Humble Beginnings - 1 Samuel 1:1-2

I'm going to dive into it this morning. Father in heaven, I just ask that you would be with us as we open your word, that as we walk through just these two short verses this morning, and as we see these great themes that spring from the beginning of this book of history, that you would encourage our hearts, that you would strengthen our souls, that you would inform our minds, and you would put us into action, seeking to follow you and to live for you. It is in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. So, I would start by saying we all have, I think, two types of friends. There are friends that you can take on a long road trip, and there are friends you can't. And just so that I'm clear, that doesn't mean that one friend is better than another friend.

There are some people that you can road trip across the country with, and it's great, and there are some people that you don't want to spend an extended period of time in the car with. It's not bad, it's just simply the way it is. And the problem with this is you generally don't know whether your friend is a road trip with them. Three in the morning, and you've got friends in the front seat, friends in the back seat, and you're driving along, and your friend in the back seat, his girlfriend leans over and whispers something, and then he kind of sticks his head up between the seats and goes, "Hey, can you turn the music on and put on something a little more calmer so that she can get some rest?" And then your friend in the passenger seat turns around and goes, "What? Do you want us all to die?"

Right? One of those is a road trip friend, right? And the other you abandon on the side of the road somewhere in the Ohio in wilderness along with his girlfriend, right? There are friends that you can travel with and friends that you can't. And it was my senior year of college, and a bunch of my buddies and one of the guys decided to bring his girlfriend, completely unrelated to the previous story, and we road trip from Missouri to Vermont. And there was one guy on this trip who thought it would be hilarious to, like, every 45 minutes do the "Are we there yet?" kind of thing, knowing good and well we weren't anywhere near yet. And it's one of those questions, "Are we there yet?" that maybe, at least in my mind, I think about all the time

when I'm driving, right? I'm doing the math. Like, 400 miles, we've been driving for two hours at this speed, right? I'm always thinking about when are we going to get there, but it's not really polite. And it's just sit there and complain, "Are we there yet?" And so this guy was also sort of being, "Are we there yet?" And then partway through the state of New York, he falls asleep. And we make it through the rest of New York, and we go into Vermont, and he wakes up and sticks his head up and looks at the Vermont mountains and goes, "I thought they were supposed to be mountains. I just see a bunch of hills," and then promptly goes back to sleep, right? So two problems, right? Constantly, "Are we there yet?" But also, when you get there,

it's like, "Oh, is this all there really is?" And as we come to the first part of the book of Samuel, right, this kind of sums up the beginning of the book of Samuel. Because since the beginning, there's been this thought of, "Are we there yet?" And we come to first Samuel, and we hear these words, and we go, "Is this how this book begins?" Right? This might be the most anticlimactic way of opening the book of the Bible, and a book that is ultimately filled with excitement. So much excitement so that in church, one of the books that I would read instead of listening was I'd go to the exciting parts of the Old Testament. Judges, and 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, Kings, sometimes Chronicles, and get those great stories. This story is remarkable. This history is remarkable. There's giants. There's a guy killing giants with a rock. There's battles.

There's oaths. There's friendship. There's politics. There's political intrigue, and it begins like this. So we wake up from the back of the car and go, "This is how this great historical account begins." We're going to read these first two verses with a lot of names. Some hard to pronounce names. Also names that if you're about to have a baby, you may want to consider for your baby. There was a certain man of Rathiam Zophim, of the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah, the son of Jehoram, son of Elihu, son of Tohu, son of Zoph, and Ephrathite. He had two wives. The name of one was Hannah, the name of the other Penaniah. And Penaniah had children, but Hannah had no children. We don't have to spend a lot of time observing our world to see how much brokenness truly exists.

And a lot has happened between Genesis and 1 Samuel. There's been good, there's bad, there's the light of God's glory, the darkness of sin. He is longing for salvation. And despite the fact that we like to talk about the good old days, the reality is the brokenness we see in our world and the brokenness we see that begins in 1 Samuel goes all the way back to the book of Genesis, where God creates man and woman and he puts them in the garden. And rather than choosing to follow God, they choose to chase after their own desires. And in that sin, relationships are shattered. There's relationships shattered between mankind and God. And we run and we hide and we make excuses and we try to fix it. And none of that changes the fact that there is a broken relationship between man and God.

But it also breaks relationships in families and in marriages and with our work. And in Genesis 3, work goes from something good and wonderful. And it's still good and wonderful, but it gets so much harder. And it's opposed by weeds and it becomes toil. And in the midst of God's judgment, he makes a promise. That one day, a child would be born to a woman who would set things right and who would crush the head of the serpent. And we can trace that story and that promise from Genesis chapter 3. From the family of Adam and Eve and to Seth and through the family of Noah. Through times of darkness, through times of righteousness, through a flood to this place where we get to a town called Ur. And a man by the name of Abram.

And God calls Abram out of his town. His name will later be changed to Abraham. And God will make a promise to Abraham. To take him to a place that he would make of him a great nation. And then this promise, in you all the families of the earth would be blessed. And we see this promise come through Abram, who would become Abraham. To his children, to Isaac, and to Jacob, through his family. From this family into Egypt, where initially, greeted as celebrities, become slaves, rescued by the power of God, brought through the Red Sea into the wilderness. They conquer the wilderness, and we think, "It's finally time." God's promise to crush the head of the serpent has been made to Abraham. His family is now a great nation. They've come to their home, and time will be good, and Joshua dies,

and immediately the people begin to turn their back on God. And the entire book of Judges is this: that there's righteousness, there's a forgetting of who God is, there's a turning to idolatry and to pagan gods, followed by judgment, followed by righteousness, followed by forgetting, followed by turning to pagan gods, and the book of Judges is just a tire stuck in the mud. And this promise and this hope doesn't seem to be getting any closer. It's still not there yet. And we come to the beginning of Samuel. And not only are we not there yet, we find that this is not what we were really expecting. Because 1 Samuel opens in darkness. It opens with a spiritual and a moral darkness. And I would say this, that spiritual darkness always comes before moral darkness. Proverbs tells us that our heart is like a stream of water.

And there's a rule, right? You're never downstream from the cows. And we understand this, right? Because what starts upstream comes downstream. A herd of cows always move upstream to get a drink. And what Proverbs said is your heart is upstream of everything. Your heart is upstream of your actions and of your words. Jesus will talk about this, "Out of the heart the mouth speaks." That if you struggle with your actions and with your words, that the solution ultimately is to take a look at your heart. And this time in Israel's history is marked by this phrase. There was a thing in Israel, and everyone did what he did in his own eyes. And rather than fixing their hearts on the goodness of God, what do they do? They fix it on whatever they want, mostly themselves.

And their moral darkness becomes a symptom of a spiritual darkness. And as we move into 1 Samuel, we're going to see this is true. They'll treat the ark of the covenant of God as a good love charm. They'll fix their eyes on other nations rather than on the goodness of God. We'll see, Eli the priest, he has two sons. And when you come to the tabernacle to sacrifice, part of the way the priests supported themselves and the family is that as that meat was sacrificed, they would reach in, grab some tongs out of the sacrifice, and that meat would be their meal to feed their family. But Eli's sons, they're corrupt, and they're in it for personal gain. And so as the animal is brought for the sacrifice, like before you sacrifice it, we'll take the ribeyes and the filet mignon, and then you can sacrifice it.

Essentially shaking down people in the house of God for personal gain. Right? This is dark spiritually. God's people treating God like a good luck charm, looking to the nations rather than God. But there is also a darkness of disunity. Right? Israel is not yet this great nation, promised Abraham. Right? It's a disjointed group of tribes, and there's been conflict. It has almost been eliminated at the end of the book of Judges, which is... Samuel takes place in that same time period. There's disunity, and there's darkness, but also there's a darkness of fear. A nation called, with people called the Philistines, has begun to move in, and they have grown, and they've begun to expand their territory, and their sights are fixed on the people of God. And so as 1 Samuel begins, and we hear this short trilogy and description of this small family, we have a place that is filled with darkness.

The darkness of sort of moral decay of sin and unfaithfulness to God. The darkness of disunity, where all of God's people are separated from the whole thing. And this darkness of fear, as the Philistines... I want you to understand that the darkness does not stay this way. And one of the great messages that we see about God is that into our darkest, most struggle-filled moments, He can bring light. And the book of 1 Samuel is no different. Let me just show you two places in the book of Samuel that point to how God brings darkness into light. In 1 Samuel chapter 4, the Ark of the Covenant has been used by the Israelites as a good luck charm as they go into battle. And what happens is, the Philistines take the Ark of the Covenant, and in Israel's eyes, God has now abandoned them.

And it's their problem. And if they would have listened to God and obeyed Him, they would have been different. But a great brokenness and depression sweeps across the slate. One of Eli's daughters-in-law is having a baby. And because of the brokenness and the shock, people hear about the Ark of the Covenant being taken. And as she is having this child, she names him this. She named the child Ichabod, which means there is no glory, because the glory has departed from Israel. Because the Ark of God had been captured, and because of her father-in-law and husband, both who had died upon hearing this news. And so she has this baby, and she says, "I'm going to name him Darkness." There's no hope, there's no glory, there's nothing. And sometimes for us, life feels that way. It feels like it's crashing in on us, and we count up our losses, and we look to the future, and it's dark.

And just like this lady, we're saying, "There's no hope, there's no light, there's no glory." So she names her child Ichabod, but here is the reality. God takes us from being Ichabods to Ebeneezers. In 1 Samuel 7, Samuel will take a memorial stone, and he'll set it up between me and men. And he's going to say, as he dedicates this stone, "Till now the Lord has helped us, and the Pharisees were subdued, and did not enter the territory of Israel. And the hand of the Lord was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel." Samuel will name this stone Ebenezer. If you sang old hymns, "Here I raise my Ebenezer," it just means stone of help. That in just those seven chapters, God takes the darkness and the hopelessness, and he moves us all the way from Ichabod to Ebenezer.

Right? From darkness into the fact that God helps and bring light. Let's take just a brief look at this text this morning. I'm going to read it again. It's a very quiet beginning in this book. There was a certain man of Ramathim, Zophim, of the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah, son of Jehoram, son of Elihu, son of Toha, son of Zuth and Ephrathite. Somebody from the area of Bethlehem. He had two wives. The name of one was Hannah, the other name of the other was Penaniah, and Penaniah had children, but Hannah had no children. And as this book opens, we find an unknown family in a tiny little town. And more than that, this family is broken, it's dysfunctional, and it's hurting. We'll talk about that more next week, but for now, take my word for it. Family is filled with hurt.

And in a book that is so exciting and filled with such great heroes, why does it begin so quietly and so humbly? And one of the great treasures in texts like this is that you can see things more clearly when you're going slow than driving 90 miles an hour. We've experienced this. When we go as fast as we can, we miss things. And as we come to 1 Samuel, it starts so quietly and so humbly. It forces us to stop for a minute and say, "What is happening in this text? What is going on?" And one of the great treasures in this text is that it forces us to slow down and to see what God is telling us. And it's such a humble beginning. We don't know much about this town. We don't know much about this family.

Right? There's four tribes mentioned with three locations. We don't have a lot of clarity about this family. Although there's possibly a reference in Chronicles. We don't really understand the genealogical line. We don't understand why it's there. But what we see is that God chooses families that are small, in small towns, and unknown. And He does something wonderful in His power through them. Right? There is a humility that begins this book. And it's a humility that extends throughout Samuel. Right? It's not just a humble family. It's a hurting family. Elkanah, it says, has two wives. And what the Bible is doing is recording the truth of the situation. Right? Biblically, polygamy, having more than one wife, is frequently recorded. But those records in the Bible always lead to brokenness and hurt, because it is not God's design for marriage.

It leads to heartache and brokenness, and that's what happens in this family. And one of the great truths that's often hidden in the background of Samuel, because of the excitement surrounding the events, is that God takes and lifts up humble people from Hannah, to Saul, who hid him, to David, who was the last born, and so unimportant that when they have a big family dinner, they leave him with the sheep. God gives grace to the humble. Hannah will actually say this, "Talk no more loudly. Let not arrogance come from your mouth, for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him our actions wait." The quietness of this humble beginning, God calls us to evaluate our hearts. Almost immediately, the book of 1 Samuel turns to our hearts. We'll see Hannah's heartbreak in verse 8. She's praying in her heart in verse 13.

The center of the heart is the theme that is sort of woven through every one of these chapters. From Hannah, to the promise of a priest that would follow God's heart, to the rejection of Saul where he says, "I'm coming with a man after my own heart," to the anointing of David. And it's an incredibly famous verse that you probably know. When Samuel goes, and Jesse brings out all of his sons, and they're strong, and they look like they'd be great kings, and he rejects everyone, and Samuel says, "God, why are you rejecting them?" Do you remember what God says to Samuel? "Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart." It's a theme that runs through this book. The humble and those whose hearts are fixed on God, right? It's a call to humility, to put our hope and trust in God and not in ourselves, to evaluate our hearts,

the fact our heart has on our actions. There's no going through the motions with God. One of the things that happens as we begin in Samuel is we see that God's people have a desperate need. And it's not the issue that they think it is, but it's their relationship with God. You see, they need God to speak to them. They need to hear a word from God. They need someone who can deliver to them a message from God. They need someone who can stand and minister in the house of God to stand between the people and God. And they need someone who can lead the people of God. And in the birth of Samuel, we find Samuel coming as a prophet through whom God speaks. Psalm 99:6 puts him in the category of Aaron and his sons as a priest who stands between the people and God.

Samuel leads Israel, not quite the same as a king, but in the same manner. The picture of all of these Old Testament roles of prophet, priest, and king and leader are found in what is about to happen. And Samuel, while he's not a king, he is a leader and he will anoint the first king. And it is through his life that hope begins to be restored. And in this quiet, humble beginning, we see Hannah in her humility and her heartbreak. She begins to join the ranks of some of the greatest women in the Bible. Like those who came before her, specifically Sarah, the mother of Israel, and Rachel, the mother of Joseph. She struggles to bear a child. And as Samuel is born in this miraculous, God-empowered, God-appointed prayer, she sings a song of joy.

And her song of joy is going to point us to another woman in another small town who sings about a pregnancy she doesn't think is possible. And although their songs carry different words, they carry the same heart. Hannah sings in chapter 2, "My heart exalts in the Lord." A thousand years later, another woman will sing, "My soul magnifies the Lord." Hannah will sing about how God exalts the humble and raises up the poor and the broken. And a thousand years later and a little further north, another woman will sing, "He looks on the humble estate of his servant." "And generations will call me blessed because he has done things for me." And Hannah sings about how God brings the hungry, and the song that comes later, another woman sings that God is the one who fills the hungry with good things.

And in the darkness of Israel, God sends Hannah, a child, who comes as a prophet and a priest and a judge and almost king. And we get this glimpse of light. A thousand years later, Mary, the mother of Jesus, sings. And God sends Israel, but for all people in all nations. The one who would stand as the true prophet and the true priest and the true king. And in him, the darkness is overcome by the light and salvation is accomplished. And now, because of Jesus, we too can sing. Our hope, our salvation, and our future is secure. I want you to understand that God is the one who brings light into darkness. And there is no darkness that is too deep or too dark. There is no distance that is too far. There is no situation that is too big for the power of God to come and to make a difference.

This story isn't just about Samuel. It's about another who would come and who would save and shepherd and minister to God's people. And while it's a story of Israel and Samuel, it's also a story of Jesus and us. Let's pray. Father, may our souls magnify you. May we see how you lift the humble, how you fill the hungry with good things. That in the darkness and brokenness of these small, humble beginnings, may you call us to evaluate our hearts. Help us to see that you are the God who changes and transforms, and the one who brings light. It is in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.