Hannah’s prophetic prayer

So thank you for inviting me to talk about Hannah and what a woman she is, a woman of great faith. And we’re just going to look at her prayer, as it’s called. But actually, it is a lot more than just a prayer. It’s a prophetic prayer.

And when I read it, I really thought of Mary, the mother of Jesus. And how, let’s just remind ourselves of what Mary’s situation was. She was just a teenager, and the angel had visited her and basically said that she was going to have the Son of God, and she didn’t know any men.
And you know, how was that going to happen?
And she broke into a prayer. Now, what do you think that prayer would have been?
I thought it would have been “God, help me in this situation. I’m going to be full of shame, and no one’s going to like me. You know, the whole society, the whole village is going to turn against me. I’m going to be an outcast. It’s going to be so hard. And Joseph, well, he could divorce me.”

But no, she breaks into this wonderful prophetic prayer.
And it’s the same for Hannah. Hannah had spent many years trying to have a baby, and her husband’s other wife was taunting her, mocking her, because she had children, but Hannah had no children.
And how hard that would have been for her.

But the Lord listened to her prayer, and she became pregnant. And would you believe it? She’s going to give this baby away to the Lord at the temple.
Well, we’ll call it a temple, the place where the sanctuary was, where the Ark of the Covenant was, where there wasn’t actually a temple there, but it was where the tabernacle had finished up being for many hundreds of years.
And the Ark of the Covenant was there, which had the Ten Commandments, the rod that budded, Aaron’s rod, and the manna.
And it was just a wooden box covered in gold, but it represented the presence of God on this earth. And it was the golden cherubim that overshadowed the lid of this wooden box. And there, at that point, was where God said that he would reside; he would be there.
And that was the only reason why they were at Shiloh, because the Ark of the Covenant had arrived at Shiloh.
And it might have been just a bit of a tent-type thing, but over 100 years, it might have become a bit more of a building. It was never a proper temple.

So, Hannah had been barren for so long, and she breaks into this prayer, and she says, “My heart rejoices in the Lord.”
Wow. And that’s at the point she was going to give her child away. Her precious gift, her baby, her treasure.
It makes us sort of ask ourselves the question, how willing are we to give away things that we treasure so much? We tend to hold on to things, don’t we? Whereas we’re told we should hold things with an open hand. And if the Lord wants it, then yeah, it’s easy for him to take it.
But we do tend to hang on to things.

This was her prized possession.
Do we have any prized possessions? Our car, our house, our friendships, a job? Think of Abraham. He had to offer his only son, Isaac.
And here was Hannah presenting Samuel unto the Lord as a living sacrifice. Her prized possession, that thing that was most precious to her, and yet she was giving him away.

Now, we’re told that Hannah gave him away after he’d been weaned. Now, I wonder how old that is. Well, if we look in the second book of Maccabees, which is not the Bible, it’s the Jewish writings, but it does give clues on things. And it said that a child is 3 years old when they are weaned.
So we can imagine that Samuel was three years old.
Now think of the situation. She was giving him, Samuel, three years old, to Eli the priest. Now watch it. She had seen Eli a year ago, and Eli had assumed that she was drunk when actually she was praying.
This was a man of God, and he was totally misreading the situation.

Also, Eli had two sons, and they were worthless, worthless sons. They were godless. They were sleeping with the ladies who turned up at Shiloh.
It was a disgusting situation.

Here we are. Hannah is able to trust God to Eli.
I mean, if you’re going to hand over a three-year-old child, you’d want someone really good to hand him over to, wouldn’t you?
But Eli, my goodness me, what sort of father is he going to be?

But Hannah trusted the Lord, her precious baby, her treasure.
She was, in fact, giving into irresponsible hands. But the Lord had his hand on Samuel.

Perhaps at this point, we can think about the importance of disciplining children, in that Eli did not discipline his two sons, and they were reckless, they were off the rails, they were totally selfish.
And yes, Samuel was protected by the Lord, but did he have a good fatherly role? Eli the priest!
He’d let the sons do as they wished.

So I wonder how Samuel grew up and what his sons were like.
Well, unfortunately, we read this in 1 Samuel 8. When Samuel grew old, he appointed his sons as Israel’s leaders. The name of his firstborn was Joel, and the name of his second was Abijah, and they served at Beersheba.
But his sons did not follow his ways.
They turned aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice. Oh dear.
Samuel had not had a good role model, and unfortunately, his children turned out very similar.

Now, when we look at the Bible, there are some outdated and even illegal things that the Bible says about bringing children up. In Proverbs 13:24 it says, “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but who loves him is diligent to discipline him.”
Because nowadays we can’t use a cane or a rod or hit a child. That’s good, that’s good.
But let’s look at what this proverb says: whoever spares the rod.
That word rod is actually translated three times as rod, three times as sceptre, and 61 times as tribe. What? Tribe?
For example, all these are the 12 tribes of Israel. Same word as rod. So what was it talking about?
Or may I suggest that it’s talking about authority rather than a rod?
So to have 12 tribes in Israel was to do with authority.
And under those tribes, there was more authority; there were more families flowing down, all in authority.
So if we call that word rod authority, that verse turns out as, “Whoever withholds authority hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.”
A similar verse in Proverbs 22:15 says, “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.”
So that becomes, “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the authority of discipline drives it far from him.”

Now, how important it is for us to bring children up with discipline and in the fear of God.
So Proverbs 19:18 says, “Discipline your son, for there is hope.”

Anyway, that was a sort of detour. Let’s get back to Hannah’s prayer.
And Hannah’s prayer was full of God’s character, his perfections, as the theologians would call it. But we’re not discussing a car or a house, you know, so theologians like to put things under a microscope, and they like to put God under a microscope.

No, Hannah was talking about God’s character, his perfections. And this is our God. This is the God, the God of the whole universe.
And one of the things Hannah says in verse 8 about God, “He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.”
So the Lord is concerned about the poor. God tells us to lend money to the poor, but don’t charge interest.
Now that’s exactly the opposite of the loan sharks, isn’t it?
Because the loan sharks will go after the poor people and charge the highest interest.

In Exodus 22:25, the Lord says, “If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a money lender to him, and you shall not exact interest from them.”
Oh, no interest. And then he says, every seven years all your crops are given over to the poor and to the wildlife.
“The seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, and the poor of your people may eat.”
So your land, and that includes your vineyards and your olive orchards, all those are not to be picked on the seventh year, that is for the poor and for the wild animals. And what about Jesus when he was talking about his mission? The first thing in his missionary statement, if we like, in Luke 4:18, he says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
So the Lord loves the poor people.

Another point that Hannah brings out is that the Lord sees everything.
In verse 3, “For the Lord is a God who knows, and by him deeds are weighed.” And that’s good, isn’t it? That’s very reassuring.
I mean, so many programs on the telly now where you think, my goodness me, that judge, did he actually judge right? Did the jury do that right? Did they, you know, and all this sort of thing? Questions. Did that person deserve to go to prison? Perhaps they were let off, and they should have gone to prison.

But the Lord, the judge of all, our God knows everything. He can see clearly. He sees perfectly. He looks into everyone’s heart, and there are no mistakes with his justice.
Hannah brought out that our life and breath are in his hands.

Verse 6, “The Lord brings death and makes alive. He brings down to the grave and raises up.”
I don’t know how that makes you feel, that the Lord brings death and makes alive. My goodness me, you think, oh, really? What’s going on there?
That may make us feel uncomfortable that he could do such a thing, that he could break into our lives.
Surely he’s up there in heaven, and he’s not doing that sort of thing, is he? Break into our world like that?

But ultimately, that is within God’s authority.
Do you remember when the apostle John had the revelation, he had a vision, and in Revelation 1, verse 17, he said that Jesus laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, for I am the first, the last and the living one. I died, and behold, I’m alive forevermore.”
And he said something surprising. “I have the keys of death and Hades.”
You know, all the films and the cartoons and that have Satan holding the keys to hell. And it’s not like that, it’s Jesus who holds the keys of death and of Hades.
So Jesus holds the keys to death and of Hades. He is the one to fear.

Hannah goes on to say that God can change our circumstances.
In verse 7, “The Lord sends poverty and wealth. He humbles, and he exalts.”
My goodness me, the thought that death and life and riches and wealth are actually within God’s reach may surprise us.
Surely God is up there. He can’t come into our lives like that and get that close to us, surely.
And that can make us nervous or even annoyed that there should be such a thing as a God that could overrule things and step in and change things.
But he is God. And so often we try to put him in a box so that he does not touch our lives too much, a bit can be okay.

Now, obviously, a foolish person will quickly lose their money. A hard-working, diligent person will naturally gain wealth.
But God can intervene due to his mysterious purposes.
We can become poor, perhaps to humble us. Perhaps to get us to trust him and not our riches.
But the thing the Lord wants us to be is content in whatever situation we are. In 1 Timothy 6, Paul says, “Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”

We’re just bombarded all the time, aren’t we, from the telly and how important money is and, oh, we’ve got to do the lottery, oh, we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to give a pound or whatever to so-and-so and this and that and you might be a millionaire by the end of the year.
And there’s just so much pressure. But the Lord knows our situation.
We don’t have to be a millionaire. As long as we are paying our bills, we can be content with that. The Lord knows our situation.
Why would we want to be a millionaire? I don’t want to be a millionaire.
What on earth would I do with a million pounds?
The responsibility of it would be huge.
But we’re bombarded with it, the importance of having money.
And the Lord wants us to be content with what we’ve got.

So let’s return to Hannah and her prayer, and she finishes with something quite surprising about the coming Messiah.
“He will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed.”
Now bear in mind this is the first place in the Bible where the word anointed or Messiah, where it first occurs.
It was before any of the kings of Israel; remember that they used to anoint the kings with oil, so it must refer to Jesus, our Messiah.

She said in verse 10, “The Most High will thunder from heaven. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth. He will give strength to his king,” Jesus, that is Jesus, “and exalt the horn of his anointed”. That again is Jesus.
Hannah speaks of the Lord, the Messiah, being strong and fearsome.
She speaks of the Lord thundering from heaven.
Do you remember what Jesus said about the end of the world?
He said immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man. Then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. He will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

That is how this world is going to end, with Jesus coming in triumph, in glory, on the clouds. He will gather his elect.

How do we come to be his elect?
Well, it’s not by doing good things.
I think of the crucifixion and those two next to Jesus, and the one saying, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
He hadn’t done anything.
All he was doing was acknowledging that he could see Jesus was the Saviour. He could see something special in Jesus.
He could see that Jesus was the king of an invisible kingdom.
He could see his need. He knew he needed Jesus, and that’s the only criterion that he could rely upon, to call out to Jesus and say, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
And Jesus said, “Today you’ll be with me in paradise.” Not through anything that he had done, but just through the grace and the power and forgiveness of God.
And it’s up to us just to turn to God and acknowledge Him as our King.