I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading. I had been using One Year Bible Online, but it was time for a change.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Samuel 1-3.

    I am very familiar with this passage and started reading it expecting to comment on Hannah’s prayer, or Eli’s response to it. Or, I thought perhaps I would comment about the disparity of how Eli’s sons turned out and how Samuel turned out, with a reference to how Samuel’s sons turned out much like Eli’s sons. Or maybe God would lead me to write about his call of the boy Samuel, giving him a message about God’s judgment against Eli’s family. However, the wording that caught my attention was from Hannah’s song.

Stop acting so proud and haughty!
Don’t speak with such arrogance!

Now my first thought was that Hannah was directing that quote against Peninnah. I still think that was, at least partially, the case. But, as I read on in Hannah’s song, I realized that she was warning against thinking that the way our life is now is the way it will always be. Hannah reminds us that God gives both life and death. She tells us that He makes some rich and others poor. And the key message she puts forth in her song is that the circumstances we are in now may not be the circumstances we will be in tomorrow. More importantly, it is God who determined the circumstances we are in and who will determine the circumstances we WILL be in. If things are going well for us now, it is not to our credit…and if things are going bad, it is not necessarily to our demerit. Whatever our state in life we are there because God has put us there. Let us use that state to bring glory to His name.