Then she arose with her daughters in law, that she might return from the country of Moab: for she had heard in the country of Moab how that the LORD had visited his people in giving them bread.
Reader! may we not, without violence to the history, conceive this to be no unapt representation of the return of a sinner after his wandering from the Lord? Every man, like Elimelech, hath departed from the Lord by sin and transgression. The Lord in mercy sends afflictions after us. There is a famine of ordinances, trouble, sickness, death. When these visitations are properly received and felt, and the heart by grace is humbled under them, the soul, like Naomi, hears the rod, and who hath appointed it. And then, like her, we are told that the Lord is returned to Jerusalem in mercies. I will arise, and go to my Father, is then the language of the soul. Oh! how sweet, how very sweet is it, when by sanctified afflictions the Lord hedges up our way with thorns, or unsettles the nest we had made for ourselves, amidst the Moabs of the world Luke 15:13; Hosea 2:7