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Wisdom-Trek / Creating a LegacyWelcome to Day 1331 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomMastering the Bible – Ruth and Crucial Story-lines – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1331 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is required that you also have a proper understanding of God and His Word. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better. When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.


Mastering The Bible – Ruth and Crucial Story-linesInsight Forty-One: Judges The Book of Ruth Takes Place During the Days of the JudgesThe period of the book of Judges was awful. The book runs through cycle after cycle of Israel’s spiritual failure, God’s punishment for their faithlessness by means of foreign oppressors, desperate cries for deliverance, and God sending a judge in response. Sin, suffer, despair, deliverance, repeat.


One of the key things to observe in the book is that the oppressors of God's people were foreigners—people to whom the land did not belong. At times God’s instrument of punishment for sin was a people group whom Israel was supposed to have driven from the land but didn’t. At other times, it was a people group from the outside. The point is this: the presence of foreigners meant bad things. They were unpopular.


This is the backdrop for the story of Ruth. The book opens with these statements from Ruth 1:1-4 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ruth+1%3A1-4&version=NLT) :


In the days when the judges ruled in Israel, a severe famine came upon the land. So a man from Bethlehem in Judah left his home and went to live in the country of Moab, taking his wife and two sons with him. The man’s name was Elimelech, and his wife was Naomi. Their two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in the land of Judah. And when they reached Moab, they settled there. Then Elimelech died, and Naomi was left with her two sons. The two sons married Moabite women. One married a woman named Orpah, and the other a woman named Ruth. 


Ruth was a Moabitess—a foreigner. The Moabites were Israel’s oppressors during the judgeship of Ehud (Judges 3). Israel suffered under the thumb of Eglon, the king of the Moabites, for eighteen years (Judges 3:12—14). To many in Israel, Ruth was a symbol of an enemy.In view of this backdrop, the story of Ruth is truly remarkable. It stands to reason that no Israelite would have the slightest reason to help her. Instead, when the book’s ancient readers encountered the beginning of the book, they would have expected the people of God to make things harder for her. But Boaz was different. He was a living illustration of how Israel was to bless the foreign nations (Genesis. 12:3).


Even more astonishing, Ruth was destined to become the great-grandmother of David (Ruth 4:17-20). Out of the harshest of circumstances—poverty and prejudice and deep-seated wounds of the past—God would raise up the ideal king, whose...