God is looking for the kind of person he can use. Thankfully, he isn't put off very easily in his search. When Samson failed, he found Samuel. When Saul failed, he found David. When David failed, he lovingly restored him and used him again. God is still looking for the kind of person he can use. This book will help you become the kind of person he is looking for.
A new series of devotional commentaries enabling people to get to grips with the Bible one bite at a time.
Focusing on key sections, Phil Moore gives a useful introduction to each book of the Bible. There will be 25 volumes in all, each containing approximately 60 readings. The tone is light and the text is full of useful application, making it a great resource for daily devotions. It is backed by substantial scholarship for those who want more. These readings from 1and 2 Samuel provide insights into some of the greatest characters of the Old Testament, notably into the life and motivations of King David.
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In her deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly.
(1 Samuel 1:10)
I was recently reading the Roald Dahl novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my young children. If youāve never read it, itās the story of an eccentric chocolate manufacturer who invites five lucky children to visit his factory with a view to installing one of them as his heir. While Charlie is polite and instantly loveable, the other four children are definitely not. The greedy Augustus Gloop gets swept away by a chocolate river, the spoilt Veruca Salt gets thrown out with the garbage, and the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde comes to an appropriately sticky end. At this point, one of my children turned to me and said, āI really hope that Charlie is the one left at the end and not Mike Teavee.ā It suddenly dawned on me that my children didnāt know the unwritten storybook rule: bad things only happen to bad people, and good things only happen to good people.
I know the rule. You know the rule. But that makes the first chapter of 1 Samuel all the more surprising. It appears that, like my children, God doesnāt know this unwritten rule, or if he does know then he decides to break it in this chapter and very often in our own lives too. If God is good then why does he make so many good people cry?
Think about it. Peninnah means Pearl or Ruby, but there was nothing beautiful about the second wife of Elkanah. She taunted Hannah for her infertility and made her life a misery, yet God blessed her with many sons and daughters. Hannah means Grace, and she lived up to her name, yet God rewarded her with trouble and a monthly cycle of disappointment. She thought she had married a godly man1 ā one of the few men in backslidden Israel who still came to worship at the Lordās Tabernacle in Shiloh2 ā yet after their wedding he embraced the same polygamy as his neighbours3 and proved crassly insensitive towards her pain in verse 8. Even Eli, Israelās high priest and thirteenth judge,4 accused Hannah of drunkenness and tried to throw her out of the Tabernacle. The writer wants us to react against this apparent injustice, so he shocks us twice in verses 5 and 6 by telling us that āthe Lord had closed Hannahās womb.ā It wasnāt chance and it wasnāt the Devil. It was the Lord, and he did it for a reason.
Hannah wasnāt the first woman in the Old Testament whom the Lord had made infertile. He had done the same thing to the wives of the three great patriarchs ā Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel ā as well as to the mother of Samson and the great-grandmother of David.5 In fact, a straight reading of the Old Testament so far suggests that anguish and infertility are often part of the training programme God devises to create the kind of women he can use.
You see, unlike Peninnah or Elkanah, Hannah was delivered from her backslidden culture through the abject misery which she endured. It turned her into one of the great praying women of the Old Testament, as she poured out her soul to the Lord in verse 15. She came to know God in verse 11 as Yahweh Tsab
th ā the Lord of Armies, or Lord Almighty ā despite the fact that Israel had been overrun by the Philistines and the rest of her fellow Hebrews disregarded him as the weak and outdated deity of yesteryear. It caused her to pray such gritty, persistent, anguished prayers of faith that she became the perfect filament God could use to display his glory to the whole of Israel.
The chronology of the book of Judges suggests that the events described in this chapter took place at roughly the same time that Samson died as a prisoner of the Philistines. The writer wants us to notice the deliberate parallels between the baby Hannah was to conceive and the judge who had just failed. Samson had been born to a barren woman, had been called to be a Nazirite from his motherās womb6 and had been called to lead Israel to freedom from the Philistines, but had failed. Samuel would be born to another barren woman, would be a true Nazirite and would succeed in delivering Israel from the Philistines in chapter 7. Even their names sounded similar, except that Samuel meant Heard by God and spoke of gratitude for prayers answered in the past and prophesied more answers to prayer in the future.7 If Hannah had not graduated from the Lordās school of humility by learning lessons through her suffering, she would never have handed her little boy over to Eli to grow up in the Tabernacle without her.8 Because she did so, she became the kind of person God could use.9
Nobody except you fully knows the sorrows in your own life, but if God has made you cry like Hannah then I hope you find comfort in the promises of this chapter. I hope it helps you trust that Godās delays today are a sign that he has something far better in store for you tomorrow. I hope you notice that the writer doesnāt bother to name Peninnahās sons and daughters, or the five children who were born to Hannah after she handed over Samuel in 2:21. Those children born out of ease and comfort had not been prayed for and blessed through the Lord making their mother cry. They were not like Samuel, who would become the greatest judge of Israel, the deliverer of Godās People, the Lordās prophet and the kingmaker who would transition Israel from a loose confederation of tribes led by judges into a centralized monarchy. I hope this chapter helps you understand that God has made you cry because your tears are watering the earth of your life to produce a harvest of grace beyond your wildest dreams. After all, if God is big enough for you to blame in your troubles, then he is also big enough for you to trust him in the midst of them too.
If God grants you encouragement through this chapter, then follow Hannahās lead in verse 18 when she responds to Eliās blessing with faith and joy. Although nothing has changed visibly and she has only the word of Godās priest to suggest that her prayer has been heard at all,10 she dries her eyes and breaks her fast and starts worshipping the Lord.
As you worship alongside her, you will become the kind of person God can use.
How to Make God Your Enemy (2:1ā26)
Those who oppose the Lord will be broken. The Most High will thunder from heaven.
(1 Samuel 2:10)
Eli was probably full of high hopes for his children when his wife bore him two sons to succeed him as priests of Israel. He called one of them Hophni, which meant Boxer, because he hoped that he would perhaps spar for the Lord against the evil within Israel. He called the other one Phinehas after Aaronās famous grandson who fought zealously for the honour of the Lord in Numbers 25. Since the name meant Mouth of Bronze, it appears that Eli hoped his son would preach an unflinching message which would revive backslidden Israel. He hoped that his two sons would know the Lord as their greatest friend.
Sadly, Eliās hopes were not to be. Hophni and Phinehas grew up without the character which Hannah celebrates in her prayer of thanks in verses 1ā10. She proclaims the greatness of the Lord, calling him Yahweh or The God Who Really Is nine times in just ten verses. Like Jacob and Moses, she calls him Israelās āRockā in verse 2 and rejoices that he is the God who knows everything in verse 3.1 She describes him as the one who befriends the humble and the stumbling soldier and the hungry beggar and the barren woman, yet who comes as a sworn enemy against the proud and the strong and the arrogant and the wealthy. Her prayer serves as the theme tune to the whole of these first seven chapters, but it wasnāt a song which Hophni and Phinehas knew how to sing. They delighted in their own strength, and it turned God into their enemy.
Eli had used a Hebrew insult in 1:16 when he accused Hannah of being a ādaughter of Belialā, meaning a worthless scoundrel.2 He was as unfair towards Samuelās mother as he was indulgent towards his two sons. The writer of 1 Samuel uses the same phrase in 2:12 to tell us that āEliās sons were scoundrels; they had no regard for the Lord.ā They were the exact opposite of the kind of people God could use.
Hophni and Phinehas loved the trappings of the priesthood, but neither of them actually knew the Lord. They didnāt understand that the blood sacrifices at the Tabernacle pointed to a day when Godās Messiah would die a bloody death for the forgiveness of the world. They sneered at the Lordās instruction to his priests in Leviticus 3:16 and 7:25 that all the fattiest meat belonged to him and that anyone who stole it must be cut off from his People. They abused their position to seduce the God-fearing women who came to serve the Lord at his Tabernacle in verse 22.3 The only sparring Hophni did was with worshippers who tried to resist his attempts to plunder their sacrifices, and the only zeal which Phinehas displayed was to fill his belly and his bed. Eli had hoped that they would be like Aaronās godly sons Eleazar and Ithamar, but instead they were like his sinful sons Nadab and Abihu, who made the Lord their enemy and were struck dead in his anger at the Tabernacle in Leviticus 10.
When the Lord failed to judge them with instant death, Hophni and Phinehas assumed it meant he was their friend. They stepped up their activity, bullying worshippers mid-sacrifice into handing over their meat while it was still raw. When Eli rebuked them weakly yet failed to suspend them from duty, it reinforced their view that God would no doubt prove a similar pushover when judgment day finally came. While Hannah lived out the words of her prayer by making painful annual visits to the son she had devoted to the Lord,4 they continued ātreating the Lordās offering with contemptā and provoked him to display his glory by waging war against them.
God is looking for humble people he can use as filaments to display the brilliance of his glory to the world. When peo...
