Standing in the Gap

Hannah went to the temple year after year with the same ache. Her husband Elkanah loved her — but Peninnah, the other wife, had children, and Hannah did not. The annual pilgrimage became an annual wound. Scripture says the LORD had closed her womb, which made the prayer she was about to pray both more desperate and more honest: she was going to bring her sorrow directly to the One who had allowed it.

At the doorpost of the temple, she began to pray. She was weeping so hard and her lips were moving so silently that the priest Eli assumed she had been drinking. He told her to put away her wine. And Hannah said — with a dignity remarkable given what she was carrying — "I am a woman troubled in spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the LORD."

Eli, realizing his mistake, spoke a blessing over her. She went and ate. Her face was no longer sad. She had laid down what she had been carrying, and even before the answer came, something shifted. The LORD remembered her. She conceived. She named the son Samuel — "because I have asked for him from the LORD" — and she kept her vow, bringing him back to the house of God when he was weaned.

The palal that changed Israel's history started with a woman who was too undone to speak out loud.

Moses had been forty days on the mountain when God told him what was happening at the base of it: the people had made a golden calf. God announced His intention to consume them and start over with Moses. And Moses did not sit back and accept the offer. He stood in the gap.

He argued. He appealed to God's own reputation: "Why should the Egyptians say, 'With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth'?" He appealed to the covenant: "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self." He did not minimize what the people had done. He simply refused to stop interceding.

And the LORD relented. The judgment was stayed. Not because the people had repented — they hadn't even heard what was happening. But because one man had stood between them and the fire, stretched out his hands, and palal-ed with his whole life on the line.

The people had asked for a king and gotten one. In doing so, Samuel told them, they had rejected God as their king. The nation was afraid. They said to Samuel: "Pray for your servants to the LORD your God, that we may not die, for we have added to all our sins this evil, to ask for ourselves a king." They knew what they had done. And they came to the intercessor.

Samuel could have said: you made this choice. You live with it. Instead, he said something that has become one of the Old Testament's most beautiful commitments: "Moreover, as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by ceasing to pray for you." Ceasing to pray would be a sin. Stopping intercession would be a failure of his calling. He would keep praying even when the people had been foolish, even when the situation was hard, even when the result was uncertain.

Then he told them the only thing they needed to do: "Only fear the LORD and serve him faithfully with all your heart. For consider what great things he has done for you." The praying and the fearing go together. Samuel's job was the first. The people's job was the second.