Nothing is Wasted

While the popular adage declares that “the devil is in the details,” it is more accurate to avow that God is in the details. The doctrine of providence declares that God’s providential rule extends to all things great and small, from the huge to the minute, the infinite to the infinitesimal.

R.C. Sproul

I love how the Bible works. God doesn’t simply give us a definition of providence. He gives us a story. He gives us a little book like Ruth. In its four chapters, he allows us to peek behind the curtain and witness up close his hidden hand at work. Through the redemption and restoration of a destitute widow God shows us how he is intimately involved in the affairs of one family in one place at one point in time. More than that, he invites us into Naomi’s story so that we might reimagine our own lives as ground zero for his hidden handiwork.

Through the book of Ruth (and the Bible as a whole) God intends to train us to look at our ordinary, everyday lives differently. As Sinclair Ferguson writes in Faithful God: An Exposition of the Book of Ruth, “We, too, are involved in the drama of God’s unfolding purposes. Frequently, we cannot understand what God is doing. But in the Scriptures God is saying to us, as he said to John in the book of Revelation: Come up here to this vantage point for a moment and see what I am doing (Revelation 4:1ff.)! It is as if the Bible as a whole [and the book of Ruth in particular] is saying: Come up here and see how God is on his throne, working out his perfect purposes; and view things in your own life and times from his point of view.” (48)

Now, this does not mean we will be able to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together once we have allowed the book of Ruth to master us. Far from it. Nor does it mean we will always be able to discern why some particular thing happened to us or to someone we love. Again, far from it. After all, in the midst of her debilitating grief, Naomi never could have known all that God intended for her and her daughter-in-law. Neither could she have imagined in her wildest dreams that her family would be included in the lineage of the Messiah! When she walked out the door in search of food for herself and her mother-in-law in Ruth 2:3, Ruth had no way of knowing whether or not her quest would be successful. In fact, as a foreigner and a vulnerable young women, she had every reasonable reason to believe she might well come home empty-handed. Certainly, God had other plans, but neither Ruth nor Naomi had the inside track on those. They could only act in faith and rejoice in God’s hidden hand revealed after the fact. In the same way, I am willing to bet that so much of what God is doing in our lives will only ever be understood in reverse, when the tapestry of redemption is complete, and we are allowed to view it from the front rather than the back. Then and only then, will we be able to see at long last how all the various threads and seemingly random stitches fit together to form a work of art so glorious that only God could have conceived of it.

Until that day, we have the book of Ruth, as well as the rest of the Bible, to retrain us to see our lives rightly when we are tempted to think that our little ordinary lives are of no consequence or concern to a great, big God who must surely have much bigger fish to fry. The remarkable things that unfold seemingly by chance (Ruth 2:3) in its four little chapters call us back to reality and to a God who leaves nothing to chance and no detail out of his Story. Indeed, the book of Ruth is designed by our Father to reorient us to that Story and to remind us that when we cannot trace his hand or discern his purposes in some specific life situation, we can trust him, and we can trust that he is at work for our good. As Jason Gray writes and reminds us through song, “Nothing is wasted, Nothing is wasted, In the hands of our Redeemer, Nothing is wasted.” Every detail our lives will find its rightful place in our Father’s Story, just as the details in Naomi and Ruth’s lives did, and we can rest in his hidden hand of providence precisely because we can see it on display so clearly in the little book of Ruth.