Bitter

Back to Bethlehem (v.19)

We turn again to the book of Ruth, which I almost called "The Gospel of Ruth" at one point in my preparation this week, which of course is a mistake but maybe not as big of a mistake as we might think. This book is just full of pictures of the gospel. Last week we saw it in Ruth's faithful, steadfast love, a love that laid down her life for Naomi. A love that left a familiar home to go into a far country for the sake of another. A love that wouldn't take no for an answer. A love that is relentless.

And Naomi finally relented when she realized how determined Ruth was. Not that she said "okay, fine, you can come with me." Verse 18 says that “when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more” (Ruth 1:18). Naomi just gives up, because Ruth is going to win this one, no questions asked. And then in verse 19 we read these beautiful words: "So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem." They go on together, and return to the House of Bread. Verse 19 goes on to tell us that "when they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them."

I might have thought this was a bit of exaggeration before I moved to a small town, but now I realize how fast word can spread, and how everybody knows everything about everybody. And sometime we should talk about how problematic this can be, and the Christian virtue of minding our own business.

But for today, what we see here is understandable. In the little town of Bethlehem, people remembered Naomi, and when she showed up, the word spread like wildfire.

It's interesting that the women say, "Is this Naomi?" More than ten hard years have gone by. We know what it's like to see someone you don't expect, especially after a long time has passed. Naomi has aged. Grief tends to change a person. She has no husband or sons with her—just this Moabite woman tagging along. It's an understandable question—"Naomi, is that you?"

From Pleasant to Bitter (v. 20-21)

And Naomi both confirms and denies their question. Yes, she is the person that used to be called "Naomi," but no, she no longer wishes that to be that name.

Remember that names in Israel had meaning, and that meaning described who that person was. Sometimes in the Bible people's names are changed when there is a significant change in their destiny. Abram—"exalted Father"—became Abraham—"father of a multitude"—when God promised him His son. Jacob—"heel-grabber"—became Israel—"God-wrestler." Several other times new names are given to reflect a major change in someone's life.

From my research, unless I've missed something, this is the only time in the Bible where someone attempts to change their own name. And it's the only time in the Bible where someone's name is changed because of bad circumstances.

Naomi seeks a name change not because there's some great new destiny ahead of her. She seeks a new name because "Naomi" means "pleasant," and that sounds like a sick joke to her. Nothing about her life in the last number of years has felt pleasant. Every time someone used that name it must have felt like vinegar on her wounds.

So she says, "Do not call me Naomi" (v. 20). Don't call me "pleasant." That's not true anymore.

What does she want to be called by? "Call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me" (v. 20).

Mara means bitter. It's a word that's used for Esau's great and "bitter" cry when he finds out Jacob stole his blessing (Gen 27:34). It's the word used for the waters of Marah which the people couldn't drink because they were bitter (Ex 15:23). Death itself is referred to as "bitter" more than once in the Bible (1 Sam 15:32, Ecc 7:26).

"Bitter" is interesting because it's a taste word. Black coffee, dark chocolate, and some leafy greens have a bitter flavour to them, but in small amounts it can be enjoyable. Some plants are very bitter, like wormwood—a herb connected to bitterness in the Bible—which apparently is good for your health because they sell it in tea form. My mom bought a box once and offered me a sip and the only way to describe the experience is that a little part of my mouth died that day. It that's anything like what the waters of Marah tasted like, I don't blame the Israelites for staying away.

Humour aside, we know what bitter tastes like, and Naomi's life felt bitter. Bitterness defined her identity and that's what she wanted to be known as. She wanted everybody to see her and call her "Bitter."

It's important to note, though, that Naomi doesn't just say "my life has been bitter." Look at what she says in verse 21: "The Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me."

The Almighty. Shaddai. A name by which God was known to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. A name associated with his acts of blessing and cursing, judgement, and power. This God, the God of our Fathers, has made my life bitter.

Naomi understands that what has happened to her has been from the hand of the Lord. And look at how that idea continues throughout the next verse: “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?”” (Ruth 1:21).

According to Naomi, who is responsible for the grief and bitterness in her life? God. She went away full, and He brought her back empty. He has testified against her and He has brought calamity upon her.

This is God's fault, she's saying. Don't call me pleasant. God has made me bitter.

Have you ever heard people in your life say things like this? "Why is God doing this to me?" Think of the trite things we often say in response to those statements. Think of how easy it would be, even here, to write Naomi's words off as the complaint of a sad woman which shouldn't be taken too seriously.

I remember hearing one sermon like that. "Man, what a downer Naomi was. Don't be like Naomi." First of all, that's just an awful way to respond to someone who is actively grieving some serious losses. But second, it fails to take seriously the huge significance of her words.

Naomi attributed her losses to God. And we need to think hard about this, because, like we're about to see, there's a lot of pretty significant truth to consider here.

Where Naomi is Right

Let's start by asking, where is Naomi right? In what ways is Naomi correct in what she says about herself and her God here?

God the Author

Let's start at the basic level: Naomi is right to understand that God is sovereign over all things. When we say that God is sovereign, we mean that He's in charge. God is the one who rules over the world and whatever He wants to happen is what happens.

Ephesians 1:11 refers to God as “him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11).

This applies to big things, like Psalm 33:10 says: “10 The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. 11 The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations” (Psalm 33:10–11).

It also applies to small things: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord” (Proverbs 16:33). “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Matthew 10:29).

Nothing happens, not even "natural" things, apart from God's sovereign will. If you have some time this week you could read Psalm 104 and read about the water cycle and the food chain and the orbit of the planet and how all of creation is not just running like a clock that God wound up, but is working the way it works because God is upholding and sustaining and ruling over His creation.

And this doesn't just apply to nice things. This includes all things. “I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). “Is a trumpet blown in a city, and the people are not afraid? Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?” (Amos 3:6).

Jeremiah wrote, “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come?” (Lamentations 3:38).

Or, like the Lord said to Moses, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” (Exodus 4:11). Later on in Deuteronomy He said “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand” (Deuteronomy 32:39).

And as Proverbs summarizes, “The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble” (Proverbs 16:4).

With our modern way of thinking about things, we often struggle with this truth because it makes it sound like God is responsible for sin, and we're just robots. And what we have to recognize is that neither of those things are true. The Bible tells us that God is totally sovereign over all things, even calamity and disaster, and yet in such a way that He never sins, and we are fully responsible for our choices.

We can think about it a little bit like the author of a book. An author writes a story. Bad things might happen in that story, and the author decided that those bad things would happen, but that doesn't make the author a bad person who was the immediate cause of those things happening in the story.

I read a book as a child about a boy who was playing with fireworks, had a firework explode in his face, and went blind as a result. We can ask, who was responsible for making that boy blind? There's two ways of answering that question. We could say, "the boy was playing with fireworks." Or we could say, "The author chose to put that in his story."

And both would be true. Which is exactly how Joseph spoke to his brothers about their great wickedness of selling him into slavery. “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

One event. You had a meaning, and God had a meaning. God committed no evil. But Joseph's brothers evil act was an important part of the story God was telling, and He put it in that story on purpose.

This way of thinking doesn't answer every question—it's just an illustration or analogy that points us in the right direction as to how these these things all fit together. But it is a helpful picture that the Bible itself uses. “In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (Psalm 139:16).

We're characters in God's story. And to bring it back to Naomi, she's basically complaining that God has written some very hard chapters into her life. And, generally speaking, she's right. He did.

Covenant Realities

There's a second sense in which Naomi's words make sense, and that's when we zoom in on the covenant that God made with Israel. We talked about this last week. God had specifically promised His people that if they obeyed Him and kept His covenant, they would be blessed, whereas if they disobeyed Him and went after other gods, they would experience the opposite of blessing.

Every bad thing that happened to Naomi and her family, from the famine, to their removal from the land, to her son's childlessness, to the early death of her husband and sons, were all things that God warned His people would happen to them if they were unfaithful to His covenant.

And these things wouldn't just happen. God would do them. Read Deuteronomy 28, and what do you read? “The Lord will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me” (Deuteronomy 28:20). And as you keep reading that chapter you read phrases like "The Lord will make the pestilence stick to you" (v. 21), "the Lord will strike you with wasting disease" (v. 22), and "The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies" (v. 25).

God would do these things to Israel. And so, having experienced these covenant curses, Naomi has more reason than we might think to say that God has dealt bitterly with her. Not only is God sovereign over everything, but in a very special way he was directly involved in bringing calamity against His people when they refused to obey Him.

And when Naomi says in verse 21 that "the Lord has testified against me," perhaps we should take this as an admission that she, like many in Israel at this time, had participated in the idol worship and other sins that God warned them about. And these things that happened to her were God's witness against her sin.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Because, as we're going to see in 1 Samuel in a few weeks, while the blessings and curses of the covenant applied to the community, they didn't necessarily apply to every single person in the community with equal measure.

Hannah was a righteous woman but was still unable to bear a child. David repeatedly complains in the Psalms about successful sinners. This fits in with the perspective of Ecclesiastes, that sometimes the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer.

And there are some indications in this book that Naomi was a God-fearing woman.

So we don't know. What we do know is that, whether it was for her own sins, or the sins of her people, she suffered the consequences of sin. The Almighty had brought calamity upon her. She was right to recognize this.

Like Job, who understood that the Lord had given and the Lord had taken away, like the lamenting Psalmist who told God that “all your breakers and your waves have gone over me” (Psalm 42:7), Naomi knew that what had happened to her had happened by God's decision.

Where Naomi Is Wrong

But… there's always a "but," isn't there? But, there is a sense in which Naomi is not right about some things here.

When she says "I went away full," she seems to be romanticizing the past a little bit. Yes, she left with a husband and sons, but they were also abandoning their land because of a food shortage. "Full" is not exactly the right word.

And she hasn't exactly come back empty. She has a faithful daughter-in-law beside her. Can you imagine Ruth standing there while Naomi says, "the Lord has brought me back empty"? Like, "hello, I'm here?"

Naomi may also be wrong when she says that the Lord was testifying against her. She's saying that all of these things happened because of something she did wrong, which may not be true. Maybe, she's like Joseph or Job or Hannah—one who suffers as a part of a bigger story, not for her own sin

And finally, Naomi is wrong to assume that this bitter providence is going to last forever. See, when she says "call me Bitter," she is assuming that this bitter state of affairs is her new identity. That this is going to last forever. That being empty and bitter is not just a part of her story, but the rest of her story.

And she's very wrong about that. Disaster is not the only thing God is going to bring in to her life. This story has a sweet ending, and Naomi will live up to her name once again.

One of the early clues that she's wrong, and that things are going to turn around, is that her name doesn't stick. "Why call me Naomi?" she says in verse 21, and how does verse 22 begin? "So Naomi returned."

It's like when the kid walks into the kitchen and says "Mom, I'm running away to Alaska," and the mom just smiles and says "That's nice dear, I'll see you at supper," because they know how this is going to end.

Naomi is going to live up to her name yet.

Another major clue as to what is going to happen comes in verse 22, which seems like it's just summing up this chapter. “So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabite her daughter-in-law with her, who returned from the country of Moab." But then there's this little note of hope here at the end: " And they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of barley harvest” (Ruth 1:22).

This little note is important for three reasons. First, the fact that there is a barley harvest reinforces that there is food to be eaten here. The people have repented and God is once again showing them with blessings, literally. The land is fruitful and the future is bright.

Second, it's significant because the barley harvest is right around the time of Passover. And so the theme of redemption, of forgiveness, of rescue, is on the mind of thoughtful readers who know the rhythms of Israel's life together.

And finally, as we're going to see in the next chapter, the barley harvest provides the practical setting in which Ruth and Naomi's circumstances begin to change for the better.

And that's where this opening chapter ends—on a note of hope, a promise of better things.

But if that's true, then what are we to make of Naomi's little speech to the women of Bethlehem?

I think it's pretty clear that Naomi is simply speaking out of her grief here. Grief tends to make you shortsighted. Grief tends to make you focus on the thing you've lost and not see anything else beyond that.

That's why Naomi says she went away full and has come back empty. She's not remembering how bad the famine was. She's not enjoying how good it is to have Ruth with her. She's just missing her husband and two boys.

It's why she says "call me Mara." She can't imagine a future or identity in which these losses do not consume her and define her every waking minute. She assumes that this bitter winter is going to last forever.

Lament

And yet, in the midst of her grief, Naomi is doing the right thing by not forgetting God's role in all of this. Many modern people, when they suffer, begin to ask "where is God?" Because their only category for God's activity in the world is when God is doing nice things for them.

Everybody says "that was a God thing" when things work out well. Nobody says "That was a God thing" when everything is going wrong.

But Naomi gets it. She has a way richer, way more robust, and way more accurate understanding of God than many Christians alive today. She knows that God is sovereign over all, and that both blessing and calamity come from His hand, and so even in her grief she knows that she is in the hands of the Lord.

“…the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me… the Lord has brought me back empty… the Lord has testified against me… the Almighty has brought calamity upon me” (Ruth 1:20–21).

Yes, she's complaining, and you could argue that she's complaining about God, but I would argue that this is a lot better than complaining while forgetting about God.

Naomi's words here follow the pattern we see in the Psalms of lament, which, if we need to be reminded, make up ⅓ of the book of Psalms.

The Psalms of lament come from the mouths of people who are suffering and who are in grief and who take their grief to the Lord. And as they do that, they say things that make us uncomfortable.

• “Why, O Lord, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1).
• “Arise, O Lord; O God, lift up your hand; forget not the afflicted” (Psalm 10:12).
• “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1).
• “23 Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever! 24 Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? 25 For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly clings to the ground. 26 Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!” (Psalm 44:23–26).

Have you ever prayed to God like that? Do you think God would be okay with it?

I'll tell you this much: God is way more okay with you taking your complaint to Him like this than you taking your complaint anywhere else. Don't we know this in our other relationships? If my wife is mad at me, I want her to tell me! If my kids feel like I've done them wrong, I want them to tell me that.

And in a time when so many people have "deconstructed" from the faith, I think we can safely say that God would way rather we be brutally honest with him, even at the risk of sounding disrespectful, than for us to conclude He must not exist and go wandering off without Him.

In fact, I would suggest that being unable to lament, or being unfamiliar with the language of lament, is one of the big reasons that so many people have struggled in their faith in our age. Hard things happen in life, and if people have only ever been taught that God loves them and has a wonderful plan for their life, then they have no category for these things. They have no language to talk to God in the midst of their grief. And so they just don't.

Lament is a powerful and good gift from the Lord. God, who knows how each of our stories are going to end, is very okay with us being honest with Him as we walk through the hard parts of the story He's written.

There's a reason why almost every single Psalm of lament ends in a place of hope. Being honest with God about our pain is how we fight through to a place of trust. It's how we work through the fact that it hurts right now, and it doesn't make sense, but we trust that God is using this pain to tell a better story and we are going to trust that He knows what He's doing.

So maybe you're in a place of suffering today. Maybe your soul is aching, and you feel like God has forgotten all about you. One of the best things you can do is just tell him. Maybe go on a drive and say it out loud. Maybe write it out in a journal. Just tell the Lord what hurts and how you feel let down by Him.

Maybe start reading through the Psalms and use some of the language in the Psalms of lament to unburden your heart to the Lord.

And then notice how almost every single one of these Psalms doesn't end down in the dumps but gets to a broken-hearted yet hopeful place of confidence.

Learn from Naomi's story that the bitter chapters are not where the story ends. If you know Jesus, they are definitely not where your story ends. The best is always ahead. Like we saw a couple of weeks ago, even as our outer selves waste away, our inner selves are renewed day by day as we look to the weight of glory that awaits us.

And in some way that we may not yet fully understand, the painful and hard parts of our story are going to make that glory even better. And lament is one of the ways that we engage in a real relationship with God as we fight for the confidence that all of this is true, and work to trust that He's working all things for our good.

Maybe you're not in a spot of lament this morning, but odds are, you know someone who is. If God is okay with us lamenting to Him, so should you be. Sit with a hurting friend and don't correct every little thing they say that's wrong. Learn from the women of Bethlehem who, as far as we're told, just listened to Naomi. They didn't call her Mara, but they also didn't scold her for what she said.

Or maybe you're like Ruth in someone's story today, standing by and trying to love them while all they see is what they don't have. Hang in there, because we don't love people to be recognized. We love them to love them.

Whatever spot you're in this morning, can I encourage you to look to Jesus? Look to Jesus, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, who called out on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", right from Psalm 22.

Jesus is the great lamenter. He knew how the story was going to end. He endured the cross for the joy set before Him. He knew what was on the other side. He knew that His Father had not abandoned Him.

But in those moments of blackness, drowning under the weight of the judgement for our sin, in His humanity He felt abandoned by His Father. And so He said so.

And He endured that so that you could know that you'll never be forsaken by your Father. Whatever it feels like today for you, whatever it will feel like in the future, because Jesus loves you and paid for your sins on the cross, God is for you and not against you. There is a resurrection on the other side of every cross.

Let's encourage each other to hold on to these truths as we go to the table this morning.