A Promise Resting On Your Lap

After hearing a report that the Lord was visiting her people with bread, Naomi got up and left Moab.

Moab is a place of mixture where sensual religion was the ruling power (as evident by the prophet Balaam hired to curse Israel). So Naomi returned home to Bethlehem. Her daughter-in-law Ruth persisted in accompanying her so together they traveled to the Promise Land.

Beloved, God is on the move throughout the world calling His church back to Himself. He is calling to those who can hear His voice to return to that place where He spreads a table in the presence of our Enemy (Psalms 23:5). No matter what our Moab experience may have been it is time to cross the border to the Promise Land.

But when Naomi made her way into the town she told those who greeted her not to call her Naomi. Naomi's name means pleasant, agreeable and sweet, but to call her Mara which means bitter. Her husband and her two sons died in Moab. With their deaths, any posterity to carry on the family name also died. She was old, tired and bitter much like many of us who once enjoyed a sweet life that could have been so much more but in a single moment it was taken away.

Then God performed a miracle through Ruth who won the heart of a kinsman redeemer, Boaz, by giving them a child. In the final chapter we read, "Then Naomi took the child and laid him on her lap and became his nurse." (4:16, ESV).

There is something very significant when Naomi laid the child on her lap. How could she have known that she was holding the church? This little child would be the grandfather of David through which Christ would be born. Beloved, God always fulfills His promises to us even if we thought they were dead or long forgotten.

When it seems there is nothing left God presents the very thing we've longed for and places it our lap. Think of Hannah laying Samuel on her lap - a mighty prophet to usher in the first two kings of Israel. Or Mary holding Jesus, the son of God and Elizabeth with John, a Spirit empowered evangelist, resting on her knees. The fulfillment of His word will stretch far beyond our borders and generations than what we can could ever imagine!