When Our Faith is Not Enough but Jesus’s is Plenty
When I first started drafting this, I wanted to write an analysis of Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1-10 because there’s some really good stuff there, but as I got going on writing it, the lesson morphed to something I’ve been learning recently from an excellent podcast called “40 Minutes in the Old Testament.” I recommend it if you want to see how the Old Testament connects to the New. This new learning comes in the idea of faith and how you and I really don’t have any, which sounds like a sacrilegious statement, but it really isn’t, and I’ll explain.
The Appetizer of Trial
We say our God works in mysterious ways, but that’s really not true if we peruse the annals of history; He has worked largely the same exact way throughout all time, following pattern after pattern of faithfulness toward His chosen people and judgment toward the wicked from Adam and Eve until now. The Bible details these patterns if only we look closely enough to find God in them instead of ourselves (which is incredibly important when studying Scripture). It’s the reason Israel had to make sacrifices and even the reason Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac; further, the how of Isaac’s almost-sacrifice is important in painting an early picture of the cross.
I could give a thousand examples, but I wouldn’t be able to flesh any of them out, so to make a long story short, suffice it to say that, though God’s ways and thoughts are higher than ours, He tends to do things in the same way through each generation almost as though nothing truly changes (Ecclesiastes 1:9-11). God does not change; nor do His ways. It is why His commands have lasted from Adam and Eve onward and remain relevant. He does and expects the same things form the beginning of time until the end. That is also why we can see trial after trial that refines and tests our faith just as Noah, Abraham, Moses, etc. experienced.
Scripture states thoroughly that trials are to refine faith (Proverbs 17:13, Isaiah 48:10, 1 Peter 1:6-7, etc.). Its purpose is to bring us to an obstacle we cannot overcome, to ask us to walk on water,, wait on God to make life from a barren womb, sacrifice a son, wage a siege with voices rather than weapons, and give up the things God has given us (as Hannah did Samuel). And because we are the same sinful beings as our forefathers, we tend to follow the patterns of faith in ourselves before we realize our faith is nothing.
As Abraham and Sarah laughed and then schemed to give themselves children with the help of Hagar, so, too, do we hear God’s promise and covenant and then seek to get ourselves to the end of the line, the blessing we so earnestly seek. Interestingly, all we do is create more hardship and trial for ourselves. Sarah and Hagar didn’t get along. Elkanah’s second wife, Peninnah, constantly berated Hannah. Eventually, Abraham and Sarah came to the end of their rope, realizing none of their options gave them the son that was to come from Sarah’s womb. Hannah poured out her heart before the Lord so intensely that Eli thought she was drunk. Then, and only then, did God finally act because, at the end of the day, trials are to refine us into purity, and that purity only comes from less of us and more of God. As John 3:30 says, God must increase, and we must decrease.
The Entrée of Grace
I want to first be clear that, as I’ve written before, coming to the end of our abilities does not necessarily preclude God will then move. I have few better examples for this than my own life. I’ve been at the end of my abilities for almost a year now; still, God has not blessed me with what I have been asking for in promise. We cannot allow a works-based theology to drift into our suffering in trial. God will move when He is ready because He is in heaven and does whatever He pleases (Psalm 115:3). We can reference the entire book of Job for that.
Though grace comes when God is good and ready, at the exact right time, its meaning cannot be understated because God is a God who desires to give good gifts to His children (James 1:17, Romans 8:32, Luke 11:13). The interesting dilemma, then, is trying to understand why we must wait for grace, oftentimes until after the worst pain we have ever experienced. I have many examples in my life of this again, but I think the Israelites will do well also.
Multiple times, God commands Israel to mark down places and events and to tell the stories of what He has done to generation after generation. Sometimes the Israelites follow through. Sometimes they don’t. But what changes when they do? Not a ton, really. They still sin; they still fall away; they still turn to idols. At the end of the day, no matter what good God did for them, when suffering came, it didn’t help them hold on to God bar a few extraordinary people (usually the prophets). Even Elijah fell victim to this innately human reaction when He called down fire to consume an offering, routed the servants of Baal, and then ran for his life to ask God to kill him. All this in the matter of weeks at most.
“ My heart rejoices in the Lord; my horn is lifted up by the Lord. My mouth boasts over enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation. There is no one holy like the Lord. There is no one besides you! And there is no rock like our God.”
Grace is best after a trial because that is when we truly recognize God’s goodness; personally speaking, I’m far too much of a human to really recognize and attribute goodness to God when I’m suffering so heavily, even though I can look back on specific moments of God’s grace before the trial. And I think we’d all be lying to ourselves if we said otherwise. The uniqueness of grace after trial is that it leads to joyous exultation. Note Hannah’s first lines of prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1-2 “My heart rejoices in the Lord; my horn is lifted up by the Lord. My mouth boasts over enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation. There is no one holy like the Lord. There is no one besides you! And there is no rock like our God.” Personally, I’m not praying that in struggle; but when God blesses me, you can bet that’s going to be the first line out of my lips. See, we don’t appreciate grace until it comes after we’ve seen discipline; that’s why it comes after the refining trial.
The Side of Pain
I don’t want to take away from what I’m getting at, but as a short aside, I do want to mention that sometimes God’s grace comes with pain. Abraham, after raising Isaac until he was a young man, was told to walk him up a mountain after a multiple week journey and sacrifice him. Hannah gave up Samuel to the temple and likely only saw him once a year. Sure, Abraham believed God would resurrect Isaac after he killed his son, but that doesn’t take away the pain he would have felt. Hannah was blessed with more children, but her firstborn still lived in the temple from the moment he was weaned. Some of that pain might be in realizing that God’s grace doesn’t make things perfect. As I wrote about for the on February 9th and 16th, we assume God’s grace is going to mean a flawless situation, a perfect relationship, whatever we need grace for. But God’s grace is meant to sanctify us just as much as His discipline is.
The Dessert of Faith
1 Samuel 2:9 says, “He guards the steps of his faithful ones, but the wicked perish in darkness, for a person does not prevail by his own strength.” This is an incredibly rich theological statement that seems simple and straightforward (and the best theological statements are just like this). God guarding the steps of His faithful ones is evident in Abraham’s story, when he does stupid things like offer his wife up to a king’s harem twice. Still, God reached out through these unbelieving kings to preserve Abraham and Sarah. Moreover, it is evident in His getting His Son to the cross to die so that we do not perish in darkness because, were it up to our strength and faith, we would all perish in darkness.
Ephesians 2:8-9 tells us that we are saved by grace through faith, and this not from ourselves. Instead, it is a gift from God so that no one can boast. Most of us read this wrong. It is not just grace and salvation that are God’s gift but the faith itself, for if we were able to act by our own faith, we could still boast in something. The point of all of this is that we can boast in nothing. Abraham and Sarah did nothing for God to choose them or bless them. Plenty of people pray like Hannah and don’t receive what they ask for. Jesus tells us of the mustard seed of faith not to say that a little bit of our faith can do great things but to point out that we don’t have even enough to do the smallest things.
The thing about faith is that if we had our own to rely on, we’d have none. We’d have no desserts, and that would be plenty just. Yet God is righteous and just, and, as Hannah prayed, a person does not prevail by his own strength but by God’s, which is credited to us in faith and righteousness as it was to Abraham.
I’ll leave you with God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15 to drive my point home. In covenants wherein both parties are to uphold a promise in contract, it was typical to split some animals in half and pass through them to acknowledge both parties will fulfill their promises. In this case, however, God passes through the animals alone because Abraham could not hold to his side of the covenant. Instead, God declares that His goodness and faith in Himself will be sufficient, and at the end, He credited it to Abraham for salvation, just as He does for us through Christ.