The most important relationship in a family, in raising godly children, is not the relationship between the parents and the children, it's the relationship between the mother and the father. What you communicate to your children by your relationship dominates their thinking. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. It's been said that godly mothers write on the hearts of their children what the world's rough hand cannot erase. That's true of a particular mother in the Bible, and that woman is Hannah. John MacArthur takes a look at her life story today on Grace to You, and with Mother's Day just around the corner in the United States and Canada, John's timely message will show you how the Bible honors moms and motherhood. The study John is about to begin is titled, God's Design for a Successful Woman. Of course, the unique role that God designed for women is not a universally popular topic, but the truth is, in recognizing and pursuing the roles God designed for us, there's great freedom and fulfillment.
So, if you have your Bible, turn to First Samuel, chapter one, and follow along as John begins the lesson. If you go back in our history, you can read some very interesting tributes written to mother. If you happen to pick up some of the things that were written around Mother's Day at various times, you get an insight into how people felt about motherhood in those days.
I came across an interesting one by a man named W. L. Caldwell, written in 1928. Listen to what he said about Mother. Well may we pause to pay honor to her who, after Jesus Christ, is God's best gift to men, Mother. It was she who shared her life with us, when as yet our members were unformed. Into the valley of the shadow of death she walked, that we might have the light of life. In her arms was the garner of our food and the soft couch for our repose. There we nestled in the hour of pain, there was the playground of our infant glee.
Those same arms later became our refuge and stronghold. It was she who taught our baby feet to go and lifted us up over the rough places. Her blessed hands plied the needle by day and by night to make our clothes.
She put the book under our arm and started us off for school. But best of all, she taught our baby lips to lisp the name of Jesus and told us first the wondrous story of a Savior's love. And then he went on to say, the pride of America is its mothers. There are wicked mothers like Jezebel of old. There are unnatural mothers who sell their children into sin. There are sin-cursed, rum-soaked and abandoned mothers to whom their motherhood is the exposure of their shame. I am glad to believe, however, that there are comparatively few in this class."
End quote. Few, few unfaithful mothers, few sin-stained mothers, few shameful mothers, maybe few in 1928, but not so few today. What is the state of motherhood in America?
Are mothers still the pride of this land? Caldwell also said that no nation is greater than its mothers, for they are the makers of men. He's right, you know.
He's right. They are the makers of men. Paul wrote to Timothy and said women will be saved in childbearing, 1 Timothy 2.15.
What did he mean? He meant that the saving role, virtue, task, goal of women is to raise godly children. While on the one hand, woman might bear a stigma for having led in the fall in the Garden of Eden, she reverses that stigma by leading in the producing of a godly generation through spiritual influence to her children. But it all seems so out of date and so irrelevant to women who have decided that the real role of a woman is a career. Motherhood in our day has been frankly devastated.
It is mocked. Marriage is desecrated. Parental responsibility is shirked.
Children are massacred by abortion. Mothers exercise selfishness in their work and in their play to fulfill their own satisfaction with small regard for their children, whom they largely ignore. But God's standard hasn't changed, and it is fitting that we take another look at what God intends motherhood to be, the highest calling a woman will ever know. The godly women, Paul said to Titus, are to teach the younger women to be lovers of their husbands, lovers of their children, chaste, pure keepers in the home. A widow to be put on the list, according to 1 Timothy 5.10, was one who raised children, who brought up a godly generation. That's been God's standard all along.
This is the design for women. It all started with Sarah, who was a gift from God to Abram. Sarah, a model of faith.
Sarah, a model of obedience. Sarah, who given a child late in life, nonetheless demonstrated the faith and the sanctity of life that makes marriage and motherhood what it ought to be. There was the example of Rachel, whose last words before her life passed from her body were at the giving of birth to one of her children, whom she named Ben-Oni, a child of grief. There was Jacobed, the mother of Moses, and Miriam, who fought for the life of that goodly child who was fair to God. Deborah, called by God a mother in Israel. Ruth, the gentle, sweet spirit who loved and sacrificed and was blessed to be the mother of Obed, who bore Jesse, who bore David, of whose seed the Messiah came. And there was Elizabeth, that sweet, gracious mother of the greatest prophet who ever lived, John the Baptist.
Of course, there was Mary, the mother of our Lord. But when the Bible details the honor due to a mother, no more detail is given to anyone beyond Hannah. We meet her in 1 Samuel 1.
Hannah, her name speaks of her beauty. It means grace, and indeed she is the emblem of the grace of womanhood. She became a mother by faith. She first appears, as 1 Samuel opens, as a childless woman. Then she becomes a mother, the mother of one of the greatest men who ever walked the earth, Samuel.
And as you see the account of the birth of Samuel, you note the profile of a godly mother. As the book opens, it is the period of the judges. There is no king in Israel as yet. It is a time of turmoil.
It is confusion. It is a time when Israel is vulnerable to the Philistines. It is a time when they are debauched morally. It is a time when their religion has grown cold.
And it is a time for a great man to rise and take the leadership of the nation, a period of religious degeneracy, of political distress. With the death of Samson, the country was divided and leaderless. The Philistines were hanging on the edge. The priesthood was corrupt.
Moral scandals were rampant among the family of the priests. The nation was weak. The nation was impotent. And the worst of all, chapter 3, verse 1 says, word from the Lord was rare in those days, and visions were infrequent. God even had nothing to say. The nation needed a great leader, a great man, and God needed a great woman to shape that great man. And Samuel, one of the greatest men who ever walked the earth, was not only the product of the work of God, but the product of a godly mother.
And she gave to her nation and the world the greatest legacy a woman can ever give, a godly child. Verse 1 starts, Now there was a certain man from Ramathaim-zaphim, from the hill country of Ephraim, that is around Mount Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zoph and Ephraimite. And he had two wives. The name of one was Hannah, and the name of the other Paninah. And Paninah had children, but Hannah had no children. He was married to two women, Paninah and Hannah.
Hannah, by the way, meaning grace, was a common eastern name. As we are introduced to this story, I want us to note three things that profile a godly mother. She had a right husband relationship, she had a right heavenly relationship, and she had a right home relationship.
Those three things stand out and profile her for us. First of all, let's consider her right husband relationship, and may I say that this is at the very outset essential for you to understand. The most important relationship in a family, in raising godly children, is not the relationship between the parents and the children, it's the relationship between the mother and the father. What you communicate to your children by your relationship dominates their thinking. They are learning about human relationships from the two of you. They are learning about virtue, they are learning about sin, they are learning about love, they are learning about forgiveness, they are learning about sympathy, they are learning about understanding, they are learning about compassion.
They are learning about virtue, they are learning about honesty and integrity, they're watching. And far more important than your relationship to your child in the long run, long run is the relationship you have to your spouse that's projected to your child. And so at the very outset, the Word of God is clear to tell us the relationship between Hannah and Elkanah. Now first of all, let me say that it wasn't a perfect relationship. So ladies, you want to start out by realizing you're not married to a perfect man.
That's a given. I want you to understand what the Scripture says. Hannah was married to a polygamist. Now I don't know how that would sit with you as a woman, but I can guess.
And I can also tell you that it didn't sit any better with Hannah than it does with you. To have a rival in the house, to have another wife in the house, and worst of all, she is producing boys and girls and Hannah has none, and so she is the unfruitful, unproductive wife who cannot give to her husband that which her heart most longs to give. He wasn't a perfect man. The very fact that he was a polygamist indicates his imperfection. But understand this, this is a primitive time, and polygamy was a part of human culture, never God's design. Never God always designed one man, one woman, leaving their parents joining together for life and becoming one flesh from Genesis on. But human society was rife with polygamy, and when the truth of God came into human society, it was so pervasive, polygamy, that it took time to root it out, much like a missionary going today to a foreign field giving the gospel to a civilization of people and finding that those people turn to Christ but are embroiled in all kinds of polygamous marriage relationships that take several generations to untangle.
So it was in the ancient world. And so, Elkanah created for Hannah a very difficult situation. We don't know the details, but it may well have been that he went on to marry Peninnah because of Hannah's barrenness and in order to produce a generation who could then possess his inheritance. And so, that would even make the pain deeper because Peninnah came to do in that union what Hannah could not do. Not a perfect relationship, but nonetheless a good one, a right one.
Let me show you why. First of all, they shared worship. Now this man, Elkanah, verse 3 says, would go up from his city yearly to worship and to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts in Shiloh. It doesn't mean he went once a year. It meant that every year he went. In Deuteronomy, chapter 16, verse 16, explains the prescription three times a year. Yes, it was the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths. The man had to go to the place of worship. In this particular time, in 1 Samuel, the place of worship was at Shiloh because that's where the Ark of the Covenant was located before it was transferred to Jerusalem. So, at least those three times a year, all males had to go and do that.
He did that. He was a worshiping man. And he went and offered his sacrifice to the Lord. It notes in verse 3 that the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, who Eli being the high priest, were also priests to the Lord there. They are evil men and they are set in contrast to Elkanah. Elkanah was a godly man and a true worshiper, and the priests' sons, the high priests' sons themselves were evil, wicked men as we shall see. This was a worshiping man. She had a believing husband, let's put it that way. She had a devout husband.
She had a worshiper. He was not perfect. He was a polygamist, and that was a violation of God's law. And any time that law was violated, there were very negative consequences, and it always produces pain and heartache. And they had that in that family.
You can believe it. And Peninnah rubbed it in that she had children and Hannah had none. But in spite of all of that, he was a man who believed in God, a man who worshiped God. I encourage you, as I always have, young ladies when you get married, marry one who loves the Lord Jesus Christ because you need that spiritual headship.
Hannah had that. And in spite of the difficulty of that polygamous relationship, she had a godly husband who was a spiritual leader. In contrast to Hophni and Phinehas, who though they were priests and sons of the high priest, were as fleshy and vile and debauched as men could be.
And here is the first aspect then of a right relationship between a husband and a wife. They worship together. They worship together.
Basic, basic. Your worship is vital in projecting godliness to your children. That's why way back in the Pentateuch, the first set of books written when God was establishing the laws for His people in chapter 7 of Deuteronomy, He said, When the Lord your God shall bring you into the land where you're entering to possess it, the land of Canaan, and shall clear away many nations before you, and He names the nations. When the Lord your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You'll make no covenant with them, show no favor to them. Then listen to this, verse 3, You shall not intermarry with them. You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods. Stay away from mixed marriages. Next to the last chapter of Joshua in verse 11, repeating the same injunction, Take diligent heed to yourselves to love the Lord your God, and if you ever go back and cling to the rest of these nations, these which remain among you, and intermarry with them, so that you associate with them, and they with you, know with certainty that the Lord your God will not continue to drive these nations out from before you, but they will be a snare and a trap to you, and a whip on your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which the Lord your God has given you. If you go back and intermarry, you're going to lose everything.
Don't do that. That same injunction is repeated at a later time in Israel's history when they came out of captivity to rebuild, namely Ezra 9, verses 10 to 15. You come into the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians, Paul says in chapter 7, Marry only in the Lord. In 2 Corinthians 6, 14, do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what concord has Christ with Satan?
What fellowship has light in darkness? And how can parents, Ephesians 6, 4, raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord if one of them is an unbeliever? Now bless God by His grace. He can overrule the fact that you have an unbelieving husband. It may well be that when you married you weren't a Christian either, and you've been drawn to Christ and your husband has not.
It may well have been that you married an unbeliever as a Christian, knowing you were doing it and God in His grace can overrule all those circumstances. But nonetheless, His purpose is that the godly marry the godly for the sake of the next generation. Starting out then, they had a shared worship, so vital.
How you worship communicates volumes of information to your children. Are you faithful? Are you faithful to come and meet with God's redeemed people week in and week out? Are you faithful to make the Word of God the priority in your life? Are you faithful that prayer should have a high place in your experience spiritually?
Are you faithful to live what you affirm that you believe? In other words, the attitude of your spiritual devotion is communicating a Christianity to your children that they will have a hard time overcoming if it in fact is less than it ought to be. Secondly, they not only had a right relationship in their marriage because of worshiping together, but secondly, they shared love. Notice verse 4. And when the day came that Elkanah sacrificed one of those times when he took the trip to Shiloh, he would give portions to Peninnah his wife and all her sons and her daughters, but to Hannah he would give a double portion for he loved Hannah.
Stop at that point. He didn't love Peninnah. That's the implication. Peninnah was there to produce the children that Hannah couldn't have. Peninnah was there to create a future for his family, his inheritance. But Hannah was the one he loved and he made no attempt to hide that. And when they went to offer their sacrifices, I don't know if you know how that worked, but they would go to offer peace offerings and they would offer the offering and the altar there. The priest would take a small part, but most of it would come back to the family and they'd have a feast. And when passing out the feast, he would give a double portion to Hannah because she was the one he loved.
This was a gesture in the east to an honored guest. She was the one who had his heart. And it was not just the love of emotion, it was the love of kindness and the love of thoughtfulness and the love of sacrifice, the love of honor. He loved her. And this love was her security.
Man, if you don't know it yet, you ought to know it. A woman's security is in your love for her, not in your bank account, not in a fancy house, not in new furniture, not in a retirement plan. A woman finds her security in your love, and it needs to be demonstrated so frequently that there's never a question about it. People wonder often why women tend to be suspicious of their husbands and wondering if they might have some other attraction or be fooling around with some other person, and the reason is because it's so deeply rooted in a woman that her security is in the love of her man.
And that's the way it was with Elkanah and Hannah. And she was secure in his love because he took the time to demonstrate his love to her in very public ways, such as he had done at this feast in front of everyone. They shared love and thus she was secure in that love. And she needed that, believe me, when he had another wife.
No, you wouldn't like that one bit, and neither did she. And she needed that security of love. Isn't it interesting how God in His providence balanced things? Hannah had the love of Elkanah. Penina, who did not have his love, had the children that God allowed her to bear to receive their love.
God was gracious to all of them. They shared love. Vital in being a godly mother is sharing the love of your husband so that there is a security there, there is a warmth there, a trust there, a quietness there. There is the absence of anxiety and frustration so that the woman can give herself to the children and not always feel that she's got to be a beauty queen to win the affection of her husband.
Once the husband with his love wraps that woman up and secures her, then she can give herself away to her children and not have to feel that she must always fight the uphill battle to attract her husband. Thirdly, they shared another thing. They shared feelings, shared worship. Their relationship to God was a common one.
They shared love, and they shared feelings. Look at verse 6. Her rival, however, that's Penina, would provoke her bitterly to irritate her because the Lord had closed her womb. It said that also at the end of verse 5, twice says the Lord had closed her womb.
What it's trying to say is this isn't Hannah's problem. The Lord did this. The Lord closed her womb. And this Penina would harass her, you know, that kind of thing. Too bad you can't have any children, Hannah, just sticking the knife in.
And it happened year after year. As often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she would provoke her so she wept and wouldn't eat. Here she goes to the big feast. Elkanah is sympathetically, lovingly giving her a double portion. She won't eat anything because on the other side of the table, Penina is really rubbing it in that she has no children. The response, I would not want to be in Elkanah's position, trying to pull these two women together. But Elkanah, her husband said to her, Hannah, why do you weep?
And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not better to you than ten sons? They shared feelings. Boy, he read her feelings.
And he didn't pontificate. He asked a question. Why are you doing this, Hannah?
Haven't I been better than ten sons to you? Such a sympathetic heart. Some of you women are writing this down because you want to remind your husband about that. I understand that.
We can be very insensitive, very insensitive, and we can be very quick to give immediate answers to everything without hearing the heart. Not Elkanah, bless him. He knew the conflict, and he knew the conflict was intensified from Penina's side, and he knew that it was deep and painful, and it was a hard, hard place for her to be. And so he was tender and sympathetic and thoughtful, and he felt her feelings in his own heart. Why is this a godly woman?
I'll tell you, the soil is right to produce a godly mother. She has a right husband relationship. They share worship, the deepest dimension of human life. They share love, maybe the next deepest dimension of human life. They share feelings, maybe the next deepest dimension of human life. They have a deep relationship.
They move together in the presence of God with one another and over the issues of life that involve other people. That's John MacArthur, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. Today he launched a study here on Grace to You called God's Design for a Successful Woman with a look at the life of a woman named Hannah, someone who understood and embraced God's design for her life. Well, there's still a lot more practical truth to glean from the life of Hannah, and we'll get back to that tomorrow. But if you want to listen to today's lesson again, or if you'd like to let a friend know about the current series, God's Design for a Successful Woman, the audio and the transcripts are available for free at our website. So get in touch today. Our web address is gty.org. And remember, besides the messages on God's Design for a Successful Woman, you can download more than 3,600 other sermons by John, all of them free of charge.
So start listening and learning today when you visit gty.org. And keep in mind that right now nearly everything we sell is available at 25% off the normal price, including the MacArthur Study Bible. So if you'd like to purchase a Study Bible, or perhaps one of John's books like One Perfect Life, or The War on Children, or one or more volumes of the MacArthur New Testament Commentary Series, take advantage of the reduced prices when you call us at 855-GRACE or when you visit the website gty.org.
The sale ends this Friday, May 9th, so contact us as soon as possible. You can call during regular hours 855-GRACE or go online anytime at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson with a question for you. How can a wife or mother make her home a place of comfort, peace and joy? Consider that when John returns with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Tomorrow's Grace to You!
