remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has torn down the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing in His flesh the law of commandments and decrees. He did this to create in Himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace and reconciling both of them to God in one body through the cross, by which He extinguished their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through Him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. Therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God's household,
But Ruth replied: "Do not urge me to leave you or to turn from following you. For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD punish me, and ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me."
Significance
Paul tells the Ephesian Gentiles that they "were separate from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God" (Eph 2:12), and that now they "are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God's household" (2:19). Ruth the Moabitess embodies that very movement in narrative form: an outsider barred from the assembly (Deut 23:3) who renounces her people and gods — "your people will be my people, and your God will be my God" (Ruth 1:16) — and is grafted into Israel, becoming great-grandmother to David and an ancestress of Christ (Matt 1:5). The Connection Method is Analogy (Greidanus Method 4): Ruth is the narrative analog of the alienated Gentile brought near — the parallel operates across the unity of the people of God, without divine prospective design embedded in Ruth's person and without a Ruth-to-church escalation (Paul never names her; the NT never types her; TT 133 disavows the person-typology four times). The genuine go'el type in the book — the redeemer whose payment incorporates the outsider — is Boaz's, and its escalation to Christ is the freehold of TT 015 (cited, not developed, here): what Boaz did locally as redeemer, Christ accomplishes for the nations "through the blood of Christ" (2:13). The point is not the imitation of Ruth's loyalty as moral example, but the glory of a Redeemer who turns strangers into family; in Him the once-excluded find a people and a God to be desired forever.
Found via
G.K. Beale & D.A. Carson, _Commentary on the NT Use of the OT_
