08-011 - http://www.thetruthpulpit.com

Well, it wasn't by design but it was certainly appropriate for us to sing that song leading into this concluding study on the book of Ruth. We come to the end of Ruth and Ruth is a book in some ways, I won't take time to develop this thought, but in some ways it's like the book of Jonah in that the final verse gives you the key to understanding the whole and you have to, as it were, read the book twice in order to read it once; you have to read through all of the circumstances and get to that climactic verse and then retroactively you understand the significance of everything that you were seeing beforehand. In the book of Jonah, you see it closing on the theme of God's compassion and that understanding helps us know why God sent Jonah to Nineveh in the first place. Well, in like manner, when we get to the end of the book of Ruth and we see it concluding with a climactic statement, David, you see the reason for all of the events in Ruth that we have been studying over the past many, many weeks. We see that God has directed all of these events in order to bring about the person of David into the world. It's astonishing. It's a transcendent statement about the power and purpose of God and that's what we're going to focus on here this evening is "God Transcendent." In these wonderful verses of Ruth, we see a transcendent God bringing about transcendent purposes that we still celebrate today 3,000 years later and which will echo throughout the halls of eternity for all the unfolding ages and eons to come...