NOTES for Rut 1:15-22

Everyone has moments of choice that determine the whole course of life to come. In such a situation, each person is naturally guided by particular motives. It often turns out that those motives lead the person in the same direction that God's plan for that person's own life has determined, even though the person may never think of anything of the kind. What, indeed, could Ruth have known about her mother-in-law's God, even if Naomi had tried to tell her something about Him?

Ruth was unlikely to have known anything about Him beyond the forms of outward religious practice. The words “your people shall be my people, and your God my God” are merely a traditional formula expressing Ruth's readiness to follow her mother-in-law back to her homeland and leave her own people. But God has His own plan, and Ruth really will enter His people, so fully that one of her descendants will in due time become king of Israel, a country that he himself will create.

This is probably what theologians sometimes call “synergy,” the joint action of God and a human being. It may not always be fully conscious. But anyone who acts in this way always begins from something that is, for that person, a profound and sincerely pure movement of the heart.

Indeed, by every human calculation Ruth should have left her mother-in-law: she had no reason to remain with her, and Naomi herself understood this perfectly. But attachment to someone who had become family proved stronger than everyday calculations. The choice Ruth made became the spiritual foundation that enabled her to become part of the people of God.

Of course, God still had to do something more, without which such an entry would have been impossible. But He had something to work with in Ruth's heart. This is probably the essential thing in the relationship between God and a human being, the essential thing from which every spiritual path begins. God needs at least one chance, at least one opportunity, when the human heart is concerned. He will take care of the rest. God never misses His chance to save a human being.