Family Ties: Boaz

By Matt Watson

In this series we will explore Jesus’ family tree, looking at some key figures and their lives as told in Scripture. We believe the church is, in part, a family, and so we look to Christ’s family to help us see our own sin better, but also to know and worship Jesus even more.

I’ve never seen a family that hasn’t been messed up in some way. The corruption of sin rusts even the most ironlike of families, no matter how perfectly curated their social media profiles are. Every family has drama and baggage, because every human institution, organization, and system, including the most basic of which is the family unit, is made up of sinful humans. That is why no perfect family, church, or political party exists, and why we shouldn’t idolize them or put them on the proverbial pedestal.

Life is messy, so relationships are messy. Christians know the mess originated with our first parents’ sin in Genesis. Worshipping God includes recognizing our sin and repenting from it by turning back to him. This is a lifelong process. Because of this sinful mess, it should not be a surprise when family, even church family, does something stupid and sinful (but then it should also not be a surprise when repentance is called for).

This is not untrue even of Jesus’ earthly family. The glory and irony of the dual natures of Christ are that while he is fully God and perfect in every way, he also is fully man and thus experiences the same mess of life that we do, just without the corruption of sin. Jesus’ family as recorded in Scripture was messed up, and Jesus’ family as it exists today with the adopted sons and daughters of the church is also messed up. Both are made up exclusively of sinners, some of whom committed prostitution, rape, murder, idolatry, heresy, and more.

We should not be deceived into pursuing the trap of the perfect family, idolizing some concept of suburban nirvana where we curate our homes and social gatherings that would rival any Southern Living magazine cover. Only madness lies there. Instead, as we look to Jesus, let us also look at how God redeems us and our family drama by looking at Jesus’ own family.

Boaz

The first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew traces Jesus’ genealogy back to Abraham by highlighting certain names and generations, and the third chapter in the Gospel of Luke does the same, tracing ancestral highlights back to Adam.

One of those names is Boaz, who was the father of Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of King David, from whom Jesus is descended and whose throne he ultimately possesses (Rom 1:2-3). We learn more about Boaz’s story in the book of Ruth. He was a rich man, owning land and many fields of grain and crops. He was well respected, probably the valedictorian of his high school class, and had a great smile. Ruth, on the other hand, was a widow and a foreigner from Moab. If you recall from the Genesis series, Moab was the son of Lot and one of his daughters, who, after watching their city become scorched earth by God’s wrath, got their dad drunk in a cave and slept with him in order to have a kid (see Genesis 19 if you want to review the sordid details).

Therefore, the Moabites came about through incestuous rape and were seen and treated like backwoods cousins by the Israelites. That means Ruth, a widow and a Moabite, was very likely the lowliest and most vulnerable woman in all of Israel when she arrived with her mother-in-law Naomi. She had absolutely nothing going for her, and no chance of a better life, but she loved Naomi and loved her God, so she went back to Israel with her. If there was ever an unlikely match for two people to get married, it was the prep-school, real-estate business mogul, the “Barley Baron of Bethlehem,” Boaz, and the poor, lowly, foreign girl with a funny accent from the worst of third world countries, Ruth.

Kinsman-Redeemer

Yet, God is bigger than all that, and we know that they do indeed fall in love and marry. Boaz first protects Ruth from being assaulted and robbed (Ruth 2:8-9). He lets her glean from his fields, but then also sets aside some of the already harvested sheaths of grain for her to pick from as well (verses 15 and 16). Then his grace goes above and beyond by giving her roughly a month’s supply of barley for bread (Ruth 3:15-17).

Back in those times, if a woman was widowed and without a child, the brother (or in this case the next closest relative) was obligated to produce an heir with that woman so that the estate would not be forfeited (Gen 38). This was called kinsman-redeemer because as a relative (kinsman) they were buying back (redeeming) the promise of inheritance for the family. Boaz, as it turns out, would be Ruth’s kinsman-redeemer after some familial negotiations, and marries her.

See here a preview of Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation. As the Son of God from whom and to whom all things were made, Jesus is unfathomably wealthy and owns everything. Yet he set aside his position on his throne in heaven to enter into human history as a baby born in a feeding trough for sheep, the son of a humble, blue-collar family. Because of our sin, we, like Ruth, are of the lowliest of lows, dead in our sins and worthy of only death. But as we saw with Boaz, God was abundantly gracious to us and redeemed us from our spiritual poverty and lowly state. He buys us out of slavery to sin by the blood of Jesus and his death on the cross. Galatians 3:13 says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.” Elsewhere, Paul says, “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (1 Cor 6:19-20).

Through Jesus, we have the inheritance protected for us, and we get to share in that inheritance as adopted children of God (Rom 8:16-17). Yes, our families might be messed up, but so was Jesus’, and it doesn’t stay that way, and it certainly doesn’t keep Jesus from loving us. Maybe you do not have a Christ-like example in your family, but if you are in the family of God, you have Christ himself, who is the truer and ultimate kinsman-redeemer.