The Boy Who Heard His Name in the Dark

Every year Hannah sewed Samuel a new robe, a little longer than the last one, and carried it up to God's house at Shiloh. Every year the boy had grown enough to fill it.

Samuel helped old Eli the priest. By day he swept and fetched. At night he slept in the house of the LORD, near the ark, God's golden chest, where the lamp of God burned until morning.

In those days God hardly ever spoke to his people. Eli's two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests, but they grabbed the best meat from people's offerings before it was given to God, and they treated his rules as a joke. Eli scolded them, but he never stopped them.

One night, before the lamp had gone out, a voice called, "Samuel!"

Samuel jumped up and ran to Eli. "Here I am! You called me."

Eli, whose eyes had grown weak, squinted at him. "I didn't call. Go back and lie down."

So Samuel lay down. Then: "Samuel!"

Off he ran again, slap, slap, slap across the cold floor. "Here I am! You called me."

"I did not call, my son. Go back to bed."

(Samuel had never heard God's voice before. Of course he thought it was the old man down the hall.)

The third time Samuel came running, Eli sat up slowly. Now he understood. The LORD was calling the boy.

"Go and lie down," said Eli, "and if he calls you again, say, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.'"

Samuel went back and lay still, eyes wide open. (Nobody falls asleep after a night like that.)

Then the LORD came and stood there and called as before. "Samuel! Samuel!"

"Speak," whispered Samuel, "for your servant is listening."

What God said was hard to hear. "I am about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of everyone who hears it ring. I will do everything I warned Eli I would do to his family, because his sons have treated me with contempt and he did not stop them."

(A man of God had already told Eli what that meant: both his sons would die on the same day, and God would choose a faithful priest instead.)

In the morning Samuel opened the doors of God's house, afraid to tell Eli what he had heard.

"Samuel, my son," Eli called.

"Here I am."

"What did he say to you? Do not hide it from me."

So Samuel told him everything. The old priest bowed his head. "He is the LORD," said Eli. "Let him do what he thinks is best."

Samuel grew up, and the LORD was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground. (That is the Bible's way of saying every one of them came true.) All through the land, people knew that God was speaking again, through Samuel.

Samuel listened to God his whole long life. But he could only pass on what he heard, and plenty of people heard it and went on doing as they pleased.

Other prophets followed, until heaven went silent again for four hundred years.

Then God sent more than a message. He sent his own Son. John called him God's Word, a light the darkness could not put out, because Jesus did not only carry what God said. He was what God was saying. "My sheep listen to my voice," Jesus said. "I know them, and they follow me." And like the voice in Samuel's dark room, he called his own sheep by name.

One day, on a mountain, out of a cloud came the voice that once called Samuel in the dark: "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!"