then her sons died.

And then she decides to go back when the famine is lifting,

and only one of her daughters and law will go with her namely Ruth and she goes and so

at the end of that chapter she says the Lord has has dealt bitterly with me and that's true. There are bitter providences and

there are sweet providences and and this book is about to end on some

amazingly sweet providences.

But at the beginning, and the whole point I think of the book

is to try to help God's people in the darkest of times realize how life really flows, how life moves.

And at the end of the chapter, they come at the beginning of barley harvest, and it's in the barley harvest where all the

provinces will turn from dark to to sweet. So there's an opening, there's a

crack in the dark cloud that is over Naomi's life.

Might be good to give one illustration of this kind of pilgrimage from our church.

...