Daily Manna · Day 135 · May 15
A Full Reward
“The LORD recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.”
Boaz says these words to Ruth in the barley field: "The LORD recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust." Keep hold of that picture of wings, because the whole book is built on it.
A bird covering its young with its wings is more than a pretty picture. It is what a bird does when a hawk is overhead. The Hebrew word Boaz uses for wings is kanaph. It means wing, and it is also the word for the corner of a garment, the edge a man spread over a woman when he took her as his wife and took responsibility for her. Boaz says this about God while Ruth is still a widow from Moab. She is gleaning grain at the edge of somebody else's field. She has no husband and no land, and she calls herself "a stranger." She is the foreigner everyone in Bethlehem is being careful around.
Then watch the picture come back. In the next chapter, at night on the threshing floor, Ruth says to Boaz, "spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman." The word skirt there is kanaph, the same word Boaz had used for God's wings. Ruth takes the picture from his own mouth and asks him to make it real. Boaz does not tell her to try to feel more at home. He goes up to the city gate, sits down before ten of the elders, and settles the legal question that same day, just as Naomi said he would.
That is the promise, and it never depended on Ruth managing to feel sheltered. Shelter under God's wings was not a mood she reached at the edge of a field. It was a covering that came looking for her, and then it held. The foreign widow from Moab ends the book as the mother of a son named Obed, and Obed's grandson is King David. The reward was full, and it reached far beyond her own lifetime.
God's covering over you is the same kind of covering. What He has spread over you will not be lifted in the night to see how you manage without it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 135 is Doers of the Word (James 1:22).