“JEHOVAH HAD VISITED HIS PEOPLE”
C. A. Coates
Naomi represents that state of heart which takes account of all the departure from God’s thoughts, and feels the sorrow of it. Speaking assembly-wise we can look back to the time when we had first love and did first works, and enjoyed the inheritance; but we have to feel how different it is now. But God has gracious thoughts of recovery and restoration. This is necessarily an individual matter, but individual recovery always has in view, from God’s side, recovery of assembly character. God does not despise anyone who feels things rightly before Him. He delights in recovery. The Christian profession, as a whole, will end its course in apostasy, but there are those who, like Naomi, feel the state of things, and in Ruth we see sensibilities that are awakened to appreciate what is of God by coming in contact with them.
Ruth’s heart was open to the spiritual impressions that reached her. How suitable is all this in view of recovery to what is in God’s mind for His people? Sorrowful exercises in Naomi and ardent affection in Ruth moved together from the fields of Moab and came to Bethlehem. But we must not forget that what started the movement was neither in Naomi nor in Ruth, but in Jehovah. “Jehovah had visited his people to give them bread”. It was the report of this that set them in motion. And there is a similar grace on His part today. The departure is manifest, and it is right to feel it, but the thoughts of God are unchanged, and the inheritance is as much in His heart for His people as it ever was. And in these last days God has, indeed, visited His people to give them bread. It is a time of extraordinary contrasts. On one side there is lack of spirituality, worldliness, self-seeking, every man doing what is right in his own eyes. But on another side wonderful and blessed divine movements.
It would hardly be saying too much if we affirmed that there is more bread available for the people of God today than there has been at any time since the days of the apostles. The question for each one of us is. Are we interested? Is the inheritance, and the bread divinely given, attractive enough to draw us out of Moab, and to bring us to Bethlehem? If so, we shall find that it is “the beginning of the barley harvest”. The barley harvest is figurative of what is connected with Christ as the risen One. God is giving to His people what is precious and nourishing. As the Sheaf of first-fruits, Christ has been waved in resurrection, and what is secured in Him lies outside the region of either individual failure or assembly failure. It is all the product of divine grace and working. Christ is, indeed, the mighty Man of wealth; He is the true Boaz—in Him is strength. We find afterwards that Ruth kept with the maidens of Boaz until the end of the wheat harvest; the wheat harvest has reference to the saints as after the order of Christ; it brings in, typically, the assembly.
(From ‘An Outline of Ruth’)