The Song of the King-Maker's Mother

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  The Song of the King-Maker’s Mother

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  Good morning, HBC, please turn in your bibles to 1 Samuel chapter 2, and we will look this morning at the song of a King Makers mother. We will pick up today and listen in on Hannah's prayer, that was praise. And so we'll figure out later...how does a prayer turn into a song. It's just what's in the heart of Hannah to do as she moves from a low point in chapter one, through a hardship in life to chapter two, where now she's giving spontaneous, spirit-filled true worship that we often see the saints in the Old Testament having to do when...there's a place where something significant happens in the life of a godly person in the Old Testament, and they can't help but break out in prayer and praise. And in Hannah's case, to refresh our memories from last week, she was suffering in her own soul. We saw that in verse ten, greatly distressed and weeping bitterly. Why was she doing that? Because life was hard, and she was married to a wonderful man named Elkanah, but she could not bear children. The Lord had closed her womb. She had suffered that way through no fault of her own. This was just the Lord's sovereign hand, the deck he was dealing from in her life. And yet, Elkanah, to have children makes the foolish decision to take another wife...takes it into his own hands. And as we said last week, sometimes we devise the rod of our own beating. And so Elkanah has a divided home, and he has Peninnah, making Hannah's life miserable, not just in the home, but particularly in chapter one, when they would go to worship at the temple. And so here is Hannah being pestered by a worthless Penny to the point of breaking. But God was using that in her life, ordaining that to bring her to pray a most wonderful prayer in verse 11. And so, yes, persecution from Peninnah could lead to supplication in Hannah, and that was all by God's sovereign design. And so that's where we were last week. And now this week, we begin right at this moment, this very personal moment in verse 28, where she is back a few years later, offering to Eli the priest, the son that she said, Lord, if you give me a son, I give him right back to you, because grace from God leads to gratitude in us, and we have open hands towards him. And so that was Hannah's mark of faithfulness, that she says, you gave him to me not to keep, but to give back and so here he now is yours. And I'm sure to connect to this moment what would be happening in Hannah's heart in chapter two when she's about to pray? We cannot miss what you know as parents has been sad times, if you will. Bittersweet moments of taking your kid to preschool for the first time. I mean, if you really liked your kid, it was a sad moment. If you were like, please take this child, and I'll pay you double to keep him the whole day. No, that sad moment when you knew moms, dads, you were getting that child back in about three hours. Um, but there was some sadness there. Or, you know, later on in life, taking them to college and dropping them off and the tears then. Not to mention, if they came back after four years and asked if they could move in again, but there would be these heart wrenching moments just in your own life. You can connect with that. Whereas what is beyond my understanding is what she felt in verse 28, about to give her little boy over for good, for keeps. No getting him back, she says, as long as he lives, he's the Lord's. And here we have now, chapter two, what ensues in this moment is pure praise. A beautiful prayer that Hannah exalts God in, and her own soul is lifted up too. So, follow along with me as I read 1 Samuel 2:1-10.
  "Then Hannah prayed and said, my heart exalts in the Lord, my horn is exalted in the Lord. My mouth speaks boldly against my enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation. There is no one holy like the Lord. Indeed, there is no one besides you, nor is there any rock like our God. Boast no more, so very proudly. Do not let arrogance come out of your mouth, for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and with him actions are weighed. The bows of the mighty are shattered, but the feeble gird on strength. Those who were full hire themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry cease to hunger. Even the barren gives birth to seven. But she who has many children languishes. The Lord kills and makes alive. He brings down to Sheol and raises up. The Lord makes poor and rich. He brings low. He also exalts. He raises the poor from the dust. He lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with nobles and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and he has set the world on them. He keeps the feet of his godly ones, but the wicked ones are silenced in darkness. For not by might shall a man prevail. Those who contend with the Lord will be shattered. Against them He will thunder in the heavens. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth, and he will give strength to his king, and will exalt the horn of his anointed."
  Father, your word is more valuable than gold. Yes, much fine gold. So help us to take the Pennys...the small amounts of the afflictions in our lives and cash them in for the glories of your riches today. As only you can reverse that in our heart through the power of your spirit working in the Word, we ask in Jesus’name, Amen.
  I'm pretty sure it's the opening line of a somewhat known book in the Christian world called "The Knowledge of the Holy" by A.W. Tozer. And he starts by saying, "you know what comes into your mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us".  That wasn't just like, a great way to get you, the person who picked that book up to want to read on, right? It's a book called The Knowledge of the Holy. And he basically calls you out like, hey, uh, whatever you think about when you think of the word God that says everything about you. So read on, my friend. But the truth in that is that when you think about God, the first thought that captivates your mind, that captures your attention says, what about your view of him...without being asked, can you give a definition of God? Or can you describe his attributes just naturally? When you think of God, when his name is mentioned, what comes into your mind? In the life of Hannah, prior to this prayer, we saw in chapter one that when she prayed to God in verse 11, the words that came out of her mouth were the picture of the God she was praying to when she said in verse 11, O Lord of hosts. Do you remember what that name meant, what that title meant?...God, Almighty, God of angel armies. No doubt in her mind by what she said her heart was going where?...it was going vertical. It wasn't staying down here where often my prayers tend to stay, especially in the time of trial. They stay right down where I'm at in the muck of life, and yet she is able to look up in verse 11 and pray to the God who reigns on high. And she also saw herself rightly. She mentions a few times in that verse about being a maidservant, lowly, weak, just like we feel often. But the question we come to in our own lives is this...is it not in those low times where we see God most clearly, when we do look up, not from the highest vantage point where we think we're going to get that perfect view, but actually from that low valley.  The book The Valley of Vision, a collection of prayers written by Puritans 1600s, collected and assembled together. The book itself, the title The Valley of Vision, then leads into the opening prayer that this editor put together in the opening of the first prayer goes like this. "God, you have brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths, but see you in the heights. Hemmed in by mountains of my sin I behold your glory." And that's where Hannah is as we start chapter two. She has been hemmed in by not just whatever sins she had to deal with in her own heart sin of disappointment, discontentment, whatever those might be. For Hannah, certainly the sins of those around her, sins of Peninnah and all around what would look dark. She looks up and sees the glory of God, and in chapter two launches into a prayer that I will call a praise that I will just call true worship. Uh, do you want to try to pick apart in your heart when you're praying and it turns into praise and say, okay, over here was this part? No, of course not. They overlap, and that's what we see when we get to know Hannah here, that this true worshiper in the afterglow of this bittersweet moment of handing over her only son at the time to the Lord. The afterglow of this she gives us an example in chapter 2:1-10 of true worship. And true worship is one of faith. Verse one. It's one of faith. Looking back to her salvation. That's what she's grounded in. But it then moves in 2 to 9 to her love...her affection for the sovereignty of God in her life and not just her life. Her life, as we see in these first two chapters, is meant to catch the attention of the reader and say she is representative of a larger picture of what's happening in the life of God's people at this point. Because just as her life looked really dark and hopeless and helpless in chapter one, so it did for the people of God in Israel, because at the close of Judges it says everyone's doing right in their own eyes. There's no one with a word from God. The Word of God was rare. There's no person to lead. There's no judge left. It's barren. The wasteland of Israel's faith, as was her life. So she's representing something to us. And she in the present, after looking back to her salvation in verse one 2 to 9, we will look at the the praise she has for God's sovereignty. This God who can reverse the worst circumstances, as we have said, we see with what?...our own appearance of things horizontally. But that's not always what God sees. And then lastly, in verse ten, she bookends it with a look to the future, a hope in a future king to come. And so that'll be our little outline this morning. Some hooks to hang our thoughts on.  
  First verse one...modeling to us true worship has its start, its commencement in God's great salvation.  Hannah prayed and said, my heart exults in the Lord. My horn is exalted in the Lord. I'm trying hard to enunciate the difference between exulting with a 'u' and exalting with an 'a'. Now, I know in poetry things especially in your Bible, when you see poetry and you wonder, how do I know when it's poetry? The end of words...there's no rhyming here. That's because in Hebrew in which it was written, there was rhythm and rhyme. Although it's not the rhyme that we're used to with songs today. That's just the end of the words rhyme. All throughout there would be a cadence and a similar sounding on syllables if you were a Hebrew reader and listener, but just trust me, it's poetry. The cheat code to knowing when you're in poetry in the Old Testament is a very scholarly observation, where you see more white space around the black letters, you have poetry. So you can put that one in your back pocket and try to sound smart at life group. Look right in front of your face at your Bible. You see where there's not a lot of white space around letters. That's called narrative, and where you see more white space around letters is called poetry. All right. Class dismissed. So she launches into this song. Verse one. Also, don't miss, this is personal to her. She talks about herself in verse one, and then she disappears. But when she talks about herself, it has to do with her salvation. And she talks about my heart and my horn and my mouth and my enemies. And I rejoice because we have said here before...saving faith is found in the personal pronouns. When he is not just the Lord, he's my Lord, and he's your Lord, and he's my God, and he's your God, not just a God or the God. So this opening verse says a lot about Hannah's worship and that it starts with salvation. The similarity in that first line my heart exults in the Lord, my horn is exalted in the Lord is about praise. But she tells us first where it begins. All true praise starts in the heart. Exultation with the 'u' is not the same as exaltation with an 'a'. Exultation is a word for celebration and delight. Cheering with gladness overflowing of a heart...glad in something. And here she is glad in the Lord. So she's exalting. She's rejoicing in the heart. But then she's exalted. Her horn is exalted. You're like, what is the horn? It's not a trumpet. It's an image in the ancient Near East, you find in the Old Testament of victorious animals. Horn imagery in the Psalms is the animal that has the horns and gores the other animal, its enemy, and then it lifts up its head in what? Victory! A sign of its strength. So you see the connection between these two, now.  Worship...true worship begins in the heart, friends, but it does show itself on the outside in strength. Horn is a word for strength and power, and that exalts in the Lord not in itself. Everything is focused on the object of worship, right? Notice at the end of both those lines, my heart exults in the Lord, it rejoices in the Lord, and my horn is exalted in the Lord. It's not me so much, it's him. So you put that together in your mind, and you see how in your own life how are you raised above the storms in your life through worship? It's when you're from the heart...you start there rejoicing in your salvation and what God has done for you. And then it does turn to praise. As you looked around the room this morning in worship as we sang, and you saw the countenance of some of your brothers and sisters, it's okay to look at each other. It's one of the reasons we don't turn the lights out when we sing. We want to see each other. What? Sing praise to God as that one song just said it. Come on, sing praise with me. That's the call of the Psalter. It's not just go inward. Me, myself and God. Shut out the lights. Don't look around. I don't know when that happened in the last 25 years that that became the idea of singing. I know it's personal. I know you have a personal relationship with God, but when we gather as saints, we're celebrating corporately what he's done for us. And you strengthen one another that way. You look around, you don't know everybody's story, but you know some of them, and you say, I know that person is praising through persecution or sorrow or loss. Or if you're that person and you look at somebody else singing, it does something to you. We're connected. So it is from the inside. It shows on the outside. And maybe a side note on true worship starting in the heart friend...style can take a back seat. Preference...I like...if I'm going to worship, I need it to be this way. Oh?...because worship starts outside of you. So the arrangement has to be the way you like it or else you can't worship? That doesn't seem to be the case with Hannah or anybody else in the Old Testament, for that matter, because the heart of worship is in the Lord and it's in your heart. I was at a thing at LR last night. Western Piedmont Symphony. And, it was a tribute to some jazz musicians, Duke Ellington and others. But they brought this amazing musician in, this lady from New Orleans playing the clarinet. I mean, she made that thing just sing. It was awesome. And then she, she decides. They decide to lead us in Amazing Grace. And now, normally we sing here, we don't have a full orchestra and a person playing clarinet and singing with this deep voice. But my heart was moved to worship in that moment. And this wasn't a house of worship. It didn't need to be. That was where my heart was. And I'm not saying that to me. I'm just saying style goes out the window when it comes to what comes from within. Now go to your car and turn on the music you like...whatever. But when you gather with the saints, is it really about what you need outside of you to create something? Or as we see in Hannah's heart, it comes from within.  And it does then...you're strengthened when you exalt God and you're not about exalting your preference. Psalm 68:3, let the righteous be glad. If you're righteous in the Lord today, if you have the righteousness in Christ, you should be glad. Let them exalt with you before God. Let them rejoice with gladness. Notice Hannah is our example of faith, but the object of faith here is the Lord. And then she moves into talking about what comes out of her mouth. Well, she says, my mouth speaks boldly against my enemies. I don't think she is turning to Peninnah at this moment, and she doesn't seem like that type of petty woman to me. She's a godly woman. I think maybe she is speaking as she says, the plural enemies about. Hey, my life has maybe been one of hardship. I mean, in her context, in the time and place she lived in, where bearing children for your husband, for his progeny, for the name to live on as the more kids you would have in this culture, the more your future was set up for protection and provision passing on.They usually live near you. You shared what you had with them and then they took care of you in your old age. So there was something she would have felt all eyes on her entire life to this point. It wasn't just about Peninnah. Peninnah would have represented a culture that, for a barren woman, would have been just broken and sad and hard and wondering why everybody else, but not me. And does my husband love me that I can't? And Elkanah did his best to give her a double portion to show he loved her. But she says, now I can speak boldly against my enemies, but she doesn't do it by mocking them and saying, look what I have now. She does it by praising God and saying, look what he's done for me. Do you see the difference? So all of this goes to the end of verse one. I can do all these things. My heart, my strength, my speech. All of it is praise to God because I rejoice in your salvation. That's where it starts. If you're a Christian in here today, if you're in Christ today, the start of your worship, and if it's been cold and if it's been in neutral and if it's been in a ditch, we can't create an atmosphere that can touch what God does in your heart through looking back and seeing what he's done for you in Christ. It starts with your salvation. What's God done for you? We just sang about the blood applied. Thank you Jesus, you have saved my life. Brought me from the darkness. So if your heart has been cold lately, I'm not going to take you to anywhere else today. I'm going to pull the struggle bus over and say, hop out here. Go back to your salvation. That's where it was for Hannah. In a moment that was both wonderful and painful. Giving over her son, she says, why, I can rejoice right now and be exalted in my strength and speak up, is because of your salvation for me. So if your heart didn't exalt today in song, remember your salvation. If your soul didn't exalt today and wasn't strengthened, remember your salvation. If you're mad at your enemies today more than you are glad in God, remember your salvation. I mean, that's the only way you're going to get out of it, friend. You got to go back to that. Remember when God saved you, and you've changed since then. But God has not. He is still the God who saves. Even in Christ, he pulls you back out of that thing you want to fall back into. He delivers you from it. He rescues you still. Even as a Christian, when you find yourself struggling in sin, pulled back into old ways, he will still get you out. Call on him and ask him today to just pull me out of whatever muck and mire my soul has been in that keeps me from worshipping you in the heights, because I have just been face down in the depths. Well, look up, brother and sister. Look up to God in your salvation. He delivers.
  She doesn't stay there. That's just verse one. And note, as I said before, she's off the scene. She said what she needed to say about her life. Now she looks around and in the present moment she sees God's sovereignty moving in power, omniscient over everything, knowing all things, doing all things. And she praises him for that. Hannah's faith from verses 2 to 9. In summary, fashion...her faith is now looking to God's sovereignty. And out of that, her praise and adoration grows. She moves from looking back in faith to her salvation, to looking presently to God's sovereignty. And it lifts her up. And the first character quality of God after she has come back to say, I can rejoice because you've delivered me. You've rescued me. What kind of great God are you? You are a holy God, verse two. There is no one like you. You are matchless and nobody comes close to you. The bedrock of moving forward and worshiping this sovereign God, who can know all things and do all things, starts with this quality that makes him able to do that different from all false gods, false religion, false worship around her is that he's holy. He's other. There's no one like him, she says. No one like God in his holiness, in his difference. As you want to lift off this morning and worship, say, hey, I've been good like I. I do thank God for my salvation. But after that, if somebody were to say, what comes into your mind when you think of God, it's like blank space. Start with his holiness then. Start with the thing that is most unlike you. Because, see, maybe in ways in which it's common to man, I would maybe pick a character quality of God that I can relate to. You know, his love, of course, because I understand love and I try to or whatever, his joy or. But when you pick God's holiness to move your forward, move forward to your worship. You're picking a quality of his that has nothing to do with you and exclusively to do with him. Does that make sense? Like, I'm looking at something much greater than me to exalt who? See, that's why holiness just lays it flat, doesn't it? Because then there's nothing I can connect to other than he is worthy of my praise. And who isn't?...me. When I praise God's holiness, when I say you are holy and there's no one like you, I'm included in that...there's no one like you. We're all included in that. So he gets all the praise when we start with His Holiness, his exclusivity of being the perfect God, perfect in...and then you could fill in the rest if you want. He is perfect in his love. That's what makes him holy. He is perfect in his justice, makes him holy. He is perfect in his power. You go down the list of perfections. But do you know they all start at the source of he is holy, holy, holy, Isaiah 6:3. The whole earth, then, is full of your glory. And if you went to Isaiah 6 and saw what Isaiah said next in verse 5, when he saw the holiness of God, he didn't say, yay is me. I'm an overcomer. My best life now. No he says, woe is me. I'm not an overcomer. I'm a man of unclean lips. If that's what you look like when he a vision of the glory of God, it was Christ, actually, John tells us. And I see you where you are it lays waste my pride. But a person that knows that that holy God would love them. See, that's the switch. Because if he's just a holy God and he does nothing for me, then I might say, great, you know, a transcendent God. He's out there, but he's not near. And he was near. He came, he sent his Son. And in a demonstration of his love died for us. That's where you go...a Holy God would die for a sinner like me? So the holiness of God, which initially might have this repulsive effect to the sinner because he's so unlike us, and that holiness has a sense of terror and dread, as it did in the Old Testament at times. Leviticus 10, when Moses's brother Aaron had two sons, Nahum and Abihu, and they brought strange fire to offer before God. That wasn't the way that he commanded according to his perfect law. They were incinerated in a moment. I don't know if you knew that story. Not the best bedtime story, I guess, for our kids. But it does teach about His Holiness because it says fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them. And they died before the Lord right in front of their uncle and father, Moses and Aaron. And this was the Lord's answer. Those who come near me, I will be treated as holy. That's why R.C. Sproul can say we tend to have mixed feelings about the holiness of God. There is a sense in which we are at the same time attracted to it and repulsed by it. Something draws us towards it, like Exodus 3, when Moses sees the burning bush and he is drawn to see what's going on there. This is something different. And God says, hey, stop where about you're going to walk is holy ground. There is a thing that can draw us towards it for the person of faith, and yet there's still something in it that is dangerous and entirely other and gives us, rightly, a fear of God. Because when you ask a person that has no idea what God is like, do you fear him? They probably say no because they're ignorant of him. What are they to fear? They don't know anything about him. But for the person that understands something of the holiness of God, his otherness, his difference from us, it can draw toward. And yet, as Sproul says, we want to run away, and we can't seem to decide which way we want it. That's mysterious and amazing all at the same time, isn't it? And that can kick start your praise today, because it takes the eyes off you and puts it on him. Makes you go up. And as Hannah now is going up, she is exulting in the heart, rejoicing. And she is being strengthened, lifting up in the Lord. She moves from verse three or verse two, talking about his holiness to his sovereign omniscience. And maybe there's a connection there. Well, she says there's no rock like our God saying, yeah, this, this holy God I can take refuge in. That's what a rock was for an Old Testament saint. Some safe place, some safe haven, some cliff to get yourself into, to be protected.  And she calls God her rock.  But then she moves in 3 to 5 to talk about a different quality of this sovereign God, his omniscience. He knows all that. Again, like I was saying before the holiness of God, this idea of transcendence, he's other. But does he care about me? Does he care what's going on down here? How the world works. Verse three. The scoffer would say, nope. The proud and the arrogant. Verse three boast no more. So very proudly do not let arrogance come out of your mouth, you scoffer of God. Why? Because the Lord, the holy Lord, who you think is just not even paying attention. He is a God of knowledge, and with him actions are weighed. You know the way the proud person, the arrogant person. If you want a good definition for a boast, what is boasting? Its arrogance coming out your mouth. Verse three. That's what it is. Want to know a boaster...when arrogance is flowing out of their mouth? Can I give a PSA? Parents, let's help rid the world of boasters by teaching our kids not to follow the bad examples of professional athletes or others who everything has to be about them. I know it looks cute when your four year old, does something and taps there, you know, you know and turns around and does this. But is that really what we want to train our kids to do and tacitly approve of by like, you know, that was a good run. Give it to the kid. Yeah. Let them come over to the sideline and say, great job on that or whatever it might be. But also say, but by the way, who gave you those legs? God did. Did he give you that mouth to make much of yourself with? End of PSA. Back to verse three. These boasters, their boast as you connect it to...For the Lord is a God of knowledge. And with him actions weigh. Why is she warning the proud? Well, you get it when you get the second half of verse three and then verses four and five. The proud think they know how the world works, don't they? Those proud who looked at Hannah's life like Peninnah and her scorn and mockery would have been. You must be cursed by God that you can't have kids, you know. And Hannah, that's just the way the world works, you know. I mean, look at me. I can't. I lost track of all my kids again. There's so many, you know? It's just God loves me and blesses me. And I'm strong and I'll be strong. And I have many children, and they're going to take care of me. And, you know, you're just one of those people that life dealt a bad hand. And that's how it's just going to be. That's life. The strong stay strong, the satisfied stay satisfied. And those who have a lot have a lot. And that's just the way life goes. That's the boaster. As if there's not a God who knows, who's weighing actions, or as Proverbs 16:2 says, weighs the motives. So if you think you can get off the hook of, I'll fool God. On the outside, I'll be a really good person. I want the glory for myself. But if he's just weighing my actions and I'm just doing a lot of good deeds, he'll be impressed with me and life will go the way I want it. Karma, if you will. When I was working in LA, a lot of my waiter and waitress friends loved karma. You know, just because they just cared about the outward action. Everything was just, I'm going to do this good thing because, you know, guys comes back around and they would come around the corner and after they got the big tip, karma baby, I was good this week. I remember these discussions and if they got a bad tip that person's got something coming to them. So my apologetics in that moment was...so help me understand this. You got a bad tip from them. So the karma wheel starts. The karma circle starts now, with their bad action, that's going to give them something bad. But what if you're actually on the receiving end of that? As in you did something bad this week. And the reason you got a bad tip is because you're a bad person. And they didn't have an answer for that. Karma only worked when it was to their what?...advantage of the way that the boaster or the arrogant sees the world. And so all Hannah is doing so far is just saying, I praise this sovereign God of knowledge who...Proverbs 16:2...He doesn't just weigh our actions, he weighs our motives. In Proverbs 21:2, he weighs the heart. Look, he sees us inside and out. None of us are pulling the wool over his omniscient eyes. So that humbles us. But it gives hope because verses four and five say, hey, listen, have you watched in life that sometimes the bows of the mighty get shattered, the strong become weak, And sometimes the feeble gird on strength. Ha! Not only that, those who were full and satisfied are so broke now they're begging for bread. And those who were begging. Now they have ceased. And then she gets to herself. She's not talking in the first person, but she goes, you know, even those barren women give birth to seven, which is a number of completion, perfection or satisfaction. And yet those who have many children, she doesn't say loses them or she just says, languishes as that thing you thought was a sign of God's good favor on you because you're such a great person, you turn around and find yourself, Penniah, going...all these kids won't come out and milk the goats with me. Send them back. It's the God of great reversals is the story here in this song under his sovereign omniscience. And she's saying, you who boast and think you've got it figured out. You have another thing coming. And that's what Hannah could give praise for in her life. Can you praise God for that in your life? How do you do that right now? Well, a starting point would be, you know, as we're warning and saying life isn't always just the way it appears. Um, so things might be coming up you right now. You're strong, you're satisfied, and you're well supplied, which is a perfect recipe for being a little too comfortable. Not to say you shouldn't be thankful if you're strong, satisfied, and well supplied. If you see every good thing is a gift from God. But if you start to put your faith in those things and hope in those things, and even maybe pride comes in and says, yeah, you know what? I've just been on such a good streak lately, I think I have all this because I kind of earned it, I deserve it. You get that kind of Self-righteous, comfortable. What can God reverse? He can send an affliction. He could send a trial to try to wake you up and say, if you thought it was always just this way and you've got me in this kind of cycle, that you do this, and I do this, and it leads to your own pride in yourself rather than exaltation of me, then maybe that comfort is going to lead to some affliction, just maybe. And on the flip side of the God of great reversals, when you see those who are weak become strong, and those who are hungry are fed, and those who are barren give birth to seven for the afflicted in the room today, there's a lesson in saying maybe the hardship I find myself in, I don't need to resign myself to the idea it's going to stay this way forever. And life may have beat you down long enough that you actually have started to believe that. Like nothing's going to change and everything I do, it just backfires. And the older you get, the more you just almost want to feel like giving up. And Hannah wants to say no. The God of great reversals can switch those either way, in your affliction, he can now bring you comfort beyond what you could ask or imagine. Do you believe him? Do you trust him? Because one of the great things that humble us is when we do just come to grips with, no matter how long we've lived and how wise we think we are, and if we read knowledge of the holy frontwards and backwards and underlined everything, we can have all of that knowledge. But we're not the God of knowledge, are we? And you just have to admit, as I do, none of us has a fat clue of what tomorrow's going to bring. A bill of debt, a bill of health, a neighbor named Bill who just really gets you upset. You don't know what tomorrow's going to bring, but you can trust the God of all knowledge. He knows. He's sovereign. So that's lesson one. His sovereign omniscience she praises him for. Now the scoffer, or even the skeptic might say, oh, well, that's fine. It's just he has foreknowledge. He knows everything. I'll grant him that. But does he do anything about it? Well, then you move into verses 6 to 9 and listen to all of the action verbs of Yahweh. The Lord kills, he brings down, he raises up. The Lord makes poor, the Lord makes rich, the Lord brings low. He also exalts, he raises the poor. He lifts the needy. He keeps the feet of his godly ones. Sounds like he's not just sovereign in his wisdom. He's sovereign in his power. He's not just willing, but he's able. And in His holiness, because that's where we started. He has the perfect understanding of everybody's situation all the time. And so not only could we trust his sovereign wisdom watching our lives and how they're going, but his sovereign power of when he determines to reverse something or not. And so Hannah just launches into all these different proofs of God's power that he is sovereign in his omnipotence. And it makes her praise continue to lift. I just picture like an airplane. She just keeps going higher and higher in this song. And at the heights, it's that he's in control of it all. Verse six, she says it two ways. It's still the same thing. It's a merism in poetry when you, you know, say, you know, oh, where's my keys this morning I searched high and low. That means you tore up the whole house, right? Every little nook and cranny of it. I saw somebody look at their wife just in that moment. Just staring at the Bible. But I see these things. Um, maybe it happened before church. The Lord kills and makes alive is just a all encompassing phrase saying every millisecond of your existence he's in charge of. You can accept that or try to reject it, but it's true. He brings down to Sheol and he raises up. So that's your material life. Your physical life. And then she moves to seven and eight. Talk about your social standing. Uh, your standing in the world, your job situation, your the house you live in. I mean, I'm just adapting these phrases from the Old Testament like, you know, when's the last time you've been in an ash heap? But you have had a bill that you can't pay. And he says he can reverse these things, and he can raise you from the dust. And you can find yourself sitting with nobles, inheriting a seat of honor. You can get the promotion, you know, or I know. It's all over. It's everywhere. But we know it's in our church. The marriage you think has no hope. It's in the ash heap. It's ready to be taken out. There's no hope for it. No. That can be reversed to friend. He has the power to do it. He has the power to change you. He has the power to change your spouse. He knows everything about you already. He knew everything about you when you thought you knew everything about that person wanted to marry them in the first place. And now you find yourself years later, feeling like you don't know them at all and they don't know you. He knew you then, put you together, didn't look away, didn't make a mistake, and he's all powerful to fix whatever you think is an uncrossable divide at this point. But you got to believe that this sovereign God, this God of great reversals, can redeem it. That's step one. And to put the punctuation on. You know, he's in the the totality of my life, living and breathing and dying. And he's in the totality of my life. My day to day existence, my life, my job. She takes it in verse eight to creation. The pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and he set the world on them. She goes back to like, how much can this God reverse everything? He was the God that started with what? Absolute nothingness. And out of that created everything. So what are the material things in his universe he can't turn around. You got it. He's going from the argument from the lesser to the greater to the greatest. If we go back to the beginning, he started it all and he didn't have anything to work with. But what? His own sovereign power. So he can do it there back then. And he could do it right now in your life, knowing every single part of it. And it humbles us because we have to trust then whatever hard things come. Verse nine, he keeps the feet of his godly ones. Can you look in your life and see small moments? This is what Hannah was doing that was so helpful and practical to us is she's seeing in the small moments a bigger story. This is what God does to keep his people. I saw this in my life this past week. The killing and making of life. Last Sunday night I go home. I'm in the mood for chocolate, and I go into my cabinets and grab a box of chocolates that was for my wife. Maybe that was my first sin. And, um, I read the label as my wife has trained me to do after 13.5 years, because I am. And I'm trusting you by telling you this, that none of it's going to come back to me in some little concoction. I am deathly allergic to cashews. They are my Kryptonite. So I get this box of chocolates out that says I read the label three times because I read things for a living, so I'm good at this. Peanuts. Good. Walnuts. Good. Pecans. Good. Almonds. Good. I'm good. So I take some...my lips getting tingly. Oh, nuts. So I throw it in the trash. And all it took was a little nibble to close my throat. And some Benadryl is not helping. An expired EpiPen was my salvation. Yahweh was my salvation. But the expired EpiPen helped. And Shannon, of course, is like, did you read the label? And then I go, you know, my dad got you those chocolates. He may have mixed the tops. He's prone to do silly things. Um. And so she finds the chocolate in the trash, melts it off, looks at it, and says, that was an entire chocolate of cashews. It was a cashew cupboard. And it makes me think of this down the little. I mean, how lame would it have been to find out your pastor's dead? Not because he took the gospel to the Aborigines. No. Death by chocolate. And he's in the nitty gritty of your life that way. Do you see that? Can you look back this week when you praise him for his sovereignty continuing in your life, both in his knowledge of it and his power over it? It's the small stuff maybe you have to look at first to back up like Hannah does and says, all the way to creation, he's over it all. And here's the warning in verse nine. So if you think you're in control and you're keeping yourself...last part of verse nine, not by might shall a man prevail. I don't care how strong you think you are. There's something that can take you out. Maybe it's not a cashew. But not by your might shall you prevail. He's pointing you back to him. She's pointing us back to God, saying the godly ones he'll keep. And the wicked who boast and think they're all powerful. And they're all knowing they will be silenced. I mean, that's really the summation of sovereignty. It ties nicely in, if you like John 15, apart from me, you can do nothing. Because it's good sometimes when we run a thread from our Old Testament to our new and we see two different verses can say the same thing. Apart from him, you can do nothing. Not by your strength you'll prevail. Whatever it is you think you need to prevail in right now, it's not going to be in your own strength. It's going to be in going back to him and saying, God, I need you. Every circle of life and pattern and situation. You're sovereign over. So I need to deal with that.
  Last she moves from her present circumstances where she could praise God's sovereignty over and believe it in every aspect to look at the future. And that's where her hope comes from. Her love and her affection for God were raised with looking at his sovereignty and wisdom and power. And now in verse ten, she ends looking to the future of what God can still do and will do. And we know that because she uses 'will' five times in verse ten. Those who contend with the Lord will be shattered, against them he will thunder. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth. Nobody is going to escape his final judgment. And then this most interesting end. He will give strength to his king. It's interesting. Israel has never had a king. I mean, Hannah would have known about kings of other countries and lands and people groups around her, but it seems somebody whispering in her ear what's about to happen as they move from theocracy to monarchy? As God says, you know how I'm going to. I got a plan still working here. I'm going to use a man, a king to pull it all together. I'm going to take what is messed up right now in Israel, because there's everybody's doing right in their own eyes. So stick around for the rest of Samuel to find out who that is.  But she's looking way down the road saying he will give strength to his king. Because later on, the people want a king. But it's not his king. His king? Who could that be? And he will exalt the horn, that strength. It's going to be lifted up a name above all names that everybody will bow to. That's how strong he's going to be. His anointed and that word anointed is what? His Messiah. So, friends, here's a prophetic word from an unlikely preacher, Hannah, because it says in the New Testament that people long to look into the mystery of the gospel and in who this Christ would be. And they spoke of that which they didn't know, but it was the Spirit of Christ in them. So how beautiful it is to see this Hannah, who just a chapter ago seemed to be left behind in the dust and the ash heap, and now she is praising Yahweh with all of her heart, and her last words get to be her most memorable. Jesus is coming. She says it in faith. She says it in hope. There's a king who's coming to be the Messiah and exalted and strengthened. And he did come, but he didn't do the first time what he'll do the second time. He didn't set up a physical kingdom here. He was actually rejected in the eyes of man. The cornerstone, the rock on which if you fall, you will be crushed. But if you bow, you'll be lifted up. You'll be put back together. So he comes the first time with the good news that he came to die for sinners, not the righteous.
  So are you one of those sinners today that needs this good word from Hannah? That God does have a man and it's his Son, and he sent him to die for you. And you don't receive the benefits and the goodness by anything you could do. I hope you've seen that so far, that the great reversal in life isn't because that person, in their own strength, tried to prevail. It's because they abandoned all hope in themselves and put their hope in who? They put their hope in God. They put their hope in this coming King who's already come. His name is Jesus Christ. He lived a perfect life, completely fulfilled the perfect law of God, the holy God that you and I can't. And then to take away the sin of us who would believe he dies on a cross in our place, and he offers salvation to you today? If you would see yourself as needy and bow before him. If you are in Christ today, you have the same future hope that Hannah has that Christ will return. And even if your present circumstances you're going to, you're going to be working through those...you just would admit today. It's been tough. Life's been hard. I've experienced a lot of loss. He knows that. And he was powerful enough to stop it, but he chose not to in his sovereign wisdom and purposes in your life. But he hasn't left you without hope. Because if you're in Christ today, you have his Son. And so you have hope that's going to go into eternity. And so maybe you're in a valley of vision now and you need to look up. You need to see that maybe as that poem ended, it's quite a paradox that the way down is the way up. To be low is to be high. The broken heart can become the healed heart. The contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit. The repenting soul is the victorious soul. And to have nothing but to have Christ is to possess all. That to bear his cross is to wear his crown one day. Because in the daytime, stars can be seen from the deepest wells, and the deeper the well, the brighter that star shines. Take hope, Believer.  
  Let's pray. Father, we thank you that because you are our salvation that we find light in the darkness. We find life in our death. We find joy in our sorrow. We find grace in our sin. We find riches in our poverty. Help us to look up. May your holiness, may your wisdom, may your power, and absolutely your salvation in your Son be our faith and love and hope today to say as we're about to sing, that you are our salvation. The Lord is my salvation is the greatest hope any of us could say and walk out of here with today. And if somebody doesn't have that hope that they would turn to you. And by your Spirit's work, trust in your Son right now, we ask this in Jesus name. Amen.