Day 217—This Far
A Milestone Retreat Before 1 Samuel
However you can engage today, we’re here. Read, listen or both.
The written portion gives an overview, with verses broken down into smaller bites, and journaling/prayer prompts for reflection. In the podcast, Steve Traylor reflects on today’s passage with Scripture reading, a deeper pastoral teaching, and prayer (about 15 minutes). Perfect for morning coffee, commutes, or when your eyes need a rest.
📚 Resource Library:
Printable Bible Book Guides: Discipleship charts for books we’ve completed together
Hard Questions, Honest Answers: Deeper dives on difficult topics that arise along the way
Genesis-Ruth Retreat
Before we go any further, stop.
Something has been happening over the last two hundred and sixteen days, and it deserves more than a passing glance.
Many of you have been in God’s Word every day—or most days, or as many days as you could manage—since Genesis 1. Seven months. Creation to Ruth. The question worth sitting with today is not only what you have covered. The question is what God has been doing in you while you were covering it.
The Word of God is far more than information. It is living and active, and God uses it to shape the people who abide in it. That something is God’s work, not yours. Your part has been showing up. His part is what happens next. And today is a day to sit quietly with both—what the story has shown you, and what God has been doing in you through it.
You Showed Up
Start here, because this matters more than you may realize.
Some of you began this study in places you would not have chosen. Grieving. Exhausted. Angry with God, or not sure you believed in Him at all. Carrying wounds that made even opening a Bible feel like too much. Some of you have been fighting chronic illness, or depression, or losses so heavy that getting through a single paragraph took everything you had.
And you are still here.
That is not a small thing. For some of you, still being here after seven months is itself the evidence of something God has been doing—because you did not have the strength to stay on your own. If you showed up on the hard days, something was holding you. That is worth pausing to notice.
For others, the journey has been quieter—steady and faithful and perhaps less dramatic, but no less real. You came back day after day because something kept drawing you back. That drawing is not accidental.
Whatever brought you here today, you are here. And God has been present in every day of this—the days you felt it and the days you felt nothing at all.
Sit with that for a moment. You showed up. So did He.
What the Story Has Been Doing to What You Believed About God
Most of us arrived at Genesis 1 carrying a picture of God that was assembled from many sources—sermons, childhood impressions, painful experiences, cultural assumptions. For some, He was primarily a rule-keeper waiting to register violations. For others, a distant force, mostly benign but not particularly personal. For others still, a God who clearly favored some people and had, for reasons unexplained, not favored them.
God’s Word does not return empty. Seven months under it has given the Lord room to reshape those pictures through what He has revealed about Himself. Not by arguing with them directly, but by showing you who He actually is across the sweep of the story.
Here is what the narrative from Genesis through Ruth has put on display:
God is holy in a way that costs something. Sinai was not approachable. The tabernacle had a veil. The priests had protocols. Nadab and Abihu died for unauthorized fire. The conquest of Canaan was an act of divine judgment on centuries of accumulated wickedness. A God who is truly holy cannot simply absorb evil indefinitely. This is not the permissive parent of modern religious imagination.
And yet He is also hesed—lovingkindness that will not let go. Exodus 34:6-7 is His own self-declaration: merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. He endures Israel’s wilderness complaints for forty years. He raises a deliverer every time the people cry out—even when those cries are more desperation than repentance. He works through a foreign widow in a barley field and weaves her into a genealogy that will carry His purposes forward for a thousand more years. This is not the harsh judge of popular caricature either.
He is both, fully and simultaneously—and He has always been both. This is perhaps the most significant thing the story from Genesis through Ruth has to offer. The God who descended on Sinai in fire is the same God who walked in the garden in the cool of the evening, calling to two people (Adam and Eve) He already knew were hiding. The God of Leviticus’s precise holiness requirements is the God of Ruth’s quiet hesed, working in the background of an era when the foreground was chaos. He is not the harsh Old Testament God waiting to be softened by Jesus. He is the same God, revealing Himself progressively—and what He has been revealing is who He has always been.
That is worth pausing to receive. Because if it has landed—if the God you are carrying now is larger, more complex, more genuinely holy and more genuinely merciful than the one you started with—something has already shifted in you.
Has your picture of God changed over these seven months? Not necessarily resolved or completed—just changed, expanded, complicated in ways that feel more true? If you have remained under His Word for these months, you can be confident that God has been faithfully using His Word, even where you cannot yet see the fruit. Ask Him to show you.
What the Story Has Been Doing to What You Believed About Yourself
The narrative from Genesis through Ruth holds up a mirror. And the reflection is not primarily about other people.
Israel is not a cautionary tale about ancient failures. Israel repeatedly demonstrates what every fallen human heart does, given enough time and enough comfort: it forgets. It reaches for what it can control when God seems slow. It builds golden calves forty days after hearing thunder at Sinai. It enters the Promised Land and brings the wilderness in its heart.
But here is what sustained reading does, if you have let it: the problem was never primarily about keeping the rules correctly. The problem was always the heart. Geography did not cure Israel—they brought themselves into Canaan. Better laws did not cure Israel—they had the law of Moses and still could not sustain it. Better leaders did not cure Israel—Joshua was as faithful as any, and the generation after him forgot everything within a single lifetime.
For readers who have spent years believing that the Christian life was primarily about memorizing what was required and making better decisions—and who have been quietly devastated by their inability to do so consistently—this is not discouraging news. It is liberating news. The failure was not a performance problem. It was a heart problem. And a heart problem requires a solution that reaches where rules cannot.
Which means grace is not the fallback plan for people who tried hard enough and still failed. Grace is the only plan that was ever going to work. The sheer weight of the story’s evidence has been pressing toward this reality: that God’s grace is more staggeringly amazing than most of us previously understood, and that this is what finally makes trust and surrender and obedience possible. If that has landed—even partially—something genuinely important has happened in you. And if it has not yet landed fully, keep reading. The story is not finished making its case.
Has anything shifted in how you understand your own failures? The story has been holding up a mirror for seven months. Ask God what He has been showing you about yourself in it. He is not showing you in order to condemn. He is showing you because He has a solution—and He wants you to know you need it.
The Question the Story Has Been Building
If you have been paying attention, something has been quietly accumulating in the background of everything since Genesis 3.
God is faithful beyond anything human faithfulness can match. Human beings are broken in a way that no law, no leader, no land, and no judge has been able to fix. The covenant keeps being renewed and keeps unraveling—not because God is weak, but because the problem is located somewhere no external solution can reach.
By the time you close Ruth and read that Moabite widow’s name in the genealogy that leads toward David—and further—you are meant to feel the shape of a question forming: if God is this faithful and humans are this broken, what does the solution actually have to look like?
It cannot be a better law. Israel had the law. It cannot be a better leader. They had Moses and Joshua. It cannot be a better land. They had Canaan. Whatever the answer is, it has to reach the place none of these things could reach. It has to reach the heart.
If you can feel that question forming—if the story has awakened in you a deeper longing for the King, the covenant, and the redemption God has been promising—that is not merely intellectual engagement. That is the Spirit’s work. The Old Testament has not yet named the full answer, but it has been teaching us to long for Him. The narrative has been designed to produce exactly this: a hunger for something the story has not yet delivered, a sense that everything so far has been pointing somewhere that has not yet fully arrived.
Can you feel that longing? Does the story feel unfinished in a way that makes you want to keep reading? That hunger is not accidental. Hold onto it.
What Comes Next—and Why the Long Road Matters
Some of you have wondered, at some point in these seven months, why God did not simply skip to Jesus.
It is an honest question. If the answer to the human problem is ultimately the Incarnation—God entering history in the person of His Son—why the centuries of covenant and failure and wilderness and conquest and judges and kings? Why the long road?
The honest answer is that we cannot fully know all of God’s reasons. But Scripture does show us one thing the long road accomplishes. It does something a shortcut cannot.
It shows you, over and over and in unmistakable detail, what the problem actually is. Not so you will despair of it, but so that when the solution arrives, you will recognize what it is solving. You cannot understand why “It is finished” is the most important sentence ever spoken until you have felt the weight of everything that was unfinished. You cannot grasp what a new covenant means until you have watched the old one fail—not because God designed it to fail, but because it was always meant to reveal what only grace can accomplish.
The next phase of the story—kings and prophets and exile and return—will press deeper into that same question. It will not be easier reading. There will be moments of great faithfulness and moments of staggering failure, sometimes in the same person, sometimes on the same page. There will be prophets who speak with stunning clarity into darkness that does not seem to be listening. There will be exile—the loss of everything Israel thought God had secured for them forever.
And through all of it, God will keep revealing Himself. Keep showing what He is doing and why. Keep building toward something only He could see clearly from the beginning.
He knew this phase was necessary. He knows what He is going to show you in it. The invitation is to keep going with humility and curiosity—trusting that if Genesis through Ruth has already begun to change how you see God and yourself, the kings and prophets and exile have more to show you still. You do not need to understand the whole plan in advance. You only need to trust the God who has proven, across two hundred and sixteen days, that He is faithful to what He has promised.
The long road is doing something. Stay on it.
Action/Attitude for Today
There is no new passage today. This is a day to receive and to ask.
If God has been working in you through these seven months—if your picture of Him has grown larger, or your understanding of grace has deepened, or the question the story is building has begun to feel genuinely urgent—receive that as His gift. Thank Him. Give Him the glory. Take one step today in the direction He has been leading, even if that step is simply telling Him you are willing to follow.
As you look back over these seven months, where have you seen God prove Himself faithful? Name it if you can—even one moment, one passage, one day when He showed up. That naming is not nostalgia. It is worship. And worship is one of the things the long road was always meant to produce.
If you are not sure what He has been doing—ask Him. Not as a test, not as a demand, but as an honest prayer: What have You been doing in me that I may not have noticed? And then keep walking. Keep showing up. Keep asking. That is not the consolation prize for people who have not yet arrived somewhere. That is what faith looks like in its most honest form—and it is what God has always worked with.
And if today you can only manage to be here at all: that is enough to begin. You are not too broken, too far behind, or too far gone for what comes next. One evidence of God’s work may simply be this: despite unanswered questions, He has continued drawing you back to Himself. He who began a good work in you is faithful to complete it—and He has not finished yet.
Before you move on tomorrow, take a few minutes simply to thank Him for bringing you this far. Not because you have accomplished something remarkable—because He has been faithful. Then, if you are willing, bring this prayer into what comes next: Father, I do not always know what You have been doing in me across these seven months. But You know. Where You have been working—in how I see You, in how I understand myself, in the questions that have begun to form—I want to receive it. Thank You. I give You the glory. Where I am still uncertain or numb or just surviving, keep working anyway. I cannot transform myself. I can only keep walking with You and keep asking. So here I am—still asking, still walking, wanting to see what comes next. Do what only You can do. Amen.
The long road is not a detour. It is the journey. And you are not walking it alone.
The Bible for the Broken is published by Aurion Press LLC. © Aurion Press LLC. All rights reserved.