Book of Samuel chapter 2. Some of you may remember a few months ago I preached here and I preached on 1 Samuel chapter 1. I thought I would simply pick up the story where I left off last time. But first let's ask the Lord's blessing upon the reading and preaching of his word. Oh Lord God and loving Heavenly Father we praise you because as we've already been reminded this morning you are indeed light and though our hearts and minds are small and indeed darkened by sin yet You are light and you shine into that darkness. We pray today, O Lord, that you would illuminate us as we reflect upon your word, as we reflect upon these words sung by this woman so many years ago and so far away. We pray, O God, that you would make her thoughts contemporaneous to ourselves, that as she looked forward to Christ, so we too might look to Christ today. For we pray these things in his name. Amen. Hear the word of the Lord. And Hannah prayed and said, my heart exalts in the Lord, my strength is exalted in the Lord. My mouth derides my enemies because I rejoice in your salvation. There is none holy like the Lord. There is none besides you. There is no rock like our God. Talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth. For the Lord is a God of knowledge and by him actions are weighed. The bowels of the mighty are broken, but the feeble bind on strength. Those who are full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who are hungry have ceased to hunger. The baron has borne seven, but she who has many children is forlorn. The Lord kills and brings to life, he brings down to shale and raises up. The Lord makes poor and makes rich, he brings low and he exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust, he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honour. For the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and on them he has set the world. He will guard the feet of his faithful ones, but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness. For not by might shall a man prevail. The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces. Against them he will thunder in heaven. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth. He will give strength to his king and exalt the power of his anointed.' Then Elkanah went home to Ramah and the boy ministered to the Lord in the presence of Eli the priest." It's well known, of course, that one of the things that the Bible teaches about human nature and being human is this, that we're made in the image of God. And many theologians over the centuries have debated exactly what it means to be made in the image of God. What is it that makes human beings exceptional compared to all other creatures on the face of the planet? Many answers have been given. But I want to suggest this morning two things that we should think about as we look at this passage in particular. Though not just this passage, it touches on many passages in Scripture. There are two things that human beings can do or human beings possess that no other creature on the face of the planet possesses and we see them beautifully demonstrated in this passage before us. First is that we have a capacity for language. We're able to talk. You can teach parrots to say things, you can teach monkeys to push bits of plastic around on a table to order Diet Cokes and things like that, but you cannot teach any other creature on the face of the planet. to use language as we do, to shape the world around, to create relationships, to destroy relationships. Language is very, very powerful. Isn't it one of the most amazing things as a parent or a grandparent to see one's offspring or one's grandchildren acquiring that capacity to speak? Powerful, mysterious. The second thing is music. No other creature on the face of the planet, I'm told by people who know these things, even has the brain physiology that would allow them to listen to and appreciate music. Now I'm not saying that one can reduce the image of God to the ability to speak and the ability to produce or listen to music. But those are two of the things that Mark, human beings, offers special. And if we're honest, they're two of the things, aren't they, that make our lives so rich and wonderful in so many ways. And sometimes those two things are brought together. And here is one such example. Poetry and poetry set to music is peculiarly powerful and peculiarly rich. I don't think there's a culture, a human culture on the face of the planet that does not have a place for words and music combined to express those great experiences of life, whether experiences of joy or of sadness. Music and words come together at great moments, don't they? Oddly enough, as I was thinking about this this week, I was reminded of one of the villains of church history, Arius, a man in the fourth century who wanted to deny, really, deny the full divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. One of the ways that he most successfully spread his theology was through songs. He understood the power of song to grab the human imagination. And here we have, of course, one of the great songs in Scripture. It comes on the back of the story I told a little while ago when I preached here, 1 Samuel 1. We have Hannah. She is the beloved second wife of this man Elkanah. And while the other wife has produced children for Elkanah, Hannah, this beloved wife, has been barren. And that would have had a twofold impact upon her. We can, I think, fairly certainly say that it would have had a personal emotional impact on her. She's clearly somebody who desires to have children. She wants a child upon whom she may lavish her love. And that has been thus far denied her. But it would also, in the world in which she lives in, have been a source of some social shame. We have an understanding now of infertility and barrenness where we don't see it as a source of shame for the woman or for the couple involved, but in the ancient world it was very different. The woman could not produce children for her husband. She got the blame for it and it was seen as a sort of real mark against her, not only in the marriage but in the community as a whole. So we have this character Anna, Hannah, who has been laboring really under this barrenness, this infertility that say has been a source of sadness to her but also of social shame and then miraculously and wonderfully Eli, the priest of the Lord, when she and her husband are visiting Shiloh to worship one year, Eli tells her that she will have a child. And I commented I think in that first sermon that of course this is wonderful for her, it relieves her of her emotional sadness, it relieves her of her social shame, but also and most importantly The solution to her personal problem is also going to be the beginning of the solution to Israel's national problem. This is Israel at the end of the period of judges. It is a period of great national apostasy, of deep corruption. In fact, when Eli sees her praying silently and moving her lips, he just assumes she's drunk. from which I think we can infer that public drunkenness was so common that if you saw somebody talking to themselves you assume they were drunk. This is a time of great national corruption and this glorious moment for her is going to be a glorious moment for Israel as well. And here then at the beginning of chapter 2 we reach the next section, the next moment in the story. The little boy Samuel has been born, he's grown up a bit and she has taken him to the Temple of Shiloh as promised and has dedicated him to the Lord. And it's in this context that our heart overflows with joy for what has happened. And one might say at this point, mere prose. is not sufficient for her to be able to express all of her feelings. We might perhaps say poetry is not enough for her to express all of her feelings. She bursts into this beautiful and powerful song, only words and music combined. will allow her to express all that she wants to say. And I want to just offer a few brief thoughts on the form and the content of the passage before us this morning. First of all, notice it's a personal prayer. which tracks back to God himself. We read in the first two verses this. Hannah prayed and said, First of all, as I've already said several times, notice the exultancy here. She sings. But notice also the content of what she sings first. Note she gives thanks for what the Lord has done for her personally. She feels strong, whereas before she would have felt very weak, emotionally weak, socially weak. Now she feels strong. She uses that image, her horn has been exalted. That's a fancy way of saying she's been made strong at this point. Her personal sorrow and her social shame has been removed. You may remember that there was a source of shame and sorrow very close to home. The other wife, Penina, the one who was very fertile and fruitful, did not allow her fertility to go unnoticed by Hannah and was constantly rubbing her face in it and making her life a misery. Well, she has now been delivered from that. And this is a great thing. But notice this about the dynamic of those first two verses. She moves from what God has done for her The great things that God has done for her to the uniqueness of God in himself. She knows from whom her deliverance has come. She's not one of those people who prays for something and then when it's delivered forgets that she prayed for it and it's come from the hand of God. She's praying to God here in the sanctuary. The place where, if you like, God dwells in covenant with His people. And her prayer reflects the fact that the answer to her prayer tracks back to God's character. It does this because God and God alone has answered her prayer. Nobody else has done this for her. Nobody else could do this for her. She gives credit where credit is due, and she points to God's utter uniqueness. And there's a lesson, I think, for us here as we think about our own prayer lives, maybe as individuals, as families, or as churches. What should the logic of our prayers be? Where should the focus of our prayers go? Well, it's true, isn't it, that prayer often begins with the personal. And I think that's a good and proper thing. We call out to God to answer personal needs for us, exactly as Hannah did. There's nothing in the text that indicates she was wrong in her initial prayers to call out for help in her time of darkness. We often call out to God in prayer to meet our needs. When our needs are met, when God answers prayer, we give God thanks for the things that He has done. But our mind should never stop there. When we ask God for forgiveness, for example, our mind should then be drawn to reflect upon the God who forgives and how he forgives. Our mind should be drawn to the grace of God the Father, exemplified, demonstrated, set forth on the cross at Calvary. When we ask for daily bread, our mind should be drawn to acknowledge God as the one who provides all good things. And it's worth reflecting, isn't it? And Grace, of course, she'll have plenty of opportunity to do this. It's worth reflecting on how often in the Psalms God's goodness is the starting point of praise. And we might say about God's goodness, without sort of getting into too much technical jargon, we might say that God's goodness is one of his essential attributes. What do I mean by that? God would be good even if he'd never created anything. God in himself is good. God acts in certain ways because he is in himself a certain kind of God. This might be a provocative way of putting it, but one could put it this way. God is merciful. Not because he is eternally in himself merciful, but because he is eternally good and will therefore deal mercifully with those who look to him. God can only be merciful if there are creatures upon whom he can be merciful. God is good eternally and his goodness demonstrates itself in time in the way he deals with those who have sinned and yet look to him for salvation. God is righteously angry. We read about that in Scripture all the time, God is righteously angry. But that's not because He's in Himself eternally righteously angry. It's because He's eternally good and will therefore deal with evildoers in a righteously angry manner. We typically in our prayers thank God for what He's done, is doing and will do. And it's good and right that we do that. But as we grow in faith and knowledge, our prayer should reflect more and more the logic of the Bible, which sees God's action in history as the result of who He Himself is in eternity. Even the Lord's Prayer points us to that, doesn't it? The opening words are, Our Father. Well, when does God become Father? This is one of the beautiful truths that flows out of our Trinitarian faith. God is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God does not become Father, He is Father. He becomes our Father as we are adopted in and through His Son. But God in Himself is eternally Father. The early church fathers saw correctly that it is the very substance of God, the very identity of God, to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And thus the Lord himself teaches us that priority in prayer of rooting gratitude for all God's actions and all of our intercessions and requests in the eternal reality of who God is in himself. And that is what's so wonderful about these first two verses. Hannah moves seamlessly from that which God has done for her to that which God is in himself. And she knows that the former depends upon and flows out of the latter. Secondly, notice in this prayer, there's a universal theology underlying it. The prayer starts with Hannah, but it's not all about Hannah. Verses 3 and following. Talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth. For the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed. The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble bind on strength. Notice what she's saying here. She's making some claims about how we should think in general about God. Primarily this, it is not human wisdom but divine wisdom that is to be the criterion for assessing reality. There's a didactic element. She reminds others and herself that human pride has no place in God's universe. And then that lays the foundation for a series of dramatic inversions. And what she's doing here, of course, is fixing in her mind and in our mind the greatness and the otherness of God. Just as if you juxtapose black and white, the difference between the two is much clearer when the two are placed together. Military might, bows shattered and weakness made strong. Isn't that a useful thing to remind ourselves of today when the forces at play in the world around seem so overwhelming and so powerful? And yet here, Hannah, all she's done at this point in time, of course, is given birth to a little boy, but here Hannah grasps that it is in that weakness that the powerful get shattered. The fools, she says, are reduced to having to work just to keep food on the table. And yet the hungry are fully satisfied. The barren woman, she declares, and she has to have been, of course, thinking of herself and those other women that she would have felt so much solidarity at this point. The barren woman is born seven, which is the perfect number. The barren woman, if you like, has had all the children that she could possibly desire. And the one with many children is forlorn. Things have been turned upside down. The world has been flipped on its head because this is the way she acknowledges God's work. It's what the great theologian Martin Luther described as God's alien work. He would use the language of God's alien work. And he has a powerful phrase where he says that God achieves his proper work by doing his alien work. We could translate that in sort of saying God does that which he intends by doing the opposite of that which we expect. That's a sort of broad way of understanding how God does his proper work through his alien work. is the pathway to life. Struck again and again by that second thief on the cross, Lord remember me when you come into your kingdom. What profound theological insight that Man has, just before he dies. Everybody else that day is calling out to Christ to demonstrate his kingship, his power, his triumph over death by coming down from the cross and escaping from death. Only the second thief on the cross gets it. Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. The second thief on the cross understands what? Well, Luther would say he understands that God does his proper work through doing his alien work. He will bring him into the kingdom by taking him through death, not by bringing him to escape from death. The thief on the cross is a great example of that. And of course all of this is possible because it is rooted in God's sovereignty. Hannah knows this. God rules over rich and poor alike. He rules over social status. He can use either. to achieve what he wishes because God is sovereign, he can do the things that she is talking about. That's because he's sovereign and powerful but then of course there's that twist we might say and because he's the kind of God he is, not just a sovereign God but the sovereign God in covenant with Israel because he's the kind of God he is, he delights to use this sovereignty to raise the weak and cast down the arrogant. Not only can he do these things, we might say he tilts towards doing them because that is the kind of God that he is. And we see that throughout the Bible, don't we? Deeply embedded in the Old Testament notion of God. There's a powerful declaration the Lord makes to Israel, I am the Lord your God who loves the widow and the orphan and the sojourner. That's the kind of God I am, he says. I am the kind of God and those are the kind of people that I look to. You too, therefore, he carries on, of course, should love the sojourner, for you too were sojourners in Egypt, reminding the Israelites, of course, and it's only because I am that kind of God that you are who you are. It's because you are weak and sojourners, not because you are strong and powerful. that you are the ones upon whom I have set my love. That is what has made you the apple of my eye. And remember, tracking back to something I said earlier on, why does God do this? Because he is in himself eternally good. And that's the foundation for this prayer. All of these actions of God track back to God in himself being eternally good. What might we say in application to that little section? I think theology and praise are intimately connected. I don't often quote the great Swiss theologian, Carbarth, positively. But Carbarth makes a comment to the effect that theology and doxology are inseparable. Theology and praise are to be tied together. There is in the Christian mind to be no separation between doctrine and doxology. If we're honest I think most of us probably tilt one way or the other on that. Some are full of the joy of the Lord and perhaps in a little light on doctrine. Others of us love the doctrine but maybe Hearts are a bit dry and we're not so great on the gratitude and the doxology. Hannah is a beautiful example of the two things brought together in perfect harmony here. Read the song of Hannah, meditate upon the song of Hannah, learn from the song of Hannah. And understand too, second thing, the death and resurrection of Christ as a central revelation of how God is towards his people. Again, often in circles, reformed circles, we're very good on the death of Christ as we call penal substitution. Yeah, absolutely true. Christ is the one upon whom our sins are placed. He dies to take the punishment, the consequences of our sin and carry our sin as far from God as the East is from the West. All true. But there's more to the death of Christ than that. It's also a revelation of how God is towards his people. The one who acts through the darkness, through the death of Christ, to bring us to that resurrection hope. It is an act of God and it is a revelation of God as well. And that brings me thirdly, finally, to a confident hope. Verse 9, He will guard the feet of His faithful ones, for the wicked shall be cut off in darkness, for not by might shall a man prevail. The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces, against them He will thunder in heaven. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth. He will give strength to His King and exalt the horn of His anointed. Notice, her horn has been exalted earlier and then she tracks to the Messiah towards the end. The Great One's horn will be exalted. And then In an almost anticlimactic verse, I guess, Elkanah went home to Rama and the boy was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli the priest. Victory here clearly belongs to the Lord, not to the strong. A couple of things we might say about this. Hannah has emerged from a time of great darkness. great darkness, the light has shone into her life. She's produced the child she longed for. But much greater than that. The light is now shining into the darkness of Israel in the latter period of the Judges. It's interesting, if I get a chance next time I come, I will pick up on this perhaps, but these little references to Samuel. Here we hear about Samuel ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli the priest, and in the next chapter or two we'll hear about Hannah visiting each year and bringing him a new outfit. She's made him a new set of clothes. And it's a reminder, of course, to the reader that he's getting bigger. He's getting bigger. This is slow, low-energy stuff. It's a little boy, slowly growing, ministering before the Lord. But wow, this is going to explode. This is going to explode when the house of Eli is brought crashing down and Samuel will move to bring Saul to the throne. And then, of course, David and David's house to the throne. But it starts small. It starts low energy. It starts slow. It's a reminder, I think, that even in darkest times, we should not mistake the darkness for the Lord not working. I was reading Decided this Summer. I'd always loved Ernest Hemingway. I thought I'd go on an Ernest Hemingway kick again and also I'd read some F. Scott Fitzgerald who was a friend of Ernest Hemingway for a while at least. And I was reading a great essay by F. Scott Fitzgerald when he's reflecting upon his struggles with depression. And he had this powerful statement in it that really caught my imagination. He said, you've heard the phrase, of course, the dark night of the soul. It's often used in Christian talk. He says, in the dark night of the soul, it is always 3 a.m. in the morning. I thought that was a striking phrase. 3 a.m. It's kind of the hour of greatest darkness. If you can't get to sleep and it hits 3 a.m., it's a really bad night. And I think what Fitzgerald was trying to get out there was, when I'm in my times of depression, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is no hope. I am just surrounded by perpetual 3 a.m. in the morning darkness. It was a very, very striking phrase. That's the kind of thing that makes somebody a great writer. I think the ability to turn that sort of phrase and it gripped my imagination. I thought about it as I was looking at this passage. It must have been like 3 a.m. in the morning every day in Israel at this point. Eli's sons, the priests, They're stealing from the people who come to offer sacrifices. They're raping women at the door of the sanctuary. It must have seemed like 3am in the morning year after year after year and yet what is happening here? Samuel as a boy ministers to the Lord in the presence of Eli the priest and year by year he grows a little bit and he gets bigger and bigger and the day of deliverance gets closer and closer and closer. Hannah is the first sign of light we might say. The answer to her personal prayer to alleviate her from personal agony and personal shame. The answer to that prayer is the first sign that something big is about to happen. Her song then provides the theological framework for all that is to happen in the books of Samuel. Indeed, for all, we might say, that's going to happen in Scripture. David will come and will be king. He's not even the most prestigious person in his family. Talk about exalting the horn of the weak. All right, David. Saul's the guy who's kind of tall, glamorous, rock star looks. He's a disaster. David's the son that even his own father forgets about when Samuel turns up to anoint somebody from his house. David and Goliath. I hope you're not betting men and women, but if you were, you would not have been well advised to put money on David that day. It doesn't look as if it's going to go well for the little guy facing the champion of the Philistines, and yet his horn is exalted. What does this do? It points us towards Christ. I was worried that Calvin was going to preach my sermon for me, but he clearly got the obvious connection with Mary's song. And one of the things about Mary's song is surely this, it's reminding us of Hannah. And when we read Mary's song, all of the baggage from Samuel is supposed to come into our own minds and realize, yeah, Mary's going to give birth to this child in a stable, can't even find a decent roof over his head when she comes to give birth. And yet, and yet. in that fragile child that lies in the manger in Bethlehem. The Lord begins to accomplish his proper work through his alien work. He comes to accomplish that which is intended for so many centuries by doing the exact opposite of what one might expect. Praise God for the glorious contradictions of his gospel. Amen. Let us pray. Lord God and loving Heavenly Father, we thank you for the Song of Hannah and we thank you for its analogue, the Song of Mary. We praise you for the birth of Samuel. We praise you more for the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we pray this day, O God, that you would fill our hearts to overflowing with gratitude to you for not only what you have done for us, but who you are for us. For we ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's now sing together Psalm 2B.