‘After the boy is weaned, I will take him and
present him before the Lord, and he will live there always… So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he shall be given over to
the Lord.’ (1 Sam. 1:22,28)
The life of the prophet Samuel makes an interesting study. Conceived as a result of much travail in
prayer and faith on the part of his mother Hannah, she had made a vow that if
she became pregnant, then she would give the child to the Lord for all the days
of his life. She made good on her vow
and, after the infant Samuel was weaned, she left him with Eli the priest at
the tabernacle to be brought up in the presence of the Lord. That the Lord himself honoured this vow by
raising Samuel up and anointing him as a Nazirite prophet with a powerful
ministry to the people of God, is clear from the narrative (1 Sam. 1:1 –
2:11,18-26; ch.3).
It is a matter of debate whether Hannah should have left Samuel
at such a young age at the tabernacle, away from his biological parents,
instead of raising him at home until he was older and then releasing him into
the ministry that God had called him to, as Samson’s and John the Baptist’s
parents did. Whatever we think about
this, Samuel seems in his later life to betray signs of being what we would
nowadays call an emotional orphan. Being
brought up away from his biological parents, Elkanah and Hannah, and being
brought up instead by Eli and the women who served around the tabernacle area,
seems to have left its mark on him as he grew up. As an adult man, Eli was weak and ineffective
as a father, as the section above shows, and these women were of an ungodly character (1
Sam. 2:22). So as he grew up, Samuel
seems to have lacked the natural inner emotional bond that children have with
their biological parents. The fact
that a man or woman is called of God and is used significantly by him in
leadership and prophetic ministry, does not necessarily mean that s/he does not
have unmet needs or lacks healthy emotional development in some other area of
their life as a human being.
Samuel was brought up without an example of what a good and
effective father is. He did not have a
good role model: Elkanah was not around at all, and Eli was a failure in this
regard. The narrative tells us that,
even though Samuel was greatly used by God in prophetic ministry, and was also spending
much of his time working itinerantly as the recognised leader and judge over
the people of God (1 Sam. 7:15-17), yet he too failed in the area of
fatherhood. His two sons did not grow up
in the fear of the Lord and they became corrupt by taking bribes and perverting
justice (1 Sam. 8:1-3). They portrayed
the exact opposite of their father Samuel in terms of character quality on this
point. The fact that Samuel did not grow
up with a daily example around him of effective fatherhood, bore its fruit in
that Samuel himself did not bring up his own sons well. The simple fact is that he did not know
how to. He seems to have
developed a similar weakness to that of Eli, although it bore fruit in a
different way in his own sons’ lives.
Being so busy in the work of God as both prophet and itinerant
judge meant that Samuel was away from home quite frequently. He betrayed the symptoms of being an ‘emotionally
absent father’ syndrome. Men who have
not been brought up with a good model of fatherhood and who are emotional
orphans, tend to find their identity by being wrapped up in their work and they
are emotionally distant from their children, especially from their sons. They do not understand or know how to
succeed in their role as a father.
Therefore, they may fail to get involved meaningfully in the lives of
their children and to learn how to bring them up properly, instead finding meaning,
significance and emotional fulfilment from their work. Internally, they use their apparent outward
success in the workplace (even if this demands frequent absence from home) to
cover up and justify their all too apparent failure with their children.
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