I, like most men I know, enjoy movies with some action and movement. Fire… explosions… suspense… these are the elements that get us excited. None of those “chick flicks,” right? My wife will sit and cry over all the sad and happy parts and I’m there strictly for the comic relief. But I will honestly admit, I’m a sucker for a good romantic comedy – a love story with a happy ending. We all are – we’re suckers for it (whether we’ll admit it or not).

In a conversation the other day, I was telling my seven-year-old the story of Romeo and Juliet. I’m not sure how we got onto the subject, but she kept wanting to know more. About two thirds of the way through, I realized I was going to have to try to explain how it ended – they both die! For some reason, during the Elizabethan era, we thought that was romantic!

Romeo and Juliet was a romantic tragedy, but our culture is addicted to happy endings, so we will accept nothing other than a romantic comedy in which everyone lives “happily ever after.”

That’s the story of Ruth and Boaz. Here it is in short (based on Ruth 3-4): Ruth finds Boaz overseeing the threshing of his wheat crop and uses an ancient cultural tradition of the time to essentially propose marriage to him. He takes her up on the offer, protects her reputation, and goes out of his way to buy the land that she will forfeit without a husband. He further marries her and they have kids. And they live happily ever after.

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Ruth chapter 2 has to be one of my favorite chapters in the Old Testament because of its portrayal of our relationship with Christ. I don’t want to over-spiritualize the text. It’s a real story that happened in a real time and place. But it’s also a picture. In fact, the whole book of Ruth is a picture of our relationship with Christ.

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In our journey through the Word (I’ve been preaching through the entire Bible on Sundays), we’ve come up to the book of Ruth – one of my own favorites in the Old Testament. Ruth’s story takes place during one of the darker ages of the history of the Israelites. It’s a dark time in her nation, her life, and her family, yet Ruth manages to make some pretty great decisions along the way.

ONE GREAT TRUTH: Life presents a series of circumstances to us that are really opportunities for us to make a godly choice.

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