Year 2 Day 249

Year 2 Day 249


Pray (ACts)


Read - 1 Samuel 8:9-22


Message - Alan Burke 
Forewarned is forearmed you could say, but that’s only the case if you listen to what your being told! Here the Lord tells Samuel (9) to warn the people solemnly, let them know what the king who will reign over them would do. What we are given here isn’t on one hand two surprising, most of the things listed are needed in any form of central administration. Yes much of what is here is predictable, but others indicate that the king will use and abuse the power he would have. 


What were are told that the king would make a permeant fighting force, a professional army and they would need supported. Up to this point they didn’t have an army, it was as and when needed assembled to fight. The king will also take, their daughters, to be perfumers, cooks, bakers, he’ll take their fields, vineyards and olive orchards. 


This is going well beyond what is needed for the administration of government, imagine it, the people are in effect demanding that they have someone who’s going to plunder them. We imagine our elected representatives are servants of the people, that’s what we think, or that’s what we like to think, well here the king was going to not serve the people but serve his own interests. As he does so he’s going to give the best of what his people had to his attendants, his servants. 


By getting a king, everything for the people of Israel was going to be turned on its head, from a fairly level playing field, where there wasn’t a social elite, to a hierarchal system of those who had much, and who had taken it from those who do not. The final result of having a king, and its there at the end of verse seventeen, the people will become his slaves! 


Most of us in hearing all of this would be thinking to ourselves, I like my freedom, I like my stuff, I like what I have, I don’t want to be a slave, to be a possession of another, to be conscripted for labour, I want to do what I want to do without being at the whim of someone else! Well this would be their king, he was going to take what belonged to the Lord and also create a tax burden on the people, this was a time of substance farming, all of it, was going to be burdensome, and the reality for them is that this would be a return to slavery which they faced in Egypt, it just would be a different type of slavery. 


What is most surprising in all of this is that whey are warned of what would happen, they refuse to listen. Look what they say “we want a king over us” (v19), a more literal translation would be “there shall be a king over us”! It’s a sad act of rebellion, they thought what the needed was a king just like the nations around, they wanted a king just like the nations around, they longed for a king like the nations around, they wished for it but even when they were forewarned they didn’t care of the consequences, or that this sin would lead to this point. 


The Lord has said that he would give his people a king, but it was not a king like the other nations that he wanted for his people but that was the kind of king that his people choose. Yet the Lord God by accepting their demands would use it for his purposes, for the Lord God works all things together for the good of those who love him and his purposes. So he gave them a king, and from one of those kings would come the true king, a king that was not a fallen sinful man but a king who was while fully man was also fully God, the Lord Jesus, the true King. He is not like those who demand much from us, instead he is the King of grace, for his yoke is not burdensome, and all those who are weak and heavy laden can come to him and know his rest. He is a King who doesn’t impose on us but instead offers us his mercy as we repent and believe in him, as we are saved from our sins and trespasses, to be part of a new kingdom, a kingdom not of this earth but the kingdom of heaven.  


Pray (acTS)


Sing

WSC
Q16 Did all mankind fall in Adam’ s first transgression?
The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity; all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him, in his first transgression. (Gen. 2:16–17, Rom. 5:12, 1 Cor. 15:21–22)
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