Word of Salvation – April 2025
A God Who Hears
Sermon by Rev. John Zuidema on 1Samuel 1:1-18
Scripture Reading Luke 22:39-46; 1Samuel 1:9-28
Congregation, I’m not too sure about your family or your connections, but in my wider family, I have had at least two married couples who have been unable to have children. Now sometimes with medical intervention, couples can be blessed with children of their own. But sometimes, it just doesn’t happen even though there is physically and medically nothing wrong.
And this is an extremely sensitive subject. And our text pulls at the heart strings for we can so readily identify with the pain and trauma that Hannah is experiencing. For starters, she must share Elkanah’s love with Peninnah. And Peninnah should be more sympathetic and understanding of Hannah’s heartache, but she deliberately provokes Hannah to irritate her!
And although Hannah is loved by Elkanah, and may love her more than ten sons could, and receive double portions of meat, that isn’t really the point. She wants to have child of her own! In fact, Hannah is so sad and depressed she doesn’t even eat. She is a troubled soul for the Lord had closed her womb.
Well, v9 tells us when they had finished eating the family meal, Hannah gets up, goes to the temple and pours out her heart to God. She does it in such a passionate way that Eli the priest who is watching, thinks she is drunk. But he is quickly and embarrassingly corrected by a weeping Hannah. Hannah wasn’t drunk but was praying out of her great anguish and grief. It’s quite something isn’t it. The privilege of being able to pray to almighty God out of our anguish and grief. We don’t need to be embarrassed about that for our God can handle it!
Eli the old priest, realizing his mistake encourages her and seems to bless her. “Go in peace and may the God of Israel grant what you have asked of him” (v17). And from that point on in this first chapter, things take a positive turn. Hannah is no longer downcast.
She conceives and gives birth to a son and names him Samuel, for she asked the Lord for him. And after she has weaned the boy, she dedicates him to the service of God in the temple as promised. And in Ch 2:1-11 we have Hannah’s prayer of thanksgiving.
So, what do we do with all this? Is this just a story about the power of prayer, or how a barren woman is blessed with a son, or is it just redemptive historical? Well, it is certainly redemptive historical, but it is more than that. This passage also teaches us how God hears our prayers and comes to our aid in the here and now.
Sure, there are bigger things happening. God is the producer and director of 1 Sam 1. And in this chapter, God is raising up a new prophet who will be instrumental in introducing the monarchy. But typical of Yahweh, he does so by the most unusual means. In this case, hearing the prayers of a barren woman and blessing her with a son to bring about his purposes. It’s not the first time that God does this.
Our mind goes quickly back to Sarai who was barren even though she was to be the mother of the promised seed (Gen 11:30). In Gen 25, it shows that Isaac’s wife Rebekah had no children for the first 20 years of her married life. (Gen 25:20 cf v26). Jacob’s wife Rachel has a similar story of barrenness (Gen 29-30). God raised up mighty Samson from the fruitless womb of Manoah’s wife (Judges 13:4). And years later, God would use old, childless Elizabeth to give birth to John the Baptist (Lk 1:7).
It seems that barren women have been in a large part God’s chosen instrument in raising up key figures in the history of redemption. Don’t be too surprised, for this is the way that Yahweh often works. He is pleased to begin with people who have nothing to offer. So often God’s tendency is to make our total inability his starting point. Perhaps he knows that we are inclined to boast! Our hopelessness or Hannah’s barrenness is no obstacle to the Lord of the universe.
We can never sit back and say, that the Lord of the universe cannot use us in his kingdom. So often he uses the weak to shame the strong or the poor to shame the rich. And just an aside, in direct contrast, we can never say that God was lucky we came on the scene at just the right time! Lest we should be inclined to boast! Pride!
But God’s work didn’t just begin with Hannah’s barrenness, it also began with her distress. If you wanted to put a 21st century spin on it, then Hannah was in a state of depression. Oh, how she would love to be like Peninnah and have children of her own! And Peninnah kept rubbing salt into the wound. Intolerable!
Strangely, the Lord can use a thorny Peninnah to drive Hannah to the throne room of grace to the presence of Almighty God and to prayer. It’s amazing, isn’t it? She has nowhere else to turn. There was no IVF! She obviously found little or no solace in Elkanah’s well-meant but inadequate sympathy. The old priest Eli didn’t have a clue and he had more than enough trouble with his two mischievous sons, to start being concerned to what appeared to him as a drunken woman.
So, Hannah could only turn to the Lord Almighty – “Yahweh of Hosts,” the God whose rule encompasses every force, whether it be heavenly, cosmic or earthly. When you think about it, it’s rather brazen of Hannah to address her prayer to the Lord Almighty. She assumes that the broken heart of a relatively obscure woman in the hill country of Ephraim matters to him!
Well, she does! All God’s children matter to him, from the least to the greatest! He hears us. In Exo 3:7 God assures Moses that he has seen the misery and heard the cries of his afflicted people in Egypt. Hannah rightly assumes that the God who can see and know the pain of his corporate people can also see the anguish of soul and the grief of a barren woman! Hannah enjoys an amazing freedom before Yahweh. She pours out her soul to him with many tears! She’s allowed to do that before Yahweh! He can handle the tears! We might feel a little uncomfortable with tears, but not God.
Another surprising thing is to observe Hannah’s access to God. Sometimes people say that women in the OT didn’t have the same access in prayer to God as we do in the NT! They suggest that OT worship was a very external, formal, cut and dried sacrificial procedure in which ritual killed off any spontaneity or intense spirituality.
And being a woman, you weren’t even allowed into the inner courts to pray when you went to the temple! Well, I think if we could speak to Hannah, she would tell you that such reasoning is hogwash! Sure, Hannah’s not in Hebrews 4, but we can see in her some of the same boldness in prayer that we are now privileged to in Christ (v16).
Furthermore, Hannah hasn’t asked that Yahweh give her a son so that he can be great and powerful, but that he would serve Him all his days.
Well, we can read in vv 21-28 that Hannah fulfilled the vow she made in v11 to give her son to Yahweh. She waits until she has weaned him, usually about three years at those times, to which Elkanah cautiously agrees. But eventually the time comes, and Hannah remains true to her vows. She comes with her son and a three year old bull and a bushel of flour and a skin of wine. It is obvious that Elkanah was a wealthy man, for this goes far beyond what was required as a thanksgiving offering.
However, what is interesting are verses 27-28 where Hannah uses the root word for ‘ask’ four times If I were to translate it literally from the Hebrew, it would read something like this. “For this child I prayed, and Yahweh gave me my asking which I asked of him; and also have given back what was asked to Yahweh. All the days he lives, he is one that is asked for Yahweh.”
Hannah connects what Eli said and what she herself calls Samuel, “From Yahweh I asked him”. The bottom line is that Hannah gives to Yahweh her son. And Samuel is destined to become Yahweh’s prophet who guides the Lord’s people through a rather critical time in their redemptive history.
It is without doubt that Hannah had a positive impact in Samuel’s early years as all mothers do on their children. So, what an amazing story. Here we have a woman whose soul is deeply troubled. She wasn’t drunk, she wasn’t a wicked woman in that sense, but she prays out of great anger and grief.
And the almighty God of the universe comes to her aid. He opens her womb, and she conceives and bears a son!
And that son is used by God to serve his people and direct them in the Lord’s ways for next fifty years. The almighty God of the universe hears and answers the prayer of a woman who has absolutely nothing to offer in a most amazing way.
Hannah’s deeply troubled soul, her anguish, her tears are replaced with life, a new life and it results in a song of praise in Ch 2 v1-11. And I don’t know about you, but we rejoice with her. God is good, he is always good, but here we see such a visible sign of that goodness. We share Hannah’s joy.
Well, there have been many people in history that have wept tears in prayer because their soul, their inward being was troubled. Many prayers have gone up because people have been in anguish and grief. In fact there are probably married couples that we know who are in Hannah’s boat. Keep praying and may the Lord bless them with children too.
Here in Samuel 1, the results were positive. Hannah was about to fall and Yahweh gave her strength. She was barren and Yahweh made her fruitful. She was poor in spirit and he made her rich. That’s the way Yahweh rules. Always watching out for his people and helping those who call on him. The Lord hears Hannah’s prayer and blesses this obscure woman with a marvellous result and God receives the glory and so it should be.
And God uses Samuel in his kingdom. He is used to anoint kings who would be used by God to lead and shield his people. He is used to anoint King David whose Son would be on the throne forever. But the results are not always marvellous for the individual, even though it is always for the glory of God.
Sometimes the Lord says ‘no’, or at the very best, ‘you need to wait’. And many people can testify in hindsight, that the Lord’s ‘no’ answer was right even though they were disappointed at the time. I know of a man who I visited regularly in a nursing home. He had been in a wheelchair for 35 years. And I said to him “wow it must be tough to be sitting in a wheelchair for the last 35 years.”
And he graciously answered, “Zuidy, I thank the Lord for the blisters my backside must cope with every day. Those blisters remind me of the Lord’s saving grace. Before I had my stroke caused by being a serious alcoholic, I was on the pathway of walking away from the Lord. My lovely wife prayed for me every day that the Lord would intervene and save me. Well, the Lord graciously intervened by giving me a stroke at age 51, and here I am, 86 years of age and I am forever grateful!”
And there have been others. There was once a man, not an alcoholic, but a good man, in fact a perfect man, one without sin. Not, an obscure man who was hardly known to God the Father, but his very own Son. And that Son, kneeled in a garden to pray about 1000 years after this story. He prayed, for his soul was deeply troubled. Matthew records his words in Ch 26:38, “My soul is over-whelmed with sorrow to the point of death!” And this Son prays.
He prays to his Father in heaven and asks, “Lord, if it is at all possible, remove this cup of your wrath for man’s sin from me! Not my will but yours be done!” Three times he prayed that prayer. Luke records the same incident and writes that he shed tears of blood! That was more than Hannah ever did and more than any of us have ever done! And yet the Father’s answer in this instance was “No!” That cup of wrath could not be removed. It could not be removed for sinners like you and I had to be redeemed through a perfect sacrifice and only Jesus could offer it.
Hannah is blessed with new life, and God’s own Son is sent to the cross to die! Amazing love, how can it be, that He should die for me! And thankfully, he rose from the dead victoriously. And in this strange way God the Father, through His Son saves all sinners who repent and believe. God the Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit, saves them from the ash heap to ultimately make them sit with the resurrected Jesus Christ in glory!
Allow me to conclude. Remember, we serve a living God who cares and hears our prayers. If you or you know someone or some couple that are desperate for children of their own, pray for them. Pray with them. God is listening. And pray that the Lord will bless them with children.
Second, let us never stop praising our God for all his wondrous acts, especially his redeeming acts in Christ. For ultimately, to know him as Saviour is life, eternal life! Amen.