CALL TO CONFESSION

Hebrews 4:12-13

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13 And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

Mighty God, your Word penetrates our hearts and exposes the truth about our thoughts and intentions. It uncovers our self-confidence and self-centeredness, as well as the secret sins that we hide so successfully from one another. The truth is that we cherish and love many evil thoughts in our hearts, even when outwardly we pretend to be full of spiritual desires. We harbor hatred and anger for those around us, along with jealousy and malice. We judge and condemn others in our hearts and envy them. Instead of loving our neighbor as we ought, we use our neighbors to feed our desires and passions. Even our good deeds are stained. We often wait to serve others around us to be seen and admired and glorified. We speak your truth and impatiently and without gentleness in order to prove ourselves. Father, forgive us not just for our sinful actions but for our corrupt and perverse hearts.

Jesus, thank you that you came to deliver us from our sinful self-centeredness. Your heart was always perfectly aligned with the Father’s Word. Your thoughts as well as your actions were always pure and undefiled, filled with love for those around you and compassion for lost people. Even though you are the Lord of Glory, eternally deserving of praise, you never glorified yourself. Instead you laid aside your glory and became a humble servant, defeating the forces of Satan through your own death, and winning victory in our place.

Holy Spirit, teach us not to trust in ourselves or an earthly sources of power and strength. Enable us to rest from all our attempts to win the Father’s favor on our own, and to trust completely in Jesus, our great high priest, who faithfully intercedes for us. Help us not to be unduly discouraged by the heavy load of guilt that's so easily clings to our hearts. Instead, whenever we see clearly the sins of our hearts, enable us to fly to the truth of the Scriptures that in Christ the penalty of those sins has been paid for once for all. Remind us that we are now clothed in Christ's perfect righteousness, and that therefore there can be no condemnation left for us. In Christ’s name, amen.

“Take a few moments to personally confess your sins to the Lord.”

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

“Hear these words of comfort and assurance.” 

Hebrews 4:14-16

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. 16 Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

• We are a people who crave the things we can see and touch. 
• We want the assurance of a steady paycheck more than we want God’s promises of daily bread. 
• We want a political leader who looks strong more than we want a God who works invisibly. 
• We want a faith we can see. 

• And this is exactly the desire that brings us to one of the most pivotal and sobering chapters in the entire Old Testament. 
• What we encounter there is not merely a political transition in ancient Israel. 
• What we find is a window into the human heart; your heart and mine. 
• It is the story of a people who had the living God as their King, and looked at the nations around them and said, “We’d rather have what they have.” 
• That is Israel. And if we're not careful, it is also us. 
• We are still making the same exchange. 

• We’ll walk through this text under four headings:
• The PROBLEM of Failed Leadership 
• The PROPOSAL for a New King
• The PRICE of Worldly Kingship
• The PERSISTENCE of Rebellious Desire
• And in the end, we’ll see the glorious King that Israel was really longing for and which God graciously provided. A King who doesn’t take. He gives.

1 SAMUEL 8:1-3

• Samuel is now much older. Leadership must transition.
• Samuel appointed his two sons, Joel and Abijah, to serve as judges in Beersheba, some 50 miles south of Ramah.
• This proved to be a leadership failure; the distance meant a lack of oversight on Samuel’s part. 

• Three sins are named: 
• They turned aside after gains: that is dishonest gains.
• They took bribes: a practice that the law of God expressly forbids. 
• They perverted justice: they twisted the verdict, making crooked what God intended to be straight. 
• To sum it up: they didn’t walk in Samuel’s ways. 

• This is a call back to Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, whose corruption was highlighted in earlier chapters. 
• Samuel was the leader God had raised up to replace that failed leadership and now it seems like he is repeating Eli’s failure. 
• The big difference is that Samuel is not implicated in their sin like Eli was with his sons.
• Eli knew and he did nothing about it. 
• Samuel did. Not only did he not hold on to political power, he didn’t prop up his sons. 

• First, Samuel’s appointment of his sons as judges was a leadership failure. 
• Not because they later proved to be of deficient character, but because there is no notion that he sought the Lord’s counsel in doing that or that he had a clear word from the Lord. 
• Notice v1, “he made his sons judges over Israel.” 

• Second, Godliness is not genetically transmitted. 
• The best of leaders can have the worst of sons. 
• The godliest of parents can have children that turn from their ways and do not serve the Lord. 
• We cannot guarantee the godliness of our children. Grace is not inherited through DNA. 
• This is not a failure of God’s faithfulness but a reminder that every generation must receive the faith personally. 
• But the following is also true: The ungodliest of parents can have a child whom the Lord will graciously save and who will walk with the Lord. 
• By God’s grace, Samuel’s own grandson, Heman, will be appointed by David as one of the men who lead worship before the ark. (1 Chron 6:31,33). 
• Parents and Grandparents: Pray for your children. Teach them. Model repentance before them. And entrust them to the Lord. 

1 Samuel 8:4-8

• The elders of Israel see the problem. 
• The security Israel enjoyed under Samuel’s leadership was threatened. 

Two contributing factors to their proposal:

1. Samuel’s Age

• It’s interesting how Eli’s old age was repeated throughout the narrative until his death. 

2. Samuel’s Sons 

• Israel’s well-being: her peace, security, and prosperity enjoyed under Samuel’s leadership, cannot be guaranteed if the sons of Samuel were left in charge. 

• Their grievance seems legitimate. 
• The current system is failing and something needs to change. 
• But their solution is a new form of government.
• “Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.”
• They want a monarchy; one like all the nations. 

• Was the sin in asking for a king?
• Moses anticipated that Israel would one day want a king. (Deut. 17)
• But the king was to be of God’s choosing, and he would have to live and rule according to God’s law. 
• It does not appear that there was fault in their desire for a visible king. 
• The fault is in the phrase that is the interpretive key to everything that follows. 
• They wanted a king—to be “like all the nations!’
• The fault was not in the request but in the motive for the request. 

• Israel was never meant to be like all the nations. 
• They were called to be uniquely distinct from all the nations. 
• They were a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a people belonging to God (Ex 19:5-6). They were the Lord’s treasured possession, a holy and separated people, a nation whose God was near and who would respond when they called upon him. (Leviticus 20:26; Deut. 4:6)
• The Lord was to be their King.
• And when Samuel takes this proposal to the Lord, the Lord’s response is that their true motivation was a rejection of his divine Kingship. 
• Samuel confirms the Lord’s verdict in 1 Sam 12:12 And when you saw that Nahash the king of the Ammonites came against you, you said to me, ‘No, but a king shall reign over us,’ when the Lord your God was your king. 
• They weren’t just requesting a political upgrade, they were rejecting the God who had made them different. 

• The elders’ proposal was in effect to opt out of covenant with the Lord and implement a political model that mirrored that of the nations around them. 
• Why would they want that? 
• A visible king offered a strong, stable, and predictable center of political authority for a nation that otherwise had to depend on an unseen God. 

• Their problem was real but their solution was all wrong. 
• We too get disappointed with earthly leaders. 
• We have seen failed leadership and we could be tempted to abandon heavenly kingship. 
• You will encounter leaders who fail. Pastors who will fail you. 
• Don’t ever let someone else’s failure become the excuse for your departure from the faith. 

• We live in a day when churches are tempted to soften the message to become more palatable to the culture around them.
• These are faint echoes of the proposal the elders of Israel made: “give us a king like all the nations.” 

• V6 Samuel was really bothered by their request. “The thing displeased Samuel.” 
• He goes before the Lord in prayer. 
• The Lord comforts him: “This isn’t about you. They’re not really rejecting you.” 
• Then he delivers the hard truth: “This is about me. They are rejecting me.”
• This was an act of spiritual treason.
• This wasn’t an isolated incident. The Lord says, “According to all the deeds they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day…” 
• This is not a sudden rebellion. It’s the same old story. 

• We are called to be a people who live by faith, not by sight. (2 Cor. 5:7)
• And we can be tempted to find security in visible things.
• That may not feel like a rejection of God, it may seem pragmatic and reasonable. 
• But when we place our deepest trust in something other than God, when we say, “I need something I can see, something I can control, something the world respects,” we are doing what Israel did. 
• And when we do that, we are in essence saying, “God, you’re not enough!”

1 Samuel 8:9-18

• Even in the face of this rejection, God does not abandon his people. 
• He says to Samuel, “Obey their voice. But warn them!”
• Even in judgment, there is mercy.

• Their repudiation of the Lord’s kingship will come at a cost. 
• Notice, that the ways of the king that would reign over them are characterized by the repeated verb, “take.” 
• To sum it all up—Samuel says, “and you shall be his slaves!”
• The people asked for a visible king to give them freedom but all that they will find is bondage. 
• They will be owned, through and through. 
• The kings are just like. Idols always consume. They take more than they’ll ever give. 

• And the most terrifying outcome is that there will come a day when the weight of their choice crushes them, and they will cry out to the Lord, and the Lord will not answer them. 
• Notice how Samuel emphasizes that this is the king of their choosing, not the Lord’s. 
• “YOUR king, whom YOU have chosen for YOURSELVES…”

• God won’t answer their cries, not because he is incapable or has ceased to be sovereign. 
• No, it’s because they have been handed over to the consequences of the very thing they demanded. 
• The Lord whom they have rejected as King, will for a season, let the silence teach them what His words and warnings could not. 
• This is the terrifying mercy of a God who loves his people enough to let them feel the full weight of a world without him, so that they might turn back to him. 
• Sometimes the most loving thing God can do is let us have what we asked for. 

• What we crave apart from God always costs more than we imagined. 
• And by the time we discover what it will cost, it’s too late. It has already taken. 
• Just like sin: sin promises more than it delivers and takes more than it ever gives. 
• And sin puts us into bondage. Christ died to free us from sin’s tyranny and mastery. 

1 Samuel 8:19-22

• The people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. 
• This is a resolute, willful, digging in. A sinful stubbornness. 
• They chose slavery over freedom, because at least slavery comes with a crown! How foolish! 
• Look at the desire driving this persistence of folly:
• They restate that they want to be like all the nations. 
• They are tired of being different. 
• They want visible justice, a king who will judge them. 
• They want a permanent, centralized authority to settle disputes and enforce order. 
• They want a visible king to fight their battles. 
• They desire military security. A warrior-king riding out at the head of their armies. 
• The problem wasn’t in what they wanted but from whom they demanded it. 

• Israel wanted a king they can see more than a God they must trust. 
• And God grants their request. 
• God says to Samuel, “Make them a king.” 
• Now, God is not surrendering his kingship. 
• Their rebellion is part of his redemptive plan. 
• Through this flawed monarchy, God is writing a story that can only end one way. 
• And that is with the coming of the true and final King, Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of God. 

• There is a theological principle Paul articulates in Romans 1. God’s judgment sometimes takes the form of giving people over to the desires of their hearts. 
• He doesn’t always restrain us from our foolishness. Sometimes he lets us have what we demanded, and sometimes that leads us to discover why we needed him all along. 

CONCLUSION

• A people who had the King of the Universe, threw it away for a human imitation. 
• But praise God the story did not end there. 
• Hidden within this passage, within the very institution that emerged from Israel’s sinful motivation, God was planting the seeds of his greatest act of redemption. 
• The monarchy that began here, through all of its failures and hints of glory, God will bring forth David. 
• And through his line, in the fullness of time, God will send His own Son, the King that Israel truly needed but could never have imagined. 

• And here is what makes Jesus the Greater King when we see him against the backdrop of this chapter:
• Where earthly kings only take, Jesus only gives. 
• Earthly kings take your sons for their armies. 
• The Father gave his only Son for your salvation. 
• Earthly kings take the best of your fields and property. 
• Jesus says, “I go and prepare a place for you…that where I am you may be also.”
• Earthly kings take a tenth of your flocks, 
• Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd who lays for his life for his sheep” 
• Earthly kings conscript people to serve them, 
• Jesus came to serve, not to be served, and give his life as a ransom for many. 
• Earthly kings enslave. 
• Jesus came to set us free and he said, “I no longer call you servants, I have called you friends.” 
• Every failure of the earthly king finds its answer in the perfection of King Jesus. 
• He is the King we truly long for.

• And because of this King, we are no longer a people who need to be like all the nations. 
• Peter, in his letter, tells us who we are: a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possessions. This is your identity. Own it! (1 Peter 2:9)

• Everyone of us has something or someone that we are tempted to trust more than God.
• Call it out.  Ask the Holy Spirit to show you where you have wanted to have "a king like all the nations."
• Take an honest inventory of what your substitute king has taken from you.
• Repent. And trust the Lord. Trust is not passive. Trust obeys.
• For those of us who have followed King Jesus, who may find ourselves drifting toward substitute thrones, let us lay down every competing loyalty and misplaced trust. 

• Let's close with a declaration.
• “The Lord is my King! He will fight my battles! He is enough!” 

APPLICATION AND REFLECTION

In light of today's message....

• What did I learn about the gospel?
• How can I apply what I learned about the gospel to my life?
• With whom can I share the gospel this week?