Everyone Did What Was Right in Their Own Eyes

Read it: Judges 2; Ruth 1–4

Joshua’s generation kept their promise. Then they died, and the Bible gives one of its saddest sentences: “another generation rose up who did not know the LORD or the works that He had done for Israel” (Judges 2:10). Remember Deuteronomy 6: tell your children the story, talk about it at home and on the road. Somewhere, that stopped happening.

The cycle

The book of Judges covers a few hundred years after Joshua, before Israel had a king. Chapter 2 sets out a pattern that repeats over and over, like a song stuck on loop.

First, Israel turns away. They “served the Baals” (Judges 2:11), the fertility gods of the Canaanites around them, who promised good harvests and plenty of children. Second, God hands them over to raiders and oppressors. Third, in their misery they cry out. Fourth, God has pity: “the LORD raised up judges, who saved them from the hands of those who plundered them” (Judges 2:16). A “judge” here doesn’t mean someone in a courtroom. It means a rescuer and leader, someone like Gideon, Deborah or Samson. Then there is peace for a while. But “when the judge died, the Israelites became even more corrupt than their fathers” (Judges 2:19). And round it goes again.

Notice the word “more”. It isn’t a circle so much as a downward spiral. The judges themselves get worse as the book goes on. Gideon starts brave and ends up making a golden object that all Israel worshipped. Samson is strong but reckless and selfish. By the last chapters, Israel’s own tribes are fighting each other, and the stories are some of the darkest in the Bible. The writer sums it all up twice: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

That line could be written over a lot of modern life too. “Do what feels right to you” sounds like freedom. Judges shows where it leads when a whole people tries it with God left out. It also leaves a question hanging: would a king fix things? Hold on to that for the next chapter.

Meanwhile, in Bethlehem

Then, set “in the days when the judges ruled” (Ruth 1:1), comes a short book that feels completely different. No battles, no heroes with swords. Just a family, a famine and a field.

A man from Bethlehem took his wife Naomi and their two sons east to Moab to escape a famine. Moab was across the Dead Sea, a neighbouring nation that worshipped other gods and was often Israel’s enemy. The sons married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. Then, one by one, all three men died. Naomi was left with nothing in a foreign land, and she decided to go home.

She told her daughters-in-law to stay in Moab and find new husbands. Orpah kissed her and went back. Ruth refused. Her words are some of the most loyal in all of literature: “For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God will be my God” (Ruth 1:16). It was not just loyalty to a mother-in-law. Ruth was leaving her gods for the LORD.

Back in Bethlehem, Naomi was bitter. “Call me Mara,” she said, a name meaning bitter, “I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty” (Ruth 1:20–21). She was being honest with God about her pain, and the book lets her.

A field and a redeemer

It was harvest time. God’s law said farmers must leave the edges of their fields for the poor and foreigners to gather, which was called gleaning. Ruth, both poor and foreign, went out to glean, and “she happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz” (Ruth 2:3). “Happened” is a wink from the writer. Nothing in this book is an accident.

Boaz was a relative of Naomi’s dead husband, and a good man in a bad age. He had heard about Ruth’s loyalty, and he blessed her: “May the LORD repay your work, and may you receive a rich reward from the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have taken refuge” (Ruth 2:12). He protected her and quietly made sure she gathered plenty.

Naomi saw hope for the first time. Boaz was “one of our kinsman-redeemers” (Ruth 2:20). In Israel, a kinsman-redeemer was a close relative with the right, and the duty, to rescue a family in trouble: to buy back land they had lost and to carry on a dead man’s family name. At Naomi’s urging, Ruth went to Boaz at night at the threshing floor and asked him to take that role, saying, “Spread the corner of your garment over me, for you are a kinsman-redeemer” (Ruth 3:9). It was a request for marriage and protection, and Boaz treated her with honour. There was a closer relative, so Boaz settled the matter publicly at the town gate. The other man stepped aside, and Boaz married Ruth.

They had a son, Obed. The women of Bethlehem put him in Naomi’s arms, and the bitter woman was full again. Then comes the last line, the twist the whole book has been walking towards: Obed “became the father of Jesse, the father of David” (Ruth 4:17). This foreign widow became the great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest king.

So while Israel was falling apart, God was quietly at work in an ordinary town, through an outsider’s faithfulness, preparing a king.

Where Jesus is in this

Matthew opens the New Testament with “the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1), and he names Ruth in it (Matthew 1:5). A Moabite woman is part of the family line of the Messiah. From the start, God’s promise to Abraham was for all nations, and Ruth is an early sign of what Paul would say: “you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household” (Ephesians 2:19).

Boaz also helps us understand what Jesus did. A redeemer had to be a relative, and had to be willing to pay. Jesus became our relative, fully human, so He could rescue us: “God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law” (Galatians 4:4–5). “So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers” (Hebrews 2:11). Like Ruth, we come to Him with nothing, and find refuge under His wings.

Think about it: Judges says everyone did what was right in their own eyes. Where in your life are you most tempted to make yourself the judge of what’s right, and what would it look like to trust God there instead?

Go deeper: Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards — preaching on Ruth’s famous promise to Naomi, Edwards points out that Jesus came from Ruth’s family line and sees her as a picture of every true believer: someone who leaves the old life behind, comes to trust under the shadow of God’s wings, and keeps going when others turn back like Orpah. Start with chapter 4, “Ruth’s Resolution”.