a bittersweet providence
It was her childhood home, the place where she married her husband and gave birth to two sons. After ten years away, she was back in Bethlehem of Judah, with nothing but a young foreign woman at her side. The townspeople struggled to put a name to her changed face. Her name was Pleasant, Naomi in Hebrew. The sound of it alone made people smile. If names were prophetic, hers was a blessing. But now, after all these years, and after everything she had lost, Her name sounded like a cruel joke. She begged them,
“Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty.” Ruth 1.20-21a
In those days, judges ruled Israel and the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes. When the people turned their backs on God, He would bring war or famine until they cried out to Him again.
During one such famine Naomi's husband moved his family to Moab, the land of their enemies (Deut. 23.3-6), because food was plentiful there. And there, he died, leaving Naomi with her two sons, who, in disobedience to God's command (Deut. 7.3-4), married Moabite women. With no husband, and with her sons tied to Moab, there was no turning back. Naomi devoted her pleasant nature to the family that remained, winning the hearts of her daughters-in-law in the process.
Then both of her sons died. Everything Naomi had loved, every joy she had known, and all her financial provision was gone. As hunger set in, she got word that God had once again blessed Israel with food. With no future to promise them, Naomi urged her now beloved daughter’s-in-law to go back to their own families, get married, and start over without her. But one, Ruth, refused to leave the mother she’d grown to love or the God who, through Naomi, she had learned to worship.
What Naomi could not see as she changed her name to Mara, was that even as she wandered in a foreign land, even as she grieved, even as providence turned bitter, God was with her, converting an idolatrous Moabite woman into a faithful, God-fearing daughter and carefully preparing the way for Naomi’s return home to God’s own idolatrous people.
Naomi also couldn’t know that God was providing the means not only for her joy and redemption through the birth of her grandson, Obed, but He was writing her into the story of redemption for Israel through Obed’s grandson, King David, and ultimately for us all, through the Son of David, Jesus Christ, Savior of the world.
It was no mistake, then, that even in the midst of her bitter grief and loss, Naomi’s name was Pleasant.
