Making a Choice

August 14, 2011


Background Scripture: Ruth 1
Lesson Passage: Ruth 1:8 – 18

Decisions are made all around us everyday where people live, learn, play, and work. Part of life involves making decisions. In fact, if we try to avoid making a decision, we only concede that we have decided to live with the decision of another—in effect, choosing to make the same decision. The freedom and authority to decide seem fundamental to our being made in the image of God and after His likeness. Decisions also involve great responsibility for decisions have consequences. It is often the consequences that we are trying to avoid when we procrastinate and put off making a decision. Yet, having the ability and right to decide is a privilege of being a free moral agent. Unlike humans, other animals live by instinct and do not exercise the power of making a choice. Instinct serves to support sustaining life whereas making a choice involves determining the quality of life we choose to live. Our lesson today involves six people engaged in making choices that have profound consequences for them as well as countless others. Elimelech decided to take his wife and two sons out of the land of Canaan because of a famine and led them into the land of Moab where he died. His widow and two orphaned sons found themselves strangers in the land away from the land of their inheritance. The two sons made choices of Moabite women to be their wives rather than the Hebrew women back in Judah which would have been according to the Law. In the process of time, both sons died away from the land of their birth leaving their mother and widowed wives in the land of Moab. Upon hearing that conditions had improved in Judah, Elimelech’s widow, Naomi, made a decision to return home. Her daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah, desired to go with her but at her prompting, Orpah returned to her family in the land of Moab. Ruth, on the other hand, made a different choice. Ruth chose to forsake her family, homeland, and god that she might be able to follow Naomi. Ruth vowed that Naomi’s destination, lodging, family, God, and place of death and burial would also be hers. Ruth was claiming for herself all that Naomi would embrace and live and die for. This was her choice and the consequences that followed. Ruth did not simply embrace one of the decisions that Naomi was making, she was accepting all of them. So great was Ruth’s devotion towards her mother-in-law that Naomi ceased to try to persuade her otherwise. When Ruth accepted death as a possible consequence of her decision, what more could Naomi say to her? In the few verses covered by our lesson, many years are encompassed and the choices made by six people during that time had major impact for them and others around them. But none of those choices were as all-encompassing or as far-reaching as the one made by the Moabite named Ruth.


Robert C. Hudson
July 28, 2011