Day 137

Ruth 3:1-4:22, John 9:35-10:21, Psalms 62:1-12

If I’m honest, I want to think that it is all about love! I know that Boaz is one of the Kinsmen Redeemers, but this is more than just duty.

The Kinsmen Redeemer was the line of descendants set up back in Leviticus 25 to keep the family name going. First call was the brother but then it went down the family line, to take on the widow and have a child with her, but the child would take the name of the dead bloke. So it was a duty thing.

But if this story was about duty in the life of Israel, then surely the first Kinsman Redeemer (ch4 v1) would have taken Ruth. Instead Boaz manages to persuade him that there is more to this than land so that Boaz may take Ruth into his family. Earlier Ruth has had a wash, made herself look pretty and put her best perfume on, more the actions of the love struck going on a date than about duty. If this was all about what had to happen then it wouldn’t have mattered how rough she looked. This is love and a story of love battling over all the rules. God was in this right at the start and at the end we see love win through.

This is also about a family line that takes us all the way into the Gospel . Ruth’s son was called Obed, and his son was called Jesse and his son was just a wee lad called David who just happened to be one of the greatest kings known to Israel. It doesn’t stop there, because we know that Christ is of the line of David and so from this 4 chapter book about a woman named Ruth, the story stretches all the way through to Christ and beyond.

The Gospel reading includes one of the important parts of Jesus ministry that is quite distinctive to John’s Gospel and that is the 7 “I am” sayings. We are half way through them and you can see the full list below. This links with something that I forgot to mention two days ago. In John 8:58 Jesus says “I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I am”. This was like a red rag to a bull and we see them take up stones to kill him. If we didn’t know that he was the son of God this would be the worst kind of Blasphemy. If we take our minds back to Exodus 3:14 when Moses wanted to know the name of God, he got the answer “I am”. Jesus was calling himself God, you can see the steam coming out of their ears!

But John makes a little bit of a theme of it and interwoven through the Gospel are these “I am” passages that expand on not just the name of God, but the nature of God. Here they are:

1. "I am the bread of life." - John 6:35, 41, 48-51
2. "I am the light of the world." - John 8:12, 9:5
3. "I am the door of the sheep." - John 10:7, 9
4. "I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." John 10:11, 14
5. "I am the resurrection, and the life." - John 11:25
6. "I am the way, the truth, and the life." John 14:6
7. "I am the true vine." John 15:1, 5

Let us kneel before the great “I am” today. As we chose one of these sayings and know his nature, let us also know his love.