Harbor Presbyterian Church: Carlsbad

1 Samuel 8 – “A King...Like All the Nations”

Rev. Darin M. Stone

Harbor Presbyterian Church – November 2, 2008

 

I want to invite you to turn with me to 1 Samuel 8.  You should know that I am supposed to preach on chapters 8-10 today, but since neither your attention span nor my vocal cords can endure what it would take for me to do justice to these three chapters, I’m going to focus upon chapter 8 specifically and make only superficial allusions to chapters 9-10.

 

The passage we’re going to explore together today just so happens to zero in on the people’s request to radically change the way they are governed.  The elders are requesting that Israel have a king to rule in Israel rather than a plurality of judges.  This is no insignificant request.  We’ve seen the challenges of this kind of thing in post-Communist nations and in places like Iraq.  But what we really want to see here is what their request and the motivation behind it reveals about their own spiritual health.  With that in mind, let’s turn our attention now to the reading of God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant word from 1 Samuel 8:

 

Sometimes, when we read Scripture and hear it preached, it warms our souls.  In one of John Newton’s hymns, he writes, “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds in a believer’s ear.  It calms his sorrows, heals his wounds, and drives away his fear.”  Those are some great words, and at the end of the day, all of Scripture points us to Jesus who is the one to who does these things for us.  But before we are lifted up to be comforted, we first have to realize that the sorrows, wounds, and fears we experience are largely self-inflicted, and we live amongst people and in a world that has brought these things upon themselves.  Scripture doesn’t sugar-coat that reality, so when we look at passages like the one we just read, we see something of ourselves in the failure of these people.  So what I want to do this morning is explore a few things about ourselves that we see in these people and some of the catastrophic effects of their decisions.  And then I want to propose a few considerations for us.

 

We have a tendency to make substitutes for God.

 

What seems to stick out front and center in this story is the tendency of Israel, and of us, to make substitutes for God.  The default mode of our heart in both days of trouble and in days of prosperity is to seek to live life out of our own resources rather than out of the resources that Christ provides, to lean upon our own wisdom rather than the wisdom that is spelled out for us in the Scriptures, and to derive a sense of security and vitality from something or someone other than God.  And all of these things were part and parcel of Israel’s character in these days. 

 

If you look at verse five, you’ll see what I mean by this.  In verse five, we see that the elders – who were the people’s representatives – essentially gave Samuel’s sons a vote of no confidence.  And that seems to be a perfectly reasonable vote because Samuel’s sons turned out to be just as greedy and unjust as were Eli’s sons.  So when you consider the fact that Israel had experienced no shortage of poor leadership and that the next leaders in line appeared to be nothing but a couple of wahoo’s, it’s easy to see why they wanted some change they could believe in.  And they weren’t asking for some kind of superficial – throw the bums out and replace them with a new set of bums – kind of change.  What they wanted was a completely new form of government.

 

Now again, we can feel their pain, can’t we?  But you have to take a closer look at exactly what they were asking for.  The elders come to Samuel and they say, “Appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.”  Now, if you turn back in your Bible’s to Deuteronomy 17, you’ll see the stipulations that God provides for the establishment of a monarchy.  Deuteronomy 17:14-15 say, “When you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,’ you may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose.”

So in a sense, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the elders requesting a king just like all the other nations.  But as we read further in Deuteronomy, we discover that God wanted to make sure that Israel wouldn’t have a king just like all the other nations.  Verses 15-17 say, “One from among your brothers you shall set as king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother. Only he must not acquire many horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to acquire many horses, since the Lord has said to you, ‘You shall never return that way again.’ And he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold.”

So what God is saying is that there may come a time when having a king might be the last resort.  Other nations have kings and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.  But Israel was not to have a king just like their kings, because the kings of the other nations believed, governed, and lived in ways that were antithetical to the God of Israel.  They were polygamous and greedy and unjust, and had all around poor character.  So God is saying, “Don’t choose a king like that.  Don’t choose a king based on his ‘charisma’ or the amount of style points he’s been able to accumulate for himself.”

That’s what God says negatively about choosing kings, but as we read on in Deuteronomy 17, we see what God has to say about kings positively.  Beginning in vs. 18, he says, “And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests.  (This would be Israel’s constitutional standards).  And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel.”

So here, God is saying that if you’re going to have a king, that king has to understand that he is a vice-king at best.  That he serves at the command and at the will of God and as such, God and his law were to be king.  He is to be bound by God’s constitution and not to be a law unto himself.

Now I’m not sure how many of you are aware of this, but back in 1644, a Scottish Presbyterian minister by the name of Samuel Rutherford wrote a little book that would lay the foundations of civil liberty that we enjoy in America today.  What you have to understand is that at that time, there was a phrase that served to define the ethos of kingship in those days.  And the phrase was Rex Lex, which is a Latin phrase meaning, “the king is law.” The king believed that he was to be the sole arbiter of law; that the king was above the law and was not subject to any law above himself.   

But Rutherford’s book was entitled Lex Rex.  Lex Rex means, “the law is king.”  So in that little treatise, Rutherford made the case that the king is not ultimate; that the king is subject to God – to king greater than himself – and thus, a law greater than himself.  So as king, he is to execute God’s statutes and not rule in a self-serving fashion.  There are to be limitations on the king’s power because, ultimately, God is in charge and not man.  Now, did Rutherford just pull that idea out of nowhere?  No.  That’s what Scripture teaches, right here in Deuteronomy 17.  So as Americans, we can be thankful that, at least for now, civil liberties, checks and balances, and the rule of law are characteristic of our nation.  So when you get to heaven, you can thank Samuel Rutherford for that.  And ultimately, you can thank God.

But when we look back to our passage, we discover that God’s law was not king in the nations surrounding Israel.  The kings there ruled with just as much, if not more, greed and injustice as did Israel’s judges.  So when the elders demanded a king “like the other nations” we can tell that they weren’t simply asking for a change in the structure of their government, but they were asking for a king that would have the same status and function as the kings in the nations surrounding them.  And when they asked for such a king, they were at the same time, rejecting the kingship of God.  That’s exactly what God says here in 1 Samuel 8:7; that the people are rejecting the kingship of God.  And I think that with that in mind, there are at least three things that we need to consider by way of application.

Consider the perpetual pull of cultural conformity.

First, we need to consider the perpetual pull of cultural conformity.  From the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep, you are bombarded with messages that suggest a compelling answer to the insecurities, and fears, and doubts, and frustrations you deal with everyday.  When the elders approached Samuel and said, “we want a king like the other nations,” and they wanted to “be like the other nations” – even after Samuel warned them that the king was going to exploit their sons and daughters, and mess up family life, and redistribute their property and give it to his servants, and will have the audacity to tax them 10 percent of their profits in order to fund his bloated bureaucracy (it was God that demanded 10 percent), and otherwise make people dependent upon big government, and even after he warns the people again in chapter 10 (there’s your chapter 10 reference) when Saul is being crowned as king that they are rejecting God and that they will suffer the consequences of it – it was at those points they ceased to take their spiritual bearings from God and began to take those bearings from their neighbors.  In other words, the culture, ever so subtly, became the spiritual and moral foundation of their lives, rather than God. 

But I want to suggest to you that our default mode is to do the same thing.  That’s exactly what our catechism says that sin is.  The answer to the fourth question of the WSC says that “sin is any lack of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.”  And if you’re not conforming to God, then you’re conforming to something else.  If Jesus isn’t your king, then something or someone else will be your king.  And this is our chief problem in life.  If God and his word are not your authority, then the winds of the culture and its word will be. 

But the problem with that is that the winds of our culture are constantly changing.  Political opinions are in a constant state of flux.  Things that the majority of people would have said were evil 20 years ago, those same people now think those things are good.  Read some of the things that people wrote 50 years ago, 100 years ago; things that just about everyone believed were true.  Now we laugh at those things.  In fact, leave the country and go someplace else; or even go to a different part of the country.  Things that are no brainers here are viewed as highly suspect there.  What’s normal here is offensive there and what’s offensive here is normal there. 

So the world and its values and norms are always changing, but not only that, you’re changing.  Who didn’t think, back when you were in high school, that you’re parents’ dip-sticks didn’t quite touch the oil?  And then we got into our 20s, and discovered that they were much wiser than we thought they were when we were in our teens.  So if that’s the case, what could possibly make you think that you’re not going to go through other changes? 

Folks, if your authority for what constitutes God’s character and for what he loves and hates is the Bravo Network, or talking heads on the news, or what your friends, and neighbors, and colleagues say, you’re going to be tossed in whichever direction the currents seem to be flowing.  And I honestly believe that we all vastly underestimate just how deeply American culture affects us, how much politics affects us, or how other cultural influences affect us.  We underestimate how authoritative those things are to us and to what degree we pledge our allegiance to them.

So the question is, Do you have a transcendent, unchanging standard upon which you are deriving wisdom?  In other words, do you treasure Jesus and his word to point you in the way you should go?  Psalm 1 says that the person who builds his life on God’s word will be like a tree with deep roots that won’t be pushed over by the winds and the elements, but the person who builds his life on popular opinion will be blown away like the chaff.  The Psalmist says that God’s word is a lamp unto your feet and a light unto your path.  Is that something that you really believe?  Folks, this passage challenges us to consider whose voice we’re listening to and to whom we are conformed.  And you can tell this by exploring God’s word and saying, “God, show me where I am conforming to the world and not to you.  Help me to live out my identity in you.”

Consider that most of your problems are primarily spiritual and not mechanical.

But it’s not just that we’re constantly being pulled to imbibe the habits of our culture.  We also need to consider that the overwhelming majority of our problems in life are not primarily mechanical, but spiritual. Let me tell you a story to explain what I mean.

I don’t know if any of you ever heard about this story, but a few years back, there were a couple of guys from Arkansas who were returning home late at night in an old pick-up truck from a frog gigging trip. (I mean, we’re talking about a real redneck experience here).  On the trip home, the truck’s headlights stopped working, and the two men determined that the problem was a burnt out fuse. They didn’t have a replacement, but the passenger discovered that a bullet from his .22 pistol fit perfectly in the fuse box located next to the truck’s steering column. The headlights now worked, and they kept on driving. After traveling about 20 miles and just before they got home, the bullet overheated and discharged, striking the driver. (Now I’m not even going to tell you where that bullet hit him).  The truck sharply veered off the road and struck a tree. Both men were put into the hospital and listed in serious condition.  (I told you it was a redneck story!)

But here’s where I’m going with that story.  The fuse is an instrument of restraint.  It is a safety device that keeps something from blowing up or starting on fire if the electrical current becomes too strong.  But a bullet is an instrument of coercive force.  So when the elders decided they wanted a king so that they could conform to what all the other nations were doing, they were attempting to solve a problem of the heart with an external, mechanistic solution that lacked the restraint of God’s word.  They diagnosed the problem as structural rather than spiritual, so they essentially stuck something with coercive force into an instrument of restraint.  They employed the wrong solution to the wrong problem.  Groucho Marx once said that, “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”  It seems like that’s exactly what the elders were doing here.

So Saul comes along and he’s tall and handsome and he looks the part of a king and has all the style points, and he leads well for a time, but ultimately he just totally falls apart.  He makes foolish vows and starts consulting a psychic of all things.  And this is the guy who’s supposed to be the rider on the white horse!  He’s supposed to keep hope alive for them, but he ends up being a failure.

But that kind of thing can become easily characteristic of our lives as well, can’t it?  When something is going wrong in our lives, what we tend to do is attribute the problem to a failure in technique, or a lack of education, or knowledge, or something along those lines, rather than a problem happening at the level of our souls.  That is not to say that we don’t need to learn about better strategy and techniques, but education itself can only clarify.  It can’t transform.  Changes in strategy or technique only deal with symptoms and not problems.  That’s why Dr. Laura theology doesn’t work.  You can’t just “go do the right thing.”  Because simply going and doing the right thing apart from a heart that is profoundly broken by doing the wrong thing, will never lead to deep-seated change.  A changed technique without a changed heart will not only be fundamentally superficial, but also profoundly legalistic.  Because even if you make strides in the right direction, all you’re going to end up doing is patting yourself on the back rather than acknowledging God as the one who is at work in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.  So any change you do make apart from a changed heart will lead you to be come self-congratulatory and arrogant.

But what Scripture shows us is that our problems are mainly internal in nature – happening at the level of our souls – rather than external.  Jeremiah says that the “heart is deceitful above all things,” so if that’s the case, it’s the heart that is in need of fundamental repair.  And that only happens to the degree that people are brought to the end of themselves and the end of their own resources, and they stop living that way and begin to live with Jesus as the source of their self-identification.  It happens when the peace that he has established with you becomes such a vital reality in your life that you start living a peace with other people.  It happens when you realize the security of your position in Christ to such a degree that you stop being so insecure and anxious and unsettled and you stop freaking out whenever you feel like you don’t get your needs met.  It happens when you so realize that because the hope you have in Christ is imperishable, you don’t have to pin your ultimate hopes on your family life, or the election, or your portfolio, or the real estate market, or your kid’s schooling, or anything else.  

I realize that all of these things are life-long battles.  I’m in it with you.  But I’m convinced that the only way we’re going to make headway in our battle against the world, and our own flesh, and the devil is if we understand the deeply spiritual nature of this battle and we fight it with spiritual armor.

Consider your ultimate source of hope.

Let me just close with one final consideration.  The final thing we need to consider is your ultimate source of hope, and two days before an election, I think this is particularly important for us to understand.  These Israelites pinned their hopes for substantial change in a new governmental structure and in king who would be just like the pagan kings of their neighbors.  And I want to suggest to you that Christians today can easily succumb to latching on to the same source of hope.  Many of the issues we face in this election are deeply important, and Christians need to know that when we go to the voting booth, we are not standing on neutral ground.  The way we vote is an expression of our discipleship and we will have to give account to the Lord one day as to how we vote on particular issues and candidates.  But if we wake up on Wednesday morning and we discover that our candidates lost and our propositions failed, will God be in any less control over things then as he is now?  Is he in any less control of things now than he was at any other time in the past or will be at sometime in the future?  Do you believe that God will be sitting on the throne with a perspiring upper lip, trying to figure out what to do now that everything has gone politically haywire?

Folks, as important as all these things are, our hope cannot be in who wins the election, or in what propositions pass, or in the state of the economy, or even in our personal relationships.  To place your hope in those things is to place your hope in a king that will not only fail to deliver what it promises, but that will ultimately betray and punish you.  The passage says that worldly kings will take to serve their own self-interests, but Jesus is the king who gives to serve our best interests.  He is the one who came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.  The passage says slavery to a king like all the nations is oppressive, but Jesus says slavery to him is liberating.  Earthly kings take the best of what we have, but King Jesus gives us the best of what he has. 

That’s why our hope must be in the only king that wasn’t like the kings from all the other nations.  All the kings, to one degree or another, would turn out to be failures, and when you get to the end of the Old Testament, you kind of get the feeling that this is about to be a lost cause.  But when you open to the first chapter of Matthew – the first book in the New Testament – you see how God ends up taking Israel’s failure and their failed kings and how he comes to his people in the flesh as the King of kings.  Our hope must be in King Jesus.  As the great hymn says, “Our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.  We dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.  On Christ, the Solid Rock, I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.  All other ground is sinking sand.”  That’s where our hope, and our delight, and our security must lie.

But your hope will not rest in Christ unless he becomes supremely valuable to you on an existential, internal level.   This past week, I was talking on the phone with one of the elders of the church I worked with back in Mississippi and we were bemoaning some of the things happening in our country, and he reminded me that what we really need to be praying for is for revival.  We need to be praying that the Holy Spirit would break down our hardened hearts and replace them with hearts that are sensitive, and open, and responsive to Christ. 

That’s why we need to look to Jesus and say, “Give me a heightened awareness of my sin.  Keep me humble.  Make my heart tender to you.  Make me sensitive to what you love and disgusted by the things you hate.  Cause me to be increasingly aware of my tendency to become distracted by things that would replace you as the source of my delight.  Make yourself more comforting, more beautiful, more delightful, more satisfying to me.  Weave out the implications of your grace in my life.  Stir my conscience to become more and more bound to you and your word.”  That’s how change in our lives, in our families, in our churches, and in our world will begin to take place.

So as we leave this morning, let’s leave with a heart that sees Jesus as the one whose royal title was nailed above his head on the cross.  Let’s leave seeing him as the king who is the suffering servant, the one who gave his life as a ransom for his people.  Let’s see him as the one who became poor so that for our sakes, we enjoy his riches.  Let us go seeing him as the exalted king who has seated us with him in the heavenly places.  Amen.  Let’s pray.

 

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