God redeems family lines.
One of the most profound realities of the good news of Jesus is that he isn’t only treating us as isolated individuals, but is redeeming a line of broken, sinful, and scarred people. We can sometimes miss this with our focus on individual salvation. It would be wrong-headed to lose that focus, but we must always hold it in line with the fact that God redeems a people.
For many of us, our family histories, and even our own history of sinning against others (and being sinned against by others) hangs around our neck. It feels too broken - maybe too impure - to be redeemed. Maybe you carry around identities in your family story that you don’t think you can lay aside. Maybe you just feel branded, as if this knot could not be untied.
One of the (perhaps) surprising realities of the Bible is how God not only redeems families, but how he re-narrates sinfulness, brokenness, and alienation within his own faithfulness. God redeems by leading us in and through a new history, the history of his work of salvation. We see this in the life of Jesus all the time. Israel journeyed through the sea and were led by God into the wilderness, being tempted there, and giving in to sin. Jesus journeys through the sea of baptism, where he is led into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tempted, and he is faithful.
Jesus relives Israel’s faithlessness faithfully.
Jesus retells their story, and as he re-narrates their failures in his own life, he invites them to have their lives retold and redeemed.
This is the invitation he offers you. In Christ you are no longer defined by the brokenness, pain, sin, and failure in your history or in your family story. He transplants you out of this history and places you in the history of Jesus - the faithful one.
This is what came to me as I sat with the book of Ruth. Ruth helps us understand how God redeems family lines and histories, calling us to walk in ways that unravel even the most depraved of histories.
Take a listen to my retelling of Ruth, where we see God’s redemption of family lines in surprising ways:
In the story of Ruth, we see that for both her and Boaz, their family histories are deeply tainted. Their histories reveal men shirking their responsibility and women responding through seduction - we see sin begetting brokenness and brokenness begetting more sin. Ruth and Boaz go beyond the letter of the law to life in the Spirit to redeem this brokenness [here is the book I mentioned in my sermon by David Starling who talks about this].
How do they do so? They bear witness to the covenant faithfulness of God. They trust, not in what their eyes see, but in the God who is present, faithful, and just. But the story of Ruth, a lot like the story of Esther, reveals how God acts in providence from the inside. In other words, this is not a theological exposition of God’s work in providence, but shows us what it is like from lived experience.
In Ruth, we are confronted with questions about God’s action, with little to no insight in what is or is not done by God. Did Ruth just happen upon Boaz’s field or was God guiding that? Is Boaz’s protection of Ruth and Naomi an image of God’s protection? How do we understand Naomi and Ruth’s response to Boaz’s kindness?
In the everyday reality of our lives, this is exactly how providence feels. Where is God in all of this? What is God calling us to? What does God want us to do now? Often we are left with silence, where the Lord’s work is hidden from our eyes, and we are required to present our bodies, lives, and decisions to him as living sacrifices. In these moments our prayer is: Lord, I am yours. You are the God who sees and knows. Grant me your wisdom, and lead me in faith.
What Ruth reveals, I think, in part, is that redemption is never apart from our brokenness and pain. We have to journey through our pain to know freedom from it. But this is not of ourselves. We have to come to see how the Lord is unraveling these things in us and through us as we abide in him.
How is the Lord leading you in light of the brokenness, pain, and fragmentation of your history? Does your family history and identity still brand you in ways that you carry? How might the Lord be calling you to walk through this with him, the one who redeems?