Finding Our Way In The Dark

At the beginning of the book of 1 Samuel, we find Israel still entrenched in their seemingly endless spiral of sin. The judges God raised up to lead His people failed to lead them toward a lasting zeal for His Name, and in these opening chapters, we come to see that this failure reached even further in the nation’s leadership. The priesthood itself, God’s own intercessors, had turned from doing what was right in God’s eyes to doing what was wrong, chasing after the desires of their own hearts instead of God’s, from sleeping with prostitutes to taking God’s share of the people’s offerings, and so living like the nations around them and not as those God had set apart to serve as Israel’s spiritual leaders (1 Sam. 2:12-36).

It is upon this scene that we first meet Hannah, a simple woman of righteous faith, who sought to walk in obedience to the LORD even amidst Israel’s spiritual darkness, just as Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz had done in their own times before. Barren, but accepted by God, even as Eli the priest – the very man who blessed Hannah as she petitioned with God for a son - is rejected, by the very God who accepted her. God opens Hannah’s womb and gives her Samuel, and, at the very same time, prepares the end of Eli’s line.

The cycle of the judges is soon to be over, for God is at work, to shift the people of Israel towards what He has always intended them to be. For while this is a time that God was not speaking as He had during the times of Joshua and Moses, this is still certain: He has not abandoned His people.

And out of this silence, when “the word of the LORD was rare” and “there was no frequent vision” (1 Sam. 3:1), God calls Samuel and begins to speak again, to this boy, who both hears and listens. A priest, a prophet, and the last judge of Israel, for Samuel is the inaugurator of a new era within Israel: they will have a king, and though the people first choose Saul, who proves no different than the men who came before him, God has a different name in mind, of the one who will finally be a man after God’s own heart: David, of the line of Jesse, of the tribe of Judah.

Jesus would come from this same royal line, after another period of God’s silence that would stretch for 400 years after the prophet Malachi proclaimed the coming of the LORD and the forerunner who would prepare His way. As Samuel inaugurated a new era within Israel by pointing to David, so John the Baptist would prepare the way for the new thing God was doing through His Son Jesus, the Shepherd King who would save not only Israel, but the world, from the cycle of sin we have been spiralling down since we turned from God in the Garden Eden.