Peekers and Seekers

Saturday, August 14, 2010

love and protect...til....


While strolling through Doug Wilson's blog today, Blog&Mablog, I was reminded of "May bride/December groom"...or however that goes.
Both Adam and Boaz were older than their brides—Adam by a few days, and Boaz by quite a few years. Both Adam and Boaz were men of the soil, laboring to bring fruitfulness out of the ground. Both women were vulnerable and needed a protector.  Adam was told to tend and keep the garden, which placed him in the role of a protector. At the very center of what needed protecting was his bride, and one of Adam’s greatest failures was his failure to protect his wife from the dragon.
Contrast this with the behavior of Boaz. When Ruth first begins working in his fields, he assumes the role of a protector. Boaz is a protector throughout that entire book. He tells the men working the harvest that they were not to touch her (Ruth 2:9). He protected her from want by giving her water (Ruth 2: 9) and food (Ruth 2:14). When she went to him at the threshing floor, he extended his cloak of protection over her—but he had been watching out for her from the first moment he saw her. Boaz is a new Adam, protecting his bride in ways that the first Adam had not. Boaz was such a protector that he leads with it. He did not protect Ruth because she was his wife; she became his wife because he had protected her.
And both men were great-grandfathers of the Christ.



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