Naomi, the Prodigal Who Returned

19So they both went until they came to Bethlehem. When they had come to Bethlehem, all the city was excited about them, and they asked, “Is this Naomi?” 20She said to them, “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara; for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. 21I went out full, and Yahweh has brought me home again empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since Yahweh has testified against me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?” 22So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, with her, who returned out of the country of Moab. They came to Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest.

People are still striving to see what cannot be seen. What lies beyond the mountains, what is in the depths of the sea, what is under the ground, what is in the air — they dig into all of it and study it. Now, finding the earth too small, they are combing the universe for a planet where people could live, and it seems space travel for ordinary people is not far off. People are forever curious like this about what they cannot see. Curiosity about the world grew into science, and those who wonder about the spiritual world have made gods to help them and keep them close at hand. People are even trying to work God out by their own wisdom and science.

Yet God has already made known through Scripture everything human beings wonder about. Every invention and discovery that astonishes people is only the finding of what God hid within all things when he created the world. What people now call a miracle is like finding the hidden pictures God has tucked away in a puzzle. Those who find what God has hidden are honored all their lives by those who did not, and they live in plenty, as if the finding had been their own power from the start. God created all of it for his children, yet sinful humanity uses it freely and gives no thanks.

Even so, God the Creator has not withdrawn his grace, so that every human being who draws breath can live in safety. And he gives it freely: he has allowed us to use, without cost, the many things we need to live — water and fire, land and air, life itself.

If someone without faith has found, under the name of invention or discovery, what God hid, then they have simply found, before others did, something God made to give to his children, and grown rich by it. They enjoy God’s grace freely without knowing it was created for his children, and that is why they give no thanks. Perhaps, tempted by Satan, they even live with a harder heart, to show that it was their own ability and not God’s grace.

So when we look at the many powerful people who rule the world, the one thing they lack is the grace of God, and absolute gratitude for that grace. For to someone who does not recognize grace as grace and fails to give thanks when thanks is due, even heaven’s blessings are no blessing. Whether we have much or little, for us, on whom God’s eyes and heart rest, to know grace as grace is a very special blessing. We must never, then, take God’s grace lightly; we must have the wisdom and the courage to give thanks in all things.

God separates those who give thanks for grace from those who do not. To the children who give thanks in all things, he has granted the special blessing of salvation and of being his children. Those who live on God’s grace yet give no thanks he calls illegitimate children, and he has made them live by common grace. It is those who give thanks for God’s unseen grace as though they could see it who can enjoy the grace he pours out from heaven.

Elimelech threw away God’s grace far too easily. His wife Naomi, too, because her husband and sons mattered more to her than God’s grace, left all too easily the precious land of the covenant to which God had led them. Had Naomi held a firm faith, she would have stopped her husband’s wrong choice and wisely led the family in faith. But she lacked the discernment to judge his choice, and so she abandoned the promised land.

God’s promise to Israel all along had been that he would keep them to the end. However high the mountains and however wide the seas, he told them, everything on earth lies beneath his feet, so they need not worry. He could say so because for God no mountain is too high to cross, and no sea too wide to pass over.

Friends, consider this. If God, who created the mountains and the seas, rules over all things, then the mountains and seas are merely his footstool, and those who rest in God’s embrace are above all creation. God’s children, then, stand higher than the mountains and the seas.

If children who look down on the world from the embrace of God, who is above all things, forsake him because of the world’s troubles and desires, where will they fall? Will they not fall into the world Satan holds in his grip, and flounder there with it? God sends us hardship and rebuke to keep us from foolish judgments and to help us decide rightly; if we do not pray to that God, we will fall in the end.

When her husband Elimelech said he would leave Bethlehem, Naomi ought to have prayed and asked God what the right decision was. But instead of wrestling with it spiritually, she left Bethlehem easily, reasoning that she had a dependable husband and two strapping sons, and that while her people suffered from drought, her family could eat well and live well. Going to prosperous Moab with great wealth, she may even have been proud of her husband for taking a step few others would dare. As she left home with her whole family, she may have pitied those left behind in Bethlehem, which the famine was turning to ruin. Even now, people standing on the line between the world and faith think themselves wise. They look at those who hold to their faith almost to the point of foolishness and mock them for not enjoying life a little more.

For the world, it makes no difference what one chooses. But Naomi’s life shows that those on whom God’s eyes and heart rest can only come back empty-handed in the end. When she left home, Naomi was elated at the thought that her hardships were over, and amid the envy and good wishes of many, she left Bethlehem and settled in Moab.

But against all expectation, her husband and both her sons died. Naomi learned firsthand how hollow the judgment of those who trust the world proves to be, collapsing like a castle built on sand. We must understand this: whether a person makes a one-year plan or a ten-year plan, unless God works to bring it about, no human plan will ever come to pass.

Of course, the people of the world may say, “I’ve always been lucky, and my plans have always worked out. Was that God helping me too?” But the miracles and blessings the world talks about are not works done for the salvation of souls, so they are just another matter of this age that has nothing to do with God.

If we cannot discern spiritually what the world says to us in order to mock God, our faith may be shaken. So we must first judge whether God’s grace has come upon their lives. To doubt — “They do well without any faith, so why do I, who believe in God, have such trouble?” — or to wonder, “Am I suffering because my faith is small?” — that very thought shows a lack of faith.

What Naomi trusted was her husband, her sons, and her money. But when all of it slipped through her fingers like sand, all she had left was herself, trembling with fear, and two daughters-in-law who had lost their husbands and sat staring into empty air. She knew that in this situation the resolve had to be hers alone. Ten years on, she had become a pitiful figure, but the choice was before her: go home just as she was, or stay in Moab, serving foreign gods and living among the Moabites. After long agonizing, Naomi concluded that although she had abandoned Bethlehem because she had not held a right faith until then, she could not live a wrong life a second time, and she made up her mind to go home.

Orpah, the elder daughter-in-law, chose to remain in Moab, and Ruth, the younger, said she would come along, so Naomi went home with Ruth. The whole town gathered to look at her, whispering. The Naomi who had left so confidently was nowhere to be seen; after ten years she had come back so pitifully changed that they were astonished and asked whether this was really the lovely Naomi of old.

Ruth 1:20

20She said to them, “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara; for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.

Naomi told them not to call her Naomi but Mara, saying that she had gone out full and come back having lost everything because the Almighty had dealt very bitterly with her. Mara is a word meaning “distressed” or “bitter.”

Exodus 15:22-23

22Moses led Israel onward from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness, and found no water. 23When they came to Marah, they couldn’t drink from the waters of Marah, for they were bitter. Therefore its name was called Marah.

This name is the same as Marah, the spring Moses came to when he led Israel across the Red Sea and into the wilderness of Shur. They went three days without finding water, and when they reached Marah they could not drink its waters because they were bitter, so it was called Marah. The name, we are told, came from water so brackish that no one could drink it. The Arabs are said to have called it the worst water in the whole region, so unfit was it to drink.

Naomi is now likening herself to this useless water. We can understand how anguished her heart must have been as she confessed herself a worthless creature, fit for nothing anywhere. She knew well that she had become like useless Marah because of her sin against God, the Almighty.

When the Israelites crossed the Red Sea and reached Marah, they could at least grumble to Moses that they had no water to drink, but Naomi could blame no one, because she had judged and decided for herself. It was her own choice, and its consequence.

Exodus 15:25

25Then he cried to Yahweh. Yahweh showed him a tree, and he threw it into the waters, and the waters were made sweet. There he made a statute and an ordinance for them, and there he tested them;

In the same way, only after affliction and testing did Naomi come to know that the one “tree” that could save her was God alone. She judged that only by casting God’s grace into her sin-stained heart could she live and return to him, and so, ashamed as she was, she took courage and came home.

Now God, who had heard Naomi’s earnest prayer, appointed wise Boaz as the “tree” that would save Naomi and Ruth, and through Boaz he quenched their thirst for good.

When Naomi came back to Bethlehem, she may have come with only a faint human hope: it was home, after all, so perhaps she could at least get by, and perhaps she could return to God’s embrace. But God saw her resolve to go back even so, and through Boaz he granted her a blessing greater than she could have imagined. From this we learn that the way to receive great blessing is not to pray for it but first to show God our faith.

In Luke 15 there is a prodigal son who took his father’s property to a far country, lived recklessly, and squandered all his wealth. That prodigal coming home is the very picture of Naomi.

Elimelech and Naomi had received God’s grace and love, but because they did not know how precious it was, they went, like the prodigal, to Moab, far from God. There they cast off their life as his people altogether and indulged in pleasure until they had squandered everything the Father had given them. So, just as the prodigal lost all his money and became a beggar, Naomi lost her husband and her sons and was left with no one to lean on. The prodigal and Naomi lost all their fruit of the flesh. It is not hard for any of us to abandon the life of faith. People tend to think someone has abandoned it when they neglect the visible things: not going to church, not serving, not tithing, and the like.

But we drift from God when we fail to see his grace, when he has answered our prayers but we are too spiritually dark to realize it, when we complain constantly though simply living each day is a blessing, when our negative thinking is stronger than our positive thinking. The thought that this is good enough, that I am doing well anyway, that I am better than others, that I am now doing something — when such thoughts grow large, that is pride. May you never forget it. When we forget to give thanks, we stop fearing God, we are always making excuses for ourselves, and we act as we please, by the measure of our own faith. So we fail to build up the church, and we end up in a place where we stand in the way of God’s work.

When the prodigal had squandered everything, the people of the world sent him, penniless, to the pigpens to work. When we put ourselves at the center and live as we please, as the world wants, that in itself is feeding pigs. So hungry was he that he tried to eat the pods the pigs were eating, but even that was not to be had; he was always famished, and nothing could fill the hollow longing to go home.

Naomi too tried to fit in with the Moabites and make a good life, but she was always hungry, as if eating pods, and tormented by longing for home. Perhaps she had felt that emptiness from the very day she left home, and would not have understood why her heart felt so hollow. She had her husband, her sons, her daughters-in-law, wealth and food to overflowing — why, then, did she feel so alone? She could not tell.

When those who love God leave him, they are always hungry and empty, because they are not eating spiritual food. They try, as the people of the world do, to fill themselves with the world, but unless they are filled with the word, all of it is pods, and nothing satisfies them.

The prodigal had already squandered everything, yet he could not shake off the longing to return to his father. Whether his father would scold him or his older brother rebuke him when he came back in rags, he resolved to go back no matter what, and he fell into his father’s arms. Naomi, though her husband and sons had all died and she was left alone, a pitiful sight, could not rid herself of the conviction that she must return to the promised land. Even if people laughed at her — even if no one welcomed her — she went to Bethlehem, determined to go home.

Anyone agonizes before going home, but once you leave the place of sin and are held in the Father’s arms, all your pain is over. If you sense that you are in a place of sin, turn back at once. That is why you must not be curious about the world. Step into the world thinking you must excel there in order to serve God well, and you will fall off a sheer cliff. The master of the world and of the life people want so badly is not a human being but God; only in his embrace, therefore, can you be protected, and only there will every problem find its answer.

Luke 15:22-24

22“But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best robe, and put it on him. Put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. 23Bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let us eat, and celebrate; 24for this, my son, was dead, and is alive again. He was lost, and is found.’ They began to celebrate.

When the prodigal came home, his father put the best robe on him, a ring on his hand, and good shoes on his feet. Then he killed the fattened calf and held a feast in his joy. When Naomi came home, God began a feast of blessing for her: he supplied all the food she needed with a plentiful barley harvest, brought her to Boaz, a man well prepared in body and spirit, and blessed her to become, through Ruth, an ancestor in faith.

Friends, when you return to God, there is no need to deliberate long. If you think the road you are on leads toward the world, it is wisdom to turn back to the Father quickly; and if you take courage and throw yourself into his arms, God, who is greater and stronger than we are, will forgive everything.

We should applaud Naomi’s courage. She had lost all her fruit of the flesh, and she would be mocked when she came home, yet she resolved that if only God would forgive her, she could bear all that pain. That resolve deserves our applause. May you be a Naomi like that, and through it become a precious saint who receives God’s overflowing blessing.