Recently while I was reading I Samuel I was struck by the description of one of the wives mentioned in the first chapter, Peninnah is referred to as Hannah’s rival. These women shared a husband, we can talk about the culture of the time, what was permitted and what was simply because of the hardness of men’s hearts but this post isn’t about polygamy, it’s about rivalry. The way the account is written gives us a pretty good idea of their lives. Verse 2 tells us that Elkanah (the husband and Samuel’s father) had two wives, “one was called Hannah and the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none.” The way this is written possibly, if not probably means that Elkanah married Hannah because he loved her but when she did not bear him children he married Peninnah so that he could continue his family name. In that day and age a woman’s glory was in her children, to be barren was considered to be cursed by God, it was believed to have been caused by sin and it was always a source of shame. Not only did Hannah have to share her husband with another woman, the other woman was present because Hannah could not give him what he and all of the culture required she give. Peninnah was Hannah’s rival because she was a constant reminder of what Hannah longed for but didn’t have. The true nature of rivalry is about unmet desires and unfulfilled hopes.
We all have a rival. The King James version calls Peninnah Hannah’s adversary, the same way that Satan is described later in the New Testament. We all have an enemy who believes his only purpose in our lives is to remind us of what is missing so that we will overlook what we have been given. The Bible is very clear, Elkanah loved Hannah. We can argue about this from our understanding all we want: “if he loved her then the children shouldn’t have mattered”, “if he loved her he would have never taken another wife”. These are statements that we can’t honestly make because we are speaking to a culture we don’t understand. The reality is that Elkanah loved Hannah, in fact, even with his other wife and the children that she had borne him, when it came time to sacrifice Elkanah always gave Hannah a double portion to show his love for her. The problem for Hannah was that she wore Peninnah’s presence the way a horse wears blinders, as long as this woman was there all Hannah could see was her lack of children.
Peninnah was a constant reminder, verse 6 says that Peninnah “kept provoking” Hannah “in order to irritate her”. The word that is translated as “provoking” is a Hebrew word that means “to thunder, make the sound of thunder, to rage, to tremble, to cause to tremble”. I don’t believe this word only describes Peninnah’s words or actions, it also describes Hannah’s heart. With every jab, every unkind look, every brazen action Hannah’s heart trembled as if thunder had struck within her heart again. Every time she saw the husband that loved her care for the children he had with her rival her heart shook again, every time she went for sacrifice with the entire family, to give thanks to God her heart was not moved by the love she was given it was reminded of the children she had not been able to bear. Some of us can hear the thunder of our rivals right now. Our hearts have reasons to be full but we can’t get passed the reasons they are not. We know that we are loved but we also wonder why there are still pieces missing. We can make a list of promises and kindnesses that have been fulfilled but somehow they still don’t make up for the list of unmet desires and unfulfilled hopes. Our rival knows the words that hurt the most, they are not just his favorite words they are his most fluent language.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to write more about Hannah’s story and the nature of rivalry but for today I want to simply share that unmet desires and unfulfilled hopes are an outcome of our fall into sin. We were created by God and for God and God’s design and desire for us was not just to give us our desires but that He Himself would be our desire. Jesus died for all so that all of us would have the opportunity to be redeemed to our original created image, to look like Jesus and to live no longer for ourselves but for the One who died and was raised. We are being transformed, all things are being redeemed but in this moment, in the here and the now, you and I, we both have some unmet desires we don’t understand and some unfulfilled hopes that work to make our hearts heavy. This doesn’t make us overlooked, unloved or even out of God’s will, it makes us pilgrims and strangers in a land that we were never meant to call home. We have to stop listening to our rival that tells us that something is wrong when we have less than we thought we would or even less than our hearts desire. Hannah’s story is not about dreams coming true it’s about learning how to keep our rivals at bay. It’s about learning to believe that we are loved even when we don’t see anything lovable about ourselves and not letting the thunder of our rivals quake our hearts so greatly that we begin to believe that the One who loves us defines us by what we lack instead of remembering that He is the very One that has called us “lacking nothing”.
I was recently deeply convicted and encouraged by Psalm 78:20. In its context it is the generation of Israelites that God brought out of Egypt and they said “When he struck the rock, water gushed out, and streams flowed abundantly. But can he also give us food? Can he supply meat for his people?” Can you imagine drinking water that is coming out of a rock and then saying “yeah, but we still don’t have anything to eat?” No matter what we lack today we are loved. Love covers a multitude of sins and it also, if we will allow it, quiets a multitude of rivals. My prayer for us today is that we will be confident that what we have been given is greater than what we might still be waiting for and that what can’t ever be removed would be given more value that anything that has yet to be fulfilled. We are all like Hannah in that no matter what is yet to be fulfilled we are, right now, as we are, with all we have and all we have not, loved. Rivalry attempts to make us concentrate on what is missing because even our greatest rival knows that his loudest thunder and deepest water cannot quench love. Whatever we might be waiting for or simply living without, today there is one thing I am sure of, we are loved.