CALL TO CONFESSION

Isaiah 45:22-23

22 “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. 23 By myself I have sworn; from my mouth has gone out in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance.’

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

Heavenly Father and King, we come to you today as people who would rather govern our own lives than submit to your rule and shepherding. Instead of bowing down in reverence, full of awe and wonder that you, the King of the universe should stoop so low to love and care for us, we often treat you as a servant who should do our bidding and meet all our desires. Instead of honoring the wonderful and merciful Father that you are to us, we run from your goodness and love toward the false and dangerous hopes of our desires and idolatries. Our inability to discipline our wandering ways results in incredible brokenness in our lives and relationships.

Jesus, thank you for worshiping your Father with unwavering faith and unshakable hope on our behalf. You submitted to his wisdom and trusted him completely in all the circumstances of your life. You ran to him often in your times of need and never turned toward false gods. Now your obedience is ours, and we are so grateful to be united to you and defined by your righteousness instead of our own.

Holy Spirit, we need your power at work in us. Help us to know and worship our God as he is, our King and Father who loves us deeply. Press the truth of your gospel deep into our souls so that we see the redemptive work of our triune God. Cause us to know and feel your great love for us until we are transformed into people who love others deeply because of a great sense of our own need and forgiveness. Open our lips to join the heavenly host singing praises to our King forevermore. Amen.

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

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

“Hear these words of comfort and assurance of pardon.” 

Micah 7:18-20

18 Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity 

  and passing over transgression

  for the remnant of his inheritance?

He does not retain his anger forever,

  because he delights in steadfast love.

19 He will again have compassion on us;

  he will tread our iniquities underfoot.

You will cast all our sins

  into the depths of the sea.

20 You will show faithfulness to Jacob

  and steadfast love to Abraham,

as you have sworn to our fathers

  from the days of old.

• 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?