The story of Ruth brings together many familiar strands of everyday life. There is love, of course, but there is also loss, loneliness and abandonment. There is wealth and poverty, hope and fear, commitment and disappointment; experiences that affect people's lives in every age and place.
The story of Ruth illustrates the great theme of God's grace to needy sinners. The Lord Jesus Christ is typified in the person of Boaz, the kinsman-redeemer, and when we read the book of Ruth with an eye to the saving work of Christ we are provided with many blessed insights into God's grace and mercy to all generations.
If you have never before seen this spiritual dimension in Ruth you are in for a treat as Pastor Fortner carefully and simply explains the story's historical context, Christological application and spiritual meaning. As the author points out, this book in our Bibles is called Ruth but it is really the story of Boaz, the kinsman-redeemer. As such it is really the gospel of Christ.
This timeless love story reminds us that the only way of salvation in every age, for men and women and boys and girls of every nation, is by the kinsman-redeemer Jesus Christ. A key part of this history is that Ruth was not Jewish, but a Moabitess. She was not one of the 'chosen people' of Israel, but a daughter of a nation who enticed Israel to sin.
Yet grace found her and brought her into the church of Jesus Christ, the true elect people of God. God the Holy Spirit reveals to us how salvation was gifted to a young girl in Moab whose heritage and history was one of sin, idolatry and man-made religion. Furthermore, not only was Ruth called to saving faith but just like Rahab the Canaanite before her, Ruth the Moabite was in the direct lineage of Jesus of Nazareth.
This shows how even in Old Testament times, long before the coming of Jesus the Messiah, and the wider work of Christ's apostles, the saving grace of God reached countries and people well beyond the borders of Israel. It is a delightful reminder how knowledge of Jesus Christ existed in faraway lands, and amongst nations not necessarily recorded in the pages of scripture.
This brings us back to Ruth. The volume you hold in your hand tells of grace to sinners like us. It tells how the Lord Jesus Christ came in the flesh of our humanity and fulfilled the type as Kinsman-Redeemer for all He is pleased to call His own. The God-Man, our Saviour Jesus Christ, is our Kinsman: fit, able and willing to redeem His people from their sin and to honour all upon whom His sovereign love settles in the everlasting covenant of peace.
Our late brother Don Fortner wrote this work over twenty years ago. We are grateful to his wife, Shelby, for her labours in making this edition available today. It goes forth as a testimony to our Saviour's mercy and His gracious purpose to gather to Himself a people from the ends of the earth to glorify His name.
And I will set a sign among them, and I will send those that escape of them unto the nations, ... to the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame, neither have seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the Gentiles (Isaiah 66:19).
