Tag Archives: 1 Samuel 1

March 29, 2024 Bible Study — One Does Not Prevail by Strength, but by Following the Will of God

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Samuel 1-3.

Today’s passage gives us three separate people showing faith in God: Hannah, Samuel, and Eli.  We often overlook Eli’s faith because of his failure as a father.  Nevertheless, all three provide us examples of acting in faith.  Let us start with Hannah.  Hannah desperately wanted a child, in particular a son.  So, she cried out to God and promised that if He gave her a son she would give him back to God to serve Him for all of his days.  When God answered her prayers, Hannah did not say, either to others or herself, “Well, it was bound to happen eventually.”  No, she said, “God has demonstrated His power by answering my prayer.  I will keep my vow and give this boy to serve God all of his life.”  She then sings a song of praise, aspects of which are reflected in the actions of both Samuel and Eli.  She tells us that there is no one like God, that He alone brings death and brings life.  He send wealth, and He sends poverty.  She reminds us that we do not prevail by strength, but by the will of God.

Which brings me to Eli’s show of faith.  While Eli failed to rein in his sons from evil, he recognized that it was God’s voice calling Samuel in the night.  He correctly told Samuel how to answer God’s call.  Then, when he got Samuel to tell him what God had said to Samuel, Eli accepted God’s judgement.  Eli knew that he had failed to raise his sons to properly fear and respect God, but he did not fail to teach Samuel what he needed to know.  And he accepted God’s judgement for his failure.  Finally, we have Samuel, whose example here is mostly in following the lead given him by his elders.  Following Eli’s instruction, Samuel responded to God’s calling and submitted himself as a servant of the Lord.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

March 29, 2023 Bible Study — A Messianic Prophecy Before Samuel’s Calling

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Samuel 1-3.

I often have trouble deciding what to write about in this passage because there are so many things worthy of a blog entry.  However, today I was struck by the Messianic prophecy by the man of God who condemned Eli for his failure to control his sons.  In Chapter 2 verse 35, the man of God tells Eli that God will raise up a faithful priest who will walk before His anointed always.  Reading the NIV it is easy to miss how much this refers to Jesus because the NIV translates the reference to who will walk before God’s anointed in the plural, implying that God will give that faithful priest descendants who will walk before Him.  That is not a bad translation, as many of those who read the original Hebrew would have interpreted it that way because of the context. However, most other translations translate that in the singular, as in “he will walk before my anointed always.”  Now, there are some interesting aspects of this.  If that “faithful priest” is Jesus (as I believe it does), who is the anointed before whom He will walk?  My answer to that question is that the anointed is also Jesus.  I want to say that I suspect that this prophecy was also partially fulfilled by another priest as well, but I am unsure about that.  I am not completely satisfied with my interpretation of this prophecy, in part because I have never really thought about it before.  Since I am convinced that the “anointed” referenced here is Jesus (although I suspect at the time this prophecy was recorded those who recorded it thought it referred to King David and his descendants who sat on the throne after him), it may be that the “faithful priest” refers to someone else (or some group).  The other question which I have, at this point, no understanding is in what way do Eli’s descendants ask of that priest for priestly duties to perform?

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

March 29, 2022 Bible Study — We Can Choose To Avoid Repeating The Mistakes We Made In The Past

Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Samuel 1-3.

I noticed something in the passage today that never registered to me before.  After Samuel’s birth, Elkanah, his father, went up to offer his annual sacrifice and fulfill his vow.  Now, the fact that Elkanah went up to offer an annual sacrifice was mentioned in the introduction to the book, but nowhere does it mention that he took a vow.  So, is this vow which he was fulfilling related to Samuel’s birth?  Had Elkanah taken a vow similar to the one which Hannah had taken regarding the birth of Samuel?  I do not know the answers to those questions and am not sure that it is important, but I thought it was interesting that Elkanah had taken a vow which he fulfilled shortly after Samuel’s birth.

Of greater interest to me is, how and why did Eli fail so miserably to raise his sons to be God-fearing, yet succeed so outstandingly when it came to Samuel?  Obviously, the first piece of that puzzle is to be found in Samuel’s mother, Hannah.  Every year, she made Samuel a robe and brought it to him when she came to offer sacrifices with her husband.  I am sure that at the same time she reminded Samuel of how God had honored her by giving her him as her son.  It is worth noting that Samuel would have witnessed the sins of Eli’s sons, and would have had the example of his father, Elkanah, faithfully offering his sacrifices despite their blasphemy.  And yet, we cannot discount the influence which Eli had on young Samuel.  After all, it was Eli who told Samuel how to respond when God called out to him in the night.  Eli had failed to raise his sons to fear God.  To what degree that was Eli’s fault is open to question, although the passage does indicate that God placed at least some of the blame on Eli.  However, we can also see that Eli sought to correct whatever mistakes he had made with his own sons in the raising of Samuel.  And this is a point we should take to heart: whatever mistakes we have made in the past, we do not need to continue to make those some mistakes today and going forward.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

March 29, 2021 Bible Study Speak Lord, For Your Servant Is Listening

Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Samuel 1-3.

I am always struck by the similarities between Samson’s birth and Samuel’s birth.  In both cases their mother dedicated them to a lifetime Nazirite oath before they were conceived.   In Samson’s case that dedication came about because of a message his mother received from an angel, while in Samuel’s case it came about because his mother promised this in return for God giving her a son.  Of the two, we tend to think of Samuel as the better man, but I suspect that God does not look at it that way.  As for differences between the two, the story of Samson reads to me like his parents spoiled him, while Samuel grew up watching Eli’s disappointment with his sons wickedness.  Whether Samuel turned out better than Samson or not, we can see that he turned out as he did because of the prayer his mother prayed after she turned him over to serve the Lord.

The account of God speaking to the boy Samuel at the end of today’s passage represents one of two great commissioning accounts in the Old Testament (the other one being the commissioning of Isaiah).  When God spoke to Samuel, he did not understand was happening, so he thought it was Eli calling him.  It was Eli who realized that God was calling Samuel and instructed him in how to respond.  We who are older in the faith need to do similarly for those younger than ourselves.  However, we all need to remember, and repeat, the response which Eli told Samuel to give, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”  Let us seek to hear God’s voice, and repeat that when He calls to us.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

March 29, 2020 Bible Study — God Provides Rescue to Desperate People Who Turn To Him

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Samuel 1-3.

When I am doing these daily Bible studies I don’t usually get much out of the various songs recorded in what are otherwise prose passages (I’m not sure why).  However, today, in light of what is going on in the world, Hannah’s prayer of praise jumped out to me.  I want to focus on Hannah’s praise of God and her gratefulness to Him.  First, Hannah acknowledges that her strength comes from God.  In these trying times let us turn to God for the strength to get through them.  If we attempt to rely on our own strength, we will fail.  God will shelter us in ways that no one and nothing else can.  God will be our rock, our shelter, if we trust in Him.  We need to stop acting proud and haughty.  Instead, we need to put our faith in God, for it is He who gives both life and death.  We cannot defeat the trials we face by strength alone and if we fight against God we will be destroyed no matter what we bring to the fight.  If you are experiencing desperation, reach out to God as Hannah did in this passage and dedicate yourself to serving Him.

March 29, 2019 Bible Study — Serve God With Humility

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Samuel 1-3.

Once again we have a story of a man with two wives where that fact led to problems.  Since that is such a minor part of the story I am going to no more than mention it.  The main player in today’s story is Hannah, who desperately wanted to have children.  We could make the mistake of thinking that Hannah wanted to have children because of her society’s pressure on her to have them, but that seems somewhat backward.  Hannah felt the pressure to have children so desperately because she so bad;y wanted to have them.  Peninnah’s taunts would have had little bite if Hannah had not wanted children so badly. 

I do not think we can overestimate what a wonderful mother Hannah was.  Eli raised three boys to manhood.  Two of them turned out to be selfish, evil men.  One of them became a great man of God.  Perhaps Eli learned from his first two sons, but I think we need to look to Hannah, the mother of that great man of God to understand what was different.  The germ of why Samuel was different from Eli’s sons lies in Hannah’s song of praise.  Eli’s sons felt entitled to get what they wanted because they were born into the priesthood.  Hannah taught Samuel something different.

 

The Lord makes some poor and others rich;
he brings some down and lifts others up.
He lifts the poor from the dust
and the needy from the garbage dump.
He sets them among princes,
placing them in seats of honor.
For all the earth is the Lord’s,
and he has set the world in order.

 

It is worth reading Hannah’s song in its entirety, but this portion gives us a window into what made Samuel different from Eli’s sons.

March 29, 2018 Bible Study — The Responsibilities of a Parent

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Samuel 1-3.

    In her prayer for a son, Hannah vows that if God gives her as son she will dedicate him to God’s service and his hair would never be cut. Some manuscripts suggest that she also vowed that he would never consume wine, thus dedicating him to the vow of the Nazirite which was described in Numbers 6:1-21. However, Samson’s parents were instructed that his hair should never be kept as a sign of his dedication to God. So, it seems like there was a tradition among the Israelites of not cutting their hair as an act of dedicating an individual to God. I do not know if this was a variation of the Nazirite vow, or a separate tradition, but I suspect that the writer, both here and in the story of Samson, intended for us to make the connection to the Nazirite vow. I, also, believe that the writer intended for us to think of Samson when we thought about Samuel’s birth. I am firmly convinced that the writer of the Book of Judges was setting the stage for the rise of kings in Israel and explaining why they were necessary. It seems to me that the Samuel 1 and 2 continue that theme.

    Eli had failed as a father to his biological sons. We cannot know if that was because he had done something wrong or because his sons refused to follow his godly lead, but we can be sure that any godly father whose sons turned out as Eli’s did would consider themselves to have failed. However, he did not fail in raising Samuel. The first steps in that success were his recognition that God was calling Samuel in the night and his acceptance of God’s judgment on his sons and himself. I said that we do not know if Eli did anything wrong in raising his sons, and that is true, but once their sinful behavior was revealed Eli failed to remove them from positions of authority. Eli may have done nothing wrong as a father, but as a priest he failed in his duty to remove his sons from their priestly duties. That responsibility was not because he was their father but because he was the high priest. Eli’s sin was to allow his sons to continue to function as priests after he became aware of the sins they committed while filling that role.