SEA POINT EVANGELICAL CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CAPE TOWN.

MINISTER, Rev. Thomas O. Scarborough.

Samuel: 1 Samuel 1:1 to 1 Samuel 2:11.

Morning Worship, 21 November 2006.

In the past few weeks, we jumped ahead of the story we are going to look at this morning — which is the story we find at the beginning of the book of 1 Samuel.

This is an Old Testament story. People sometimes have the attitude that the Old Testament has little to say to us today — it is ancient history.

But let us not forget that the Old Testament is the Word of God — it is the Word of God to us. It is just as much the Word of God as is the New Testament. And the Old Testament can be just as spiritually inspiring, and just as spiritually upbuilding, as can the New Testament.

We should not forget that the people of the Old Testament had a personal relationship with God, just as we do today — they had a living, empowering relationship with Him. The only difference is that they were still looking forward to the Saviour — they were looking forward to the salvation and grace of God — while we look back to the Saviour, and we know that He has already done what they were looking forward to in hope.

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Now the book of Samuel begins with the birth of Samuel, and his dedication to the Lord — and that is why I have chosen this passage today.

During that time, Israel was in the time of the Judges. Israel had no King — but instead, the people were ruled by God. What kept them together was their obedience to God, under the leadership of special people gifted by God and guided by God to judge the people.

It was an unusual situation, that began with Moses, and in fact ended with Samuel, who was the last Judge of Israel.

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I’ll begin simply by running through a few verses without plan — and we shall let these verses speak for themselves.

The book begins with a very personal and a very tragic story.

It is about a man called Elkanah, who had two wives. One of these wives was Peninnah, and the other Hannah. And in chapter 1 verse 2 we read: “Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none.”

Now their husband Elkanah loved Hannah — and it seems he did not love Peninnah. We read in verse 5: “He loved Hannah,” but no mention is made here of Peninnah. That is probably where the trouble of this story begins.

And because Elkanah loved Hannah, and because she had never conceived, he gave her preferential treatment.

In verses 4 and 5 we read: “Whenever the day came for Elkanah to sacrifice, he would give portions of the meat to his wife Peninnah, and to all her sons and daughters. But to Hannah he gave a double portion because he loved her, and the Lord had closed her womb.”

Now Elkanah no doubt meant well with this preferential treatment, but it seems to have worked the opposite way for Hannah. It brought her grief. And that is the trouble with preferential treatment. It seems to us, in our human wisdom, to be love — but it is not really love at all. It always hurts someone. A preferential love is not a godly love. If you prefer one child above another, if you prefer your children above your husband — if you prefer one employee above another, or one race above another, you are not living your life in a way that pleases God. In fact the Bible goes further than that — but that is not our topic this morning.

Notice incidentally the end of verse 5: “… and the Lord closed her womb.” Why did all this happen? The Lord did it. That is the way that the Bible looks at the world — and if that is not the view that you have, then you have a modern view of life — you do not have a Biblical view, namely that God is personally and sovereignly involved in our lives in that kind of way.

Then in verses 6 and 7 we come to the trouble: “And because the Lord had closed Hannah’s womb, her rival Peninnah kept provoking her in order to irritate her. This went on year after year. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her till she wept and would not eat.”

And also, you will see that her husband Elkanah is quite hopeless in another way. Instead of being proactive, he simply says, in verse 8: “Why, Hannah? … Why? Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?” and he just lets the situation carry on.

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Hannah finds no comfort — and therefore she goes to the temple — in verse 9 — and she is weeping and praying on the temple steps, and she is saying, in verse 11: “O Lord Almighty, if You will only look upon Your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget Your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life.”

The story is well known to us. Hannah is so wretched on those temple steps that Eli the High Priest thinks that she is drunk — and he says to her, in verse 14: “How long will you keep on getting drunk? Get rid of your wine.”

And Hannah replies: “Not so, my lord, I am a woman who is deeply troubled.”

And then in verses 17 and 18: “Eli answers, ‘Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of Him.'”

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Now the most important thing about these opening verses is the vow that Hannah makes to the Lord.

And her vow — her promise — is in verse 11: “O Lord Almighty, give Your servant a son, then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life.”

And the fulfilment of that promise comes in verse 27, where she says: “I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of Him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.”

Let us notice just what Hannah is saying here. She is not fulfilling a promise just because she made a promise. In verse 27, she does not say: “Well, I made a promise. So now, I give him to the Lord.” She does not say, “I am doing this because once upon a time I made a vow.”

What she says, in verse 27, is: “I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of Him. So now I give him to the Lord.”

Here she is giving him to the Lord, not because she once made a vow — that comes into it, but it is not what she is thinking. She is giving him to the Lord because the living Lord granted what she asked of Him. She is giving him to the Lord because of an attitude in her heart. And her attitude is: “The Lord has granted me this boy. The sovereign Lord has given me this gift. Therefore this gift belongs to the Lord.”

So often people look at vows and contracts, and they say: “It’s just a piece of paper. It’s nothing more than a piece of paper.”

And that’s the only view that you can take without a living faith in a mighty God. But if you can say: “The Lord did this. The Lord arranged this. The Lord has a plan for my life through this,” then things look entirely different.

At the beginning of chapter 2, this attitude of Hannah stands out even more clearly. In chapter 2, she says a prayer to the Lord — and in this prayer we discover that Hannah has the firm conviction that it is the Lord who decides whether we should have children or not — whether we should succeed in life or fail — whether we should have food or famine — whether we should have poverty or riches or fame or honour or life or death.

Why is it that you were born into this world — and why is it that you find yourself where you do today? The Bible teaches us that it is because the Lord in His sovereign power and wisdom decided so.

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But returning to the promise of Hannah, what obviously lies behind her promise is the unshakeable conviction that a gift given by God is a gift that belongs to God. If Almighty God, in His mercy, decides to give you a thing — who should it belong to?

If the Lord gives you a child — should you not give that child to Him? If the Lord gives you a home, should you not dedicate that home to Him? If the Lord has given you a computer system, should you not dedicate that computer system to Him? If the Lord gives you an income, should you not dedicate that income to Him?

And this kind of promise — if it kept, with the help of God — leads to great blessing from God — as we shall see in a moment. It leads to His personal approval. It leads to the mark of God on your life’s course.

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But let’s turn to another theme surrounding the birth of Samuel. Let’s look at a few verses of a famous prayer that Hannah said, in chapter 2 verse 1: “Then Hannah prayed, and said, ‘My heart rejoices in the Lord. In the Lord my horn — my strength — is lifted high. My mouth boasts over my enemies, for I delight in your deliverance.'”

Hannah rejoices. Hannah’s strength is lifted high. She delights in the Lord.

The Lord has given Hannah her request, and Hannah is jubilant. But let us notice something very important about her jubilation in verse 1: “My heart rejoices in — the Lord. In the Lord my horn — my strength — is lifted high … I delight in the deliverance of the Lord.”

She is not rejoicing because her circumstances happened to go well for her. She is not rejoicing because today things chanced to work out all right in her life. That is a very shaky reason for rejoicing.

She is rejoicing because the Lord is with her. The Lord has proved to her — and she has learnt this from the Lord through all that she has been through — that He is with her, and He is working in her life.

It is an awfully shaky thing to base your rejoicing in life — your happiness in life — on whether things happened to go well for you today — if business went well today, or if people were good to you today, or if you got what you wanted today. It’s just no guarantee of being happy in life. You will be up one day and down the next — and since life is such a precarious place anyway, with that attitude you might well be down for months or years at a time. Some people are.

But Hannah based her rejoicing in the Lord. Doesn’t that remind us so much of St. Paul? “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice.” (Philippians 4:4). The Old Testament is sometimes a lot closer to the New Testament than we think.

What we have here in 1 Samuel is a fact of life. If your happiness is not based on the conviction that God is your strength, and that God is a God of love who is working for you from day to day, then you have no guarantee of living a happy or a contented life. There is simply no way it can be done without God.

Recently I shared with my Bible study group a personal example. I don’t often give personal examples, but I think this one fits.

I am studying for a Master’s degree through ……………….. Seminary in the U.S.A., as most of us know. It is one of the so-called “Big Three” seminaries.

Well they suggested that I should do the second half of the degree here in South Africa, and slot my credits back into the degree over in the U.S.A. So I sought approval from the U.S.A. to slot credits in from our finest university. They wrote back and said that there would be no one-to-one conversion — I would have to do double the work over here for recognition in the U.S.A. A combined Honours-Masters programme over here would receive 50% recognition over there. Not only that, of course, but I would be doing about twice as many years of work over here. I said, “This doesn’t compute. This would take me through to 2011 (four or five years from now) just to finish the second half of a Masters degree.”

Now the reason why I tell you this is that there are two ways one can react. One can be hopping mad — one can even have sleepless nights and great distress — or one can stop, and say — as Hannah did: “My heart rejoices in the Lord. In the Lord my horn — my strength — is lifted high … I delight in the deliverance of the Lord.” God is in this. So there’s no reason to be troubled. In fact you can be confident, when you believe in a living, personal God.

I think that I myself can see my deliverance coming together in a wonderful way in the situation I just described — but the story is not yet complete. You’ll have to ask me again in three months’ time.

Let’s take a lesson from Hannah here — it is a lesson of faith. To be distressed and angry and to have sleepless nights — and to stop eating, as Hannah did — and to end up with resentment and regret and disappointment in life — is not the way to go through life.

There is only one way you can prevent that. It is to say: “The Lord is my Shepherd.” And that starts by coming into a personal relationship with God.

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Let’s move on to another theme here — a final theme this morning. The real reason why Hannah was blessed by God, and rewarded by God — is that she pleased God through her faith.

How do we know she had faith? The word faith does not appear here. But in verse 18 — after the High Priest Eli had spoken to her — we read: “She went her way and ate something, and her face was no longer downcast.” A sudden change of attitude comes over Hannah.

And there’s something more here that we could easily overlook in this story, but I think it’s important. The Judge of all Israel, the High Priest — the most awesome person in Israel — we read in verse 9, was sitting on a chair by the doorpost of the temple — and he noticed Hannah. And the Judge of all Israel spoke to her.

And we read here in 1 Samuel that Hannah was on an annual pilgrimage to the temple with her family — so this was likely the Passover feast, when hundreds of thousands of people thronged to the temple. Hannah most likely was just a nobody in this vast crowd. And probably there were a hundred people with her there on the temple steps.

But the High Priest spoke to her, and he said, in verse 17: “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of Him.” And immediately Hannah’s weeping was gone. Her appetite came back. We read even that her face changed. No longer was it downcast.

And when we move on to the prayer that Hannah prays in chapter 2, there we really find the signs of faith. And of course, we find a great sign of faith in that she hands over her young son Daniel to Eli the High Priest with the words: “The Lord has granted me what I asked of Him … so now I give Him to the Lord. For his whole life, he will be given over to the Lord.”

Now Hannah didn’t always have faith. But we see plainly that there came a switch in her life. There is a clear switch from “great anguish and grief,” to use her own words — to an attitude of quiet, confident faith.

And that is also the point at which God’s blessing comes into her life. It begins simply with the blessing of peace. There’s no great event that happens – not right away — there’s no material benefit — there’s no great change in her life — but immediately, she is blessed with peace.

Then God’s blessing continues with the blessing of a son, and blessing on her family — and eventually, there is blessing on the entire nation of Israel. And in chapter 2 verse 21, we read the explanation: “The Lord was gracious to Hannah.” That doesn’t mean, it just happened to turn out that way — it means that God — the Lord — personally blessed her.

One of the central messages of the Bible — maybe the central message of the Bible — is that you can only please God with faith. This story is an example of a life that came to please God through faith. And it is an example of the pleasure that God has in such faith.

There is the famous verse, in Hebrews 11:6: “Without faith, it is impossible to please God.” That verse does not say: “Without values, it is impossible to please God.” It does not say: “Without deeds, it is impossible to please God.” It says: “Without faith …” Everything started in Hannah’s life through faith.

If you don’t come to faith, there is nothing you can do to please God. “It is impossible to please God … without faith.”

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Jesus said that you and I need repentance and faith. That is the first thing he ever preached, in Mark chapter 1. You need to come before God and say: “O Lord, I have closed you out of my life — and so much of what I have done, and thought, and schemed — has been done because I was without You. I want to say that I’m sorry for having walked through life my way, and for having offended You, the sovereign, living God — and now I want You to take control of every part of me through Your Holy Spirit.”

The Bible tells us that we need to come before God and say that. We need to deliberately receive Him. God’s presence in your life starts by coming into a personal relationship with God. If you would like to do that, it is crucially important. Your entire eternity depends on it. Please give me a call today or during the week — or contact your own minister — and take the time to dedicate your life to God.

AMEN.