I Samuel 1:5 “but the Lord had closed her womb.”

 Why would God close somebody’s womb so that they can’t have children?  Does this happen a lot?

Twice in this passage of Scripture, it says this.  The very next verse repeats it.

Hannah was troubled by the fact that she couldn’t have kids.  She was even ridiculed for it. 

This caused her to pray to God about it such that she vowed to dedicate her firstborn son to God all the days of his life.

And that son was Samuel, who was a prophet of God who lead Israel, the last judge of Israel before it had a king.

If Hannah’s womb had not been closed by God, she never would have prayed that prayer, and Samuel never would have been dedicated to God, and Samuel would not have become the judge of Israel. 

In other words, God knew who this child would be and called him before he was even conceived.  That means also that God couldn’t have just taken anybody for that position.  He needed Samuel, who hadn’t been conceived yet, but He also needed Samuel to be dedicated to God so he could fulfill that position.

Psalm 139:16 says: “Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.”

We see unborn babies as potential human beings.  We decide whether they should live or not depending on the circumstances or the desires of the parents.

God already sees this child as to what they will do in the world.  In Hannah’s case, He even cornered her to make the decision to dedicate this child to Him, because God wanted her child to be judge over Israel.  And, apparently, this is not like an arbitrary choice where He could have taken anyone.  It had to be Samuel.  Or, to put it another way, only Samuel could have done what he did, what God wanted to be done in that generation.

This reminds me of Jephthah, another one of the judges of Israel.  What is particularly interesting about him was that he was born of a harlot and rejected by his (half-)brothers and thrown out of the family.

Today, we might have considered him a good candidate for an abortion.  Son of a prostitute, what kind of life is he going to have?  But it was he and not his brothers who delivered Israel from her enemies. 

And then there was Jeremiah, whom God knew before Jeremiah was even formed in the womb, and whom God consecrated and appointed before he was born.  (Jeremiah 1:5)  And the apostle Paul whom God set apart from his mother’s womb for his ministry.  (Galatians 1:15)

This tells me that human life is sacred, but way beyond how we are accustomed to seeing it.  It’s like God knows you so intimately, heck, even before you are conceived, He sees the end from the beginning, and your whole future is clear before His eyes. 

We cannot judge the value of a human life when it is still in the womb.  Or rather I should say, the value of that human life extends far beyond we might ever think. 

Let me end with this:

I read the story of a woman who conceived a child in rape.

She realized that nothing was going to take the memory away, whether she had the child or not.  She also realized that this child had nothing to do with what happened to her.  This was just a new human being who had a right to live and grow up just like she had.

So she had the child.

Turns out that this child, her love for the child and the child’s love for her, saved her life.  Saved her from sadness, depression, and the pain of what she experienced.  This child brought joy to her that she never thought she could or would experience.

Hannah’s story also tells me about God, a God who knew me before I was born or even conceived.  A God who shapes the circumstances of my life in ways I never would have imagined.