Introduction.

1. Moving from Moab to Bethlehem must have been a challenging and stressful experience for Ruth. Even though she was with Naomi whom she loved greatly, making a new life in Bethlehem would have been difficult. She needed to learn a new language, culture and way of life. Ruth arrived in Bethlehem with a strong commitment to fully integrate with the people of Israel. Listen to her commitment:
   
   "Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following after you; for wherever you go, I will go; and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my  God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me."
   
   Uttering such a great commitment is very easy compared to following it through. I wonder how many times Ruth was asked, ‘Who are you?' ‘Why did you come to Bethlehem?' ‘Are you a believer?' ‘Do you miss Moab?' ‘Do you find our culture strange?' ‘What do you think of our religion?' When you are a new arrival in a small country town everybody is very curious about you, and wants to know all sorts of things about you. All the questions and all the interest is part of a process that will determine whether or not you are accepted and embraced by the town community. People are seeking to determine the kind of relationship they will have with you. If you are not accepted by the community, life can be very hard, difficult and even miserable. I guess when you move from one church to another the same process happens and people are keen to know whether you are really one of us, are you a fellow brother or sister in Christ Jesus. If you are by the grace of God a believer, then other believers irrespective of race, culture, age, political persuasion, or economic status are commanded by Christ to love you as Christ has loved them. In order for others to embrace you, you need to be able to express the hope that abides in you. The way a Christian speaks about his faith in the Lord Jesus tells you a great deal about his theological understanding. By theological understanding I mean understanding the way God works.
   
   
2. Ruth the Moabitess was a saved sinner. How was it that she now loved Jehovah and had committed herself fully to the LORD'S people? If you are a saved sinner, born from above by the grace of God, how did this change happen? Your theological understanding will determine whether you explain your salvation as a personal experience or as God's work as the Scriptures declare. There is a time and place to talk about your personal experience, but your experience must be understood and interpreted in clear Biblical terms. Your understanding and interpretation of your experiences must be determined by the Scriptures. When you talk about your experience of salvation you naturally do so from a self-centred point of view, as you are talking about yourself and what you did and what happened to you. When you talk about being saved from the God-centred point of view you talk about what God has done to bring you into his family. Theologically the way Ruth became a saved sinner, is exactly the same way as you became a Christian. God's method of saving sinners has been the same since Adam and Eve fell into sin. Our theological understanding of how we have come to be members of God's family is vital to our stability, security and perseverance as believers. How did Ruth come to believe in Jehovah? Ruth came to believe in Jehovah because God elected her to belong to himself. If you and I are to truly understand the meaning of God's amazing love then we need to grasp the grace of God in our election to be members of his family through the work of Jesus Christ. Ruth belonged to Jehovah because he elected her and made her one of his very own. Ruth believed, loved, trusted, worshipped, served and obeyed Jehovah because he followed through the consequences of electing her. Your salvation and my salvation began with God's loving election.

God delights in electing specific sinners to belong to his family.

1. The Scriptures talk about God's election of specific sinners in a number of different ways. It uses words like election, choosing, calling and knowing to describe the action of God in selecting those who would be reconciled through Jesus Christ. We see this in the way the Scriptures speak of God's election of Abram and calling him to leave his idolatrous life in Ur of the Chaldeans and follow the Lord. This call to Abram to leave his family and the city of Ur is recorded in Genesis 12:1-3. When the prophet Nehemiah talks about God calling Abram he says, You are the Lord God, who chose Abram, And brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans, and gave him the name Abraham (Nehemiah 9:7) Notice the sequence of God's action, he chose and then he brought Abram out of Ur. Abram left Ur of the Chaldeans because God had chosen or elected him, all the action is initiated by the Lord. Of all the individuals living at that time God chose Abram to belong to him in a special sense.
   
   
2. To the descendents of Abraham who became arrogant about being ‘God's Chosen People' the Lord said, ‘For you are a holy people to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the Lord loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt'Deuteronomy 10:14-15) There are three very important points being made in the passage:
   
   
1. Those whom the Lord elected are very precious to him and they belong to the Lord, they are his special possession. God loves all men and women for he created them, and he counts them valuable, but the elect are loved with a special love and are counted as a precious treasure.
   
   
2. The question ‘why did the Lord set his love upon his elect' is answered first in the negative The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples, and then in the positive but because the Lord loves you. God loved them, because he exercised his free and absolutely sovereign will and chose to love them. God was not prompted or moved to love them because he saw something in the elect.
   
   
3. God revealed his love by delivering them from the house of bondage and the hand of Pharaoh. Those whom God elects he delivers from bondage into the freedom so that they may worship him. In Israel the Lord's people were to be unique, a holy nation whose lives, law and religion set them apart from all other nations. Other nations were to look upon Israel and see the greatness of the only true and living God. 
   
3. The arrogance of thinking that every descendent of Abraham was automatically one of the elect was due to faulty theology. The Apostle Paul deals with this matter in Romans 9:6-13, he says, ‘But it is not that the word of God has taken no effect. For they are not all Israel who are of Israel, nor are they all children because they are the seed of Abraham; but, "In Isaac your seed shall be called."^ That is, those who are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God; but the children of the promise are counted as the seed. For this is the word of promise:  "At this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son." And not only this, but when Rebecca also had conceived by one man, even by our father Isaac (for the children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works but of Him who calls), it was said to her, "The older shall serve the younger." As it is written, "Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated." Being one of the elect did not depend on being a blood descendent of Abraham it depended entirely upon the will and mercy of God. God in his mercy elected Jacob, but did not elect Esau. To the Jews who refused to believe that Jesus was the Christ, even though they knew the Scriptures and saw the miracles he performed, Jesus says, ‘You do not believe, because you are not of My sheep.' (John 10:26b) The reason they did not believe was because they were not part of the elect. The implication of Jesus statement is very simple, if they were part of the elect they would believe. The belief/faith/trust/ dependence of a sinner is a result of their election not visa-versa. You believe in Christ because God elected you.
   
   
4. God's election of certain sinners is also spoken of as God knowing the sinner. We see this in Amos 3:2, where the Lord says of his people "You only have I known of all the families of the earth." This does not in anyway mean that the Lord did not know the other families, but that this family was special and enjoyed his love in a unique way. The word known is used in the same way in Genesis 18:17-19, ‘Then the men rose from there and looked toward Sodom, and Abraham went with them to send them on the way.^ And the Lord said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am doing, since Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I have known him, in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what He has spoken to him." God knows all people because he is their creator and he is omniscient and omnipresent, therefore the use of ‘known' in this passage means much more than simply knowing about or knowing who Abram is; it means God set his love upon him in order to have a living intimate relationship with him. Paul in Romans 8:29 says, ‘For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.' Some see this as God foreknowing those who would believe and on this basis elects them to glory and to be his own. This explanation runs contrary to what Jesus told the Jews in John 6:29b, ‘You do not believe, because you are not of My sheep. Foreknowing means that God knew them as individuals before they were born and loved them because he chose to do so. We talk about unconditional election which means that God simply set his love on the individual sinner because he chose to do so and not because of anything the individual could be or could do.
   
   
5. The last aspect of election I would like to mention is the time of election. When did God elect specific sinners to be saved from their sins by the Lord Jesus Christ? Listen to four Scriptures dealing with this matter:
   


1. 2 Timothy 1:9, ‘(God) who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began.'
   
   
2. Ephesians 1:3-4, ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,^ just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.'
   
   
3. Revelation 13:8, ‘All who dwell on the earth will worship him (beast), whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.'
   
   
4. Revelation 17:8, ‘The beast that you saw was, and is not, and will ascend out of the bottomless pit and go to perdition. And those who dwell on the earth will marvel, whose names are not written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world, when they see the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.'
   
   God's election of certain sinners to salvation in Christ took place before time began, before the foundation of the world and their individual names were written in the Lamb's Book of Life. Before God created Adam the names of all who were to be saved by Christ were written in the book of heaven. Jesus in John 17:1 prays, "Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You, as You have given Him authority over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as You have given Him." Who are those given to the Son by the Father? They are God's elect. Listen to the request Jesus makes in John 17:24, "Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me."  Jesus wants the elect to be with him. Jesus came to save his people from their sins, who are his people? All whom the Father gave to Jesus before the foundation of the world, all whose names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life are Jesus' people.
   
   
6. Having very briefly set out the doctrine of God's electing grace we need to come back to Ruth. How was it that Ruth a worshipper of the god Shemosh came to be a one who loved Jehovah with all her heart, soul, mind and strength? Before time began, before the foundation of the world Ruth's name was written in the Lamb's Book of Life. God by his absolutely sovereign free will chose to set his redeeming and preserving love on Ruth. Ruth believed because God elected her. Jesus' love for his elect is wonderfully illustrated in the parable found in Luke 15:3-6, "What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!' Ruth was one of Jesus' sheep lost in wilderness of Moab, using the family of Elimelech he sought her, found her and brought her into his fold. Ruth had been given to the Son and he counted her very precious, in order to save her he sent Elimelech and his family to Moab. The Lord went to great lengths to find Ruth, because she was given to him by the Father. God used Elimelech and his family in the same way as he uses missionaries to find other sheep lost in the wildernesses of the world. God in his timing sent missionaries to all parts of the world to find his lost sheep and bring them into Christ's fold. Ruth was in Bethlehem because God elected her before the foundation of the world to be in his sheepfold. It was God's delight to elect her and then bring her into the fullness of his love. In John 6:37 Jesus says, ‘All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out' Everyone whose name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life will believe in Jesus, not one will be lost. The Almighty will make sure that everyone given to Christ will believe in him, will be saved by his atoning work and will be adopted as a son of God.

Conclusion.

Your salvation, like that of Abram or Luke began before time began, before the foundation of the world. Almighty God set his electing love on you and wrote your name in the Lamb's book of life. Election and salvation are joined together in John's Gospel, listen to the summary given by John Piper, ‘All that the Father has chosen to be his, he has given to the Son (17:6); and all who he has given to the Son, the Son knows (10:14); and calls (10:3); and all whom he calls know him (10;14); and recognise his voice (10:4-5); and come to him (6:37) and follow him (10:27); and the Son lays down his life for his sheep. (10:11,15); and to all for whom he dies he gives eternal life (10;28) and keeps them in the Father's Word (17:6), so that none is lost (6:39) or snatched out of his hand (10:28), but is raised up on the last day (6:39) to glorify the Son for ever (17:10). If you are a Christian then this summary is talking about you and how you came to be a saved sinner. God has gone to great lengths to save you, he sent his Son to die for you, he sent preachers to preach to you and called you through his word, he made you alive by the Holy Spirit so that you could respond in faith, repentance, love, and obedience. God determined that this would happen when he set his love upon you before time began. This truth should fill you with a deep sense of humility and awe. And the words of Philippians 1:6 ought to be very precious to all believers, Paul says, ‘being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.' God delights in bringing the elect to glory.