First Fruits (Pentecost) and the Book of Ruth

I was sipping coffee while watching Israeli TV at 5am yesterday. The banner at the bottom of the screen said 60 rockets had been fired into Israel since 7pm Sunday (Israeli time). Unrest is nothing new to the region – going back a couple of thousand years. For those of us waiting for God’s plan to unfold into its final messianic chapter, we don’t like to see the violence but we know how it is going to end!

Monday was Shavuot, the celebration of the wheat harvest and the giving of the Law. Even though it is a one day holiday in Israel and two days across the rest of the globe, I will explore the holiday throughout the week by looking at the book of Ruth, which is read on Shavuot.

The holiday is “First Fruits” (Ex. 23:19; 34:26, Num. 15:17–21; 18:12–13; Deut. 26:1–11) or as the Christian world knows it, “Pentecost”. It comes 7 weeks (50 days) after Passover and is the day the Holy Spirit came upon Peter and the disciples, and then all of the Jewish people who came to the Temple with their offering – the 3,000-plus who responded to Peter’s preaching – also received the Holy Spirit.

The story of the giving of the Law begins at Exodus 19 and it is expounded on in Leviticus. Leviticus can seem like an endless list of rules and regulations that really don’t matter to us. There’s no altar, no active priestly activity so what does it really matter to us today.

Reading Leviticus today – and making it relevant today – makes more sense when we know the Hebrew title of the book: Vayikra, “and He called.” It is as much a book about the priestly life, sacrifices and laws of life as it is God calling His people. He’s calling His people to be holy and to conform to what He wants us to do. But He is also calling us to know Him.

He called. Why? Can we know Him? Why take God to be our God if we don’t know who He is? The Law given to Moses loses its dryness when we read it as a book where we get to know God’s character. The book comes alive when we read it to get to know God. As the quote above says, it is much more than a list of commandments, it reveals His plan for creation. One of those plans, repeated over and over again, is that there is no remission of sin without the shedding of blood – message that arcs all the way over to the new covenant and the blood of Messiah Yeshua.

Isn’t it great that God’s plan for creation is in every book of the Bible?

One book that is read on Shavuot is the short story of Ruth. It takes a mere 15 or 20 minutes to read and it, too, reveals much about God and His plan for His creation. Ruth will be the subject of these devotions for most of this week.

One of the story lines in the Book of Ruth is about being kind and compassionate.

Kindness and compassion are bundled into one idea in Jewish thought: “Chessed”. We see chessed in the way Ruth and Orpah treat Naomi in verse 1:8, “May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me.” Each daughter-in-law is given the option of staying in Moab instead of going to Bethlehem. Orpah stays and Ruth travels with Naomi.

Ruth’s chessed was well known in Bethlehem and by her future husband (and future redeemer of Elimelech’s land) knew her story well. In chapter 2:verse 2 we read, “But Boaz answered her, “All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me, and how you left your father and mother and your native land and came to a people that you did not know before.”

Ruth didn’t need to show kindness and compassion to the extent she did by leaving her home and parents. She did not need to follow the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But she did and people in Bethlehem heard about it – and her chessed toward Naomi – and apparently admired it.

There are three things to note:

(1) Ruth was blessed by God through the kindness and compassion of Boaz.

(2) Naomi was blessed because she wanted to be called “Mara” (Bitter) when she arrived back in Bethlehem but by the time this narrative is written she is called Naomi throughout the rest of the book.The bitterness she felt evidently did not stick around.

(3) Ruth and Boaz were blessed by becoming the great-grandparents of King David.

The kindness and compassion you have on others is blessed by God because chessed is one of the characteristics of God. His chessed is so great that He sent Yeshua to the tree to bare the weight of our sins.

We shouldn’t do kindness and compassion for the sake of God’s blessing. We should do it because it reflects God’s love for us. Our hope and prayer is that people will see our Messiah in us — and they’ll want the hope and joy we have in Him.