A King to Save Us
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger.
We’re talking today about Saul, the people’s desire for a king like the nations. I believe last week we talked about the birth of Samuel, who would be the one to anoint King Saul – spoilers – but how did that come about? That wasn’t exactly something that God offered on a silver platter as, “Yes, this is what I have intended for my people, Israel.” It was kind of initiated from the grassroots, if you will.
There would be a theme in itself that I hadn’t thought about. We often have the idea that if something comes from the grassroots then it’s got to be good.
Someone once said the only time democracy is mentioned in the Bible is when Pilate gave the crowd a choice as to who he should crucify and who he should let go, and they all chose Barabbas. The crowd always chooses Barabbas.
Our founding fathers were distrustful of the people, of popular government. America has been called a democracy so long now that we take it for granted, but that’s not what it was supposed to be. It’s not what anybody trusted. The Greeks’ democracies were short-lived and catastrophic, by and large. The reason has nothing to do with structure as such, and that’s what we’re going to see tonight, because as the authors of the Federalist Papers said, “Men are not angels.”
Really? You mean the Bible was right? Wow! That means that grassroots voting is no better than elite voting, in and of itself. The question has to do with character, restraints on government and all that.
Anyway, God had in fact promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that kings would come out of their loins somehow, some way, someday. In fact, Jacob had said to Judah, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh come, and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” So the long-awaited hero, deliverer, savior would be a king. He’d bear a scepter. He’d be a lawgiver. But there’s not a whole lot else.
The false prophet Balaam spoke of a scepter arising out of Jacob, but again not a lot of detail. But when we come to Deuteronomy, Moses does lay down rules that would govern the king, and interestingly enough he says, “When you come into the land and you want to set a king over you like all the nations, here’s the kind of king you should want and have and pick.” And that’s the excuse they’re going to use. “We want a king like all the nations.”
It depends what you mean by that. If you mean you want to have a government that most people are familiar with and that seems to serve most people’s purposes, that’s one thing. When you say, “We want a king so we can be like the nations,” that’s a different emphasis and a different issue.
And it’s interesting that it’s a king. It’s an individual. You can look at all the different monarchies through history and how they look at their king as their icon. I’m thinking of my favorite, Dom Pedro II of Brazil, but he’s not exactly typical.
I was thinking of Alfred the Great, but he’s not either – we’re thinking of the atypical kings, actually.
Kings are not bad. The question is what kind of king. What Deuteronomy says is he’s going to be a king under law. This is Deuteronomy 17, and specifically the restrictions placed on him. First of all, he had to come from a covenant people. You couldn’t pull in a foreigner.
No William of Orange coming in, apparently. There were three things that the king was not to multiply to himself. He was not to multiply horses. Those were the tanks, the offensive weapons of the day. No restrictions on battlements and walls and such, because your walls are not going to go out and start a war, but your horses might.
Then there was a limitation on wives. They were not to multiply wives to themselves, because wives for kings meant foreign alliances in those days. You married the daughter of the king of the neighboring nation so that you were all now one big happy family, and also if things went wrong you had an automatic hostage – a little detail that wasn’t actually put in the contract.
Then the king was not to multiply gold to himself. He was not to have a huge budget for what he was doing, because the law actually gave him very little to do – defend the people and preserve justice. He’s not there to create a social welfare system or an education program or to manage the economy. It’s very simple and limited, and to this degree our Libertarian friends would be very happy, so far as they tolerate any kind of civil government at all. And when it came to such things, the king had tremendous power to act and to deal with criminals and with invaders. So those were the restrictions.
There was a positive requirement that the king was to write out a copy of the law in his own hand. This was not a devotional exercise. This was a judicial exercise. He was supposed to master the law. By the way, it would mean he had to actually be literate, and he could not pawn it off on somebody else. “Hey Sam, have you written out those chapters for me today? You done my homework?” No, you’ve got to do it yourself.
In that culture, writing it out meant that you had to process it, read it, it had to pass through your brain and your hand and such. He was to become intimately familiar with the law of God because that was the standard.
So those are some of the things that were in place. The question then becomes if God knew that and intended to give Israel a king, what’s the big deal when they finally asked for one? It has to do with their attitude. They used the excuse that Samuel’s sons aren’t the man he is.
Samuel had appointed them judges in Beersheba. Beersheba was the southern boundary. It would be like – what’s the last American city before you hit Tijuana? It would be some small out-of-the-way place, and they had very little effect on anything, but they weren’t doing a great job. They were not walking in Samuel’s ways, and the elders used that as an excuse.
Now, Samuel had led great revivals in his time but, as we’ve seen, one of the problems with Israel throughout the book of Judges was perpetuating revival into the next generation. So although Israel had in some sense repented and God had driven back the Philistines, recovered the ark to them, the battle of Mizpah had followed, Samson has done his work, and God has been looking after Israel very clearly for some time and they’ve had peace, yet now that Samuel is old, people are getting restless again.
Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways. Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the Lord.
And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee. Now therefore hearken unto their voice; howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them and shew them the manner of the king that shall reign over them.
The problem was not that they wanted a king under Yahweh. They wanted a king instead of Yahweh. It’s not that they simply wanted a more efficient civil government – more reliable, more predictable, and we could make good arguments for that; the whole judges thing had been rather creative and interesting, a great deal of freedom but also a great deal of being beat up by your enemies…
No, it’s not. God is saying this is just one more thing. They’re not going after an idol in the traditional sense, after false gods, but they are turning this idea of a monarch into an idolatry. “They want this king instead of me, and because that’s what they want, that’s what they’re going to get.”
God says to Samuel, “Go ahead, make them a king, but this is the kind of king they’re going to get. You tell them,” and there is a list that follows. Here are some of the things that Samuel told them out loud in front of everybody.
“This is what’s going to mark your king. Your king is going to conscript your sons for military and agricultural armies. He’s going to conscript your daughters to work in his bakeries and kitchens. He’s going to take the best of your lands [eminent domain] and distribute them to his lackies. He’s going to take your slaves for his own use,” and he would take the tenth of their seed, of their vineyards, and their sheep.
The last point has to do with the tithe. God demanded a tenth of all these things, and this is what marked God as their sovereign and their king. This was tax. You paid 10%. It wasn’t something enforced by civil government, nor was it necessarily enforced directly by the ecclesiastical government, although I assume that your rabbi/pastor/Levite, after not seeing you do anything for a while, might walk over and say, “Hey, Zechariah. We never seem to see tithes coming in from you.”
Presumably you could be excommunicated, but it would take a while. There was no mechanism set up to check on such things. You were not required to submit your books at the end of the year to the synagogue to see whether or not you were doing something. Again there was a great deal of room for freedom and for putting the burden on the individual to do what was right.
This is a highly symbolic number. One-tenth shows that everything I have belongs to God, so giving one-tenth indicates that he is my God.
Yeah, so for a merely human king to demand the same amount was idolatry. The king was taking the place of God. So to be told that he will, and to be okay with that, is great wickedness. On the other hand, to be told he will do that and say, “Oh, no. No king would ever do that,” we in the 21st century can only sit back and laugh at that one.
Oh, it would. It would be nice to go back to 10%. I’m all about 10%. That’d be great.
I forget what the percentage was when the united colonies decided to break with Britain, but I think it was 1-2% tops, the whole taxation rate, and even then it wasn’t so much the tax burden as it was the principle involved. “They’re taxing us directly and they don’t have the authority.” But if they knew then what’s happened to their descendants, they would be horrified. At some point maybe amused, then horrified again.
I think it was FDR who proposed a 103% income tax at one point – the idea being if you were in the top tax bracket you obviously had savings and the government had a right to it. All that to say, 10% sounds really nice today.
It does, but at that point it was symbolically a slap in God’s face. So Samuel warns the elders of all this and he says –
And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you, and the Lord will not hear you in that day.
It should be. There are some Christians, who I sure mean well, who are patriots in the traditional American sense, the whole God and country thing, and as far as they can see God disapproves of this kind of taxation. God disapproves of tyranny and all that, so God would not ever tolerate this or make use of it; therefore, we are always justified in our rebellion against tyrants. That’s kind of hard to prove from scripture and from God’s own track record.
First of all, God says, “Give them a king. Here’s the kind of king you’re going to give them.”
Meaning that the king that gets there is legitimately king. He has a legitimate claim on these people.
Yeah, and what God has said is going to happen they have to deal with. They can’t come back and say, “Oh wait. Surprise, surprise, you were right. Our tyrant is being tyrannical. We should get rid of him or overthrow him or assassinate him.” And God is going to say, “No.”
“Isn’t that nice? I could and I’m not going to. You’re going to have to deal with this,” because what’s basic here is who do you trust? Who do you serve and who do you trust? Is it earthly processes, a constitution, a republican form of government, a monarchy, an emperor, a bureaucratic system? Do you think that politics can save you?
Far too often Christians have thought, “Well, yeah. That’s how you fix things. You fix things with politics, and when you try to do the right thing God will bless you and everything will come out all right.” I’m sorry, that’s not in scripture anywhere. What’s in scripture is, “You chose to trust politics. Well, God is going to turn you over to politics for a while, and it may be a lot longer than you think.”
In fact, in this case it was until the collapse of the two kingdoms. God never took them back to a republican simplicity again, because God has far more important things to worry about than our form of government. Again, that’s a shock to some American Christians who are involved in politics. “Well, isn’t that the most important thing?” Not to God. It’s way down on the list.
Insofar as the political choices we make reflect our faith in our God and our commitment to his Word, to that degree he is concerned, but the specifics? Let’s go on and find out a little bit more about what happens to Saul, and some of these things perhaps will be a little bit clearer.
We shift gears and we’re introduced to a young man named Saul. All he’s got going for him is he’s really tall. He’s from the tribe of Benjamin, which is the smallest of the tribes because of the massacre that happens at the end of the book of Judges. His father has lost some donkeys, and Saul and his servant go looking for them and they can’t find them and finally they decide they’re going to go to Samuel, because obviously a prophet of God would have time to be a “find a donkey service” for these young men.
We get the feeling that Saul has not really got it together spiritually, but meanwhile God has come to Samuel and said, “I’m going to send you the guy who’s going to be king. When he comes, you anoint him.” So Saul comes, meets Samuel, and Samuel says, “Stop worrying about the donkeys. They’re found. You’re the one we’re concerned about.”
So they go to a sacrifice and Samuel makes sure that Saul gets the best piece. The sacrifice, of course, is a peace offering, and Samuel as the prophet of God is the one who’s offering it. Since the whole breakdown of the tabernacle structure, apparently it’s okay at this point to offer sacrifices other than at the tabernacle.
By giving this choice piece of meat to Saul, he’s including him within his family or his close friends or disciples. He’s trying to set things up to maintain, “You’re going to be king, and I’m going to be your God-uncle. I’m going to be the guy who’s going to be at your elbow giving you advice and talking to God, because this could go really bad, but it needn’t.” So in the morning Samuel anoints him. This is chapter 10 of 1 Samuel. He sets a number of signs for him that will come upon him, and they do one by one.
One that I think is crucial for understanding what’s going on here, we’re told that he meets some other prophets along his way who are singing and praising God with instruments of music and prophesying in the Spirit, and the Spirit of the Lord comes upon Saul as well and he begins to prophesy and he speaks God’s word by inspiration. So this is a good thing. Our king is apparently a son of the prophets now.
But someone in the crowd who sees this – well, a number of people say, “Is Saul also among the prophets?” It doesn’t sound encouraging. It isn’t like, “Wow, I knew he had it in him. I knew God had his hand on him. I knew God had great things for this man.” It’s like, “Saul? Really?”
It’s not a good thing, and someone quips, “But who’s their father?” That is, who leads and sets the agenda for the prophets? In heaven it would be God. On earth it would be Samuel. Is that what this means? Does this mean that Saul has been changed to such an extent that he will be, as it were, a prophetic king? That’s great, but it doesn’t sound like the people who know Saul are convinced yet.
It’s a funny line, “Is Saul to be numbered among the prophets?” I think especially working with kids who are learning to flex their logical and rhetorical muscles, it’s like, “I will make this impenetrable logical proof. He prophesied; therefore, he is a prophet.” But we can all look at that and say, “No, he’s not.” Because something is true in one sense doesn’t make it true in another more important sense.
Yeah, the more important sense. And speaking of more important senses, we’re told that when Samuel left Saul, God gave him another heart. That sounds like regeneration on the surface. If there were nothing else it would be easy to take it to mean that, but the further we read into Saul’s life the less and less evidence we see of anything that smacks of the fruit of the Spirit. In fact, he is demon-possessed for a while, or at least demon-oppressed.
So what it means apparently is simply that Saul goes from being kind of a shy retiring goofball to being someone to be reckoned with, someone forceful, someone who can command men and charge into battle.
Saul goes home and he doesn’t tell his dad what happened, just a skeleton outline of, “Yeah, I talked to him and he said the donkeys were found,” but Samuel calls the people together at Mizpeh yet again and says this –
Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, I brought up Israel out of Egypt and delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of all kingdoms and of them that oppressed you.
And ye have this day rejected your God, who himself saved you out of all your adversities and your tribulations, and ye have said unto him, Nay, but set a king over us. Now therefore present yourselves before the Lord by your tribes, and by your thousands.
And so they cast lots. Samuel already knows the outcome, but the rest of Israel is completely ignoring what Samuel just said. “You have rejected God your Savior.”
So he does, and the lot falls on Benjamin, and then the family within that, and the family within, until it shows up on Saul, who does not seem to be there. So they actually ask God, “Is he here or are we still waiting on him?”
Behold he hath hid himself among the stuff [baggage]. And they ran and fetched him thence, and when he stood among the people he was higher than any of the people from his shoulders and upward. And Samuel said to all the people, See ye him whom the Lord hath chosen, that there is none like him among all the people? And all the people shouted, and said, God save the king.
Interesting. I hadn’t really thought about this verse a great deal before. “Look at him. See him. There’s none like him.” Visually there was no one like him.
God looks at the heart. It’s something he will tell us later on when it’s time to anoint David. What Samuel says to the people is, “See him whom the Lord has chosen. There’s none like him. He’s taller than everybody. Doesn’t that make him a great king?”
You would think there would be somebody there who would say, “Yeah, but what are his credentials? What’s his track record? Can we talk to his rabbi? What’s his testimony? What’s his work record? Has he stood for theological confirmation?” – all of the questions that you could ask, and yet when Samuel simply says, “Look at him. He’s taller than everybody,” nobody sees the absolute absurdity in that, and they’re all just excited.
In the original article I wrote for this I started with the story of Warren Harding, who was one of our presidents who no one remembers now.
He came right before Coolidge, right? Which means nothing happened because everything was great.
Everything was great, yeah. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink spends some time with that election and basically argues that people knew nothing about him. He really had nothing to commend him, nothing special. There were lots of people who had his credentials. But because he was tall and handsome, taller than the average American, carried himself well, dressed well, was handsome – that won him the presidency. Gladwell calls it the Warren Harding effect. It’s not dissimilar here to what we’re seeing in Saul.
Of course, ever since then, and more and more with the invention of television, Americans have been captured by image.
Yeah, say JFK versus Richard Nixon in their debate. It’s an interesting thing. We’re told that people who saw it on TV said that Kennedy won hands-down. People who heard it on the radio without the images said that Nixon won. But since more people were watching on TV, JFK got the election because people more and more want someone handsome, trendy, cool, suave, with-it, and all those kinds of things.
We’ve now gotten to the point in America where three seconds of showing your candidate looking really good, handsome, beautiful, whatever, is all you want. You really don’t want them opening their mouth much.
Our current president has been criticized more times than anything else not for how he looks or even for how old he is, but for the things he says – not measured against a Republican standard but simply measured against common sense and anybody’s standards. “Shut him up! Somebody get him off the stage!”
For the last president it was, “Get him off Twitter. Get him off Twitter.” Now it’s just, “No, just don’t let him talk to anyone.”
He looks like a nice old guy, a grandfatherly type just to look at him, and the angles you photograph somebody are very important. If you want to photograph someone you don’t like, you kind of get underneath his nose and go up. If you want to make him look good, you shoot more downward or slightly profile. So the roots of this are ancient. They’re in the heart of man, because what we’re talking about is image.
Image is visual perception. We make images. We make idols and icons, but we also make celluloid images and paintings and photographs and all kinds of things. We’re not forbidden to do all of these things, but we are warned in scripture over and over again that interpretation has to accompany image. We have to be told what’s going on here, because when we’re not then the image is just left with simply its essential visual impact, which is emotional and touches us hormonally more often than it does intellectually - one of the many reasons those things are not supposed to be used in worship.
Maybe this is just me getting old. I know when I was young I took lots and lots of pictures. When I got married I stopped. I took a few of our children and then really I just gave up on cameras and such, and I’ve begun to distrust people who have lots of pictures around. I’m not saying it’s wicked, I’m just saying there needs to be some judgment here.
“Why do I want to look at my children when they were little? Oh, to remember those good old days.” I’m fine with the present good days. I don’t need to remember everything that’s happened in the past. Again, that’s my personal call on this. I think there is a danger in surrounding ourselves with uninterpreted images.
It’s one thing if you can say, “I put this in because this happened at such-and-such a time, at such-and-such a place, when such-and-such things were happening. You remember the story that goes with this?” Okay, now it’s doing something.
You’ve attached some weight to that picture. Today with the camera phones I find it more common that people of my generation have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures that they’ve taken the time to take. There’s an effort put into taking the pictures, and rarely do they go back and ever look at them again. It’s an obsession with making what is in front of us into an image, without ever attaching utility to that image.
Perhaps it’s something we should talk about another time. At this point I’m just pointing out that it’s interesting and that there are potential dangers, as there are with any kind of technology. Every technology brings with it some sort of danger, and we need to be aware of that and figure out what we’re going to do about that to avoid the potential danger – whether it be fire or nuclear energy or a handgun.
Or books or podcasts. There are potential dangers. Just to absorb the next technology, particularly when it’s something as powerful as images, without thoroughly thinking through it theologically and morally is to walk out on quicksand, I think. It may be that there’s just a perfect Indiana Jones-like path right through the quicksand if you just know where to step or accidentally hit the right steps, but…
Yeah. Maybe we can not do that. Maybe we can actually consider why we’re doing it and what we’re doing.
I know for our own church it’s been something of a challenge. We were working on presenting not just the pastor but the whole service online – images. Now, for shut-ins of our own congregation who legitimately cannot come to church because they are physically disabled and can’t come, there’s much potential good here because they get to see friends and hear the Word of God in a highly…’crafted’ is not the word but I’ll take it…context, but they know. “I know these people. I know what’s going on.” They can deal with it. But to what extent do we want to convince people that, “This is just like church”?
No, it’s not. It’s a solution of sorts for people who really physically can’t get there, but there are real dangers here, and we’ve seen them in the wake of COVID, people who are still content to “watch church” and think that because they see it and hear it, that’s all that matters, right? The Gnostic implications for our understanding of our own humanity are tremendous, and so in the political realms. We should probably get back to that.
“No, you saw a carefully-crafted image of something that’s been edited, photographed at a particular time, gone through editing software, released under certain circumstances with certain background music. You were not there. You did not see it. You do not know what happened.” But since “seeing is believing,” we’ve convinced ourselves that this is okay.
I don’t know how many people said the most ridiculous things about our previous president just based on a sound-byte here and there, a visual clip. I’m sure President Trump had his flaws, but I know a guy who was one step away from the Cabinet. He talked to the president fairly regularly and could come and tell me privately – on the condition of, “The media cannot know this is going on, but…” – some of the things that were happening in the background.
I was like, “This president has done some awfully great things. He’s dealing some serious blows to the extreme left,” for whatever that’s worth. But one sound-byte, one image, is enough to just tell people, “No, he’s a horrible man. This other guy who looks kindly and gently and probably needs to be in a rest home, he looks so much nicer.”
This is what’s happening here. The people see Saul, and we’re not even told particularly that he’s good-looking. We’re told that he’s taller than everybody else, which probably means around 7’ give or take. That’s going to be ironic later because when Goliath shows up.
He’s even taller, and the one person who should go out and face him first, 1) because he’s king, and 2) because he’s the tallest guy around, would be Saul, and Saul is in his tent shivering, because height is not much of anything, honestly.
That’s so funny. I’ve never thought about that. They’ve pinned their hopes on this person because he’s so tall. Then along comes somebody taller. End of hope.
Yeah. It’s interesting that no one points this out to Saul. Even David doesn’t. David, of course, has some tact and wisdom and doesn’t say, “Sire, you’re the tall one. Why aren’t you out there?” He realizes that this is a matter of faith, but we’ll talk about Saul and David another day.
Then Samuel told the people the manner of the kingdom, and wrote it in a book, and laid it up before the Lord.
So it’s going to be a constitutional monarchy. I’m sure we would all love to have a copy of that constitution, but we don’t because it was for that time and that place, under those particular circumstances. Apparently God assumes that if we’re smart enough and holy enough and godly enough to come up a form of government that’s going to be pleasing to him, we can figure out details easily enough. There are so many things that don’t really matter, and so many that so obviously matter – see the Ten Commandments – that we don’t need a photocopy of that one. We can come up with our own.
The principle that there was such a thing, even when God ordained it, is important. God ordained that it should be a constitutional monarchy, not an absolute monarchy, but as to what the restraints were beyond what was already in the law we’re not told and it doesn’t matter.
No, and how many people have actually read the Magna Carta? I have and it’s boring. If you go back expecting to see lots of Jeffersonian language and sloganeering and such, it’s not at all. There’s a little bit up front, but mostly it’s just, “Here’s what the king is going to keep his hands off from now on,” and a lot of the words we don’t even use anymore. “What is that anyway?”
So Saul goes home, and God has touched the hearts of some people who go with him to be kind of his servants, his guys, his cabinet, whatever they become, and some other wicked people. Interestingly enough, the wicked see through this.
The children of Belial said, How shall this man save us? And they despised him, and brought no presents.
You know what? They’re right. This man can’t. When unbelievers point at a conservative president and say, “What can this guy do for us?” – well, not a whole lot, actually. He’s certainly not going to save us. When President Trump was on his way out and it looked like the voting was going to favor the man who got the office, I had one guy come up to me in church and said, “I believe that President Trump is going to lead us through this. He’s like Joshua leading us through Jordan. I’m with him on his side. God is going to turn this around and do something incredible, and great revival is going to…”
I hope not. I doubt it, but I’m sure he was very disappointed for a while and probably wondered how he got things so wrong. I would hope that much at least.
So the critics said, “What’s so great about this man?” Well, you know, there’s nothing great about any human ruler. Some are better than others. Some are better in some ways and worse in others. But the whole point here is that politics don’t save us. Human rulers don’t save us. Presidents and Supreme Court justices don’t save us.
This is hard for political activists sometimes to get ahold of. Might some bit of political activism be really important right now? Yeah, sure, but it’s not the equivalent of revival and it’s not the equivalent of turning everything around.
If you’re in a fire fight and someone is shooting at you and someone manages to take away one of the guys with the gun just before he’s about to blow your brains out, you are very thankful to that man for having done so. You’re still in the middle of a fire fight. There’s still a lot of people out to get you. It’s not all over because of what one person does.
In Chapter 11 of I Samuel, Saul’s first real challenge comes up. An Ammonite king named Nahash – which is the equivalent of a word for serpent – shows up and comes to Jabeshgilead in Transjordan and corners them and lays siege to them. They say, “All right, we’ve lost. What do you want?”
“Well, I’ll make a covenant with you. I’ll make a peace treaty, if you let me thrust out all your right eyes” – which would mean, since you’re holding a shield that covers your left eye, you basically are no longer capable of fighting on the battlefield. He could have picked other things, but he picked that.
They say, “Give us seven days and we’re going to send messengers all through Israel to call for help,” and interestingly enough the king says, “Sure, fine, go for it.” I for one would have said, “Oh yes, let them come,” and then killed them all, but this guy apparently was so convinced of his superiority that he figured, “Nothing’s going to come of this. Let them go.”
The message comes to Saul, and Saul is out plowing in the field. We can think here of George Washington, who wanted nothing more than to go back to his farming. He didn’t want to be president. Or Cincinnatus in Roman tradition.
Here we have the Spirit of God again. He takes his oxen and hews them up and sends them throughout the coasts of Israel and says, “This will be done to anyone’s oxen that doesn’t follow after Saul and Samuel.” He includes Samuel there for a little bit of weight. He does a forced march against Jabesh and destroys the Ammonite armies.
Who is he that said, Shall Saul reign over us? Bring the men, that we may put them to death.
There shall not a man be put to death this day, for today the Lord hath wrought salvation in Israel.
Samuel says, “Let’s go to Gilgal and renew the kingdom there,” so they go through the sacrifices and the promises, and yet, in the midst of what seems to be revival – this is Chapter 12 – Samuel does this summary to Israel –
Behold, I have hearkened unto your voice in all that ye said unto me, and have made a king over you. And now, behold, the king walketh before you and I am old and grayheaded and, behold, my sons are with you, and I have walked before you from my childhood unto this day.
Behold, here I am. Witness against me before the Lord and before his anointed. Whose ox have I taken? Or whose ass have I taken? Or whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed? Or of whose hand have I received any bribe to blind mine eyes therewith?
Basically, “Have I done anything unethical as judge, as a civil ruler? If I’ve stolen anything or cheated anybody, tell me now and I’ll face the music.”
And they say, “No, you haven’t defrauded us or oppressed us. The Lord and his anointed are witness.”
Then he recounts their history of how God brought them up out of Egypt by the hand of Moses and Aaron, and goes along those lines and rehearses some of the judges and how God delivered them again and again throughout that time period. Then he says something we weren’t told earlier -
When ye saw that Nahash the king of the children of Ammon came against you, ye said unto me, Nay, but a king shall reign over us.
So there was a precipitating factor, because Nahash was already out there as a threat. Although he had not struck Jabesh yet, he’d probably been doing some stuff and been making some noise. He might have been a new king on the throne saying, “Israel is the great threat. We must wipe them from the face of the earth. Follow me.”
Now therefore behold the king whom ye have chosen and whom ye have desired! And, behold, the Lord hath set a king over you.
We keep coming back to that again and again. God set not just a king generically, he set this king over you.
If ye will fear the Lord and serve him and obey his voice and not rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then shall both ye and also the king that reigneth over you continue following the Lord your God. But if ye will not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then shall the hand of the Lord be against you, as it was against your fathers.
It’s supposed to be wheat harvest, but it stops being wheat harvest when God sends thunder and rain and wipes out their harvest. Then they say to Samuel -
Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God that we die not, for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to ask us a king.
Fear not. Ye have done all this wickedness, yet turn not aside from following the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart. And turn ye not aside, for then should ye go after vain things, which cannot profit nor deliver, for they are vain. For the Lord will not forsake his people for his great name's sake, because it hath pleased the Lord to make you his people.
Here’s the thing. He gets them finally to admit that asking for a king, at least on these terms and along these lines and with this heart attitude, is sin. It’s rebellion. They finally say, “Yes, we’ve sinned. It’s part of our track record. It’s rebellion.”
God does not say, “Then get rid of the stupid king thing.” He doesn’t tell them to go backwards. He says, “Start out where you are. So you’ve got a king. I’m not taking the king away,” nor does he say the things he prophesied would not happen. They in fact have been prophesied and they’re going to happen. It’s just a question of how long and on what terms. But he gives them hope.
“If you and your king will obey me from this point forward, if you will trust me rather than yourselves, rather than your politics, rather than your military, rather than your clever political strategies – if you will trust me, then it will be well with you and I will bless you and we’ll walk together. But if you don’t, you know what’s coming.”
Now, there are political ramifications here, but let me point out the personal ones. There are many times in life when we get to the point where we realize we’ve done a lot of really stupid sinful things. A woman marries a non-Christian husband, has children, realizes one day the guy’s a complete creep, he’s evil, he’s dangerous, she has no money, she’s got nothing, and she turns back to God.
God does not say at that point, “Well, first of all divorce your husband, then disown your children, then go back and live with your parents because it all started when you turned your back on them, then go back to the same church where you should…”
He doesn’t do that. He says, to judge from this, “All right, but from this day forward you’re going to do what’s right.”
It says in 1 Corinthians your children are holy, and you don’t know whether by your witness your unbelieving spouse will come to Christ.
As long as there is not some kind of legally-prosecutable abuse. I will leave it at that.
Yeah, danger in some sense. I’ll leave it at that. That’s a discussion in itself. But just because he’s not a Christian and he makes fun of your Christianity is not grounds for walking away. Just because he’s not a nice person is not grounds for walking away. Just because he criticizes your housekeeping or your parenting skills, it’s not grounds for walking away.
God does not say, “Just drop the whole thing. Give him the children, because they’re already tainted by this. They wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t sinned, so you must give them….” God does not do any of that but just says, “All right, but from this day forward you’re going to walk with me and you’re going to deal with the consequences of sinful actions. But if you walk with me, from here on out my grace will be sufficient for you, and you can walk in blessing.”
That’s a great comfort in a lot of ways. If we look back on our lives and say, “How many things would I have to fix? How far back would I have to go? How many things would I have to undo?” …
Yeah. So once again, grace plus nothing, faith plus nothing, clinging to Christ plus nothing.
That means even as a nation. The point is not that before God will have us back we need to abolish certain Cabinet offices and reduce the tax burden and get the federal government out of this, that, and the other thing…
Yes, exactly, all of those things. Now, there may be a point and place and time for each of them, but we don’t have to do all that before God is willing to take us seriously. What there needs to be is a recognition of our own absolute failure, of our own sin, and calling upon God and clinging to God and saying, “You are our salvation. You are our way out of this. We will not trust in princes any longer. The hand of flesh cannot save us, and we will do whatever we have to do, but we are on your side now. You’ve saved us, we will be loyal, and we’ll figure everything else out.”
From that point on, God can bless an imperfect nation because, you know what? There is nothing but imperfect nations. There’s nothing but imperfect governmental systems. Nothing but imperfect politics. Salvation is not by fixing the political system. Salvation is by confessing that whatever we’ve got, we got here largely because of our sins.
Yes, there was grace, there was God’s common goodness at points, there were Christian principles, there was Christian capital we borrowed and burned up. There comes a point where we have to start over. Starting over doesn’t mean starting everything over. “Let’s just abolish all civil government and then try from scratch.” That’s not a good idea. It really isn’t.
Right, inventing the wheel again. We begin where we should, and as I said earlier, the monarchy never goes away. In fact, in the person of David, God is going to transform it into a vehicle for bringing Christ into the world, at least in part. But then the monarchy under the sons of David goes crazy, and God eventually sort of discards it, too, and there’s this whole virgin birth thing.
And yet, through the entire thing we have still the promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. “Kings will come forth out of your loins,” and that’s a good thing. It’s not as though monarchy itself is a curse. It’s that God’s monarchy is a blessing. Human monarchy brings with it a lot of disaster.
And God is pleased to call his people kings and priests to God, not presidents and pastors, because the words do mean something. They do carry biblical connotations. Where it has been good insofar as we have deified these things, that we do not believe in a divine right of kings or divine right of pastors, for that matter, or divine right of church government, these are things God has ordained and we need to submit to them. Anarchy is just as great a sin as totalitarianism. It’s just even more trouble, because at least totalitarianism has an order of some sort.
I know some people who say, “No, anarchy is better!” You have not lived through anarchy, thank you. Besides, people will demand order and they’ll get it.
And our God is a God of order. It comes back to who’s around you and how do you relate to them. Your family has an order. Your neighborhood has an order. Relationships are structured by nature because we are covenantal beings.
Yeah. Idolatry is an obsession with an image. It’s a rejection of reality. Saul’s image was impressive, and for a time God used him powerfully, but God knew Saul’s heart. In time the reality would eclipse the image. Saul would prove indeed to be a king like those other nations round about. He would be a tyrant, a murderer, and worse. He would try to kill the Lord’s Messiah.
God says, “I gave thee a king in my anger and took him away in my wrath.” Israel’s basic problem wasn’t a political structure or a weak military or a lack of leadership. Israel was under the righteous judgment of God, and the only solution was sincere repentance.
That’s where America stands. We’re good at gimmicks, and even the church is really good at gimmicks – one last program that will fix everything, whether it be religious or political or some blend of the two. That’s no substitution for mass revival of people as individuals coming to God and saying, “I have sinned. Forgive me. Change me and I will serve you, even if it means serving you in the midst of tyranny, disaster, and persecution.”
We don’t get to set the conditions for God, but God is good and in his time he will accomplish that which is best for his people. He always knows what’s best for his people. We like to set conditions on God because we like to be comfortable, especially being American.
I hear the protests already. “But America isn’t Israel.” Correct, that makes it worse because we can look back on Jesus and say, “Yeah, that’s the king we were supposed to serve.”
That’s the king we’re supposed to serve, and we’re not. There’s this thing called the Great Commission where we’re supposed to make all nations his disciples. We need to get back to that one, and that means that as nations we have to confess Christ as King. That means at some point we have to have little things in the Constitution that says, “And you will take this oath in the name of the triune God of scripture.”
Or some god never named. Basic tests can be imposed like, “Do you believe in a Creator God? Do you believe the Bible is his Word? Do you believe in the last judgement?” The original colonies and the original states’ governments had those things in their charters and in their first constitutions. The American Constitution was unique in leaving them out. The only parallel is the French Constitution up to that point.
Nobody could conceive of a nation who served no god in particular, except perhaps here, Israel, because for once they didn’t call for an idol. They just called for a king. Maybe there’s some lessons there we need to listen to.
Let’s wrap up with some recommendations. I have a children’s book to recommend. This was sent to me today by a dear friend and I had never heard of it before, but it is utterly charming. It’s called Chrysanthemum and it’s about a little mouse whose name is Chrysanthemum. She goes to school and all the kids make fun of her because she is named after a flower. “Chrysanthemum? Pshh. Lame.” Her name doesn’t even fit on her name tag. How weird is that, right? But it has a happy ending and I was utterly pleased with it. So Chrysanthemum.
I remember it being read aloud by a small girl a long, long, long time ago. I hadn’t heard of it in years.
Since you’re going to do that, I’m going to suggest something equally or actually even less overpowering, Sandra Boynton’s But Not the Hippopotamus.
She is. I assume she’s a Christian. There’s Not the Hippopotamus, The Going to Bed Book, and I think there’s one other. It’s just cutely-drawn animals and it’s a board book and it’s very simple, but as you watch one of them you notice that these in fact are the animals on the ark.
Yup, and they’re just fun little books to read and pleasant to look at. In an age where so many children’s books are horrific with their illustrations – ugly and gross – something this sweet, mildly repetitive after a poetic fashion, pleasant, and there’s a faint moral message of including everybody in your group and not pushing people away, not even the hippopotamus – it’s a good thing.
Lewis said if it’s a good book, children and adults should both be able to enjoy it. I’ve read some of these little board books to my children when they were little over and over again, and I never grew tired of them because although they’re simple, it’s the simplicity of a simple but powerful poem.
There were many other books, and I think we’ve talked about some of them before – The Story of Ping, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, The Little House, Make Way for Ducklings – there are beautiful children’s books out there that though they’re sometimes imaginative – and they’re usually imaginative because they make the animals somewhat human – they show God’s creation as a beautiful thing to enjoy, to take pleasure in, and to appreciate.
This is of much more value than a lot of the trash that appears as children’s literature today. Maybe at some point we can do a series on all our favorite children’s books for really little children.
When I come back from maternity leave and have some more informed opinions on the subject.
Sandra Boynton is also super-skilled in her musical writing. I don’t know if you’ve listened to her album.
It’s Blue Moo. It’s a bunch of songs written in different styles, totally riffing on different bands from today and from yesteryear. Before the honorable Davy Jones of the Monkees passed away, he recorded a song called “Your Personal Penguin.” Of course, you can get each of these songs as a standalone children’s book, but there are recordings and you can get the whole album. That’s my favorite song, “Your Personal Penguin.”
Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. If you’d like to get hold of us, the best way to do that is by sending us an email at [email protected].
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