Scripture Daily

Context No. 1189 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

Context · Reflection

1 Samuel 8:7-22: in context

7The LORD said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they tell you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me as the king over them. 8According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, in that they have forsaken me and served other gods, so they also do to you. 9Now therefore, listen to their voice. However, you shall protest solemnly to them, and shall show them the way of the king who will reign over them.” 10Samuel told all the LORD’s words to the people who asked him for a king. 11He said, “This will be the way of the king who shall reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them as his servants, for his chariots and to be his horsemen; and they will run before his chariots. 12He will appoint them to him for captains of thousands and captains of fifties; and he will assign some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest; and to make his instruments of war and the instruments of his chariots. 13He will take your daughters to be perfumers, to be cooks, and to be bakers. 14He will take your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves, even your best, and give them to his servants. 15He will take one tenth of your seed and of your vineyards, and give it to his officers and to his servants. 16He will take your male servants, your female servants, your best young men, and your donkeys, and assign them to his own work. 17He will take one tenth of your flocks; and you will be his servants. 18You will cry out in that day because of your king whom you will have chosen for yourselves; and the LORD will not answer you in that day.” 19But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; and they said, “No, but we will have a king over us, 20that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.” 21Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he rehearsed them in the ears of the LORD. 22The LORD said to Samuel, “Listen to their voice, and make them a king.” Samuel said to the men of Israel, “Everyone go to your own city.”

Israel has demanded a king so they can be like the other nations. God tells Samuel to give them what they ask, but with a sobering word: they have not rejected you, they have rejected me from being king over them. God has Samuel warn them plainly what a human king will do, take their sons for his armies and their daughters for his kitchens, seize their best fields and vineyards, tax a tenth of everything, and reduce them to his servants, until they cry out and God does not answer. But the people refuse to listen: no, we want a king, that we may be like all the nations, to fight our battles. So God says, give them a king.

The heart of the tragedy is the phrase like all the nations. Israel already had a king, the LORD himself, who fought their battles and reigned over them directly; that was their unique privilege, to be a people ruled by God. And they trade it away, precisely because they do not want to be unique; they want to be like everyone else, with a visible king marching before them. God names it exactly: in asking for a human king to replace his direct rule, they are rejecting him as king. It is a very human impulse, to want the security of the visible and the ordinary, to prefer a king you can see over a God you must trust, to give up the strange, demanding privilege of being God's own for the comfort of blending in. And God, in a hard mercy, gives them what they insist on, along with a clear-eyed warning of its cost, this king will take and take and take. Sometimes God's judgment is simply letting us have the lesser thing we demand instead of the greater thing we already had. Israel wanted to be like the nations, and got a king who would tax and conscript them like the nations too.

Where do I trade the demanding privilege of being God's own for the comfort of being like everyone else, preferring a visible security over the God I must trust as king?

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