Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] So glad we get to be together today and do what we're doing.
[00:00:03] We are. We are continuing our series today in 1st Samuel, at least for a little bit. This is weird, but. Because we just started. But we're actually going to take a break from First Samuel after this Sunday.
[00:00:17] We're going to have a couple weeks where we have some standalone sermons. We're having a new missional partner come in in a couple weeks to share kind of the vision for their ministry. And then we're into adventure. So after today, we actually won't come back to First Samuel until January, which is funny because we just started and already we're getting behind. But that's how it works, right?
[00:00:37] So we are going to be in First Samuel today. If you don't have a Bible with you, I'd encourage you to grab one of the house Bibles. We're going to be in 1st Samuel chapter 2 today. By the way, if you haven't been here the last couple weeks, we have a gift for you as a church. At the welcome table back there, we have these CSB first and Second Samuel Journal Bibles. These put the scripture next to a journal page so that not only for Sunday sermons, but in your personal devotional time, you can take notes and mark them.
[00:01:04] You may be able to hear this just me talking, but I may lose my voice mid sermon today if it just gets really quiet. Can you guys do my ego a favor and just keep nodding and saying Amen quietly until I sit down? Is that okay? Can we just agree to that right now? Okay, cool.
[00:01:22] Okay. So we're actually, even though we're only three weeks in, we're actually finishing the part of the story today that involves Hannah. We're ending out our time with Hannah today. And, man, I am really excited for this. This is a beautiful way to cap off her story, but also to really launch us into the rest of what's actually happening in First Second Samuel.
[00:01:48] What we're doing here is we've taken the first seven chapters of Samuel, which are really kind of the introduction of this larger book, and we've put them into this micro series we're calling Faithful. And the reason is this, and we've said this several times, but the plain reality is if you are a person who is living your life with a desire for faith to be at the core of your person, right? A driving factor for how you live your life, how you understand the world, you already know that faith is difficult, right?
[00:02:18] Faith is hard. There are times when it just comes naturally to us. And it's beautiful. And we go to a retreat or we sing that just right worship song, or we're in this discipleship group and we have these moments of spiritual breakthrough and it all clicks and makes sense. But at the same time, we all live our lives, and we have times where life gets boring or painful or difficult.
[00:02:39] We have doubts, we experience traumas or injustices. And it just comes back to these moments of going, man, man.
[00:02:47] Faith can be really hard at times. It can be really hard to sustain.
[00:02:54] And I think these first seven chapters of Samuel really show that in some beautiful ways. We get this positive example of faithfulness in Hannah's story, and then we'll get a super negative example of faithlessness through Eli and his sons in the following stories. But what I think is so cool that brings all of this together is that at the end of the day, and we'll see this, I think, especially as we land out Hannah's story today, we'll see is this story isn't really about Hannah's faithfulness. And don't get me wrong, Hannah's faith is beautiful, and it is an example. And we should be challenged and inspired by the way our sister thousands of years ago responded in faith to the difficult call God put on her life. It's a beautiful thing that should challenge us and inspire us. But more than that, what we see in the story of Hannah is the faithfulness of God.
[00:03:53] Really, the story is about God's faithfulness, which is so encouraging to me.
[00:04:01] It's so encouraging to me because it's really easy, especially in the Old Testament, to read these stories of these kind of heroes of the faith, right? And you're like, man, like, here's what we do. We look at what amounts to the edited social media posts of a person's life, right?
[00:04:18] We get three chapters on all of Hannah's life.
[00:04:22] And really they sum up a story that took multiple years in her life in like, three, three passages. And we get these highlights of beautiful surrendered faithfulness. And we assume that that's just what Hannah's life looked like.
[00:04:39] And then we put it next to ourselves and go, dang, they were just better at this than we are.
[00:04:45] Like, it must have just been easier to be a person of faith 5,000 years ago. I don't know what it is, but, man, she's just better at this.
[00:04:54] But that's not true.
[00:04:56] That's not true.
[00:04:58] You're getting the edited version of the story, right? You're getting the highlight reel.
[00:05:02] I think what's so beautiful about Being brought back to the reality that really we're talking about the faithfulness of God is the fact that faith is difficult.
[00:05:14] We are all bad at it.
[00:05:18] But God is faithful to us all the time.
[00:05:21] The Lord is truly faithful. Even when we are faithless, even when we are wrestling and struggling and hear this church failing.
[00:05:30] In our faith, we worship a God who is faithful, who remains faithful, because that's who he is.
[00:05:39] That's his character, that's his person. And it's eternal and it's unchanging.
[00:05:44] And so my main point today in First Samuel chapter two is going to be this for us today. It's this.
[00:05:50] God is so faithful to his children.
[00:05:55] God is so faithful to his children.
[00:05:58] And I hope, I hope that, like, that idea just echoes back and forth in our hearts today. Because I know in a space like this today, we bring with us a plurality, a multitude of structures, stories and experiences that you guys walk over that threshold like I do, carrying a mixture of your joys and your excitements and your victories and your sorrows and your doubts and your hurts and your frustrations, and to be reminded of the truth that Yahweh, the creator and sustainer of reality, is faithful to you, considers you, keeps the aim and effort of his love and his faithfulness upon you.
[00:06:45] Come on, church.
[00:06:47] That's exciting. That's encouraging. That man that builds us up, beloved, your God is for you.
[00:06:56] That's beautiful.
[00:06:58] The problem, I think, is that often at the end of the day, we want to experience the faithfulness of God immediately, right? We want the fruit of God's faithfulness in our circumstances. Right here, right now. No pause. No, wait. Like, we're microwave people, right? I just got out of work. It's time for dinner. Pull something out of the freezer, put it in. I want to eat right now, right?
[00:07:23] You guys know this, but I have four kids, and my wife and I both work, which means we are crock pot people.
[00:07:32] And some of you are like, yes, I also am a crock pot person. We have solidarity in the crock pot life. Crock pot life is amazing. You've never used it because it goes like this. You get up in the morning, you pull a freezer bag out of the freezer, you dump it in the crock pot, you go to work.
[00:07:46] That's how you cook dinner. You come home, yummy dinner. It's amazing. It's wonderful. Here's the problem.
[00:07:54] You gotta get up in the morning and put the freezer back in the crock pot, right?
[00:07:59] You can't Be Sam and get off work at 5:30 and then come home and go, where's the crock pot?
[00:08:05] And put it in. That doesn't work.
[00:08:09] That doesn't work. That doesn't work. If you do that, you're having a pot roast sickle for dinner, right? Like it's not. Which is, by the way, from experience, not as good as the pot roast.
[00:08:21] I say that because honestly guys, I think many of us, even subconsciously, we try and treat God more like a vending machine.
[00:08:32] We want something instantaneous. We're like, look, God, I have given you my surrender plus my praise, plus my spirituality. I went to church three Sundays in a row and I did my quiet time two out of five times this week. That's a decent percentage. If you spread it out over three weeks. Like we do this and we go, okay, cool. I've put in enough Jesus coins into the vending machine. So give me the fruit of your faithfulness and a joyful and fulfilling life.
[00:09:01] And that's not how it works.
[00:09:04] As cheesy it is to say this, I think God is much more often like a crock pot than a vending machine.
[00:09:11] Where we come to him in faithfulness and our circumstances don't change and our life trudges along at the same pace with all the same mundane activities and all the same struggles. And there is something about perseverance in faith.
[00:09:30] There's something about keeping the faith over the long haul, through difficulty, through suffering, through boredom, through doubt. There's something about perseverance that God has said this is better.
[00:09:50] And so he not just allows us, but directs us to experience his faithfulness in a much more crock pot timeline where we endure, where his spirit empowers us to endure.
[00:10:04] And then we look back and we see his faithfulness and we see the fruit borne over the course of months or years or decades.
[00:10:12] That's not fun, but that is such a truth of the scriptures. Something in the waiting is a part of God's design and actually shows us his faithfulness. So 1st Samuel 2 is where we're at today. While you turn there, if you haven't already, let me put us back in the story. We're stepping into a story in progress that we've been covering for the last several weeks. And it's a beautiful story. If you haven't been here the last couple weeks, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to it. Not because the sound of my voice is amazing, but because this is a really powerful part of scripture, essentially what it goes what it goes to give you the quick summary goes like this.
[00:10:50] First Samuel opens in what the scripture calls the era or the time of the Judges. This is the time after God had freed Israel from slavery in Egypt and given them the promised land. Through his prophet Moses and his general Joshua, he's given them the promised land. But it's before Israel has been united into an ancient monarchy in Jerusalem, around the king and around the temple. It's this weird middle ground. And Israel existed in this time as kind of like a tribal confederation. Like the Israelites identified more with their tribe than they did with their nation, their people as a whole. And if you read through Judges, what you find is it's an incredibly chaotic and sinful time.
[00:11:34] Basically, the second Moses and Joshua die, the generation that led them out of Egypt, Israel just immediately falls away and breaks their covenant they made with God at Mount Sinai. And the Book of Judges gives you this descending spiral of things getting worse and worse and worse as God's people turn back to him and are faithful to covenant, and God blesses them and they turn away to idolatry. And then all the curses of covenant fall upon them and they suffer and they turn back and repent. And God raises up a judge and it gets worse and worse and worse. And each successive judge leading Israel, or leading really a couple tribes, like, they're worse than the last one. And by the time you get to the end and you've got Samson, the famous one, he's actually just terrible. Like, there's really nothing redeeming about him whatsoever. And when you get to the end of Judges, it tells one of the most despicable and evil stories in all of scripture about the way Israelites treated each other in abusive and violent and terrible ways. And the book ends by essentially saying, in those days, Israel had no king and everyone did whatever the heck they wanted to.
[00:12:38] And it's not saying it in, like a cool punk rock way, it's saying it as an accusation.
[00:12:46] Israel is not just set apart from the nations around it. It's not even that they're acting more holy than them. They're worse than the nations around them.
[00:12:54] Everyone does whatever they want.
[00:12:55] It's violent, evil, wicked era of time where people are not faithful to the Lord. That's where first Samuel picks up in the era of the Judges, in the time of the Judges. And we're introduced to these characters in the very beginning. Elkanah and Hannah and then the other wife, Peninnah. Peninnah. I just keep thinking penne pasta, which doesn't work. But you know what? We can just sub that in Penne pasta. So Elkanah, Hannah, and Penipasta, the two wives.
[00:13:22] And she's a real person. I shouldn't do that, right? That's disrespectful. Anyway, the story basically goes like this. We're introduced to Elkanah and his family. And what's surprising about it is that Elkanah is presented as a righteous and godly man who's actually pursuing the Lord, who's actually seeking to follow covenant. And God's blessing is all over his life and his family, with one exception.
[00:13:46] His wife. Hannah is barren.
[00:13:48] And in this day and in this moment in redemptive history, barrenness wasn't seen as primarily a physical condition. It was seen as a spiritual condition. It was connected to God's blessing and connected to the covenant and to the people looking on. On Hannah, there would have been this very real spiritual component of going, what's wrong with you? God's blessing your whole family except you.
[00:14:10] And so for years, Hannah lives under this suffering.
[00:14:15] And again, it's terrible. Like, you read the first chapter of First Samuel, and you find that her rival wife mocks her for her infertility and rubs it in her face. And her husband tries to comfort her, but, like, it makes it worse. Like, oh, you don't need kids, or, not good enough. And she's like, no. Like, I love you, but that's not what this is about. And then it tells a story of them going to the tabernacle to worship. And Eli, the priest says, and her sorrow and her tears, her bitterness, crying out to the Lord, this has been years. Why do you do this to me, God? Why won't you give me a son? Why? Why are you making me suffer like this? Pouring out her frustration, her bitterness. And the priest, instead of comforting her, thinks she's drunk and rebukes her, right? Like, it's just thing after thing piled onto her. And in the midst of all of this, in the midst of years of suffering and years, years of longing and unmet desires and mockery and lack of help and being misunderstood and being alone and all this going on in that moment of prayer, Hannah has a spiritual breakthrough.
[00:15:22] And the text doesn't give us a lot of detail of it, but we see it.
[00:15:26] There's this transformation in her heart where she makes a vow to the Lord and says, you know what?
[00:15:32] If you give me a son, I'll actually just give him back to you.
[00:15:37] And that's.
[00:15:39] We can miss that as the Modern readers, right? But what the author is getting at, right, is that having a son in that day, it's not just a sign of God's blessing. It's her social and financial security, right? It's very important. It's her standing in the family, in the community.
[00:15:55] And she says, lord, if you give me that, I actually don't need the things it would give me.
[00:16:01] I'll give him directly back to you. I'll dedicate him to your service.
[00:16:05] And so God later, not immediately, but later, allows her to become pregnant. And she has a son, and she names him Samuel. And she keeps her vow.
[00:16:15] We talked about this last week, this beautiful moment where she comes back after he's weaned, and she brings him to the tabernacle with this redemption offering for a firstborn son. And she turns it into this extraordinary, extravagant Thanksgiving offering to make sure the whole world knows I'm not doing this out of obligation.
[00:16:33] I'm not doing this because I've made a rash vow, and I have to. I'm doing this because I want to, because I love the Lord, because I am grateful to fulfill my vow, to take the desire of my heart that I've longed for for years and hand it to the Lord as an offering.
[00:16:50] It's powerful.
[00:16:53] It's easy for it not to translate to us as modern readers because it's so foreign to our experience.
[00:16:58] When you put it in its context, it's a powerful story. And we're picking up at this exact moment.
[00:17:05] Hannah's standing here at the tabernacle. Eli the priest is there. Her son is there. She's had this huge thanksgiving offering. She's let everyone there know I am grateful to the Lord to fulfill my vow and dedicate my son to the service of the Lord. And. And she's getting ready to leave him there and go home.
[00:17:25] It's a sorrowful moment. It's simultaneously a beautiful moment. It's difficult. It's all these emotions mixing together. And in the midst of that, Hannah prays.
[00:17:38] And I want you to consider this as we look at this prayer. Hannah's story starts with her praying in the tabernacle.
[00:17:48] And she's praying in sorrow, bitterness, and resentment. She says that pouring out my bitterness to the Lord, right?
[00:17:57] And now she stands here with her son, and she prays a prayer of praise and thanksgiving in the same spot. Read this with me. First Samuel, chapter two. Starting in verse one, we read this.
[00:18:10] Hannah prayed.
[00:18:13] My heart rejoices in the Lord. My horn is lifted up by the Lord. My mouth boasts over my enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation. There is no one holy like the Lord. There is no one besides you. There is no rock like our God. So do not boast proudly or let arrogant words come out of your mouth, for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and actions are weighed by Him.
[00:18:36] Pray with me as we continue on church. Jesus, we need you this morning to be our discipler.
[00:18:43] Lord. We need you to speak your gospel truth out of your word to us.
[00:18:48] Challenge us, convict us, remind us, encourage us. Holy Spirit, you know the needs of our hearts this morning. And you know that ultimately, regardless of our story, the need of our heart today is met in you as our true treasure.
[00:19:03] So, Spirit, I pray that yout would draw us to that afresh today.
[00:19:07] Whatever. Reminder, challenge, teaching, conviction, we need to be drawn back to you as the fulfillment of our heart. I pray that you would do that today.
[00:19:16] Father, we need you for this. So we pray it in your name, Jesus. Amen.
[00:19:22] So you may notice as you look at your Bibles, that this section of the text is set up. Hannah's prayer is set up as poetry. You kind of see that like it's in verse.
[00:19:32] That's because it is. It is poetry, which is kind of weird.
[00:19:38] It's easy to miss that in English translations because, you know, like, the rhyme and those sort of things don't translate into English when you come from a different language. But this prayer is a poem or a song of some sort. And I think that's interesting because I don't know about you guys, but in my experience, people don't usually pray in spontaneous verse.
[00:19:57] Like, that's not my experience in small group or prayer meetings or things like that. That's actually led to several different theories about what exactly it is we're looking at when we look at this text. Some theologians actually think that this part isn't something Hannah wrote or said. The author of Samuel, whatever it is, 80, 100 years later, essentially put this piece in as a way of summarizing her story and really setting up the rest of the book. And there are reasons why someone might believe that.
[00:20:28] But other theologians look at this and go, well, maybe what's happening is that Hannah's story, it survived in the cultural ethos as a song, that people wrote a song about it because it's before books and things like that. And so maybe that poem or song was preserved, and that's why the author put it here, to kind of cap off for some story. What I think is actually more likely, and I have a Textual reason for this, I'll explain to you. I'm sorry if this is too nerdy, but I think this stuff's important. What I think is actually more likely is that Hannah herself, in her joy, in her worship, and in the emotion and difficulty of the moment, is most likely recalling poetry and songs she already knew.
[00:21:11] And that that prayer was collected and remembered and included in this story. And here there's two reasons. I think that the first one is that's a really normal thing to do. And I guarantee you've probably experienced it in your life when you have a moment of extreme emotion around spirituality. Oftentimes scriptures we know, worship songs we know pop into our mind. I don't know about you, but it's like that's been a part of my prayer life before, where I'm praying and thinking, and then I just end up wandering through a worship song that I know and love in my prayer with the Lord.
[00:21:43] That's a relatively normal experience. And we know that Hannah is someone who is devout in her worship and would have known the poetry and worship songs of her day. The other reason is that if you. This is really nerdy, but if you actually look at the prayer she gives, the poetic structure of it is too old to have been written when Samuel was written. We actually know a lot more about Hebrew poetry and the construction of Hebrew poetry than a lot of ancient poetry.
[00:22:12] And when you look at Hannah's prayer, it is a much more archaic form of Hebrew poetry than what we see in, like, the Psalms or later in the Kingdom and Monarch period. She does these set triplets, whereas most of more newer Hebrew poetry that we're more used to reading is done in couplets. And so it's very likely that what she's saying actually dates to the time of her lifetime, not 100, 100 years later when Samuel's being written. And so I think that's what's happening here. I think she's overcome by the moment. And her prayer comes out is probably a conglomeration of songs and scriptures and poetry she already knows. And it kind of makes sense because if you look at this first section, it's incredibly personal. She speaks in eyes, right? She's talking about the Lord's care for her. And yet each of the things she says here, if you look at them, they're general. Like, they're not specific to her experience, but they also make sense with her experience, right? Like she's grabbed a song or a verse she knows that applies to what she's experiencing, and she prays it to the Lord. So, like, look at what she actually says here. Like, look how this part of the prayer is spoken personally. My heart rejoices. My horn is lifted. My mouth boasts. This triplet is personal. Her heart is full of joy. Her horn is lifted. This is a reference to victory. A warrior's war horn is lifted in the victory shout, right?
[00:23:44] And her mouth boasts over her enemies. She was in a difficult position where she was being mocked, and now she's doing well. Now she's out of that position of being on it. You can sort of copy and paste this over Hannah's personal experience, right? She just offered a big Thanksgiving offering of joy and worship. The Lord has given her victory. Her rival wife's mocking has been silenced by her giving birth.
[00:24:13] And then we get another triplet. In this first section, there's no one like God. God is holy. God is a rock, a foundation. These opening tribes, triplets, like I said, right? Like, these are the structures of the oldest Hebrew poetry we know. And she closes this opening section by saying, look, be careful how you boast, because God knows. And God weighs what we say and what we do. That's pretty intense. But you can also, you can see Hannah's vindication in this section, right?
[00:24:47] She's lived for years under the cruel and unjust treatment of her rival wife. And now she's speaking the truth, right?
[00:24:56] For once, everything's coming up Hannah. And if any of you catch that Simpsons reference, you're my kind of people.
[00:25:03] She's doing good. She's doing good.
[00:25:06] The real point of this opening part of the prayer that we can actually learn from here is that this is. Guys, like this, even this personal part, right? Like this is a prayer of praise.
[00:25:18] You catch this?
[00:25:20] Like, she's praising God even as she celebrates this long desired thing in her own life, this long desired freedom, this desire of her heart. Her prayer is a God centered prayer.
[00:25:34] It's not about the thing she was asking for.
[00:25:38] It's about God himself.
[00:25:40] And guys, I'll just be honest. I think many of us need that reminder, right?
[00:25:46] We need that reminder for our prayers to be centered on God.
[00:25:50] We're so stuck in the weeds of living our lives that it's really easy to just slowly become more and more and more self focused in our prayer.
[00:26:02] God, I'm struggling today. I need you to fix this. God, I need you to show up around this. God, I need you to do something about this. And by the way, it's totally appropriate and good for you to tell God what's actually going on in your life, what's actually going on in your heart and to ask him to intervene. Your Lord loves you. He is involved in the minutia of your life. And it is appropriate and good and worshipful to invite him into the minutia of your life to tell him the real desires of your heart, the real struggles of your day to day. But what we see here that I think is a good chapter for us is that our sister Hannah has been so struck by God that she genuinely desires to praise him and consider him even as she celebrates her own victory.
[00:26:48] I think that's what's so cool about this, is that the nor like the normal and natural outflow of her receiving the desire of her heart is to turn away from herself and to praise the God who provided for her.
[00:27:02] And I think it's a reminder to us of really where this text is going that God is the actual desire of our heart. Right?
[00:27:09] Which is why it's good for us to stop and go. How God centered are my prayers, right?
[00:27:16] Not that we don't. Not. Not that we feel like we have to come up with some flowery worshipful language or our prayer isn't valid, or we can't tell God the real things we want. But as we're sharing with God our real heart, are we drawn to his person?
[00:27:31] Are we drawn to his presence in our life?
[00:27:35] So this is a good transition to where she goes with the prayer. Read on with me in verse four.
[00:27:40] The bows of the warriors are broken, but the feeble are clothed with strength.
[00:27:45] Those who are full hire themselves out for food. And those who are starving hunger no more. The woman who is childless gives birth to seven. But the woman with many sons pines away. The Lord brings death and gives life. He sends some down to Sheol and He raises others up. The Lord brings poverty and gives wealth. He humbles and he exalts. He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the trash heap. He seats them with noblemen and gives them a throne of honor. For the foundations of the earth are the Lord's. He. He has set the world upon them.
[00:28:20] This section of the prayer of the poem expounds on God. It moves to consider God's authority over all creation. Hannah doesn't just stick with her experience. Look what God has done for me. Look how God's power speaks into my experience. That actually moves her to just considering God in general and the power and authority that he wields in all of reality. She expounds her praise of God to His sovereignty now, something that is, again, just a little weird for us that you need to point out. And by the way, this plays out a lot in the Bible, especially when you read the Gospels and when you read the Psalms. But Hebrew poetry and Hebrew writing is often purposely structured in such a way that the main theme is placed dead in the center of the text. This is a poetic structure in Hebrew poetry where you would take the main thing you want to say and you put it here, and you would essentially write your couplets out, expanding out from the middle. We don't tend to write like that as Westerners. We like to put the main point at the front and at the end. That's how we like to write these things.
[00:29:31] A lot of Hebrew poetry does the opposite. In this section, you can see that and. Exactly. Exactly played out. If you look at the dead center of this section, what you get is our God is sovereign over even life and death.
[00:29:48] He chooses who dies, and he can resurrect who he wants to. That's a heavy thing to say, right?
[00:29:54] And then you look how it expands out from there. The God who controls even life and death, well, he has control over everything.
[00:30:05] He is the God who has control over fertility and infertility, over poverty and wealth, over financial success and business. He controls economics. He controls food. He controls the strong and the violent. Everything in creation belongs to God. He has set up this world, and he's in charge of all expands out from this truth of his power over even life and death.
[00:30:32] And here's the thing, guys, that's actually terrifying, right? Like, that's a beautiful thing to say in the context of church. We're like, praise God. He's control over everything. Until you stop for a minute and go, he's in control of everything.
[00:30:48] Like, everything, everything.
[00:30:50] Like, everything, everything.
[00:30:53] Like your heart beating right now, that's the pleasure of God.
[00:30:57] Your lungs moving air in and out right now, that's the pleasure of God.
[00:31:03] Adam's holding together to keep this building in place. The weather going on right now, the political system in our country, the wars in our world, those who are wealthy, those who are suffering, he's sovereign over all of it.
[00:31:20] And if we're honest, there is a part of that truth that to every single one of us, is scary.
[00:31:28] Yeah, it should be.
[00:31:31] It should be for two reasons.
[00:31:34] The first one is the scripture tells us we should fear God.
[00:31:38] God is scary to think. And you're like, I don't think you should say that. Pastor is 100% true.
[00:31:45] God has complete and total power over Everything. You are entirely helpless before God. Entirely helpless. That's scary.
[00:31:56] That's why when people see God in scripture, you know what they do?
[00:31:59] They get scared, right? Because that's scary.
[00:32:04] They fall on their face and go, oh, no, I should not be here.
[00:32:10] But the other piece to that, the reason that that can be so scary is because we live our lives in a cursed and broken world.
[00:32:19] And in a cursed and broken world, we all know the way the rule works is whoever has the power misuses it, right?
[00:32:29] That is the way of the cursed and broken world.
[00:32:32] Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely, Right?
[00:32:36] Whoever gets power left unchecked uses it to benefit themselves and to harm others.
[00:32:45] That is the story that is played out in our reality, in our planet, over and over, generation by generation, from Genesis 3 till now, and will continue to do so.
[00:32:56] And so there's a reality that pretty much every single experience we have of people having absolute power is them misusing it unless you put tons of controls and checks and balances all around it. And even then, they're going to scheme and figure out a way to use that power to benefit themselves and harm others.
[00:33:18] That is the story of how this world has played out for so long. And so to stop and to go, hey, just so you know, that's God.
[00:33:32] He has all the power.
[00:33:33] He can do whatever the heck he wants and no one can stop him. There's no check, there's no balance. He's got all the cards and you are helpless.
[00:33:43] Everything in our lived experience says that's going to go bad for me.
[00:33:48] Everything in our lived experience says that's going to go bad for me.
[00:33:55] Guys, if you go back through human history and you follow culture by culture, what you will find is that the general, the average human ethic, the average human ethic is whoever's in charge is right.
[00:34:13] Period.
[00:34:14] Whoever is stronger, they're correct.
[00:34:19] Whoever has the power gets what they want.
[00:34:21] And people who don't have power get used. And that's their lot in life. And they need to either get power or deal with it.
[00:34:28] That's the human way.
[00:34:31] And by the way, just because we live in a historical moment that is, hear this, an anomaly, or even, for the most part, our secular philosophers and thinkers say things like, no, no, no. Human beings are all worthy of dignity and all worthy of honor. And there's such a thing as rights.
[00:34:49] Guys, that's a recent idea.
[00:34:54] That's a recent idea, and you need to hear this.
[00:34:58] That's a recent idea that only exists because of Christian theology.
[00:35:03] It's a recent idea that Christianity introduced into the world and it's so good and so beautiful that even the secularized and Christ denying parts of our society go, well, we want that part, we want that part. That part's good. I like that part.
[00:35:19] But go back pre Christianity as a world religion and look at all the world powers, Rome, Greece, Persia, Babylon, Syria, Egypt.
[00:35:35] Read their histories.
[00:35:37] What you will find.
[00:35:38] Siri thinks I'm talking to her.
[00:35:41] What you will find is that the average ethical structure of a human being is whoever has the power gets to do what they want. And whoever doesn't have the power either get power or just deal with it.
[00:35:55] But there's something interesting that when the God of Scripture, when Yahweh, who wrote the Bible, who preserved the way of life, that is the gospel, who is advancing his kingdom of God on earth, when his way of understanding the world begins to permeate earth, all of a sudden you see a shift in how even people outside the faith begin to think about ethics and right and wrong and the value of a human life.
[00:36:26] The idea that you matter simply because you are not because of how strong you are, not because of how much you've accomplished, not because of what you contribute to society, but simply because you exist. You are beautiful and valuable and worthy of protection and worthy of life. That idea comes straight from the heart of your God and nowhere else.
[00:36:53] You need to hear this. You can't justify that idea, which with anything besides the word of God.
[00:37:02] This is the only ethical structure in human existence that gives any credence to the idea that you as a human being have inherent worth and value. And that may sound crazy to you, but the reason that sounds crazy to you is because you live on the fruits of Western society that was built upon Christian ethics.
[00:37:29] We took the ethics of scripture, the ethics of Yahweh, the way God views us and views the world, and we built whole human societies on them. And we did it for so long that we forgot that idea came from God. And we've decided it's just self evident. But it's not self evident.
[00:37:46] It isn't the reason you matter.
[00:37:52] The reason we believe you matter is because your Creator has endowed you with worth and value.
[00:38:01] Your Creator says, you're made in my image.
[00:38:04] You're precious, you're worth protecting, you're worth chasing after. You're worth seeking, you're worth paying a huge price for.
[00:38:13] You're worth sending my own son to die for.
[00:38:17] You don't construct that idea with anything besides the Word and Voice of God.
[00:38:22] And the reason I camped there so long, guys, is this. You have to know.
[00:38:28] We worship a God who takes the ethics of this world and he absolutely inverts them.
[00:38:35] Our God has no interest in who is currently in power and who currently has all the cards.
[00:38:44] The wealthy, the poor, that makes no difference to Yahweh. The dead, the alive, that makes no difference to Yahweh. The rich, the violent, the strong, makes no difference to him. He can break their bows. He can crush their businesses. He can empty their stomachs. He can kill them and resurrect them. The power of this world, the ethics of this world, the worldview, the average worldview of humanity doesn't come from God and doesn't terribly concern Him.
[00:39:16] He's greater than that.
[00:39:18] And so when we read these words and we go, ooh, God's got all the cards, I don't know what I think about that. That's kind of scary. That's kind of risky. That's actually kind of fearful for me.
[00:39:28] You need to know something, beloved.
[00:39:32] The God who has all the cards, yeah, he has all the power, but he's also perfectly loving.
[00:39:39] He's also entirely different from this world.
[00:39:43] He's about as different from the ethics of this world as something could possibly be.
[00:39:47] He takes the might, makes right ethic of the sinful and broken world and he turns it on his head and he says, every single one of my humans, every single part of my creation, every single one of my people is of infinite value.
[00:40:05] I will chase after them and I will care for them, and I will love them, and I will call them to myself, and I will sacrifice myself to make a way for them to have restoration and redemption.
[00:40:18] It may be initially scary to consider the absolute sovereignty of God, but you need to know something.
[00:40:25] Scripture says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, right?
[00:40:31] Do you know why it says it's the beginning of wisdom?
[00:40:34] Because if you're not scared of God, you haven't thought about him accurately.
[00:40:39] If you don't start there, if you don't start from a place of fear, then whatever you're considering, it's not actually God.
[00:40:46] But it's the beginning of wisdom.
[00:40:49] Because you don't end there.
[00:40:51] Because as you get to know God, you find that fear is not the primary thing that defines your relationship with Him.
[00:40:58] His love for you is the primary thing that defines your relationship.
[00:41:02] Which is why the scripture can say, perfect love casts out fear.
[00:41:07] Not that God is not powerful, not that his power shouldn't give us pause but our God is so loving, so inherently good, so much more than the best this world has to offer, that as we get to know him and experience him and receive care from him, his love legitimately casts out the fear that began our relationship.
[00:41:34] Guys, our God inverts the story of this world and tells a better story where you don't have to be strong and successful to matter, but matter, because your God loves you and made you, cares for you and calls you.
[00:41:51] Ooh.
[00:41:53] But here's the question then, because it leaves a hanging question for us.
[00:41:58] If that's the case, then why does the world look like it does?
[00:42:03] Why does it look like the strong wind?
[00:42:07] If God is truly in charge and God is this good, why is there so much injustice? Why are people treated differently because of their circumstances, because of their power? Why are there penne pastas who torture? Hannah's right.
[00:42:23] Bring it back. Bring it back. Oh, yeah, there it is.
[00:42:28] Read on with me. In verse nine, he guards the steps of his faithful ones.
[00:42:34] But the wicked person in darkness, for a person does not prevail by his own strength.
[00:42:40] Those who oppose the Lord will be shattered. He will thunder in the heavens against them. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth. He will give power to his king. He will lift up the horn of his anointed.
[00:42:51] And then Elkanah went home to Ramah. But the boy served the Lord in the presence of the priest Eli.
[00:42:58] And that's how Hannah's story ends out in Scripture, Hannah declares in her prayer that even though we live in a world with penanias, ultimately God is so faithful to his children, his sovereignty is turned toward us. He guards our steps. Beloved, you may feel like the evil powers of this world are winning, maybe even winning against you.
[00:43:28] It may feel like injustices and suffering and unmet desires, the ones you face that are just insurmountable.
[00:43:38] And to you.
[00:43:40] Hannah says, you are not alone in this world.
[00:43:45] The Lord guards the steps of his faithful ones, the children who turn to God with real dependence. He has them.
[00:43:55] No one can thwart the Lord.
[00:43:57] No one can beat Him. He's actually in charge. What she does is she puts this life for us into a cosmic perspective.
[00:44:05] Because the reality is we do live in a world where sinners are allowed to live and sinners are allowed to continue in their sin, and their sin affects others, us included. But God is ultimately in charge, and a person can't prevail on. On their own strength, because no matter how strong they may be, God is stronger, and he is in charge. And A day is coming when he will judge everything.
[00:44:31] Everything.
[00:44:33] And it says, those who pursue the Lord, those who rely on the Lord, those who seek the Lord, we can rest in him. Because regardless of how much people in this world think they might be in charge, they are not.
[00:44:48] There's a timer ticking down to when the Lord returns.
[00:44:54] He's good.
[00:44:55] He's in control. He knows all things. He judges all things. And there is no sin in this world that will not be accounted for by Yahweh.
[00:45:09] Do you hear this, beloved?
[00:45:11] Those of you who have suffered greatly, you must know. You must know there is no sin, no injustice, no evil, no trauma done against you so insignificant that Yahweh will skip over it.
[00:45:28] He will take account of every wrong ever done to you because you are precious to Him.
[00:45:34] He sees all.
[00:45:38] And so when he comes to judge, he will judge and you will be accounted for because you're important to Him.
[00:45:49] Now, there's a flip side to that, right? Because we participate in all that sinning that's gonna get judged.
[00:45:58] Which leads us really to where this text goes.
[00:46:03] Truly beloved, we can rest in the strength and goodness of God.
[00:46:07] We can.
[00:46:08] That's beautiful, but do you notice how there's this weird moment where Hannah takes this, like, stark left turn and she prays about a king.
[00:46:16] Isn't that strange?
[00:46:19] It's strange, but I think it's actually an important comparison.
[00:46:23] It really partially happens because this whole chunk of text up to this point is like the cold open of Samuel. You know what I'm talking about when you watch, like, a movie or a TV show, and it starts with this little, like, 90 second micro story about some character that's not actually related to the main story. And when it gets to a point, all of a sudden, like, the titles, like, blink up on the screen. You know what I'm talking about? Like, that's what happens right now.
[00:46:44] Elkanah and Hannah go back home. And, like, the title fades up. First Samuel, the Search for a Holy king. And then, like, you know, that whole stuff.
[00:46:53] And so there's a truth that Hannah's prayer is meant to help set the pace for the. The whole story of first and Second Samuel. And the whole story of first and Second Samuel is Israel desperately needs a king. They need one really bad. But more than that, more than that, Hannah's speaking prophetically here about a gospel truth, which is that we all need a king. Because what we'll see in first and Second Samuel is that even the best earthly kings fall short.
[00:47:24] The best ones aren't good enough. We all need our king. And we need our true king, King Jesus. Amen.
[00:47:31] Humanity is so broken by sin. We've taken God's good creation and turned it into a place of power and abuse and anxiety and sorrow and hurt. And all of us have been victims to this broken system. And all of us have participated in this broken system. And we need the intervention of God.
[00:47:50] We need the one with the power who is good to show up and intervene and guard our steps and save us. And thanks be to God that he sent Jesus, the true king, who did just that and made a way for us to actually be redeemed.
[00:48:09] And because of our wonderful King Jesus, our suffering in this world is not wasted. Our sorrows, our hurts, hurt, our unmet desires are redeemed into something as beautiful as he draws us to the life he has for us.
[00:48:23] Band, if you want to come back up, this is where we're going to land today.
[00:48:27] It's that truth that our true king redeems us.
[00:48:32] You have to understand. That's what Hannah broke into in her prayer.
[00:48:37] That was her spiritual breakthrough, where she was able to see her God alongside her suffering and her unmet desires. And she discovered that he really was enough for her.
[00:48:51] You know, when Elkanah tried to comfort her, he would say, oh, Hannah, you don't need to have kids. Like, I love you and we have a great marriage. Like, isn't that enough?
[00:49:00] And it hurt her because she loved Elkanah, but she's like, no, no, it's not enough.
[00:49:07] I have this desire. Great. It's different than that.
[00:49:10] I love you and I love our marriage, but this is what my heart desires.
[00:49:15] And what's beautiful is when she met with her God and her God so gently and lovingly showed her heart, you actually don't need that because I love you, and that is enough.
[00:49:28] She realized that was actually true, that to have God was to have everything. She needed that to have God and to have nothing else is to lack nothing.
[00:49:39] And, beloved, you need to know something.
[00:49:42] God is enough for you.
[00:49:46] Really enough.
[00:49:47] Enough to actually fill the need of your heart.
[00:49:51] And no matter what circumstances you find yourself in, amazing or horrible or somewhere in between, you need to know your creator, the lover of your soul, the sustainer of reality, who points his sovereignty toward guarding your steps, is enough to satisfy your heart today and forever.
[00:50:13] And you can experience that and you can tap into that, and you can live that. You can.
[00:50:18] You absolutely can. You absolutely can.
[00:50:23] I want to invite us to take a minute in prayer to reflect to kind of close out. And I want to invite you to consider three things.
[00:50:31] If you're here in this room this morning and you're thinking, man, preacher, that sounds awesome, but I just don't know how to do it. I don't know how to get out of my own way. I don't know how to see the forest because I'm so zoned in on the trees of this experience, in this moment. I don't know how to take steps toward that. Today I want to give you three thoughts to consider in your prayer. 3.
[00:50:51] Three things you can actually, like, walk out of here and go, I'm going to try this.
[00:50:55] I'm going to see if it actually points me to finding my satisfaction in God.
[00:51:00] And, guys, it really is just being proactive in pursuing him.
[00:51:04] Because the reality is God is so good that when you experience him, you won't need to be convinced that he's enough and that he's better.
[00:51:11] When you experience him, you'll know it.
[00:51:14] So I'd encourage you to think through these things. What would it look like for you to actually trust God?
[00:51:20] For you to actually take a leap of trust and say, I don't like this particular circumstance or suffering or injustice, but, Lord, I know you've brought me here, and I'm going to trust that you have purpose in this and that you're going to be with me and that you're going to cause me to endure.
[00:51:34] What would it look like for you to praise God?
[00:51:38] For you to actually get around your circumstances and say, lord, regardless of what I'm experiencing today, you are still worthy of praise?
[00:51:45] What would it look like for you to serve God?
[00:51:48] For you to actually show up and say, you know what, God, my circumstances feel like, they conquer me right now, but you are so good.
[00:51:55] I want to give my time to you and to your family.
[00:51:59] When you take those kind of proactive steps, you will experience the Lord and you will find he truly is sufficient.
[00:52:07] You guys know this, but Kim and I are foster parents. And one of the things they talk about a lot in foster world is this idea of attachment theory. And there's a lot to it. I'm going to butcher it, simplifying it, but one of the things they talk about for foster parenting specifically is this truth that traumatic experiences at a young age, they damage the psyches of children and make it hard for them to form real relationships. It's a real thing kids in the system struggle with.
[00:52:32] It makes it hard for them to form any attachments in life. It leads to behavior issues, antisocial behavior, and is really common among kids who experience the foster system.
[00:52:43] But the beauty is that research actually bears out the truth that what is destroyed by lack of loving and attachment in children's lives can be rebuilt by loving attachment in children's lives.
[00:52:59] That when human beings and adults who are safe show up and love kids and actually create safe environments for them, what was destroyed in their hearts and their psyches is actually rebuilt.
[00:53:12] Kids can walk in loving, beautiful, real relationship and attachment.
[00:53:18] I share that to say this, the world is rough and faith is hard.
[00:53:25] And if you're honest, I'm pretty confident that you have been beat up and and your ability to trust and attach has been affected by it.
[00:53:34] But God.
[00:53:36] God is present and God is repairing what has been broken in your heart and he is available to do that for you today.
