Month: November 2024

"My heart exults in the LORD; 
      my horn is exalted in the LORD. 
My mouth derides my enemies, 
      because I rejoice in your salvation" (1 Samuel 2:1).

Hannah’s prayer of praise opens with exclamation for personal reversal. Many a song has been ruined by a predominance of “my” and “I.” But “my” and “I” are not necessarily poisonous to every song. If you are to rejoice in redemptive reversal, it must be personal. David sang, “But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me” (Psalm 13:5–6). If you cannot sing “my” and “I,” you have no reason to sing.

What separates the bad “my and I” songs and prayers from the good ones? Much of it can be seen in this: Hannah’s song is as theological as it is personal. Matthew Henry well expresses what it is that makes this song beautiful instead of ugly. 

“What great things she says of God. She takes little notice of the particular mercy she was now rejoicing in, does not commend Samuel for the prettiest child, the most toward and sensible for his age that she ever saw, as fond parents are apt to do. No, she overlooks the gift, and praises the giver, whereas most forget the giver and fasten only on the gift. Every stream should lead us to the fountain; and favors we receive from God should raise our admiration of the infinite perfections there are in God.”

"There is none holy like the LORD: 
     for there is none besides you; 
     there is no rock like our God" (1 Samuel 2:2)

The gift was good, but Yahweh is peerless. Our God is not only incomprehensible; He is incomparable. He is incomprehensible. We cannot comprehensively master His infinite glory. He is incomprehensible, but one thing we may comprehend about Him, is that He is incomparable. “There is none holy like Yahweh.” When Moses asked God what he should say when the people ask the name of the God of their fathers, God answers “I AM.” Names define. God alone can define Himself. There is no other. “There is none besides you.” God always wins His class because He is the only one in His class. His position is uncontested. This is not because His class is low and insignificant. It is the highest and most esteemed.

“There is no rock like our God.” After the Red Sea swallowed the Egyptian forces, Moses sang, “Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” (Exodus 15:11). The understood answer—no one! As Israel prepared to take Canaan, Moses gathered all the people and sang to them of this Rock. “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he. …their rock is not as our Rock; our enemies are by themselves” (Deuteronomy 32:4, 31).

With Hannah we may rejoice that the incomparable Lord is our God. He is our Rock. We are not by ourselves. It’s personal. It’s theological. Such is the stuff of true praise and prayer.

Samuel opens with a birth narrative, a nativity. Though the Bible is filled with such stories, they are not told recklessly.  The Bible is not littered with nativities. Select nativities are set within the narrative. God does not toss nativities like trash out of a window. He sets them like gems in jewelry. When God tells a birth story, He is preparing us for a bigger story.

God made man and blessed him saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). A multitude of births followed, but the hope of man looks for just one—the promised Seed of the Woman who will crush the head of the serpent (Genesis 3:15). When God tells a birth story, it is pregnant with this hope. 

Genesis is structured around genealogies. The story of the patriarchs is a story of births. God promised Abraham that “in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 26:4). When God tells a birth story, He is telling the story of the Offspring in which all the nations are blessed. When God tells a birth story, pay attention, because something big is about to happen, something God-sized.

To tell any birth story, some introductions must be made. Ours opens telling us that “there was a certain man.” Before God has told us the man’s name, he has told us much. Samuel opens during the time of the judges and transitions us to the kings. The birth story of the most well known judge opens in this way, “There was a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah. And his wife was barren and had no children” (Judges 13:2).

Do you remember the rest? 

“And the angel of the LORD appeared to the woman and said to her, ‘Behold, you are barren and have not borne children, but you shall conceive and bear a son. Therefore be careful and drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head, for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines’” (Judges 13:3–5).

This is the birth story of Sampson. When God tells us a birth story, He is telling us He is about to do something. 

Later in Samuel we will encounter this phrase again. “There was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish, the son of Abiel, son of Zeror, son of Becorath, son of Aphiah, a Benjaminite, a man of wealth” (1 Samuel 9:1). This is how we are introduced to Saul. When God tells us a birth story, He is telling us He is about to do something.

Yes, this nativity anticipates the nativity, but it foreshadows Elizabeth more than it does Mary. Elizabeth was barren. Her husband Zechariah receives a vision in the temple. The child is to be dedicated to the Lord. He is not the Seed, but he will introduce Him. Neither of these nativities tell of the King, but in both of them, we are introduced to the introducer. God is about to do something.

To understand 1 & 2 Samuel you must understand Judges. To understand Judges you must understand Joshua. To understand Joshua you must understand Deuteronomy. To understand Deuteronomy you must understand Exodus. To understand Exodus you must understand Genesis.

You must read the Bible in order to read the Bible. Every time you read through the Bible, you are better equipped to read the Bible. You begin, more and more, to read the Bible in light of the Bible. You bring less of yourself and less of your culture to it. You begin to read yourself and the world in light of the Bible.

To understand Samuel, you must understand Judges.Through the latter half of Judges, one repeatedly encounters this haunting line, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25). The morality of Israel is linked to her king. Think how often in Kings you read something like this, “Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. And he did not do what was right in the eyes of the LORD his God, as his father David had done, but he walked in the way of the kings of Israel. He even burned his son as an offering, according to the despicable practices of the nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel. And he sacrificed and made offerings on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree” (2 Kings 16:2–4). The King leads the people in worship or idolatry.

To understand this aspect of Samuel and Judges, you must understand Joshua. Joshua closes with Joshua charging the people to remain faithful to the covenant that God has made with them. This means driving out the remnant of the nations, not intermarrying with them, and not being like them.

Joshua recalls God’s faithfulness to His promise in bringing them to the land and warns them not to go and serve other gods, lest God drive them from the land (Joshua 23). It was their disobedience to this command and this threat of judgment that looms large over Judges.

To understand Joshua you must understand Deuteronomy. During the time of the judges, two promises had not yet been fulfilled, that of a king and a place. Again and again in Deuteronomy we find language like this, “But when you go over the Jordan and live in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to inherit, and when he gives you rest from all your enemies around, so that you live in safety, then to the place that the LORD your God will choose, to make his name dwell there, there you shall bring all that I command you” (Deuteronomy 12:10–11).

Also, the people’s plea for a king to Samuel was not altogether evil. It was their demand and their desire therein that were wicked. But God had promises them in His covenant saying, “When you come to the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,’ you may indeed set a king over you whom the LORD your God will choose. One from among your brothers you shall set as king over you” (Deuteronomy 17:14–15).

To understand Deuteronomy you must understand the Torah. This means you must understand Exodus, where Yahweh redeems His people out of Egypt, that they might be His people and He might be their God. He does this to bring them into a land of milk and honey where He will dwell in their midst.

This means you must understand Genesis and the promises to the patriarchs. God promised Abraham land, children, and blessedness. Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob. God renamed Jacob Israel. Israel had twelve sons. Among them was Judah, whom Israel blessed saying, “Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies; your father’s sons shall bow down before you. Judah is a lion’s cub; from the prey, my son, you have gone up. He stooped down; he crouched as a lion and as a lioness; who dares rouse him? The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples. Binding his foal to the vine and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine, he has washed his garments in wine and his vesture in the blood of grapes. His eyes are darker than wine, and his teeth whiter than milk” (Genesis 49:8–12).

To understand that promise, we must go all the way way back to the beginning. God created man in His image, giving him dominion and placing him in the garden. Adam was a king. He was blessed. God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule—this was blessedness. This was how things were meant to be.

When Adam sinned, this was lost. But God gave the promise of a seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent. This is the promise of a warrior king who would set creation right, putting the serpent back under the foot of man, a King who would reestablish God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule.

From this point forward, in your reading of Scripture, you are looking to every peculiar birth of a son with this hope. And so it is that we come to this book that opens with a woman desperate for a child that she then dedicates to the Lord. A child who grows up to anoint a king. A king who defeats the enemies of the people of the Lord, but who is to have a greater Son who will enjoy rest and build a house for Yahweh.