Day 6: 1 Samuel 1:19–28

“I prayed for this boy, and since the Lord gave me what I asked Him for, I now give the boy to the Lord. For as long as he lives, he is given to the Lord” (vv. 27–28a).

Hannah named him Samuel. So precious. So prayed for. So deeply loved. And so very important to the Hebrew nation. “She named him Samuel, saying, ‘Because I asked the Lord for him’ ” (1 Sam. 1:20).

Hannah vowed to the Lord that she would give the son she asked for to the Lord and that the child would be a Nazirite. Can you imagine how much easier it would be to say those words about a hypothetical baby, before you held the child in your arms—before your heart became so wrapped up in his that you could hardly keep them separate? Imagine the emotion that filled Hannah’s heart. Elkanah went up to make the annual sacrifice. Hannah did not go along, but she told him, “After the boy is weaned, I will take him and present him before the Lord, and he will live there always” (v. 22).

And that’s just what she did.

After he was weaned, she took the boy with her, young as he was, along with a three-year-old bull, an ephah of flour and a skin of wine, and brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh (1 Sam. 1:24).

Hebrew mothers, according to the accounts recorded in the Apocrypha (2 Mac. 7:27), customarily nursed their children until they were about three years old. I cannot imagine a more difficult age to tear myself away from a child. Still young enough to be such a baby! Old enough to question why. I cried the first time I let mine go to Mother’s Day Out for half a day!

If Hannah mustered up the strength to take him there, you would never expect that she could walk away and leave him. In fact, these days we would question such a mother’s love for her child.

Oh, but God had a plan. A marvelous plan. He allowed Hannah to be childless so that she would petition God for a child instead of assuming it would be the normal result of marital relations. He also allowed Hannah to be deeply desirous of a child so she would dedicate him entirely to the Lord. He sovereignly planned for His word to come through Eli at the temple so that she would return him to the exact place where she made the vow. Why? Because God had a plan for Samuel that was far more significant than even the most loving set of parents could devise.

Surely while nursing him, Hannah looked into the face of her precious son, and with love overflowing, rehearsed the faithfulness of God in his tiny ears. No doubt he was weaned to know he was appointed to grow up in the house of the Lord. What did the child do when she took him there? “He worshiped the Lord” (v. 28). The Hebrew word is shachah. The Complete Word Study Old Testament tells us that “shachah was not used in the general sense of worship, but specifically to bow down, to prostrate oneself as an act of respect before a superior being.”6

I recall a scene, engraved in many of our memories, of a tiny boy stepping forward from his grieving mother, saluting the flag-draped coffin of a man who was not only his daddy but the President of the United States. Imagine another scene: A tiny three-year-old boy, still with creases of satiny baby skin around his plump little thighs, bending his knee and bowing before El Elyon, the sovereign God of all creation. How precious this child must have been to God. How in the world could a child that age have such respect for the God of the universe? We get a clue from Hannah’s prayer of praise, found in 1 Samuel 2:1–10 . . .

“There is no one holy like the Lord; there is no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God” (v. 2).

Samuel learned faith from his mother—a woman whose faithfulness evidenced her faith, a woman with compulsory praise on her lips. She met painful sacrifice with a song.

God does not ask of us that we take our children to the temple and leave them there to be reared by priests, but we must give them to God in other, equally important ways.

Remember the faith of Hannah. She sought God in her deep need. She made a vow that, by its very nature, was either a deep commitment or a hollow mockery. Then she fulfilled her vow with a mother’s sacrifice.