6 When Samuel heard their demand—“Give us a king to rule us!”—he was crushed. How awful! Samuel prayed to God.
7-9 God answered Samuel, “Go ahead and do what they’re asking. They are not rejecting you. They’ve rejected me as their King. From the day I brought them out of Egypt until this very day they’ve been behaving like this, leaving me for other gods. And now they’re doing it to you. So let them have their own way. But warn them of what they’re in for. Tell them the way kings operate, just what they’re likely to get from a king.”
1 Samuel 8:6-9 the Message
Am I a citizen of the kingdom of God, bowing to His will as my King? Or am I the king of myself, a victim of the tyranny only a human king can inflict, even if that human operates with the best of intentions?
Even though my prayer every morning is to do God’s will for my life that day, I know that I am incredibly practiced at holding on to things I am meant to hand over to God. One of my coping mechanisms for my generalized anxiety disorder is definitely worrying over all the possible scenarios of a thing as if my “control” will somehow affect the outcome. But that control is truly an illusion. And my mind, which is imagining all the things that can go wrong and what can I do to prevent them, isn’t being helped, but rather it is being put into a state of even more anxiety with this poor pattern.
Still, God has patience with me that I don’t understand but openly receive. How many times in my life has He proven to me that even the worst thing I can imagine happening does not end me? I may experience inconveniences and maybe even incredible pain, but when I look for my King-God, He is always there, ready to comfort me when I am at my lowest.
So many examples come to my mind, but perhaps the least maudlin of them involve my house. First, it took me almost three years to find the right house at the right time in the competitive Houston market. I have lived here for more than 20 years. Everything I ever worried about home ownership before taking the plunge into it, I have experienced and survived in this house of mine. And I mean everything:
Foundation cracked/repair–check
Roof leaks–check
Plumbing leaks–check
Washing machine water all over my floor–check
Termites–check
Carpenter ants–check
HVAC replaced–check
Etc., etc., etc.
In each of these instances, I spent more time worrying about how the problem would get fixed, even when God sent me just the right person to fix it. Picture me sitting in my chair worrying about the work the person who is trained is doing, as if I am the one doing the actual work! Fortunately, I am getting better at reminding myself that fixing the problem rests on the trained person’s shoulders, not my own.
Maybe better, but certainly not flawless.
The stories in Judges show us again and again how tragic life can be when we try to rule ourselves instead of submitting to the will of God. Samuel, the final judge in Israel, saw his share of this erroneous behavior. Despite his strong commitment to doing God’s will (he had spent his entire life in the house of God, dedicated to His service), he failed to raise children with the same commitment. In fact, his sons were so terrible at the prospect of inheriting one of them as a judge in part prompted the people to call for a king.
Even though Samuel goes into great detail to warn Israel about the tyranny of a human king, the people want to have one, convinced that a nation lead by a king just like all the other nations around them is what they require to finally conquer everyone and rule the Promised Land. Like me, they have conveniently forgotten all the times before when God showed up, literally, and saved them from enemies and even from themselves. He saved them from Egypt, fed them in the desert for more than 40 years, gave them Jericho and fertile ground for their crops.
What does Israel trade God’s kingship for? Instead of ending violence, Saul’s kingship puts Israel under the strain of preparing for it. His war engine includes chariots and weaponry that must be created and tended by men. His treasury requires taxes on a nation already oppressed under the tyranny of the Philistines, the latest enslavers God has allowed to conquer Israel because they have forgotten their covenant with Him. Saul subjugates them to reactive, irrational decisions based more on his impulses than any guidance sought from God.
Saul is so terrible as a king, that God quickly decides to choose another. And the man He chooses, a boy really at the time, is the kind of person we could all take a lesson from in terms of trusting God as King.
When he enters the Bible story, David is the runt of his father Jesse’s eight children, from the smallest family in the smallest clan in the smallest tribe, Benjamin. Because God can do all things, even using the lowliest of people, David’s descendants would one day include our Savior Jesus Christ, He who saved all the world from the consequences of our sin.
But before that, before God turned him into the greatest of Israel’s human kings, David served as a shepherd for his father’s sheep, honing his survival skills and his reliance on God’s protection to do his job well. “God delivered me from the teeth of the lion and the claws of the bear,” David declares, giving credit to God for every victory in his life.
Nowhere is David’s reliance on God as his King more apparent than when the lowly shepherd David took on the Philistine super soldier Goliath. Picture this. The armies of Israel and Philistine in all their glory face off on separate hills with a valley in between them. Every day for 40 days, a giant of a man, Goliath, standing over ten feet and decked out in 126 pounds of armor, stomped into the valley with his armor bearer to taunt Israel.
“Send me your champion,” Goliath says. “Let this be a contest between him and me and let the victor become master over the other.”
Every day, Goliath repeated this ritual, and every day, Israel looked on, quaking in their boots. One day, David is among the onlookers, but instead of their fears, he finds himself outraged at Goliath’s complete disregard for God.
“Who does he think he is, anyway,” David asks, “this uncircumcised Philistine taunting the armies of God-Alive?”
Just as God saved David from the hazards of watching sheep, He would also save him from the challenge of fighting the Philistine champion. David tells King Saul, “Don’t give up hope. I’m ready to go and fight.”
Not only did David feel a righteous rage on behalf of God, he so trusted in God to bring him victory that he entered the valley armed only with the tools he’d carried in his other dangerous encounters, a shepherd’s tools, including five smooth stones and a sling.
David answered, “You come at me with sword and spear and battle ax. I come at you in the name of God-of-the-Angel-Armies, the God of Israel’s troops, whom you curse and mock. This very day God is handing you over to me. I’m about to kill you, cut off your head, and serve up your body and the bodies of your Philistine buddies to the crows and coyotes. The whole earth will know that there’s an extraordinary God in Israel. And everyone gathered here will learn that God doesn’t save by means of sword or spear. The battle belongs to God–He’s handing you to us on a platter!”
(1 Samuel 17:46-49 the Message)
If God is truly King of my life, if I live in obedience to His Word and place my destiny in His hands just like David, what victories for His kingdom might I also experience? This is the focus that lays the firmest foundation for Christian living.
Is your God truly your God-Alive? Because He loves us so much, we have the opportunity to start each day anew, to choose to look to God instead of ourselves and to know the joy that is His alone to give.
In Christ,
Ramona
Photo by Allen Beilschmidt sr.:
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