Intro
The book of Ruth is more than just a story about kindness even though that plays an important part in the book along with other sub-themes such as repentance, faith, grace, and works; characteristics that are considered to be New Covenant traits. What we see though is that the word translated into a form of kind (kindly, kindness) is found three times in the book of Ruth, it only refers to Ruth twice and the word is more often translated to “mercy.” Now on the other hand we have the word for redeem/redeemer and it is found 21 times in the four chapters of the book of Ruth with 13 of those times in the last chapter…but redemption is only half of what this prose is really about.
We pick up the story today at the end of the harvest and at the time of the year we are currently in: the Pentecost season.