Most people do not reject God by saying straight out, “I hate God.” They reject God by saying, “I still want God, but I just want something I can see.” That is exactly what happens in our text in 1 Samuel 8. Israel asked for a king, but God said to Samuel, “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me.” So here is the question this chapter makes us think about: what kind of king do you want? Hi, I am Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. We are going to follow the passage as it unfolds through a series of questions, and that is the framework I will hang this video on: Why did Israel want a king so badly? What was God actually responding to? What does all of that say about us, about our hearts? What kind of king did God offer, and how did they want that?
Two Projects
Before I get into all of that, I wanted to share a couple of projects I have been working on. The first is a new Facebook page for Calvary Baptist Publications. I have put up my sermon notes there. I like seeing other preachers’ outlines. As I preach our sermons on Sundays, our volunteers follow along with my sermon notes so they can see which yellow Scriptures are coming up and put them on the screens for the livestream. My son is one of those volunteers, and as he follows along in my script, he notices whenever I go off script, and we laugh about it later. So with that little behind-the-scenes interest, and some of those stories that do not make it into the sermon, some of the thoughts in my scramble of notes at the beginning of the sermon, I put up the entire sermon notes, full format and everything, right here on the Facebook page. With some of these videos I might post the actual sermon notes that go with them as well. I have a separate transcript for these YouTube videos, so it is not exactly what you see here, but this is what I used in church. I have about three sermons loaded on there as of this recording. So that is a fun little interest story. Second, I am super excited to share some book cover designs, just ideas we have been kicking around as a church staff. My wife Jamie is working on the ladies’ Bible study she does every summer, and I think this coming summer’s is going to be one of the best ever. It is going to be on feelings, and I am really excited about it. We were talking about it on our way to a visit the other day; this will be one of the best yet. She has done Joy, and she has done Ezekiel. For this one we have several working titles so far, and nothing has quite jumped out at her. I just work on these kinds of things in the early morning hours or in little pockets of time in the evening; I just like this kind of stuff. I was up at 4:00 a.m. this morning and hammered out a couple more designs. We have about five we are working through, and none of them may even make the cut, I do not know, but I wanted to give a little sneak preview to all ten of you who might see this. In the first one, she was going for a boho-style theme. It might be called Filtered Feelings, I do not know: filtering your feelings through the Word of God, “Are my feelings right?”, with this design here. Some liked this color scheme because it reminded them of the Pixar movie Inside Out, and I really like the look of these couple with the funky colors; that just seems fun. In this one, my wife was going for a hand-sketched journal idea, which ties into some of the other journals she has done: Filter Your Feelings, a four-week Bible study. I do not know whether we will use any of those, but you got a little sneak preview of the design process. But I wanted to get into 1 Samuel chapter 8.
Why Do People Keep Searching for Visible Solutions?
1 Samuel chapter 8 is where we have gotten to in our 1 Samuel series, and the question is, man, why do people keep searching for visible solutions? In Samuel’s day they had the Lord as their God, but they wanted something visible. From ancient civilizations until today, there has always been a human tendency to seek spiritual answers to the human situations we find ourselves in. If there is a famine, well, the gods must be mad at us. If a woman is barren, she must have angered the gods. If we paint our bodies or sacrifice our bodies or sacrifice something on the altar, maybe the gods will favor us, fix this health problem, help us win this battle, and we will defeat our enemies. Nowadays the sensibility is, “Well, we have moved past that. We are not pagan like that anymore. We have a much more cultured understanding. Now we believe in science.” You might have heard of the “God of the gaps” idea: whatever we did not understand, we used to say, “Oh, that was God,” and now, they say, science has eradicated God. How does hair stand on end? Where does thunder come from? Who hangs the lights in the sky by day and by night? How do trees grow? It used to be explained by God, and now it is, “Well, it is just science.” Hang on a second. A lot of the science talk today is really just a retooling of the old pagan mindset. The old mindset said, “I have to find an answer, and I am going to push until I find it, and the answer is not the God of the Bible. It has to be more complicated than that.” The old mindset was pagan rituals. Today it is not so much pagan rituals, but they think they are not exercising faith. There is the idea that faith is too simple: “I do not think faith will work. We have to find another solution. Simple faith in God is not going to work. He is invisible. We have to turn to a king.”
But even Christians can get like that sometimes. We can become no different from our atheist friends or our pagan friends. We can try to force the Creator God into our box, which is what we say atheists and pagans are doing: “I have to explain God. I have to contain God in something that makes sense to me, and if He does not make sense, I am not going to believe Him. It has to make sense to me, or I am not going to do it.” That is how we can get in our understanding, whether we say it out loud or not. I believe it is a common sentiment in all of us. It comes out like this: “Well, I want my kids to succeed,” so we focus on what the culture says your kids need to succeed. “Sure, they can do their God stuff too, but what is really going to get them ahead is school and sports and college and career and extracurriculars and all this other stuff,” and God is just a nice little thing in the mix. We start swallowing the world system without ever giving God a second thought. I am afraid some people trust their work more than they trust God. If you had to choose between trusting God and trusting your paycheck, some of us would have a hard time deciding. So there is a tension in this text that asks, “Who is the real King of my life?”
Why Did Israel Want a King?
So why did Israel want a king? When we come to 1 Samuel 8, the people come to Samuel, and on the surface their request sounds reasonable. Let us look at verses 4 and 5; I will make it a little bigger for this screen. “Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.” “Behold, thou art old.” Well, thanks. Samuel’s sons were not walking in Samuel’s ways, and that was true, but it was not the real reason the elders came to Samuel and said, “We want a king.” That was just a veiled reason. I think it hurt Samuel deeply, too. He had given his life to these people. He was the prophet. He was their priest. He was a judge for them, and Israel was finally at a national scale. He probably thought his sons would take over, but they rejected his ways. So the people were rejecting Samuel and his ways. “But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the LORD.” Then God says something in verse 7 that reframes the entire chapter: “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.” “They have not rejected you, Samuel. They have rejected Me.” So here is the real issue. This is not about Samuel’s leadership succession or about Samuel being too old. Spiritually, this is about their rejecting God’s rule. People today would say, “Well, I am not rejecting God. I am still a believer. I just have other things I have to focus on right now. I have to back off of God and stuff like that for a little bit.” Well, to me, backing off looks a lot like rejecting God, and that is what God is saying to Samuel here. Verse 8: “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.” God is saying, “This is nothing new. Throughout their entire history they have said they want Me, but they keep running to other things.” There is always something better than God, and in this chapter the thing they are running to instead of God is a human king.
What Was God Warning Them About?
So what is God actually warning them about? God tells Samuel, “You have to make sure they understand what they are asking for. They can have a king, but warn them.” That is what verse 9 says: “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.” “Protest solemnly.” God is not confused about what is coming. He knows their future. He knows what kings do. He is not approving of it; He is warning them of what is coming. So in the next several verses Samuel lays out the warnings: this king will take, and take, and take, and take. There are all these things a king will take through his taxation. “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.” This is terrifying: “You are going to cry out because of your king which you have chosen. You are the ones who asked for this, and the LORD will not hear you.” One of the principles here is that God may allow what you demand, but that does not mean He approves of the thing you choose. Have you heard the saying, “You may get what you want, but you will not want what you get”?
What Kind of King Did God Offer?
Did God ever offer them a king? Yes, but not the kind of king they were asking for here. God was very clear about what it would take for them to have a king. Way before they ever had a monarchy, in the wilderness wanderings, God wrote in Deuteronomy 17:14-20: “When thou art come unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me; Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the LORD thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother. But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the LORD hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way. Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold. And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites: And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them: That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel.” The king God commanded is very different from the one the people were imagining. They wanted a king like the nations. They wanted a visible solution, a military presence to fight their battles for them. But God’s king is built on the Word of God. He is to fear the Lord, read the Scriptures, and obey the Scriptures, so that his heart is not turned away from the things of the Lord. Because God anticipated their asking for a king, I do not believe the request for a king was the problem. I think the motive was, and God lets us hear their motive. Going back to 1 Samuel 8, verses 19 and 20, here is their reasoning: “Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have 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.” It was a heart of distrust in the God who had promised to fight their battles for them. They said, “No, we want a king like the nations, and we want him to fight our battles.”
What Does That Say About Us?
When I read about their hearts, what does that say about us? Before you judge them, turn it around on yourself. What are the human kings you tend to run to? If you get scared (and they likely were scared), who is the human king you run to? Whom do you trust more than God? Whom do you treat as the real source of your safety? They were looking to a human king. What Samuel was saying, and what God was telling Samuel, is that running to human kings is rejecting the heavenly King. That is a scary thought, but that is the principle I take from this passage, and I believe it is what God is saying: running to human kings is rejecting the heavenly King. That shows up in principle in a few places in the New Testament for us as well. 1 John 5:14-15: “And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us: And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.” So we have to make sure our requests are not selfish, that the motives behind our requests are in line with what God wants of us. John 14:13-14: “And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” Requesting things is not a bad thing. People will say, “Well, I asked in God’s name, and it did not happen. I guess God did not come through.” No, no, no, no. That is not trusting the King of kings. That is trusting your own version of a king. That was not asking in line with the King; that was creating a king in your own mind and trying to force that king to do what you wanted. Sometimes the greatest mercy of God is not answering the prayer the way you demanded. Sometimes God is rescuing you from getting your way.
So what kind of king do you want? If we take this Old Testament passage, 1 Samuel 8, and look at the heart behind their motive, what is the request behind the request? The Scripture says, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” And down to verse 33: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” We already have a Master. We already have a King. But there are always competing thrones, and God knew there would be this competition, the temptation to place their trust in a human king rather than in the eternal King. So I am using that as a principle to ask: who is a human king you tend to lift up above God? Analyze that king and say, “You know what? I want to submit that to the King of kings.” Is your job a competing king? Is your therapist a competing king? Who has more influence over your life? Do you run to your education, or to a book? Do you trust that video more than the Scriptures, or some system or method or visible solution? “I just want an answer. I do not want somebody to give me a Bible verse. I do not want to be told ‘God.'” If you are looking for something other than God, remember, you cannot serve two masters. The Scriptures constantly try to bring us back to being a different people. We are a peculiar people. “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” You are peculiar. You are different. You are not like the nations. We do not ask for a king to be like the nations. We want to live by faith every single day. It is not as if we have a faith box we open up on Sundays and close on Mondays, doing church stuff with the box open and then closing it and doing human stuff the rest of the week. No, that is not how God designed your life. Your whole life is designed to be a life of faith, day by day, moment by moment, truly believing that God is your King. Israel said, “Give us a king,” and God said, “The heart behind that request is rejecting Me.” So I am asking you to analyze your own life and think, “What kind of king do I want? Am I truly yielded to the King of kings, or am I trying to set up some separate king?” That is a simple thought from 1 Samuel chapter 8. I hope it is an encouragement to you. Go back and read the entire chapter, and we will continue with these Bible study videos as we go along. We will see you in the next one. God bless you.
