40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 1 Samuel 1:18-2:10 (Episode 225)

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

God remembers Hannah and she bears a son and names him Samuel. There are some interesting things about his name and the conversation she has with Eli as she dedicates him to the Lord. And Hannah prays a prayer previewing Mary's Magnificat. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are over there. Hey, if you like 1517 Podcasts, whichever ones you like, maybe it's just this one, but it's probably other ones, hey, you can do something to help us out that costs you nothing. You can go and rate and review them.

That means you can go to iTunes, give it a five-star rating, and just say a couple words like, I really enjoy this podcast. That's good enough. Throw it in there. Helps us out. Also, what helps us out is the good old word of mouth. Now, we know that you can't go word of mouth because you're not allowed to get close to people's mouths right now,

but you can do the virtual word of mouth where you can be naked faced and all and just share it on social media with your friends and so that that's still the best way so if you like the podcast tell all those people that like you that are your friends on social media they should check it out and you know we just started a new book so now's a good time for people to jump in so word of virtual mouth that's a good way to do it chad uh here we are in uh in first samuel we got through one episode we did not get through the first chapter but uh but uh we'll finish it up today and get into probably uh the birth of the man that the book is named after rightly or wrongly yeah that's right we got a good start we got through the first 18 verses so we got introduced

all the central characters at least in this first section and we we have a little bit of the of a discussion of the the theme that comes up to the which we're going to see uh laid out in greater detail in chapter two in hannah's song actually it's basically the theme that you see uh beginning here with with hannah herself which is the theme of the reversal where god is is as she will say she he lifts the the lowly and he puts down the exalted so it's the same thing that we see multiple times in the old testament of course in the new testament as well where god is flipping things upside down but that certainly is going to happen here with uh with the life of hannah So she becomes kind of the representative of Israel, because Israel at this time is

in bad shape, right? We saw that all through the period of the Judges. We had a little bit of a bright episode there with Ruth and everything that happened with her and Naomi and Boaz. But keep in mind that the opening chapters of 1 Samuel are set within the period of the Judges. So if you've been with us for a while and you travel with us through those dark caves of Judges where you have all sorts of horrible things happening. Well, you know that if we are

still in the period of the Judges, the beginning of Samuel, the things in Israel are bad, really bad. Most of the places are really bad. You've got rank idolatry. You've got these horrible kinds of immoral acts being performed. You've got people hiring priests to serve their own little private chapels, kind of mixing together worship of pagan deities with worship of Yahweh. you need at this particular time something that's going to give you some hope, something that God is going to give to Israel that's going to be a signal that he is going to begin to invert things, turn things right. And that's what we're going to have with the birth of Samuel, which we will get to here in a few more verses. But Hannah becomes kind of this emblem of Israel. She's

barren. She is oppressed. She doesn't seem to have any hope. And so what does she do? She cries out to God. And what does God do? Well, he works as he always does in this creatio ex nihilo sort of way, this creation from nothing sort of way. So that is the way that God prefers to work. He likes his preferred material with which he works is nothing, is lowliness, is the absence of something. That's when he can speak into existence that which he desires. So he is going to take Hannah's womb, which is kind of like the great void, and he's going to speak into that his creative word, and he's going to then make Samuel. Just like if you think of her as the emblem of Israel, he's going to speak hope into Israel with the birth of Samuel, and then of course later on

with the birth of David. Anyway, that's kind of the theme that we got introduced here, and we're going to see how it plays out here in the rest of the chapter. So our characters so far are Hannah. And she is a woman who's married to Elkanah, who also has another wife. And that other wife has several children. She's making Hannah's life miserable because she's always just basically rejoicing in Hannah's distress. And then we were also introduced to another major character in these first few chapters, and that's Eli. He's the priest, and he has two sons that we're going to meet in chapter two, both of whom are good for nothings. So that's where we're at here with verse 19. So what's happened is that Hannah has been praying to the Lord. Eli thought

she was drunk at first. Then he realized she was praying. She told him what her problem was, and he said, basically, may God give you your petition. So we're going to pick up with verse 19. This is what happens now. So they're at the tabernacle, by the way. So they arose early in the morning, and they worshiped before the Lord, and then after that, they went back to their home in Ramah. We were told that they were from Ramah in verse 1. Now, I'll throw this out now. It'll come up again when we get, I think, to chapter 7, but when Samuel grows up, interestingly, he doesn't stay right there. He actually moves back to Ramah, so that's where he's going to live. That's where eventually he's going to die, so presumably, he went then back to where his family was at

and lived there. So that became his hometown. But much later on, he's going to grow up under the tutelage of Levi in this kind of temple tabernacle atmosphere. So they go back to Ramah. And Elkanah, the father, the husband, says he had relations with Hannah, his wife, and the Lord remembered her. So literally, he knew his wife. That's kind of the intimate knowing that we pick up on in Hebrew all the time. And then the remembering, we have discussed multiple times. this is zakar this is when god doesn't remember in the sense of he forgot but he remembers in the sense that he's going to actively perform that which is good for his his child or his people so he remembered hannah in the sense that he actively gave to her that which she desired

so she gets pregnant conceives gives birth to a son and she named him interestingly she named him Samuel, I say interestingly, because she says, this is her explanation of why she named him Samuel. She says, because I have asked him of the Lord. Now, what's weird here is because the verb for ask is sha'al. And if you take that and you turn it into a name, the name would be Shaul, or as we say it in English, Saul. So the way she explains it is, I'm naming him this because he is the one that I asked from the Lord. I Sha'ald from the Lord. You would think that she would name him Sha'ul or Saul because she asked him from the Lord, but that isn't what she says. She names him Samuel. Now Samuel can mean a couple different things. It could be a

combination of the the el at the end is the name of god l and then the first part could be either a shortening of heard like shama l god has heard or it can be shame l that is the name god's name or the name of god something like that now i i i gosh i'm stealing this uh insight from from another commentator but i wonder if part of what's going on here is okay samuel is the one who is given by God because Hannah asked him from God, all right? So he is, if it were, the real Saul. So when you get a few chapters in and the people come to Samuel and ask him, and that verb ask is used over and over that chapter, ask him for a king, kind of implicit in that, I think anyway, is this idea that, hey, you already have the one that was asked from the

Lord. He's standing right in front of you. His name is Samuel, but he is really your Saul. He is the leader that I have given to you, but you don't recognize that. And so instead you're asking for another Saul, another asked from the Lord. And the one that you're going to get is going to end up being more of a nightmare than a dream. Yeah, that makes sense with, I got a couple of things a couple of things here one that makes a lot of sense with god's response to when they ask for a king and he tells samuel that they have not rejected him samuel but they rejected him god yes now this only makes sense if samuel was being rejected or had had a reason to feel rejected yes right and and so and so this works when he's like hey i gave you this guy that's

going to be like sort of is going to be my mouthpiece and they're like we want a king and god says hey don't feel like they rejected you they rejected me there's no reason to say that unless samuel has very good reason to feel like they've rejected him as the one that god gave them to lead yeah great insight yes yeah the other thing is just to go back is i love i know we've talked about this a million times but you got you just got to know it you know this i'm sure this is in chad's devotional which is coming out soon if it's not he missed it he blew it when hannah prays she specifically asked god to remember her this is this is the request and then after this we see and god remembered her and i only say that and i know we brought up a million

times that when god remembers he acts obviously israelites know this and this is why she prays this way, right? To be remembered. And I think that asking God to remember you is about as good a prayer as you can pray if you're in duress. And this is why when you have the thief on the cross and he says, remember me, it's the best prayer that you could pray. I mean, this is like a quintessential Hebrew cry out to God, right? I mean, he is not just saying to Jesus. And it's almost as if, and you can correct me, Chad, but when that man says, remember me when you come into your kingdom, there is an acknowledgement that that is God, because that's the sort of thing that Hebrews said to God, right? I mean, he's not simply asking a guy to remember him, not to

forget him, right? I mean, it's not simply that. It's not simply me telling my daughter like, hey i want you to remember what i told you about looking both ways before you cross the street when you go over to your friend's house it's not like that he's saying remember me in the same way that hannah is crying out to god to remember her which is to remember and to act right so when when you come into your kingdom do something about me and so every every time that you see this sort of thing appear i can't help but think about that guy and think if you can't get a lot of words out which I'm guessing you can't when you're being crucified. These are the words to get out, man.

Yeah, I mean, on the surface, it's probably the most seemingly preposterous prayer ever prayed in Scripture. I mean, if you put yourself there. So you're dying on the cross, and you're talking to the guy who's dying on the cross a few feet away from you. And, I mean, you both look just horrible. I mean, you just look like death warmed over. You're bleeding. You've been whipped. uh i mean it just is as bad as bad can get yeah and yet he turns to this other guy and says

remember me when you come into your kingdom in other words when you when you take your seat as king remember me so he's not only confessing that he believes in him he also is confessing that what's going to happen next is that the messiah is going to actually take his seat as king so it's a It's really a confession of the resurrection right there on the cross, which, given the circumstances, I think is probably the most phenomenal prayer that's ever been prayed, and that by someone who was equally condemned and someone who was just about to die himself. So it is, I mean, it's a, it's a phenomenal prayer from him. And yeah, no matter what our situation is, if we pray, remember me or remember my son or remember my wife, remember whoever, then we're basically asking God to be God for them to act on their behalf. to do what he's promised to do. It's good language for when you don't have words. Yeah.

Sometimes you don't know. You find yourself in situations or maybe you're just struggling with life or anxiety or whatever, and you don't even know what it is that you're asking God to do. Remembering you is a good default. Yeah.

Remember me. Lord, have mercy. These short prayers are often the best prayers. and how often do you i mean i mean maybe you can't do this off the top of your head chad but as i sort of audit the old testament i can't think of many times that people have requested that god remember them and he not oh yeah yeah i don't think there's any case where that hasn't happened right this seems like a prayer you're guaranteed to get an answer to yes exactly but yeah. So, uh, him remembering the Lord, remembering her, uh,

this is him being to her the same kind of God that he's always promised to be to her. So yeah, good, good stuff there. Okay. So back to back to verse 21, I guess she's asked him from the Lord. So she names him Shamuel. Uh, if, if you're wondering, by the way, why so often uh the names we have in hebrew don't sound anything like the names in hebrew when we speak in english it's because most of the time our names are not derived directly from the hebrew but from uh kind of a greek slash latin translational basis so we have a lot of we have a lot of names that when you say them in english and you hear them in hebrew it's like that doesn't seem really

closed at all well that that's the reason don't blow up my world chat are you telling me that jesus doesn't sound like jesus like people won't walk around saying jesus the way we do i think he had a british accent honestly so he probably doesn't sound like he's from texas or arkansas yeah so this is actually samuel is uh chamuel anyway he gets his name and then verse 21 says that the man elkanah he went up with all his household to offer to the lord the yearly sacrifice and to pay his vow so this is the following year and it says hannah stayed home she didn't go up because she tells her husband that i'm not going to go up i'm going to stay home until the child is weaned so not just that year but presumably for the next two or three

years and she says then i'll bring him up that he may appear before the lord and stay there forever so in other words she's going to keep her vow but because the first time that she brings him she's going to leave him there. She wants to make sure that he is old enough to be weaned and be able to eat the kind of food that three-year-olds need to eat. And so she said he's going to stay there ad olam in Hebrew. And I think we've talked about this before. This is translated forever, but when you see forever in the Old Testament, just kind of do a translation in your mind and think the unforeseeable future. Or in some cases, it's the unforeseeable past, because it's not kind of this eternity sort of word it just means a future i can't see so olam can refer to like

10 years from now or 100 years from now or it can refer to eternity but it doesn't doesn't mean eternity just means like a long time either and that can point forward or it can point backward as well like to ancient days or something like that so of course sammy was going to stay there forever because he's going to die and he's actually not eager to stay there forever because as i mentioned earlier he moves to rama later on but that's what hannah's communicating he's like she's like basically saying okay once i win him i'm gonna leave him at the tabernacle for a really long time and i don't know how long he's going to be there but that's where he's going to stay and her husband responds to her and says all right that's you know literally do what's good

in your eyes do what seems right to you we we encountered this phrase in judges a number of times, except this particular case is positive. So she is going to do what is truly good in not only her eyes, but the eyes of the Lord. So she's going to stay there until she weans him, and then she's going to bring him to the tabernacle. So that's what verse 24 says. When she weaned him, she took him up with her. Well, so it can either be, I think most English translations have a three-year-old bull. The Hebrew actually has three bulls, so a little bit of a textual issue there as to how we should translate that, but most translations actually follow the Greek translation there, so they have a three-year-old bull or three bulls, and not only that, but an ephah, a flower,

and a jug of wine, and brought them to the house of the Lord in Shiloh, although the child was young. so um yeah i don't know how to take that it would really be remarkable astonishing if a family like this had three bulls that they could sacrifice yeah i mean that would be i mean one bull would be a huge sacrifice uh i mean even ranchers these days like to ask them to give up three bulls that would be a huge sacrifice for a family like this to have three bulls so maybe they did uh Most translations say a three-year-old bull. Anyway, whatever it is, they have a bull and the flour and the wine. They bring these to the temple, and they slaughter the bull.

They bring the child to Eli, and then Hannah addresses Eli. Here's what she says. This is verse 26 through 28. She says, dedicated him to the Lord. As long as he lives, he was dedicated to the Lord, and he worshiped the Lord there. Now, this is kind of cool in Hebrew because, and I don't even know how in the world you can bring it out, but in those two verses, 27 and 28, the same Hebrew word occurs four different times, but it's translated in almost four different ways. So, the word is the one that I mentioned

earlier for being asked for her asking for this child at sha'al if i were it it goes something like this where she says that so she she prayed and the lord the lord granted to me my petition which i petitioned from him all right and therefore i have well esv has lent my translation has dedicated but it'd be something like therefore i have treated him as one who has been petitioned because it's the same word that's used there and then she goes on as long as he lives he is to be treated as one petitioned from the lord and he worshiped the lord there so all three all four of those occurrences are the same same root shaal to ask for but it's a little bit weird as to how to translate that you get you get the idea though basically what she's saying is

look i asked for this child and god gave him to me and so now that which i asked for i'm giving back and he's always to be seen as someone who is god's answer to my petition more or less so he's kind of like almost like to be treated as an embodiment of answered prayer so i asked for him here he is treat him in such a way that when you see samuel you're seeing the one that actually god gave to not just me but to to all of israel yeah this is uh this is like your primary text for baby dedications oh is it yeah i didn't realize i dedicated him to the lord so you know let's all do that um don't think that's great uh we're not we're not told to do that just fyi since this is your primary text uh this is not prescriptive uh to people of faith everywhere to dedicate their

children to the lord in this way uh it's a little bit different unless you uh go dedicate your baby you know at the church and leave them there so you're not doing that uh not the same not not applicable yeah right right i did not know that and i how long has it been around because i i mean i knew that happened somewhere somewhere around the time probably that they once you stop baptizing babies you all of a sudden you have this gift from god in your hands you're like i feel like i should do something with this oh i see and you're like i certainly can't baptize it so i guess i'll dedicate it so i don't i don't know man i don't i think it's only been around as long as it became uh you know common to not baptize them i don't think they were doing that

in until post-reformation uh okay okay all right yeah yeah well uh yeah the the best dedication if we're gonna dedicate then let's just hand them completely over to the lord in the waters of baptism baptize them and take them home uh don't don't dedicate them and leave them at the church yeah because you're gonna get calls from the church really quickly if you leave and don't have and don't halfway it don't dedicate it and take them home if you dedicate you gotta leave them uh if we're gonna be strict biblicist here yeah yeah dedicate them as well as a baptism that's the best way okay so that uh we've wrapped up chapter one chapter two begins with poetry and this is uh i don't i cannot remember if i mentioned this last time or not but uh structurally

if you look at the beginning of first samuel and then the end of second samuel they both they both have uh poetry at the at the at these bookends so we have hannah's we have hannah's poem here and if you look at the end of second samuel then you have david's poem so these i think probably were put put there as bookends structural bookends for for the two books of samuel and this particular prayer does really set the theme as i mentioned earlier for the rest of what we're going to be reading in in samuel now it's a it starts out kind of sounding like it's going to be a private psalm it's going to be a private prayer but right away it expands outward and you see you see this you see this all over the book of psalms as well you know where maybe

the the psalm will start out and it seems like it's an individual prayer you know lord i'm having this trouble or these people are against me or this situation is happening to me and the next thing you know it's a national prayer like you get and you move through 10 or 20 verses and what started out looking like it was going to be an individual petition is concerning the whole nation of the whole world that that tends to be the way that biblical prayer works and we see this in the case of hannah as well so she starts out by saying my 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. All right, so all these I's, first person, my heart, my horn, my mouth, I rejoice.

But as soon as you leave that first verse, everything is expanded, and you're looking not just at one particular Israelite woman's situation, but you're looking at a situation that applies broadly. And that's one of the reasons I brought up earlier that Hannah is sort of emblematic of Israel because her song speaks that sort of way. She starts out saying, okay, I, Hannah, am exalting. My horn is exalted. But then right away she leaves that to this broader focus because she is going to be this picture of Israel situation as well. And if you haven't picked up on it already in the language that's used in 1 Samuel chapter 2, this is the model that Mary used for the Magnificat, because these two, if you put them side by side, it's pretty obvious. In fact, it's

so obvious, I don't think it can be disputed, that the Magnificat, so Mary's psalm that she's saying there in the presence of Elizabeth, that is based upon Hannah's psalm. Now, Hannah's psalm may have also been based upon other psalms. We know, for instance, that some of the language is exact if you compare Hannah's song and Psalm 113. So, which came first, you know, maybe Psalm 113 was first, and then Hannah based her song off of it, or maybe Psalm 113 is based off Hannah's song. Wherever it came from, whether she wrote this on her own, whether she adapted it from another existing song, who knows? It really doesn't matter. In the end, it is placed on her lips as an expression of her her personal situation and then brought her to the national

situation so my heart exalts my horn is exalted my mouth speak my mouth literally is enlarged against my enemies which is a which is a pretty graphic image and i think what judging by some other occurrences of this particular image about the mouth widening or or enlarging probably what is trying to be communicated is i'm gonna gobble up my enemies so i'm not just like staring and opening my mouth at my enemies it's the idea of my mouth isn't large so that yeah i'm gonna eat them i'm gonna devour them he's not shocked like oh man just jaw dropped yeah yeah this isn't like you know the mouth a gate and astonishment this is more like i've got a i've got a big old burger here and i've got to like stretch my jaws to get the burger in that's the idea here so he's going

to gobble up her enemies which you know if that kind of language bothers you well welcome to the language of the psalms right because yeah that's what's happening all over the place we don't we don't always we're not always comfortable with biblical prayers and i think the reason is because we no longer pray biblically like we should we're not you know we have we kind of have uh have flattened out our prayers. We've maybe prettied them up. We've taken out some of the raw, rough edges. And so when we're actually exposed to the in-your-faceness of biblical prayer, we're often, our religious sensitivities are often shocked. Well, I wish it were the other way around. I wish that we were so familiar with biblical prayer that when we heard a lot of the

prayers that are prayed these days we're like yeah i need to toughen that up a little bit so she says uh that's what's going on so her mouth is large and oh by the way i forgot one thing so my horn is exalted horn in in hebrew is karen not like k-a-r-e-n q-e-r-e-n i feel so sorry for all the karens out there by the way let me just and all the chads yes what's up with this you know i i am deeply offended who came up with that as a designation i mean gosh i've always loved my name you know people are now first of all i did i had to go through the whole chad ordeal with uh the the election year of bush and gore when they were pregnant chads and dimple chads and hanging chads and all of that i felt like my name was just drugged through the mud

and now it's coming up again so all the karens out there i feel your pain let me just let me just say that that's right i know some real solid karens yeah i do too i do too yeah so this is like a q-e-r-e-n karen so we actually have this particular image used quite a bit in the bible horns are i mean they're they're used for in various sorts of symbolic ways but a lot of times they're used for like strength. And if you've ever, if you've ever watched wild animals fight with their horns, you understand that that is, that is the weapon of choice. That's their strong feature. And so a horn lifted up or a horn exalted, that is basically a metaphorical way of saying that I am being lifted up. My strength is returning and it's all the result of the work of

the Lord. So she is going to mention her charon, her horn, at the beginning. And then if you look in verse 10, at the very end of the psalm, it says that God will give strength to his king and will exalt the charon, the horn of his mashiach, of his anointed. So her horn is mentioned at the beginning the messiah's horn is mentioned at at the end and then she goes on to describe god in various ways she says we have we have three negatives right in a way right right in a row uh that the hebrew ain issues which means like there is no or there is not so there is no one holy like the lord there is no one besides you there is no rock except our god so this is her way of by negating one thing, she affirms the other. So no one's holy like God, no one besides

you, no rock except our God. And then she shifts attention a little bit to her enemies. And I can't help but wonder if maybe since Hannah's the one singing this, and I know it's not just about her, she has in mind her co-wife here. She says, boast no more so very proudly. Don't let arrogance come out of your mouth for the lord is a god of knowledge and with him actions are weighed little law right in there yeah yeah yeah a little law you mentioned uh in the last podcast you know that maybe one of the reasons she was praying silently is she didn't want word getting back to you know her co-wife uh about her request she's praying out loud now huh she's praying out loud now there's no more of this like praying in her heart and letting her lips move i i suspect she

like she found a soapbox stood on top of it and saying this at the top of her top of her lungs so stop your boasting cut out all of your arrogant speech because god knows and with him actions are weighed now she shifts into what i mentioned earlier this inversion this flipping upside down where those who seem to have power are rendered powerless and those who seem powerless are now lifted up by the lord and so uses he uses various contrast here between those who are kind of the haves and those who are the half nots like having power not having power having wealth not having well so here's what she says she says the bows of the mighty are shattered but the feeble gird on strength so that's one contrast that she she puts there then she goes on those who were full

now hide themselves out for bread, whereas those who were hungry cease to hunger. So she's used kind of the image of warriors, and then the image of eating, and then she goes on to use an image that's closer to home. She says, even the barren gives birth to seven, but she who has many children languishes or is forlorn now this almost came literally true because we know from a couple of chapters into first samuel that hannah ended up having a total of six children which is pretty cool so uh she who was barren in reference to her actually gave birth to six but in the in the poem she says the baron gives birth to seven probably of course of course you'd say seven right of course She has seven. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Since this came up, by the way, want to guess how many times

the name Yahweh is used in this poem? Of course, seven. You have all of this very intricate structuring of this poetry in the Old Testament. So yeah, of course, it's got to be seven. And then we have one of my, actually, this is one of my favorite Old Testament verses, just because it accords so well with what we talk about with regard to the theology of the cross. about how God is putting to death and making alive. He's putting down and lifting up. He is crucifying and resurrecting. The verse, verse six says,

the Lord kills and makes alive. He brings down to Sheol and he raises up. So the Lord kills and makes alive. Well, yeah, I mean, like if you, if you wanted to summarize the activity of God with regard to humanity, that's pretty much it. This is, this is just long gospel, man. uh the lord kills and he makes and in fact you might even be able to say

that you have the you have this the lord kills and brings to life but it there's a it's not just that he does both of these things like sometimes he kills and sometimes he brings life the the lord kills in order to bring to life the lord brings down to sheol in order to raise up like the one happens uh to have the other happen right it's not just that sometimes he does this sometimes he does that you never know like sometimes you can raise up sometimes you're gonna like cast down say no no he he kills he brings death to bring life yeah yeah i mean all of this is just uh all of this is laying the groundwork for good friday easter right yeah or we might even say that Good Friday and Easter was the pivotal event that gave rise to all of this. I

mean, it goes both ways. All of this was laid out. Everything about Holy Week was already fully prepared for by the time it actually happened. So when Jesus dies and then is resurrected, when he's killed and then made alive, when he's brought down to Sheol, he's brought down to the grave, and then he is raised up again. Well, once you see that particular pattern, the way it works when you have your kind of Emmaus road experience, then you begin to see it everywhere. And I suspect that's really what happened when Jesus was on the road with them. He was like opening up things like this to them to say, look, the pattern's everywhere. It's all over the place. This is the way that God works. He good Fridays and Easter. He good Fridays and Easter. He did that all of the Old Testament.

and then that of course becomes a pattern by which he still is active in our lives in our lives as well and hannah says it perfectly right he does one in order to do the other and then she's not done yet she goes on to for more of these contrasts he the lord makes poor and rich he brings low he exalts he raises the poor from the dust he lifts the needy from the ash heap i was looking at that hebrew word for ash heap earlier it actually sounds almost like ash heap honestly uh it's uh ash pot like ash pot i guess ash pot is the the hebrew word there and it's like basically what we might call the uh the uh the garbage dump yeah it's where you it's i think in nehemiah choose for like where they pile the dung so just picture the place where

you know if you got animals you gotta you gotta get rid of their manure so you gotta haul it off somewhere oh you dump at that same place and you know you're you're burning fires all the time so you gotta do something for the ashes so you have some place to take those and of course you can have a little bit of trash of course they didn't produce as much trash as we do but you got stuff you got to throw away well that all goes to the ash boat so when it says he lifts the needy from the ash heap that's the image you should have in mind just think of a the dump ground that's where he's lifting people up from. And he makes them sit with nobles and inherit a seat of honor. So that's the way she kind of finishes all of these contrasts. And so she's turning,

she's saying basically that the God of crucifixion and resurrection, the God who kills and makes alive is the God who takes the world and he flips it upside down so that his glory is revealed in crucifixion and where there seems to be no life is where he speaks life into existence once more. Yeah, you gotta love this language too of you know, being

taking the needy from the ash heap and making them sit with princesses and inherit a seat of honor. You could leave it right there. You could just say, hey, he lifts the needy from the ash heap and he makes them sit with princesses and you're like, oh, that sounds nice. You have this sort of explanation of how he's going to do that, which is inheritance, right? So you

inherit a seat of honor uh so this is uh this is uh obviously what happens when someone is adopted uh into the household of god right i mean we see this language in the new testament a ton where we have an inheritance right and we have an inheritance because of who our father is who our brother is nothing to do with who we are but everything to do with who these other people are who we've been brought into and so uh it's it's cool to see an inherent reference uh in an old testament song yeah i mean it's almost as if i was just when you were talking i was looking here at the hebrew it's a i mean it's really it's a regal image like the seat of honor i mentioned i think last time that eli was sitting in a kissay which usually the word for throne and that's what

used here so seed of honor or we could also translate this as like a throne of honor so it's like we he makes us he lifts us from the the stinking depths of the garbage heap to make us to where we are like sons of royalty yeah yeah when you inherit something you didn't do anything yeah you get it right like i mean so like an inheritance is is given to you by virtue of who your father is has nothing to do with anything you've done all you've been is born yeah that's that's the beauty of this like this whole story and of course her her poem as well it's this is all grace this is all this god acting out of sheer mercy in order to to bring this about let's let's jump we we're almost there let's jump to the end so we can finish off the

this uh this particular part so she says at the very end that the lord will judge the ends of the earth, he will give strength to his king and will exalt the horn, the charon of his Mashiach, of his anointed. Now, a couple of things here. First of all, there is no king in Israel right now. So this is prophetic in nature. This is looking forward to what is to come when there actually will be a king, and we're going to meet him very soon. But Saul and David and Solomon and Rehoboam and all the kings after them were nothing more than the preparation for the king that she's talking about, because she goes on to say, will give strength to his king and will exalt the horn of his anointed. And that is Mashiach, Messiah. So she is, Hannah is just like Mary the Magnificat

was singing about the very one that was now in her womb. Now Hannah is singing about the one who will be in Mary's womb. So she's looking forward to the birth of not just a series of Davidic kings, but to the king who will finally fulfill all the promises. So this particular poem, I mean, you can't get much better than Hannah's psalm because so much is packed into it. The Messiah, his kingship, the theology, the cross, crucifixion, resurrection, all of this in just 10 short verses. Yeah, awesome. And yeah, we are out of time.

So next week we will get into some more worthless fellows. Some worthless sons. Sons of Baaliel coming up next week. Yeah, really been getting a lot of this in the last couple months. A lot of worthlessness going on. So we will visit that next week. Chad, I'll see you then.

All right, see you then. We'll see you next time.