1 Samuel Lesson 9
DVP of centralized Power – 1 Samuel 8
Turn to 1 Samuel 8; at this point in the book of Samuel we begin a new
section; the second large section of the book.
The first seven chapters were all introduction. These first seven chapters were to show how
God was preparing to deliver
God establishes the office of king and its first incumbent, Saul,
fails. Beginning with this chapter we
get involved in the details of kingship.
Why is this important. This is
important for two major reasons. The
first reason is that this entire development of the office of king is a
typology of the office of Christ. In
fact, Jesus Christ is a title: “Jesus” is the man’s name, “Christ” is His
office. Christ is not Jesus’ last
name. Jesus full last name was Jesus
Ben-Joseph, and that is the name, but Jesus Christ means that Jesus is the
Christ, and the word “Christ” is not a personal name but a title of an office. And therefore if we wish to say Jesus is the
Christ we obviously have to know what is the Christ supposed to do. If you don’t know what the Christ is supposed
to do you can’t tell very easily whether Jesus is that man to fill that office.
So beginning in 1 Samuel 8 we deal with the office of the Christ, the
king. And therefore these chapters are
necessary to appreciate the person of Jesus Christ. Apart from understanding the Old Testament
you cannot understand what the claim means when it says in the New Testament
Jesus is the Christ. Inevitably you must
wind up with a sentimental non-Biblical image of Jesus, maybe the archetype
hippie, maybe the great radical social reformer or some other human viewpoint
image and portrait of Christ but it won’t be the true Biblical portrait of Him. Only as you under-stand the categories given
to you by the pages of the Old Testament can you truly understand Him who is
our Savior.
Now 1 Samuel 8 is the first major section of this large group, God
establishes the office of King and its first incumbent, Saul, fails; we could
summarize the thought of chapter 8 by saying that this chapter shows God’s
response to the people’s demand for a king.
The people demand a human viewpoint king and God gives them a divine
viewpoint king and so there’s a collision of desire in this chapter, a
collision between the desire of the people and the desire of the Lord. And the desire is resolved by the rise of a
peculiar office in the nation
The other countries had kings, yes, but none of them had kings of this
character. None of them had kings that
were so carefully circumscribed in their political power as
So strange as it may seem, probably opposite to what you are thinking
about, the king of
Now to understand the background for 1 Samuel 8 we have to understand
the concept of kingdom first. To get
some background on the kingdom we have to begin by turning to Genesis 9. The first thing we notice in Genesis 9 is the
establishment of a fourth divine institution.
At creation God established three divine institution’s, we call them
divine institution’s, you can call them creation ordinances, or whatever you
want to call them, the Bible doesn’t call them by any name, I have just chosen
that label, and these have to do with man’s social life. Man’s social life in Scripture has
structure. The first one is
responsibility or volition; the second one is marriage; the third one is
family; and all of those are creation ordinances, all of those were given
before the fall.
Now in Genesis 9 we have the establishment of a fourth divine
institution; this is established after the fall. And obviously therefore the fourth divine
institution has as its original function the dealing with evil. The first three divine institution’s deal
with evil only secondarily because they were given before evil. But the fourth divine institution, having
been given after the fall, has as its prime objective to protect man from evil.
The family, the third divine institution, started the concept of
authority, but the authority that was involved in the third divine institution
was what we can call paternal authority.
It was the authority of the parents over the children and this was the
basic form of authority. This is the
form of authority that was first apparently used in early urban government
situations, where the elders of the city ruled.
The elders, the old men, ruled by virtue of their age, their supremacy
and their supreme standing in the family, given them by virtue of their
fatherhood. And so we have the paternal
authority given in the third divine institution. That’s the fountainhead for all other forms
of authority.
But there was a problem; Adam had a son by the name of Cain. Cain murdered; Cain was the first murderer of
history, and Adam, though he had paternal authority, could not punish his son
for murder; he could train his son not to murder but once the crime of murder
had been done, Adam could not judicially judge Cain. He had no way of executing judgment upon
crime and therefore Adam had to stand by while God Himself drove his son forth
as a vagabond upon the earth.
Cain was the founder of the first urban society and this is why
urbanization in Scripture is always pictured with a sinful tone; urbanization
started with Cain the murderer and from thence all urbanization is always
oriented to removing the curse that God placed upon Cain, “a wonderer and a
vagabond shall you be in a fallen world.”
And the tendency for society toward urbanization, ultimately in its
spiritual sense, is a tendency to do away with the curse of Cain, to prevent
the curse of the vagabond from being executed, so men cluster together in their
cities and erect their human works as a defiant token against God’s curse. So urbanization developed and you have the
rise of government but still you had no solution to the problem of a judicial
authority. Even in the cities, in the
early cultures you had Lamech, in Genesis 4 describe how he murdered and would
conduct blood revenge. So again there
was still no divinely authorized judicial judgment.
Now we come to the fourth divine institution after the flood. God expressly states in Genesis
A new kind of authority is delegated to man, an authority that was not
originally given in the form of paternal authority, now man has been given
judicial authority and judicial authority carries with it tremendous
seriousness. Judicial authority is the
right to execute God’s judgment upon evil and that right and that authority has
been delegated to man. It’s extremely
important that you understand this because in our own generation, because of
the unpopularity of the Vietnam War, because of the popularity of a lot of
other issues, this is being downgraded, and yet we must stand fast for our
military, we must stand fast for capital punishment. These are the authorized areas of judicial
authority. Two ways, towards an enemy
outside the nation, war; the doctrine of just war is authorized in
Scripture. The military is simply
executing God’s judgments upon the enemy and it must be viewed as that kind of
an action. And this is why you can pray
for men who are in battle, pray that they will be, if it is necessary, the best
killers in their particular organization, as gruesome as that sounds. Why? Because they are engaged in executing
God’s judgment upon the enemy. There is
Biblical authorization for the doctrine of war.
Finally, we have another area which is at home, capital punishment.
Both war and capital punishment represent the core of judicial
authority. Anyone who is against capital
punishment, anyone who is against the military, is against the fourth divine
institution. An act of passivism in this
sense, and act of obstructing the United States military in a just war, and you
could debate whether any given war is just, but in the area of this obstruction
to war in the just sense of the word, not to all wars but to a just war, and
obstruction to capital punishment is rebellion against God’s will. It is God’s will for just war and it is God’s
will for capital punishment. This is the
fourth divine institution, judicial authority.
Man has been authorized this authority.
Now, how does follow through. We
said when Cain committed the murder, Adam was a man who could not execute
judgment on his son. Not so, however,
with future parents. With future parents
they were given in the early days, the patriarchs, combined divine institution
number 3 and divine institution number 4 together, and this is why Abraham
could send Hagar into the wilderness, threatening her with her life. Abraham not only had paternal authority over
all his house, Abraham had judicial authority. As a nomadic member of a tribe
Abraham was the leader and therefore Abraham was invested with judicial as well
as paternal authority.
Now as man began to cluster and the nomadic tribes began to urbanize and
you have men come together in the form of a state, the state inherits the
judicial authority. So the state now has
the judicial authority as its base, and in Scripture judicial authority is
definitely authorized and is declared to be God’s will for a very interesting
reason. Genesis 9:6, “Whoso sheds man’s
blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He
man.” Often the arguments against
capital punishment are that capital punishment brutalizes. That is not true, verse 6 says it’s precisely
the other way, not to capitally punish a murderer is brutalization. It is brutalization of the victim who has
been murdered. Not to capitally punish a
murderer is to say in effect that the victim of his crime is not worth it. So the shoe is precisely on the other foot in
Scripture. This verse is the classic
verse to authorize judicial punishment.
Now what has this got to do with “kingdom.” The first time we meet the word “kingdom” is
in Genesis 10 and in Genesis 10 there’s a man by the name of Nimrod, in Genesis
10:10. And with this we have the rise
and occurrence of the first time the word “kingdom” is used in the Bible. Apparently this was the first kingdom in
history, and like the city, the word “kingdom” has a bad flavor to it from the
very start. As the first murderer was
the one who urbanized to avoid the curse of God, so the first great religious
apostate was the first one to organize men into a kingdom, again to avoid the
curse of God. A kingdom, Nimrod organized
out of the following cities. “And the
beginning of Nimrod’s kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in
the land of Shinar,” that’s in the Mesopotamian plain. Verse 11, “And out of that land went forth
Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah,” and these are
what later became the great centers of culture in the Sumeria and all the way
down to the Assyrian societies. These
are the middle eastern cities of the Mesopotamian valley.
So what is Nimrod’s kingdom? We
could summarize the kingdom concept in the Bible from the very beginning as an
attempt at social salvation. There’s a
definite religious flavor to “kingdom” from the very beginning. “Kingdom” is the use and prostitution of the
fourth divine institution which was originally given, judicial authority, to
exercise judgment upon evil, but in the kingdom idea, the fourth divine
institution is then made an instrument of social salvation, so that a man
attains through judicial authority and instead of using the power of his sword
to judge specific crimes he turns around and uses the power of the sword to
coerce men into a social order and that social order is then used as a system
of security for moral and physical evil.
The great movements of history are all kingdom movements. In our own generation, in our own century we
have seen at least two attempts that are very cruelly kingdom attempts. One is the Third Reich of Adolph Hitler. In this case there was obviously a kingdom
attempt, and the German liberal Christian theologians held no bones about it,
they openly identified Adolph Hitler with the Messiah and openly said that this
Third Reich was the later day kingdom of God on earth. And you cannot understand the fanaticism of
the Nazi’s unless you capture the religious, and I say again, “religious”
commitment they had to the Third Reich.
Again you cannot understand communism unless you understand that it too
is a religious commitment to the concept of social salvation by the
dictatorship or the proletariat.
So in both these systems of the 20th century we have the
kingdom concept coming up again. What is
it? It is a misuse of the fourth divine
institution, to turn around and use the fourth divine institution, government,
the state, judicial authority, for more than it was intended to do. Now you can see what happens here if you go
back to the Garden of Eden and think of the fact that after the fall Adam and
Eve were naked and after the fall they saw that they were naked, and what did
they do; they gathered fig leaves together.
Now there’s nothing wrong in trying to cover up their nakedness because
what did God finally do? He did cover up
their nakedness by a sacrifice and He gave them skins. So there was nothing wrong with the impulse
to satisfy their nakedness before each other.
But what was wrong, however, was them taking to themselves the fig
leaves without authority of God, without a blood sacrifice, in other words,
ignoring grace and trying to solve the nakedness problem by works, human works.
The fig leaves, then, represent human
works.
Now in history the kingdom idea, all the way down to our modern
welfarists is an attempt to do the same thing, except now the fig leaf becomes
government and the nakedness becomes man’s social dilemmas. And in order to cover up the nakedness what
men will do is revert to fig leaves, that is, government power. And the government power is then used in
place of the fig leaves as a system of works, social salvation by works,
instead of relying upon divine grace. Is
there anything wrong with being concerned with social dilemmas. No, there’s nothing wrong with that as there
was nothing wrong with Adam and Eve being concerned with their nakedness. Both concerns are legitimate concerns, what
becomes wrong is when man goes to solve the problem on the basis of works
instead of the basis of grace.
So here Nimrod, the first great apostate, as it says in verse 9, “the
mighty hunter before the LORD,” Nimrod was a hunter of men, literally. He wasn’t a hunter of animals, he was a
hunter of animals too but he was a hunter of men. He gathered them, just like you would animals
and gathered them and coerced them together into the first great kingdom. It was this kingdom that God judged in
Genesis 11 for coming together for world government. By the way, this is the first occurrence of
the United Nations in Genesis 11 and you have God’s eternal answer to the
problem of men trying to unify themselves under world government ignoring the person
of Christ. It’s most interesting that
you can walk into the UN building and you cannot mention the name Jesus Christ
in a religious sense in the building or the guards will throw you out but you
walk through the door and what stares you in the face, a statute of Zeus. So obviously though we can’t talk of Christ
we can talk of Zeus in the United Nations building. This is another illustration of the
continuing religious flavor to these kinds of movements.
Now the rise of the kingdom is something that has afflicted man since
Nimrod and the Gentiles always have reverted to kingdoms. In fact, the Jews were in the middle of one
of the greatest manifestations of kingdom that has ever existed in
history. And that was the nation
Egypt. The Egyptian state, the Egyptian
kingdom, was at that time the most satanic organization socially on the face of
the earth. And therefore it was that
state that God chose to liberate the Jews from.
He could have chosen to liberate the Jews from the Mesopotamian area,
whatever kingdom happened to be at that time, depending upon the chronology you
use. God could have tried to liberate
the Jews from some Arabic tribe some place but God didn’t do that. God brought the Jews down into a place called
Egypt and from there He liberated them by fireworks at the Exodus. Why did God choose to have a confrontation
with Pharaoh? Because Pharaoh
represents, up to that time in history, the highest degree of incarnation of
satanic ideas of kingdom.
As an illustration I have some photographs here of archeological finds of
what these early states looked like.
Here is an early dynastic temple in the Mesopotamian era and if you look
at this you can obviously see how the town is centered upon the temple; the
temple becomes the center of the entire urban culture, the city must worship
the gods of the city and therefore you see even the rise of the kingdom with
the rise along of the religion along with the political order in the urban
society. This was very typical. There was no such thing then as a secular
state; religion was never separated from politics. It’s only been separated from politics since
Jesus Christ’s time in one real sense, or in Israel before that. But this is the typical Gentile… our
forefathers, if you trace your family tree back, all the way back to the flood,
most of our forefathers we would find lived in that kind of a situation; they
worshiped the gods of the cities. Now
that shows you the urban structure of a city with its streets all centering on
the temple.
Now we come to some more things showing what the Egyptians had developed
out of this. In the Egyptian state they developed a concept that Pharaoh became
the god-king. Pharaoh was not just a
dictator; one of the greatest Egyptologists of the 20th century,
Professor Henry Frankfort of the University of Chicago in his book, Ancient Egyptian Religions, writes
this: Pharaoh was the fountainhead of
all authority, all power and all wealth.
The famous saying of Louis XIV [can’t understand phrase]” that is I am
the state, “was said with levity and presumption when it was uttered but could
have been offered by Pharaoh as a statement of fact in which his subjects
concurred. It would have summed up
adequately Egyptian political philosophy.
Pharaoh was the state.” And to
show you this we have a column taken from one of the early Pharaoh’s. this column has a message on it from top to
bottom. And the message is most
interesting to read. At the top you’ll
see there’s a symbol, that symbol is a symbol for heaven. At the bottom you’ll see another symbol, that
is the symbol for earth and in the middle is the name of the Pharaoh. He is the mediator between heaven and
earth. And this is the exalted title
that Pharaoh had. So you see the
religious flavor of this; you have to capture this or you do not understand in
the Old Testament the collision between Israel and Egypt and why God collided
with Pharaoh head on.
Pharaoh claimed the Messianic prerogative to himself, he was the savior
of the nation. And all people worshipped
Pharaoh. You wouldn’t walk into
Pharaoh’s presence without shaving every hair on your body from head to
toe. No one unclean could come into the
presence of Pharaoh. Therefore Pharaoh became a god. To show this at even an earlier state than
the picture you are now looking at which was some centuries later, here is a
very first, it shows you how early this concept had developed. This is a comb, an ivory comb, and the first
dynasty and although it’s badly scratched, the symbols on this comb are the two
Egyptian symbols for welfare and prosperity.
Then in the middle you have the Egyptian symbol for eternal life,
showing that it preceded, by the way, it was a satanic anticipation of Jesus
Christ, and here you have the Pharaoh granting eternal life, for in the box
with all those strange markings on it is Pharaoh’s name. And above the box we have the symbol of
Pharaoh, which is a falcon, and the falcon is the god Horus, and he becomes
Pharaoh, there’s a bird sitting here, and the bird is standing on this box with
the name Pharaoh. And this says that in
effect Pharaoh is Horus incarnate; Pharaoh at the point of his coronation
becomes the god Horus. And inside is the
serpent; the serpent was the symbol of enlightenment and wisdom. So all the Pharaoh’s would have the serpent
on their crown and this would be the symbol that they are enlightened with
wisdom. So they have the serpent of
Satan, and shows, by the way, very interestingly why the Old Testament, and who
wrote Genesis in its final form? Moses,
do you see now why Moses stressed the serpentine character of Satan; because
Moses had grown up in which the serpent symbol was the symbol of Pharaoh. Now Moses stressed it because it was true
history but what we’re saying is isn’t it interesting to notice how the
Egyptian state, being satanic, naturally gravitated toward satanic
symbols. And above this you find a
second occurrence of Horus, the wings, the bird’s wings that are spread out are
another symbol of Horus and above that there’s a third symbol of Horus, a boat
with this bird in it again and that’s the idea of Horus in the sky. Horus is the lord of the sky and Horus is
incarnate in Pharaoh and Horus incarnate in Pharaoh grants eternal life and
welfare to the state.
So you can obviously see there was a tremendous set of religious claims
being made for Pharaoh. The state was a
system of salvation in that generation.
This was, then, the representative of the way the Gentiles naturally go. This sets the background for 1 Samuel 8; we
are now prepared to see what Israel attempted to do at this critical juncture
in history. By the way, one further
picture of Pharaoh to show they had no qualms about having themselves
represented in Egyptian art forms, important as it is in modern art forms is often
expressed by the artist or the sculpture in size of object. So if there are a number of people in the
picture the Egyptian artist will make the big people the important ones and the
people that are not so important will always be portrayed little. And you can measure how important the people
are by measuring their stature, how high they are in the Egyptian art. Here an artist has portrayed Pharaoh with two
gods; on his left the god Horus with a falcon head, and on the right is Nom
with a cattle head, oxen head, and here’s Pharaoh in between and it obviously
says that Pharaoh is equal to the gods; Pharaoh stands with the gods and no man
can stand with Pharaoh, only Pharaoh sits in with the gods.
This, then, is the tremendous allegiance that Egyptians had to the
state. This explains why, except for the
Jews, there was never a successful revolt against Pharaoh in all history. There were competing Pharaohs, yes, but never
was there an all-encompassing revolt such as in Russia in 1917, never was there
a civil war such as this country experienced.
The average Egyptian was content to accept his servitude to Pharaoh
because of one factor and the factor was security; Pharaoh promised and granted
him material security and for the sake of material security the Egyptian
citizen voted away his freedom. He would
prefer his material security to political freedom, and this battle has been a
see-saw battle ever since, and people always, everywhere, generally vote away
their political freedom to get the gain for themselves for what they think is
material security.
The same thing happens in 1 Samuel.
In 1 Samuel 8:1, “And it came to pass, when Samuel was old, that he made
his sons judges over Israel. [2] Now the name of his first-born was Joel; and
the name of his second, Abijah; they were judges in Beer-sheba. [3] And his
sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after money, and took bribes, and
perverted judgment. [4] Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves
together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, [5] 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.” And so you have the cry
that goes up for a kingdom.
Now in the first verse “Samuel made his sons judges” means and shows
that the man Samuel did not fully appreciate what God was going to do. Do you remember in Hannah’s song, when his
mother Hannah sang the song after she had brought Samuel for consecration, 1
Samuel 2:10, do you remember what she said in her declarative praise song. Hannah sung this song to the priest or she
had somebody sing it, in either case she authored the song, and in verse 10 she
wrote: “The adversaries of the LOR shall be broken to pieces; out of heaven
shall he thunder upon them.” In 1 Samuel
7 we saw the fulfillment to that prophecy.
Hannah had looked forward many, many decades, down through time when God
would thunder upon the enemies in a supernatural.
But then she writes more. “…The
LORD shall judge the ends of the earth; and He shall give strength unto his
king, and exalt the horn of His anointed.”
“The horn of His anointed” is the power, the word “horn” is a synonym
for political power, this is why in Daniel you have the horns of the beast and
it’s talking about political power. He
will “exalt the horn of His anointed,” the word “king” and the word “anointed”
in verse 10 is the first time these are used in Israel for an Israelite king
and it is certainly the first time that the word “Christ,” the word “anointed”
is the same word for “Christ,” that that word occurs in the flow and
development of progressive revelation in the Bible.
Well now obviously Hannah in verse 10 is looking forward to more than
just the judgeship. Hannah is looking
forward to a monarchy and the rise of a king.
But in 1 Samuel 8:1 we find Samuel himself does not go along with
this. Samuel is reticent to bring about
any changes; Samuel wants to stick with the old ways. After all, they’ve had judges for 400 years,
we may as well appoint some for this generation, and so he does, and he does
the best thing he knows how.
But then in verse 5 the elders ask, “make us a king to judge us like all
the other nations.” Now the reason for
this, there are some legitimate reasons for it, but there are some illegitimate
reasons. First of all, a king himself
would not necessarily have to be bad.
The king was predicted in Deuteronomy 17, there’s a whole passage in
Deuteronomy 17 that depicts what the king should do. Suffice it to say for our point tonight that
Deuteronomy 17 answers the question that is often asked in discussions of
politics and that is what is supreme, law or men. And Deuteronomy 17 says very loud and clear,
law, not men. Therefore the king in
Deuteronomy 17 is always placed underneath the law. Since the king represents the pinnacle of
civil authority in the nation, then this obviously shows and is a testimony of
God’s will for every nation on earth, everywhere, at any time in history, that
always the civil power must yield to law, that nowhere should we ever have a
man in charge of a society who is himself not controlled and bound by law. This is why we have a constitution which few
people read, less people know and practically no one ever uses. But constitution was supposed to define the
limits of certain offices of government, and of course, we reinterpret the
constitution today like we reinterpret the Bible, it’s the same principle, if
you don’t like it reinterpret it. But
the law was originally given to contain the king, even the king had to obey the
law.
As I say, 1 Samuel 8 is a center of political philosophy in God’s
Word. 1 Samuel 8 is a speech, primarily,
Samuel is going to give a speech and in this text he gives one of the classic
political speeches of all time. In fact
I would suggest if you’re ever in a course in government or social studies that
you see if you can finagle your way with the teacher into doing a paper or a
report on 1 Samuel 8 and the political philosophy stated therein because this
speech is a capsule summary of God’s view of politics and represents an early
stage in the Bible of basic Biblical political theory.
It begins with this apparently innocuous request, to “make us a king to
judge us like all the other nations.”
Now that would strike you as very innocuous had you not studied
carefully chapters 5, 6 and 7 because you remember in chapter 5 and chapter 6,
how could you ever forget, how God gave a very peculiar affliction to the
Philistines and as the ark was circulating through the pentapolis God gave the
Philistines a very embarrassing curse and it was, besides showing that God has
a relaxed sense of humor, it also shows that God was capable of handling
Himself quite without help of the Jews because here was the lone ark being
carried from city to city for seven months, and all during the seven months the
ark made out real well all by itself.
And God didn’t need the help of anybody, and chapters 5 and 6 certainly
demonstrate that God is able to deliver.
So there’s nothing wrong with God’s capabilities, they have had
empirical evidence; empirical evidence that God provided so that no one will
ever forget it. Those of you who weren’t
here ought to go back and read 1 Samuel 5 and 6, if you feel like laughing as
you go through it it’s okay. In chapter
7 we come to another empirical evidence that God had given and that was when
the nation went on positive volition and confessed, what did God do? He delivered them without the aid of any
military weapons. So both chapters 5 and
6, and chapter 7, both demonstrate something that is being denied in this
request of chapter 8:5.
If you skim down to 8:20 you see what
is implied in verse 5. “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.” What
did the Lord just get through doing in chapter 5, 6, and 7. Wasn’t it fighting their battles? Of course it was, “the battle is the LORD’s
and He will fight for us.” But the Lord
had fought these battles and these people rejected the faith technique. So they were on negative volition when they
made this request in verse 5; it is a denial of relaxing and trusting the Lord
to carry on and fight the battle, and these people are people who are all
tense, and they’re warped out of shape by the pressures of life. These people face the political pressures of
the Philistines and they have their eyes on their problems, like many of you
may have, and you can’t get your eyes off your problems and God isn’t capable
of handling your problems and so you have to create some human viewpoint
gimmick to get around your problems and this is exactly what is happening
here. This is nothing more than a cheap
human viewpoint gimmick to get around some problems. And God has just gotten through giving them
fantastic evidences.
Let’s go back to the beginning of chapter 8 and see what happens. Verse 6, “But the thing displeased Samuel,
when they said, Give us a king to judge us.
And Samuel prayed unto the LORD.”
Samuel recognizes there’s something wrong here because who was it that
led the revival in chapter 7 that led to the total deliverance? It was Samuel, so Samuel had been through
this all before, he knew that what had happened, if a believer will just
confess, get back into fellowship and move on, the Lord will take care of the
enemies or He will enable us to attain victory over them. But in either case he knows the Lord is
sufficient, but the people refused to do it and so Samuel is displeased and he
takes it before the Lord.
And in verse 7 the Lord addresses Samuel. This shows…Samuel was a prophet, Samuel
receives direct revelation. “And the
LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people and all they say
unto thee; for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected Me, that I
should not reign over them. [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 you. [9]
Now, therefore, hearken unto their voice; howbeit, yet protest solemnly unto
them, and show them the manner of the king who shall reign over them.”
Now let’s examine this more carefully.
In verse 7 God says, “Hearken unto the voice of the people,” now back in
1 Samuel 1 I warned you that there was going to be a parallelism between Hannah
and the nation. And I said at that time
that Hannah was a very selfish woman and
she was a woman that for years went on bitterness, resentment, and Hannah could
not relax and so finally when she came to the point, she came to a breaking
point where all her bitterness and all her resentment and all her mental
attitude sins finally got to her, and Hannah at least managed to eek out one
prayer to the Lord for her problem. She believed,
her use of the faith technique began at least when she went to the Lord in
prayer. But the prayer wasn’t a very
sophisticated prayer, the prayer was a request that she have a child just to
show her opponent. So here we have a
peculiar thing, we have Hannah coming back to the Lord but as she is coming
back, she still has a lot of human viewpoint.
She wants to get back, she’s got a lot of vengeance, resentment and
bitterness and she still wants to get back at this other woman. But she makes a prayer request.
Let’s diagram this; she makes a petition and then she has a motive
behind the petition. The motive was a
human viewpoint motive; the petition at first looked like a human viewpoint
petition but what God did in His sovereignty was He turned that petition around
and made a divine viewpoint petition out of it.
In other words, what Hannah prayed for isn’t what she got. She prayed for a baby just to show the other
woman. But what she got was a baby,
which probably did show the other woman, but she got a lot more; she got a
savior of the nation. And so God took a
selfish prayer request that was channeled to Him, turned it around and
literally answered the petition but ignored the motive. Now that’s the way God answers you’re prayer,
I’m sure, most of the time and the way He answers mine. Many of our prayer requests are very selfish,
but God is gracious and God overlooks the motive that we often have in our
prayer requests and as a result this is how we often get answers to our prayer,
not because we’re such great prayer warriors, it’s simply because God is very
gracious at the other end of the
line. And so God overlooks the motive
and moves on to petition.
Now you have a similar thing with the nation, they are selfish too, they
have seen God deliver them but they want a king, they’re trying human viewpoint
gimmicks and they too come up with a petition; the petition says we want a
king… [tape turns] … but there’s going to be certain little fine print attached
to the contract and this particular king will now be in such a way that He will
in his office magnify the person of Christ.
But Samuel is told in verse 8 that these people have rejected the
empirical evidence. Notice what it says:
“According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought
them up our of Egypt even unto this day,” now that should actually be, if you
can visualize this in the text, if you visualize this as a parenthesis, not
that it is a parenthesis but just visualize it as a parenthesis for a moment,
starting with the word “since” and ending with the word “day,” everything that
would be set within those parentheses deals with a historic period of time
between 1440 and Samuel’s day, which we’ll say is 1050. For four hundred years God has delivered and
done miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle, and they’ve gone on
negative volition and negative volition and negative volition. They had gobs of empirical evidence and they
have rejected it.
But the reason for their rejection is given in verse 7, “they have not
rejected you,” Samuel, “they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over
them.” Now that proves then that God is
the true King, does it not. Verse 7 is
one of the key verses sin the Old Testament that shows you that God is the King
of the nation; Jehovah in the Old Testament is kingly. The movement shifts when you come into the
New Testament and the First Person of the Trinity becomes the Father. The Father concept is downplayed in the Old
Testament because there isn’t this warm family union that you have in the
body. But in the Old Testament God is
the King and so you have this concept that He has been rejected. This is the same verse that Jesus Christ
quotes in the parable, in the New Testament, in the Gospel of Luke, I believe, where
he’s talking about the prophets coming and they cast away the sons of the
prophets and they say we will not have him rule over us. This is the same verse that Mark had in mind
when he makes that little fine notation in the second Gospel, where they’re
dealing with the sign that’s on the top of the cross, you remember the sign
says, Pilate writes the sign and it says, “This is the King of the Jews,” and
the Jews come to Pilate and they say no-no, you’ve got it wrong, change the
sign, change the sign to say “He said he was the King of the Jews,” and Pilate
gives his famous response, what I have written I have written.
Now that again shows the tremendous sin nature of the nation, in
rejecting the rule of the King but it also shows something more important. And this is something that should stick with
you when you go in the Old Testament, and if this fact will stick with you it
will solve a lot of your problems in understanding prophecy. The Jew would never be satisfied with history
if history did not end with a personal reign of God on earth over the nation
Israel. The Messianic hope in the Bible
does not terminate in a human king; the Messianic hope in the Bible must
terminate on down in the corridors of time to God Himself reigning, so that
whatever is said about a human king in God’s may be true, of course it’s true,
but the point is that that doesn’t destroy this concept, God is the King. Why do I stress this? Because this is one of the early evidences
that whoever occupies the office of the Christ must be whom? He must be God, and when Jesus claimed to be
the Christ it was tantamount to saying I am God, because there was no such
thing as a sub-divine or semi-divine Christ.
When Christ, out of the fullness of the Old Testament tradition, must be
God; He may be man but He must be God.
God is King and God is the One who rules.
Now verse 9, God instructs Samuel to hearken unto them, go along with
them, just as I went along with Hannah’s prayer request, but I want you to
solemnly protest unto them and I want you to warn them about the nature of a
King. And what follows, beginning in
verse 10 is one of the classic political speeches of all time. This is an expose of what happens when men
vote away political freedom for the sake of material security. It always has happened this way, it always
will happen this way. You are about to
read something that has tremendous chokmah,
tremendous political wisdom, if only people would understand; this is the price
that is always paid by men who crave security more than they crave
freedom.
Verse 10, “And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people who
asked of him a king.” This also shows
why this was a great speech, Samuel didn’t write it. God was his speech-writer so this represents
thoughts on the mind of God. Now think
of this for a moment, don’t just slip over this at 60 mph; this represents
God’s view of politics. What you read in
here is not the result of some tenth century Hebrew prophet thinking about the
ills of his generation. These are the
thoughts, the words that come from the mind of God. And you can go out and know that this is
right, this comes from God. It may sound
like arrogance to get in an argument, how do you know you’re right, because God
said so, this is God’s view. And of
course this would sound like sheer arrogance in a discussion but it’s true
nonetheless, arrogant or not, these are the thoughts of God.
Verse 11, “And he said, This will be the manner of the king who shall
reign over you: he will take your sons, and appoint them for himself for his chariots,
and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. [12] And he
will appoint for himself captains over thousands, and captains over fifties;
and will set them to plow his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his
instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. [13] And he will take your
daughters to be confectionaries [perfumers], and to be cooks, and to be
bakers. [14] And he will take your
fields, and your vineyards, and your olive yards, even the best of them, and
give them to his servants. [15] And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of
your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. [16] And he will
take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your choicest young men, and
your asses, and put them to his work. [17] He will take the tenth of your
sheep; and ye shall be his servants. [18] And ye shall cry out in that day
because of your king whom ye shall have chosen; and the LORD will not hear you
in that day.”
All right, we have here the classic presentation of centralized
power. And why, when a government
centralizes itself with vast authority these things must always follow. Again, I can’t emphasize strongly enough,
these are the revelations of how power works and no men are free to change this
picture. No men can change it, these are
the rules that inevitably follow; always have, always will.
Verse 11, this speaks of a draft, “he will take our sons,” now up unto
this point they had a volunteer army and it was for a purpose. Their army had to be volunteer because they
wanted soldiers that weren’t yellow bellies and they wanted young men who were
convinced of the justness of the cause.
And by the way, they didn’t throw out all sorts of monetary incentive to
join the service. This is one thing the
United States Armed Forces are way off; people don’t join the Air Force, Navy
and Army because of the monetary reimbursement; there are a lot of other things
to do besides going in the military for monetary reimbursement. But the military has this line of selling
people on stay in the service and you get more money. The reason why you stay in the service is one
reason, patriotism, period!
Old-fashioned, tough, that happens to be the right way. This is the way the Bible presents it, so the
only reason for military service, like in ancient Israel was because you
recognized a responsibility to defend the homeland and patriotism. And this is the reason for this.
Well, later on when government would become strong as it did in Israel,
then he would take the men. Why is
this? This implies that there would be
unpopular causes that the king would try to do and the only way he could get
his army was to draft it, to force it to come about. So we have then the first thing of taking the
sons as a permanent military establishment for the sheer prestige of the king;
a permanent military establishment for the sheer prestige of the king. Now there’s nothing wrong with a military,
they had a military before the king; the difference however is that now the king
considers the military his private instrument for his own private wars, for his
own private causes and is unresponsive to the national issues. And so we have the draft erecting this
tremendous machine.
Verse 12, “And he will appoint for himself captains over thousands,” and
notice what they do, verse 12 spreads out so it’s not just the military, “and
he will set them to plow his ground, to reap his harvest, to make his
instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.” And here you have added to the military a
tremendous industrial complex where the government itself engages in industry
instead of regulating private industry to do the job. You have the government itself doing the
industrialization. And the government
begins to get involved in these things.
Verse 13 is the same principle, “he will take your daughters to be
confectionaries, to be cooks, and to be bakers,” they had a female draft. Verse 14, “he will take your fields,” and
here you have the confiscation of private property, he will take YOUR fields,
YOUR vineyards, YOUR olive yards. Now
what is so wrong about verse 14? Because
contrary to a lot of left-wing idiots today private property in the Bible is
the basis of freedom. God gave the Israelites economic freedom and because they
had economic freedom in the form of private property they had political freedom
and don’t let anyone ever tell you on the concept, oh, you’re free, the
government owns everything but you’re free.
Free for what? What are you free
to do? You’re not free unless you own
private property. Private property is
the only basis for political freedom and any time you have these nitwits around
saying the government is going to confiscate this and confiscate that and take
away this factory over here and the land over here, you are having the
government destroying the basis for political freedom. Watch it; every time government confiscates
they have removed something.
Illustration: Everybody in
Lubbock owns the post office, theoretically; are you free to go down there and
take your piece? Obviously not. So we have an illustration there of
government property. Now some of these
things are needful, but at the point of this chapter is there will always be a
tendency for government to centralize power further and to result in
confiscation of property. Communism,
obviously, is the most extreme form of 1 Samuel 8. This is why contrary to the National Council
of Churches in America and contrary to the World Council of Churches we say
that communism is a satanic movement, more satanic than western
capitalism. Oh, how an you say
that? I can say that because I read 1
Samuel 8, that’s how I can say it. I
Samuel 8 says that when you have confiscation of private property by the
government you are involved in destruction of freedom and that is satanic, so
therefore by deduction, communism is satanic, the state owns everything. So we have then the development of Biblical
political philosophy here.
Then further, in verse 15, “he will take the tenth of your seed, and of
your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.” Now this was massive taxation. Now obviously if the government only took ten
percent of everything this would be a millennium in our era, but in that day
ten percent was pretty heavy, and this talks about massive taxation and why
they mention seed and vineyards, and so on is that they want to note that the
taxation is total, in other words it’s taxation, even… even mind you, on the
means of production. This is not
taxation on, say a sales tax, this is not going to be taxation on even your
income, this is taxation on the very means a man uses to work. In an agricultural economy if your vineyards
are taxed, where is a man going to make his money? Isn’t it going to be using his
vineyards? So if he has to pay money on
the means of production and not just the product, it doesn’t say you’re going
to pay taxes on the grapes, this is a tax on the vineyard itself that is
mentioned here. And so you have the
government reaching in. It would be the
same today if you were a plumber or an electrician and the only way you have of
earning your bread is by the tools that you have, for the government to come
along and take one out of every ten tools that you’ve got. Now that’s what I’m talking about taxing and
reaching down and taking the means of production. So this is taxation in a very extreme form.
Verse 16, and notice what happens to it all, is it given for the benefit
of the people? No, it’s given for the
benefit of the bureaucrats, that’s what is meant here when it says “he will
give to his officers and to his servants.”
You have the development of a titanic bureaucracy; he will take your
menservants, and your maidservants, and your choicest young men,” and put them
to whose work, the people’s work? No,
his work. Notice the singular pronoun
throughout all this.
Verse 17, “He will take a tenth of your sheep, and ye shall be his
servants.” This is always the case, take
the case of modern Russia as an illustration.
Communism at one time was accepted by many of the intelligentsia in the
west as one of the great dreams that had come true; not it looks like a
nightmare that has come true. But
originally many of the people in the 30’s thought this was a big thing; in fact
some people still do, people who, by the way, have never been there to see what
it’s really like. But we have people
that think this is the great solution to men’s problems, and yet if you go to
Russia you’ll find something very interesting.
Isn’t it strange that the largest country in the world, with more land
per capita than practically any country in the world, with great fields that
stretch for thousands of miles east of the Ural Mountains, can’t raise enough
grain to feed their own people. Isn’t it
strange that a country that progresses and brags about its materialism and its
scientific advance hasn’t yet come up with an advanced computer system. Don’t worry about it, IBM is selling them to
them now. Isn’t it strange that Russia,
the great country, can’t produce enough trucks for their army so an American
automobile firm in Detroit is now graciously building them one so they can
build tanks to shoot at our soldiers.
There again the American businessman’s dollar takes precedence over the
American businessman’s patriotism.
But this is common, and notice what our government does; a perfect time
for propaganda, we could say sure Russia, we’ll sell you grain and we’ll at the
same time trumpet it all over the world, look at this, the capitalist has to
sell the communists grain, that really shows you what communism is like. Not a peep; not a peep. They could have taken advantage of that
thing, that was one of the greatest propaganda advantages the US ever had, was
the wheat ships, still coming in to the port of Houston, and yet what has
happened; they failed to take advantage of it.
But what do we do? Help them out
of a bind every single time. And
obviously the lesson to be learned here is that you have a great government
bureaucratic machine; you think the bureaucracy is bad here, there is the
greatest bureaucracy on the face of the earth and they can’t even grow enough
food to feed their people. One might
suggest that something is wrong some place.
What’s the problem? The bureaucracy, because as it says here in verse
16, “he will take all of your choicest men and put them to his work,” not the
work of a free market, it will be the work that the government decrees.
Then in verse 18 it says, as a result of all this Israel, when you have
centralized power and centralized government you’re going to “cry out in that
day because of your king,” and as I read verse 18 I wonder how strongly this
applies to the prayers that are made today.
Let’s go through verse 18 again.
“You,” this is originally addressed to the Jews, originally. “You
will cry out in that day because of your
king which you shall have chosen; and
the LORD will not hear you” because it was your choice. I wonder then if this same principle applies
to the Gentile nations. And if wonder if
the reason why prayers are not answered for the relief of oppression of the
oppressed in many quarters of the earth isn’t because of this same principle,
that those people have chosen that form of government. And they’re crying out to God in the day of
oppression and God is not hearing that particular prayer because they have
chosen that form of government. I wonder
if that might apply to the United States as the American citizens passively sit
down and let their freedoms be taken away from them one by one, until they wake
up some day and they’re all gone, and then we have great prayer meetings, oh
God, oh God, break up this oppression, destroy the government, and I wonder if
He says from heaven, I will not hear you because you have chosen it, it was
your choice and it’s irreversible in history.
Is this why prayers are not answered on behalf of the oppressed people,
because these same peoples are the ones who have chosen to live that way.
Finally in verse 19, “Nevertheless, the people refused to obey the voice
of Samuel,” they refused to take this wisdom that had been transmitted to them
by God, “ and they said, Nay, but we will have a king over us, [20] 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.” And
so verse 21, “And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he reported
them in the ears of the LORD. [22] And the LORD said to Samuel, Hearken unto
their voice, and make them a king.” And
that ended, at that point, the once great freedom of the nation. Now they will exist and many times have
blessing, but never again will they have the tremendous political freedom they
have; they just voted it away.
To conclude, so we don’t leave on an atmosphere of total pessimism, I
want to show you how God takes the kingdom concept and turns it around for
blessing, as He always does in grace, turning cursing into blessing. We’re going to conclude with a famous passage
in Isaiah 9:6-7. Just as God dealt with
the fig leaves that Adam and Eve placed upon them, by providing a sacrifice and
the skin of that sacrifice applied to their nakedness, so now God is going to
take His own Son who will die on the cross, and this Son will become The King
of Kings. And this is why in verse 6 it
looks forward to the time, for though they have the kingdom structure, the man
who sits in the office of king will not be like we just saw in 1 Samuel 8. He will be perfection.
“Unto us a child is born, and unto us a son is given; the government”
that is the kingdom, “will be on His shoulder,” not on the shoulder of a sinful
man, not on the shoulders of a sinful bureaucracy, not on the shoulders of an
irresponsible citizenry, but “will be upon His shoulder, and His name” that is
His character, “will be called Wonderful Counselor,” this means a man who is
perfectly wise, who has total wisdom in every political and social situation,
“the Mighty God,” we said that God has to be King, “the Everlasting Father,”
that is the Father of eternity, the One who teaches about eternity, “the Prince
of Peace” and there you have the King who brings peace because He Himself has
conquered evil first.
Verse 7, “Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no
end,” in other words, there will be unlimited peace, no more war, no more need
for military, no more cold wars or hot wars, there will be peace, “upon the
throne of David, upon his kingdom to order it, to establish it with judgment
and with justice, from henceforth, even forever. The zeal of the LORD of armies will perform
this.” Notice “the zeal of the LORD of
armies,” the Lord of armies is a title for God in the Old Testament when
emphasis must be placed upon the angelic conflict, that God would deal with the
powers of evil in history and these powers of evil, evil forces operating in
the political environment must also be dealt with before you can bring about
peace on earth.
Next week we’ll show you some of the results of the first incumbent of
this office of king.