Hannah’s distress
Therefore she wept (1 Samuel 1:7).
It is all very well for me to write that there are times when God allows us to enter into difficult circumstances so that we have the opportunity to prove our faith in Him. But what about the genuine pain and distress which we experience? Hannah felt the bitterness of her situation, and the cruelty of Peninnah, Elkanah’s other wife (v. 6). (It was never in the will of God that a man should have more than one wife and Christianity re-established this principle; see 1 Timothy 3:2,12; Titus 1:6). One of the hardest of all Christian lessons is to display the features of Christ in painful and unjust circumstances. Yet it is precisely in those situations that the reality of Christ in the believer is seen.
Hannah’s story teaches us another important lesson. She was deeply distressed (vv. 7, 10,15), but she portrays vividly the experience we go through before finding peace and strength in the Lord Jesus. In any difficulty, there is always the temptation to solve our own problems. In today’s world, people are encouraged to be independent and to stand on their own two feet, to be assertive and to fight their own battles – to look after ourselves. As Christians, we should indeed be people who can meet our own responsibilities, but we do this under the Lord’s direction and with His help. The Lord Jesus was the most powerful man who ever walked on this earth, but He never did anything without reference to His Father in heaven. He spent early mornings and late nights praying over the work He came to do. The Lord’s pattern of life is vital to the Christian. When problems arise, we take them to the Lord in prayer and in the light of His word. We do not try to solve them in our own strength. Peter tried this approach and ended up denying the Lord Jesus. Hannah couldn’t change her circumstances, but her distress drove her to the Lord.
However, Elkanah, although he deeply loved his wife, did not understand the distress she was experiencing. He tried to remove it. In verse 8 he made the classic mistake of overestimating his own importance: “Am I not better to you than ten sons?” Sometimes husbands, even the most loving Christian husbands, can be over-simplistic in their reactions to the needs of their wives. Just to say, “It’s OK” is not enough. The Lord’s compassion brings Him into our circumstances. It is this compassion towards each other that should be seen in our marriages. Elkanah did not feel his wife’s pain in his heart and, consequently, was insensitive to her deep distress.
Christian husbands should never overvalue themselves. We must not dismiss the needs and experiences our wives can go through, and certainly not address them in terms of our own importance. A better response would have been for Elkanah to share the sorrow of His wife; in the words of Romans 12:15, to “weep with those who weep”. He should have supported her spiritually by understanding the situation and his inability to solve it. She should not have had to go to the House of God alone. He should have been by her side. In all relationships, we can be examples, but we are not solutions. We are to be sensitive to the needs of others, especially of those closest to us, and direct them to the Lord Jesus. There is no doubt Elkanah loved his wife. But at this point in their relationship his love was not intelligent or compassionate. This was to change!
