Give Us a King

When the elders of Israel demand a king, God hears them and he obliges.  But He warns them through Samuel what it will cost them.

"These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots.  And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.  He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants.  He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants.  He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work.  He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.  And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day."

And as any rational group of human beings would, they said:

"No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles."

They rejected the King of Kings for the sake of conforming to the standards of the nations of the world.  This is what we do individually all the time; we forsake the leadership of God for what the world tells us will work, and when we come up empty handed we say, Where were you, God?  But God has given us our warnings.  This very scripture is one of them.

It makes no sense to give up so much just to have someone you can heap the blame on, but can you think of anything better?  God is mysterious, invisible, and far too immense for us to understand.  But if we establish various kings over our lives, we can point to them when we fail.  Jobs, plans, family, friends, pastors, spouses; these are the kings we establish, the kings we push out in front of us when the enemy is coming, and these are the kings that fail us time and again.

There is one King who never fails.  He will give you the other kings because He loves you; but you and He both will lament that poor choice.