Hannah kept her vow. After her child was weaned she took him
up to the temple and offered him to the Lord to serve there with the priest,
Eli. She was vindicated. Her desire was simply to have the stain
removed from her life, the stain of barrenness which suggested there was
something wrong with her, that she was unacceptable to the Lord. He had answered her prayer and her response
to that answer was praise and boy, did she know how to praise the Lord. Her praise is based in His sovereignty and
Her vindication, justice delayed was not justice denied. Are we as effusive in our praise as we are
bitter in our anguish? There should be a
correspondence between the two. Our
thankfulness should be analogous to our complaints. It is difficult for us, in
a society that doesn’t value child bearing in the same way, to understand fully
the implications of barrenness of this time.
Hannah’s prayer should help us to empathize with her former plight and
guide us in our own thankfulness when our situation is reversed.
What are the “the things that are God's”? The answer can be found in the way Jesus
approaches the question of taxation.
When Jesus holds up the denarius He asks a simple question, “Whose
likeness and inscription does it have?” That question then gives us the answer
to what is God’s, that which bears His likeness and inscription. The coin had the image of Caesar upon it and
in the same way, our lives are owed to the one whose image we bear. The goal of these hypocrites, people who seem
one way but are actually another, was to have Jesus arrested by the civil
authorities for speaking against Caesar and civic responsibility. They were prompted by yesterday’s parable,
the one about the wicked tenants. If we
apply that parable to this situation we see that they were more prepared to pay
tribute to Caesar than the one who owned the vineyard, they condemn themselves
according to the parable in this action.
I suppose Matthias was likely a very good man and a lover of
Jesus. He was there from beginning to
end, from the baptism of Jesus by John to the ascension. He hadn’t been chosen by Jesus as one of the
twelve but he was, nonetheless, present for all Jesus’ major life events,
including, we presume, a witness to the resurrected Jesus as well. Now, he is chosen to be one of the apostles,
first as a nominee and then by the lot falling on him. What a day in his life this had to have
been! Afterwards, Scripture is
completely silent as to what became of the man, just as it is with Hannah. Paul seems to have been the man chosen by God
to fill out the full complement of apostles, representing people like us, born
out of time, not eyewitnesses to any of the events of Jesus’ life but whose
faith is no less complete than those who did.
Our shame too, like Hannah’s, has been taken away and God has done something
sovereign in our salvation for which it is appropriate to give Him effusive
praise.
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