This seems like a strange thing for God to do. Why would God close a woman’s womb, so that she
wouldn’t have children?
As I read that this morning, I saw that I had made a note on
the text. Some time ago, I noted that
Hannah’s barrenness caused her distress, and because of that, she vowed to God
that if He gave her a son, she would dedicate him to the Lord.
Hmm, and He did. And
this son turned out to be Samuel, one of the great men of the Bible. She then went on to have 5 other children,
none of whom we know anything about except that three of them were boys.
So what does this all mean, if anything?
To me, it only makes sense in this way:
God knew long before Samuel was born or even conceived what kind
of person he would turn out to be. So He
wanted Samuel to grow up in the Temple so that he would fully live that
life. His mother would never had made
that vow if she had had children like most women did.
What am I saying here?
I am saying that God knows human beings down to their cellular
level. He saw your future before you
were conceived in the womb.
Human beings are not like puppies or kittens, where if we
think we have too many of them, we can dispose of a few. We are created in the image of God, but I think
we often fail to grasp the full significance of that.
Theologians will say that that means that we have self-consciousness,
a mind, a soul, a will, a reason that can make moral choices. What they tend to miss here is how that image
binds us to God in ways we can’t or just don’t imagine. Our physical children are the best way for us
to understand in a very small way what this means. We see ourselves in them in so many ways, and
it binds us further to them.
We establish a child’s worth today by how far along it is
developed in the womb, or whether this child is actually born, and then how
functional we determine this person to be.
If a person is missing a few parts, we often regard this child’s
existence as pointless. But for a God
who sees the soul, I don’t think that is the case.
God has entrusted human beings with an incredible gift and responsibility. We get to create images of God all over the
world. It’s our choice. It is often not a conscious or even a willing
choice, but the result is the same. We
are entrusted with an incredibly precious gift from God: a human being.
Our society sees far more things as far more important than creating
and nurturing these human beings. After
all, what is life all about? Is it about
having careers where we work all day to make money to buy stuff and then we
die, and we evaluate our lives by how much money we made or how much stuff we
had when we died?
OR life is about loving and creating and nurturing human beings,
because our relationships with them teaches us about the One in whose image we
were created.
I had a career. I had
successes and failures. Nobody else cares
about any of that. Certainly not my
former employers. But what remains is
my family, and the people in whom I have invested my life, even casually as I
walk my dog or go shopping.
Our society marginalizes religion for the sake of inclusion
or whatever, but it deprives its people of meaning and substance. How would we know the enormous value of another
human being if God Himself hadn’t told us?
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