Ruth 1-2; Psalm 89; 1 Timothy 5

May 15: Your life is being watched: your testimony matters. Trust God and lean not on your own understanding. Wait for Him and see how it pans out.

Ruth 1-2: Does Naomi come to repent of her unjust testimony about the Lord? (Ruth 1:20) It seems so, and hopefully her daughter-in-law’s story becomes better known than her bitter complaint. She had abandoned the house of bread for the pagan nation in a time of crisis, but God had nevertheless shown kindness to her, to Ruth, and to her dead husband and son. 

Psalm 89:1-29: Who is the real King of Israel? It is the LORD (Psalm 89:18). David is HIs servant, who will cry to God as his Father, the Rock of his Yeshua, and God will make him His firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth. His Seed will endure forever. We can compare this passage to Galatians 3:16, as in the Abrahamic Covenant as well as this promise, God has Christ in mind. It's important that the words of this Psalm are passed along accurately or the prediction is lost, and the clear references to Christ are muddied.

1 Timothy 5: Paul is instructing Timothy in generalities, but circumspect ones. Are the instructions about younger widows contradictory? If you put them on the church’s support, they’ll just start feeling the impulses of sexual desire, marry and be indolent, spreading gossip. So my advice is that the younger widows get married. If we put the emphasis on marriage as being the offense, yes, that would be contradictory. But he’s not saying that a widow who has remarried has “turned aside after satan.” He’s saying that the other things represent that. I also think the KJV translation of “having damnation because they have cast off their first faith” tends to lead us to consider this in the ultimate sense when I think the faith/“pistis” here has to do with their contractual commitment to the church in receiving the financial support, thus “damnation” is likely earthly judgment, and not the eschatological damnation of hell.

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