Love and the Sovereignty of God

I grew up on the Northshore. Moved back here in 2019 after living and pastoring in New Orleans and New York. But coming back to the Covington-Mandeville area has meant I’ve naturally run into classmates from high school every so often. I hadn’t kept in touch with any of them, but when we see each other, we get a moment to catch up, hear how each other are doing.

And, can I tell you, knowing someone from high school and then meeting them again decades later is a weird thing. We’re not the same people who graduated together. They might be in a job that I never would have expected for them, and I’m not the kid with a buzzcut driving around a Hummer H3. Praise God. People change, and it can throw us for a minute when we hear about the things that have happened in someone’s life that we used to know.

That’s what we see with Naomi in our passage this week. In the first 18 verses, we learned that her family fled Israel during a famine that was meant to discipline God’s people and bring them to repentance for pursuing false gods and lead them to trust in him again. This was in the period of Judges where there was no king and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. And for Naomi, her husband, and their two sons, that meant running away from what God was doing and settling in Moab for 10 years.

Her sons married Moabite women who worshipped other gods, and then Naomi’s husband and sons all tragically died. As she’s grieving, she hears that there’s no longer a famine in Israel, so her and one of her daughters-in law who now follows God, Ruth—they head back to her hometown of Bethlehem. Naomi hadn’t been there in over a decade, and when she returns, the women who knew her before she left are surprised at what they see. No husband, no sons—just a sad looking Naomi with some Moabite lady beside her.

It makes them wonder if this is really the Naomi they knew. The name Naomi means “pleasant”, and that’s the way she seems to have been in the past. But no longer. Naomi in verse 20 tells them, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara”, which literally means bitter. Naomi’s returned home, but she is not the same, and she’s blaming God for being against her and bringing calamity in her life.

Is she wrong? There’s a doctrine within the church we call the sovereignty of God. It’s not just that nothing is more powerful than God; it’s that nothing is outside of his control. He’s not competing with other forces, and we hope he will win. He is already victorious, and his Word will not fail. Those are big statements that inevitably should lead to a lot of questions. Even though we won’t hit all of them today, I do want to touch on some of them.

Because at the core of the story of Ruth is a God whose people are doubting whether he’ll come through on the promises he made all the way back to Abraham. And in the middle of their doubts and rebellion, God’s in the process of accomplishing those very things in the life of Ruth—but they only happen because she goes with her mother-in-law to Bethlehem after her husband, father-in-law, and brother-in-law all tragically die.

Without those deaths, we don’t get Ruth and Boaz, we don’t get their son, Obed, the grandfather of King David, and we don’t get the family line that eventually leads to the birth of Jesus. God sovereignly worked in each and every one of those events to bring about his will for his glory and our good.

But God’s sovereignty isn’t the only doctrine about God that’s present in the book of Ruth. He’s also clearly depicted as a God of love. I mean, Ruth is a love story. Sure, we see a kind of romance between Ruth and Boaz (which I promise we’ll start getting to next week), but we also see the love of God on display for his people, both generally and specifically.

Generally, we see how he’s provided for all of Israel. Even though he was in the middle of disciplining them for their rebellion and worship of false gods, he didn’t give up on them. He was actually putting into motion his plan to redeem them. To provide them with a King. To one day provide them with their Savior. That’s a God of love.

But more specifically, we see the care in how he provides for Naomi and Ruth. Women that lose their loved ones, but God gives them one another, so they won’t be alone. Women that come to Bethlehem aimless, but find new purpose and joy through how God provides. That’s a God of love.

See, we can’t understand God’s sovereignty without his love, and we can’t understand his love without his sovereignty. And we actually wouldn’t want a God that had one without the other. A God who’s all loving but isn’t in control of everything can’t accomplish much for us. He can try, just like my two year old son can try to pick me up off the ground. He loves me, but there’s a limit to his strength, and you can’t rest your faith in a God who may or may not be able to defeat the worst things in your life.

At the same time, a God who’s all powerful and in control of everything but doesn’t truly love us is a God we won’t find peace in; just fear. We’ll be afraid of angering him, so we’ll probably try to avoid him because we don’t know what he’ll do to us. Neither a God who’s loving but not sovereign nor a God who’s sovereign but not loving is good news for us. Neither can be a stable source of joy and purpose. We need both.

And the book of Ruth presents a great case study that the God of the Bible is. He’s both all loving and all powerful. He both cares for you and is in control over your life. What this brief little description of Naomi’s homecoming does for us in verses 19-22 is demonstrate three reasons why it’s good news that God’s both loving and sovereign. But before I get to those, I do want to ask the obvious question.

If God is sovereign, if he’s in control of everything, if he does whatever he pleases, and he loves us, then why does he let these bad things happen? It makes sense that when you experience suffering your first reaction might be to doubt one of these two truths about God: either he’s not sovereign enough to protect me from pain, or he’s not loving enough toward me to want to keep me from pain. We see Naomi question the latter in verse 21: “The LORD has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me.” She lost her family, and now she believes God’s against her.

How are we supposed to understand this? Maybe you’ve found yourself asking God the question, “Why are you making me go through this?” That’s exactly the question I’d ask my high school basketball coach when he would made me run a mile before practice. I hated running. That’s the worst part of any sport. So why are you going to make me run without a ball before we go back in the gym and then run around with a ball?

I knew, conceptually, that it was helping me be better conditioned, so I could last longer and perform better on the court, but that didn’t make me appreciate my coach telling me to do it while he stood off to the side watching us.

You might not know why God has brought certain events into your life and allowed the affects of sin that’s broken our world to impact you in this way or that way. Maybe you’re like me running laps around the school and knowing it would make me a better athlete, but that not making me any more okay with it while my coach stood and watched.

Maybe you understand that God can and does use every circumstance in your life, both good and bad, to accomplish his will in you and to make you more like him as a follower of Jesus, but that might not help you endure those times of pain in the moment. The difference between that and me running laps? Our God isn’t off to the side watching. He stepped onto the field. On the cross, Jesus stepped into our suffering for us, so that he could use any other suffering we go through in life for a purpose that’s good for us. And because he stays with us, we have the promise that he will sustain us.

The gospel shows us that our God is sovereign, and our God is loving. And here in these 4 verses at the end of Ruth chapter 1, we see that because God is loving and sovereign: your tragedies will always come with mercy, your losses will never leave you alone, and your identity in him will be secure in any circumstance

First off, your tragedies will always come with mercy. Look with me at verse 21.‍

Ruth 1:21 ESV

²¹ I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi, when the Lord has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?”

If God is in control of everything, then that means he’s using everything. Naomi believes she’s returning to Bethlehem with much less than she left with. And, in a very real way, that’s true. Our conversations about the sovereignty of God should never minimize how painful and real our suffering is. She’s hurting, and nowhere in Scripture do we see God act like following him means we shouldn’t experience grief. Jesus himself wept in John 11 after hearing of the death of his dear friend, Lazarus (even though he knew he was going to raise him from the dead!).

But at the same time, if God is loving and he’s sovereign, then our tragedies will always come with mercy. If he’s in control of everything, and he’s always working, then the loss Naomi’s experienced or the suffering you’ve gone through or are currently dealing with in life is never an end in itself. It’s never the end of the story. As Romans 8:28 tells us,

Romans 8:28 ESV

²⁸ And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

This should be both comforting and convicting. Comforting because the all-powerful God of the universe is working for your good. Convicting, potentially, because his version of “our good” and our version might not be the same. Let me ask you this: If you never went through any issues in life, if you coasted without any major loss and only ever experienced minor setbacks, but you never grew closer in relationship with Jesus, would you be happy?

If we answer yes to that, then Jesus isn’t the Lord of our life; we are. We’re masters at self-defining what would be good for us and then expecting God to meet us on our terms and fulfill our wishes. But Romans 8:28 doesn’t promise that God is working all things together for our version of our good—he’s working the events of the lives of his people toward his good—the greatest good we could ever experience. And he tells us what that is in the very next verse. Romans 8:29 says,

Romans 8:29 ESV

²⁹ For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

As a follower of Jesus, every event of your life is being used by God to make you look more and more like Jesus until one day we are united with him for all eternity.

Naomi thought she was returning to Bethlehem empty, but she was actually returning ready to be filled. They fled Israel to escape God’s discipline for rebelling against him and rejecting his rule in their lives. Now, her circumstances has brought her to a place where she has nothing else to rely on and needs God to be for her what she can’t be for herself.

She says it herself: she’s empty. She has no answers. She can see God is in control, but she doesn’t see how it could benefit her. But because she doesn’t have anything else to fall back on, she’s finally in a place where she’ll have to rely on the Lord. And God’s going to use this awful tragedy in her life for her greatest good as she ends this story not just at peace but joyful in the sovereign love of her Lord.

No matter what you’ve gone through, no matter what you may be going through in life, remind yourself that God is in control, he is loving, and he is merciful enough to sometimes not give you your definition of good as he works to provide you with the greatest possible good: drawing you to himself.

But we don’t just see God’s mercy here in Naomi’s story; we also see how he’s relational. Because, if God is loving and sovereign—and he is—then your losses will never leave you alone. Look how verse 19 opens up:

Ruth 1:19 ESV

¹⁹ So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem. And when they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them. And the women said, “Is this Naomi?”

And then we read again in verse 22:

Ruth 1:22 ESV

²² So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabite her daughter-in-law with her, who returned from the country of Moab. And they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of barley harvest.

Naomi thinks she’s returning empty, but she’s not by herself. If it weren’t for her journey to Moab—which, again, was a sinful action, fleeing from God—but if she hadn’t gone there with her family, then Ruth wouldn’t have married one of Naomi’s sons, they wouldn’t be returning to Bethlehem together, Ruth wouldn’t meet Boaz to continue the family line that would result in Kind David and Jesus, and Naomi wouldn’t get to see Ruth’s providential story play out in a way that shows her how God lovingly provides.

Our pain often brings with it a temptation towards isolation. We think, whatever it is we’re going through, that either other people wouldn’t understand, or we don’t want to burden them, or they can’t really help, or we don’t want to focus on it—whatever the reason might be, it’s easy to find ourselves moving away from community with other people when we’re going through something difficult.

As we’ll see in the coming chapters, Naomi needed Ruth to experience God’s provision and Ruth needed Naomi to understand how to respond to what God was doing. They needed each other, but more than that, God sovereignly provided them with each other.

I didn’t expect to move back to the Northshore from living in New York, and when I came back here it was after an incredibly difficult season of life. I didn’t really know what was next, and I didn’t have any friends over here, since I hadn’t lived here since high school.

I started attending a Bible study at church, and the first time I walked into the room, there were two main guys there to greet me: Ryan Messer and John Self. I’d quickly learn that we were all very different from each other. I liked sports, Ryan liked games, and John liked to do whatever we wanted to do. So we started playing a lot of board games. They provided incredible friendship for me as I was starting over. I got to be a best man in one wedding, I got officiate another wedding, and they’re both part of this new church.

What you might be going through in life right now might feel like a burden, but the community of other believers in your life isn’t a burden. It’s a blessing that God will use to help you through those other burdens in life. In our passage last week, we see Naomi pushing Ruth and her other daughter-in-law, Orpah away. She doesn’t want to walk with them. She’d resolved herself to be alone.

Why do we do that? Why is our tendency not to let others in when we need their help the most? It’s because vulnerability isn’t comfortable. And so we’re only going to be willing to risk vulnerability with another person if we already feel safe with someone else. Naomi didn’t feel safe with God. She felt God was against her.

But when we look at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in our place and for our good, we can have certainty that we’re safe in him—certainty that no matter what happens out there, I am loved, accepted, and have a future with the God who dwells in here. He knows all my sin, better than I do. I’ve repented from relying on those other things rather than him, and he has declared me forgiven, reconciled, and given me the righteousness of Christ that I haven’t earned. In the deepest possible sense: I am safe, and I am never alone.

And because I’m safe in Christ, because I’ve been accepted by the greatest person, I can take the risk of being misunderstood or even being rejected by another person. I can choose vulnerability and allow others to weep with me, comfort me, encourage me, admonish me, and guide me, because I know at the end of the day my God has proven he is and will always will be for me.

So, if you struggle to lean into community, to allow yourself to be known by others; if your tendency is to isolate and put on a front that everything’s fine rather than allowing yourself to be vulnerable with other people, so that they can love and serve you well, then I would encourage you: remind yourself why the gospel of Jesus is good news. Preach the gospel to your own heart every day, both good days and bad days.

Because that’s not just going to provide you with community and make you aware of God’s mercy. It’s also going to give you a sense of security. If God is loving and sovereign—and, once again, he is—then your identity in him will be secure in any circumstance. Let’s look at our passage one more time, now in verse 20.

Ruth 1:20 ESV

²⁰ She said to them, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.

Naomi does something entirely unique to the Bible here: she’s the only person anywhere in Scripture to give herself a new name. Now, that’s not to say that other people don’t change their names in the Bible. Several do. But in every other instance, God renames a person because the meaning of the new name reflects the work he is going to do in and through them. Naomi’s the only person we see renaming herself because of her understanding of what God has already done in her life.

And guess what? The name doesn’t stick. To be fair, most people that try to give themselves their own nickname today doesn’t stick either. I could tell you all this morning, I feel like “Rob” is played out. I have the same name as my dad—I’m a “second”—so I’d like for you to start calling me “deuces”.

Now, there are some of you, because of your personality and your relationship to me that you’re already wondering how long you can tease me by actually starting to call me Deuces. But it’s not going to stick. It doesn’t speak to how you actually know me.

And for Naomi, the name Mara doesn’t stick either. Even the author of Ruth refuses to use it for the rest of the book. He keeps calling her Naomi. Why? Because who God says you are is more profound and more permanent than anything you might temporarily feel in this life. Tragedy might have left Naomi feeling bitter, but God was working to make her even more “pleasant” than she ever was before.

When we understand our identity primarily through the lenses of what we feel and experience, then we won’t consistently have any kind of stability in our lives. It’ll feel like our self-understanding and our self-worth is always changing because how we feel and what’s going on around us is always changing. We need something outside of us that’s more steady and greater than us to attribute value and meaning to us. When we have to come up with our own purpose in life, then we’re also responsible for maintaining it.

But what if we were created, not because of an accident and not because we were needed, but because we were wanted? If that’s the case, then fulfillment in our lives only requires us to be close to the one that desires us. That’s why the Apostle Paul, despite all his hardships and persecution in life, can joyfully declare in Philippians 1:21, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

We don’t have to make a name for ourselves when we’re resting in the name God gives us as his children. Honestly, that’s the core of what we mean when we talk about “becoming a Christian”. We’re turning from trying to direct our own lives and relying on our own work and submitting our lives to God, resting in the work of Jesus. Repentance and faith.

God’s sovereign love in Naomi’s life wouldn’t allow her to remain “Mara”. He pursued her, he revealed himself to her, and by the end of this story, we see his pleasantness displayed through her. No matter where you’re at in your life right now, because God is loving and he’s sovereign, you can confidently build your life on what he’s done for you and what he says about you rather than putting the pressure on your own ability.

The greatest news in all the world is that you don’t have to be the hero of your own story. And you can’t. Allow God give you a name through the finished work of Jesus that will never change and will accomplish every good purpose of his in your life.

Let’s pray.