Discipline in the School of God: Chapter 14
By J.B. Stoney
To trace the history by which a woman is fitted to fill a place of testimony for God on earth must be a study both interesting and important to us, and one specially needed in these days, whether it be applied to the individual or to the church.
Woman was first formed to be a " help suited to man." At the fall she seems to have forfeited this high position, and after it to be regarded in the place of subjection and inferiority rather than that of equality and help. Grace is the great manifestation of God's love, and the principle of grace is, " Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." Where failure and weakness have most appeared, there the grace of God acts in restoration. But this restoration is never without a sense of the failure and weakness which it triumphs over, and our blessed Lord, in leading a soul into the blessings of His grace, must necessarily educate it in the righteousness of His actings, as well as in the goodness of them. It is according as we learn the Lord Jesus Christ that we in heart and conscience comprehend both, and the means and stages of this restoration detail to us the nurture and admonition of the Lord. He leads us to see, step by step, how we need His grace, and He prepares us for it by producing in us the self-renunciation which will make room for His gift. God in His discipline teaches us how the flesh hinders-shows us what it is, and deals with it that it may be set aside.
How gracious of the Lord, then, to instruct us as He does, by presenting to us in His word examples of the principles of the discipline which fits us, according to His own purpose, for service and glory.
This is what we find in Ruth, and herein consists the interest of her history, in which we learn how God led and enabled a woman, who was a member of the most despised family, a Moabite, to fill the most honoured position in the royal tribe of Israel ; nay, to concentrate in herself the blessings of Rachel and of Leah. We cannot too carefully note the manner and spirit by which this great result was attained.
Chapter i-Elimelech, Naomi and their two sons had emigrated from Bethlehem-Judah into the land of Moab because of the famine in their own land. It was an evidence of decline and judicial suffering when a man of Israel had to desert his own country because it lacked those natural blessings which were granted to a Gentile country, and the necessary consequence of this is that Elimelech's two sons took them wives of the women of Moab. A son of the promised seed, by marrying a woman of Moab, raised her from her low position, though in doing so he clouded his own and compromised it by his sojourn in the land of Moab. So that Ruth was raised by her marriage from her low national position into one of the tribes of Israel, and on the death of her husband she, a widow, with only a widowed mother-in-law, must either, like Orpah, fall back into her former low estate, or she must seek to maintain that position to which she had been raised. This could only be done by holding fast her link with Israel, and that even at personal cost ; in other words, by cleaving to Naomi, though all natural expectation in connection with her was gone. The latter is Ruth's course, not intelligently; indeed, as to the positional gain such adherence would bring to her, but influenced by the still finer motive of personal devotion to the one through whom she had been already raised so far from her low estate. How she acted and succeeded in this course is detailed to us in this interesting book, and is recorded with great minuteness as a subject of deep importance to ourselves, for whether we regard Ruth as a type of the church, or of a Gentile believer, or of any believing woman, her history supplies a chapter in God's dealings which is very instructive to us.
The first characteristic of either must be simple devotion to known truth ; and this characteristic is finely developed in Ruth. She sacrifices all hope of alteration of her state for the sake of adhering to Naomi, come what will, to whom she says, " Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go ; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge : thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me." What an utterance is this. It is that of one stedfastly devoted to one object. What an expression of a soul firmly resolved to abide by all the truth of God, the link with all His purposes and blessings! The first part of the armour of God (Eph. 6) is to be " girt about with truth " ; and the first requisite of a servant in Christ, above all when in the unobtrusive sphere of a woman, is to be simply and unequivocally devoted to the truth of God.
