‘Barren’ is a brutal word. These days, I doubt anyone would be comfortable using it to describe a woman enduring the pain and heartbreak of childlessness. The Hebrew aqar gives a sense of complete emptiness and sterility, as if every living thing has been torn up by the roots with no hope of anything sprouting ever again.

I can’t really imagine, but perhaps that is how Hannah felt. Year after year she had come before God hoping, praying for a child. Despite her husband’s love, the taunts of her rival rang in her ears. Each time, she had left empty-handed. It is bitterly ironic that her family came from the tribe of Ephraim, which means fruitful.

Hannah’s struggle echoed the spiritually sterile state of God’s chosen people, Israel. In the generations since they entered the Promised Land, their story was one of rebellion, idolatry, injustice, and atrocities. “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit (Judg. 21:25).” God’s people, meant to be a light and blessing to the nations, had become an unruly curse for themselves and others. Even the judges he raised up to set the nation right all too often fell into wickedness themselves.

Yet nothing is too hard for God. His salvation plan would not be frustrated, even by a broken and desperate plight. After years of bringing her sorrow, tears, and broken-hearted loss to God, He answered Hannah with the miraculous gift of a child. God heard her cry of despair and emptiness and brought new life – a boy who would grow to become the prophet-judge Samuel.

This reversal of circumstance is the prompt for Hannah’s beautiful prophetic prayer we read in 1 Samuel 2 – a prayer for a nation and a world that, like her, need a miracle from God to break through their barrenness.

God is moving and will keep on moving. Those who profit from suffering and evil will be laid low. But more than that, those who have suffered evil will be raised up to new life. The great reversal is coming, where the old hopeless ways will be overturned and God will make a new way in a new kingdom.

In a few decades, Samuel will reluctantly anoint a king for Israel. Many of the kings that follow will be great in stature. But, they will be powerless to overcome sin and their people’s brokenness.

But Hannah’s prophecy looks to a kingdom of covenant people. It will be won not by arms, glory, or riches. It will be built by the just service of a holy king who is to come. This is the ‘anointed one’, Jesus the Messiah. He is the great reversal; God made human as a weak, vulnerable child. He will one day save his people, not by conquest but by sacrifice. Jesus will go willingly to death so that his people may have new life.

For Hannah, the beginning of her own reversal starts with her small, personal acts of prayer worship. It is these small moments of faithfulness that God uses to work a mighty sign of His salvation plan. Today, spend some time in quiet prayer. Bring whatever need you have to God, and finish by praying these words of another faithful woman whose child would break the barrenness of sin: